Arthur Conan Doyle and Spiritualism

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In summary: He was created by Arthur Conan Doyle in 1887, and quickly became a sensation... However, Doyle soon grew weary of writing about the same character over and over again, and so decided to kill him off... In 1893, Doyle joined the British Society for Psychical Research, an organization devoted to the study of psychic phenomena. There he met... fellow member... Houdini. Houdini was initially skeptical of spiritualism, but soon became convinced that there was something to it... After a seance in which Mrs. Doyle claimed to have communicated with Houdini's mother, Houdini became outraged... However, Doyle and Houdini remained friends
  • #1
zoobyshoe
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It came out on an episode of Decoded that aired tonight that Arthur Conan Doyle was a staunch believer in spiritualism. Apparently he was astonishingly gullible about it, which is very surprising for the man who created Sherlock Holmes.

... how could Conan Doyle, a medical man steeped in empirical reasoning at Edinburgh University and the creator of a super-rational detective, have fallen for this mumbo jumbo? His support for spiritualism lent credence to some of the more outrageous frauds perpetrated on people desperately trying to get in touch with loved ones lost in the first world war. In his desire to prove the existence of spirits, he notoriously promoted two Yorkshire girls who, for a lark, claimed they had photographed the Cottingley Fairies.

http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/conan-doyle-spiritualism

Conan Doyle a Ghostbuster?

In 1893 Conan Doyle joined the British Society for Psychical Research. Other members were future Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, philosopher William James, naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace, scientists Williams Crookes and Oliver Lodge.

In 1894 Colonel Elmore asked the organization to investigate mysterious sounds emanating from his home in Dorset. At night Elmore, his wife and adult daughter could hear chains being dragged across a wooden floor and moaning that sounded like a soul in torment. The family dog refused to enter certain parts of the home and most of Elmore's staff had left.

Conan Doyle, Dr. Sydney Scott and Frank Podmore were sent to investigate the possible haunting. They spent several evenings in the home however their results were inconclusive.

One night the investigators were disturbed by a "fearsome uproar" but no damage or cause for the noise could be discovered. Conan Doyle left the Dorset home unsure if it was genuinely haunted or if the haunting had been a hoax.

Later the body of a child, approximately ten years old, was discovered buried in the garden. Conan Doyle became convinced that he really had witnessed psychic phenomena that was caused by the spirit of the dead child.
http://www.siracd.com/life_spirit.shtml [Broken]

Arthur Conan Doyle devoted a whole chapter of his book The Edge of the Unknown to a detailed argument that Houdini had genuine psychic power, but wouldn't admit it. Curiously, Doyle and Houdini remained friends for a long while, in spite of public clashes over spiritualism. Perhaps they shared an appreciation of the value of public self-promotion. Eventually Houdini became outraged as a result of a seance in which Mrs. Doyle claimed to have communicated with Houdini's mother, and the details she reported were obviously wrong.
http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/doyle.htm

The Fox sisters, who started the whole spiritualism movement by hoaxing noises from spirits, later confessed to the hoax and demonstrated how they accomplished it. The movement had gained such momentum that some of their followers refused to believe the confession:

One of those who would not accept Margaret's confession was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the fictional Sherlock Holmes and a convinced believer in spiritualism. He responded:

"Nothing that she could say in that regard would in the least change my opinion, nor would it that of anyone else who had become profoundly convinced that there is an occult influence connecting us with an invisible world."
 
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  • #2
zoobyshoe said:
It came out on an episode of Decoded that aired tonight that Arthur Conan Doyle was a staunch believer in spiritualism. Apparently he was astonishingly gullible about it, which is very surprising for the man who created Sherlock Holmes.
It doesn't surprise me, I remember studying in school how much Doyle hated Holmes. IIRC he only started it for some money and didn't anticipate how popular it would become, then he resolved to kill Holmes off so that he would never have to write about him again. But this didn't last because the paper that published it kept offering him more money and pleading with him so eventually he wrote more set before Holmes death thinking that this would be enough. It wasn't and so eventually he had to write more explaining that Holmes had faked his death.
 
  • #3
Ryan_m_b said:
It doesn't surprise me, I remember studying in school how much Doyle hated Holmes. IIRC he only started it for some money and didn't anticipate how popular it would become, then he resolved to kill Holmes off so that he would never have to write about him again. But this didn't last because the paper that published it kept offering him more money and pleading with him so eventually he wrote more set before Holmes death thinking that this would be enough. It wasn't and so eventually he had to write more explaining that Holmes had faked his death.
Yes, I recall reading he was sick of the character and wanted to dispense with him. Despite perpetuating the character "under duress", so to speak, he still convincingly characterizes the attitude of the rationalist, Holmes. Doyle seems to understand that attitude too well to also be so uncritically accepting of fairy photographs.

Holmes was largely based on Doyle's teacher, Bell:

http://www.sherlockandwatson.com/the%20real%20sherlock%20holmes.html

and Bell said of Doyle:

Dr. Conan Doyle’s education as a student of medicine taught him how to observe, and his practice has been a splendid training for a man such as he is, gifted with eyes, memory, and imagination. Eyes and ears which can see and hear, memory to record at once and recall at pleasure, the impressions of the senses, and imagination capable of weaving a theory or piecing together a broken chain or unravelling a tangled clue. Such are the implements of his trade to a successful diagnostician.

So, I experience a definite cognitive dissonance in finding out Doyle was readily sucked into spiritualism.

It causes me to speculate on the possibility of a "personality type" (unnofficially speaking) that could be characterized as 'spongey'. This was the premise of the obscure Woody Allen movie Zelig. The main character, Zelig, was an involuntary human sponge, or perhaps, chameleon: without particularly intending to, he soaked up all the attitudes and trappings of whatever crowd he happened to become entangled with; thrown in with jazz musicians, he absorbed their jargon, learned the clarinet, and was soon a member of the band. The same for each new crowd he enters, even becoming a member of the Nazi party just by accidental exposure to them for a time.

I have to wonder if Doyle, Zelig-like, merely 'absorbed' the rational/scientific attitude Bell projected, 'absorbed' the trappings and abilities of an author, and finally 'absorbed' the beliefs of a spiritualist from heavy exposure to his spiritualist wife. Diagnostic skills are essentially scientific. How could they run only skin deep in a person who was apparently very good at it?

However, I'm sure there are alternate possible explanations.
 
  • #4
Hmm cognitive dissonance is an absolutely bizarre phenomenon. I have met many people who hold two entirely different (i.e. mutually exclusive) ways of thinking/acting and it boggles my mind.
 
  • #5
There's usually some comprehensible train of thinking behind it, and basically I'm wondering what it would be in this case.
 
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  • #6
From wiki (YMMV) :
"... Following the death of his wife Louisa in 1906, the death of his son Kingsley just before the end of World War I, and the deaths of his brother Innes, his two brothers-in-law (one of whom was E. W. Hornung, creator of the literary character Raffles) and his two nephews shortly after the war, Conan Doyle sank into depression. He found solace supporting spiritualism and its attempts to find proof of existence beyond the grave..."

Put politely, the poor sod lost it...
 
  • #7
Nik_2213 said:
Put politely, the poor sod lost it...
Hahaha!

Thing is, though, his interest preceded all that:

As early as 1881 Conan Doyle showed an interest in Spiritualism. During that year he attended a lecture on spiritualism. In 1887 The Light, a spiritualistic magazine, published an article by Conan Doyle describing a séance that he'd attended. In February of 1889 he attended a lecture on mesmerism given by Professor Milo de Meyer. In fact, as part of the lecture de Meyer tried to mesmerize or hypnotize Conan Doyle, but failed.

Conan Doyle a Ghostbuster?

In 1893 Conan Doyle joined the British Society for Psychical Research. Other members were future Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, philosopher William James, naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace, scientists Williams Crookes and Oliver Lodge.
-From my second link.

I can see how all the personal loss would have made it worse, but it doesn't seem to be what precipitated it. It does help explain his acceptance of the fairy photographs, which appeared circa 1917. Before all the deaths and depression, we can suppose he might have been more skeptical of those.
 
  • #8
my own view of Conan Doyle is that he is very much like the television character House, who is (by the producers' own admission) based on Doyle's creation, Holmes.

House is profoundly rational, perhaps even obsessively so, and yet often displays a profound understanding of religion in particular, more so than the patently (and thus superficially) religious Dr. Chase, that could only be borne of spiritual understanding.

also, he's bat-**** insane.

(perhaps a more reasonable explanation is that it was quite common in the Victorian era for people to behave quite differently depending on their surroundings...no doubt this led to a high degree of "compartmentalization" for many people).
 
  • #9
Deveno said:
my own view of Conan Doyle is that he is very much like the television character House, who is (by the producers' own admission) based on Doyle's creation, Holmes.

House is profoundly rational, perhaps even obsessively so, and yet often displays a profound understanding of religion in particular, more so than the patently (and thus superficially) religious Dr. Chase, that could only be borne of spiritual understanding.

also, he's bat-**** insane.

(perhaps a more reasonable explanation is that it was quite common in the Victorian era for people to behave quite differently depending on their surroundings...no doubt this led to a high degree of "compartmentalization" for many people).
In what sense do you think House profoundly understands religion? I recall the episode where it was revealed his father was some sort of theologian, but it seemed Houses' attitude toward that was as cynical as his attitude toward everything. Conan Doyle, on the other hand, would strike me as the furthest thing from cynical on this count. It's been a long time since I read all the Holmes stories, but I don't recall any implied religious cynicism on Holmes' part.
 
  • #10
zoobyshoe said:
It came out on an episode of Decoded that aired tonight that Arthur Conan Doyle was a staunch believer in spiritualism. Apparently he was astonishingly gullible about it, which is very surprising for the man who created Sherlock Holmes.

It might be just a feature of the times. I don't know much about Conan Doyle, but there are many other rationalists of the time who also seemed swayed by spiritualism, such as William James.

It could be that the belief in spirits or telepathy were encouraged by scientific advance in fact - once you start seeing a material/mechanical base to everything, then this makes ideas about ectoplasm, a spirtual plane or whatever, a "more rational" belief than some immaterial idea of soul.

If you want to believe in religious teachings, then a rationalist would want to find a substantial explanation. It may seem kooky from our modern standpoint, but it would have been the more scientific view in Victorian times - if you were taking the arch-materialist position of the reductionist thinker.

Exactly the same dynamic still operates today when it comes to things like quantum approaches to consciousness. People are looking for a substantial explanation of something they feel needs a properly material answer.
 
  • #11
apeiron said:
It might be just a feature of the times. I don't know much about Conan Doyle, but there are many other rationalists of the time who also seemed swayed by spiritualism, such as William James.

It could be that the belief in spirits or telepathy were encouraged by scientific advance in fact - once you start seeing a material/mechanical base to everything, then this makes ideas about ectoplasm, a spirtual plane or whatever, a "more rational" belief than some immaterial idea of soul.

If you want to believe in religious teachings, then a rationalist would want to find a substantial explanation. It may seem kooky from our modern standpoint, but it would have been the more scientific view in Victorian times - if you were taking the arch-materialist position of the reductionist thinker.

Exactly the same dynamic still operates today when it comes to things like quantum approaches to consciousness. People are looking for a substantial explanation of something they feel needs a properly material answer.
Excellent point and well put. Your second paragraph puts me in mind of everyone from Galileo to Newton (including all Newton's contemporaries) who felt the discoveries of Physics had revealed something remarkable about the creator: "God was a mathematician!" I can see Doyle as viewing rationalism and spiritualism as mutually supportive.
 
  • #12
zoobyshoe said:
Your second paragraph puts me in mind of everyone from Galileo to Newton (including all Newton's contemporaries).

I just happen to be reading Gleick's biography of Newton and almost mentioned those parallels. His "embarrassing" interest in alchemy, theology, etc. :smile:
 
  • #13
apeiron said:
I just happen to be reading Gleick's biography of Newton and almost mentioned those parallels. His "embarrassing" interest in alchemy, theology, etc. :smile:
I haven't read that one. Most of my sense of this comes from a book called "The Clockwork Universe", which I highly recommend. It claims on the cover to be about Newton and the Royal Society but it is mostly about the times themselves. When it veers back to Newton you appreciate so much more, now understanding the context.

I suppose a similar book could be written about Doyle's times. (He looks pretty silly from here, but surely couldn't have been as bad back then.)
 

1. Who was Arthur Conan Doyle?

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was a British writer and physician best known for creating the famous fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. He was also a fervent believer in spiritualism and spent a significant portion of his life advocating for its acceptance.

2. How did Arthur Conan Doyle get interested in spiritualism?

Conan Doyle's interest in spiritualism began in the late 19th century when he attended a séance and claimed to have communicated with his deceased son. This experience sparked his curiosity and led him to extensively research and explore the world of spiritualism.

3. What is spiritualism and why was Conan Doyle drawn to it?

Spiritualism is a belief system that holds that spirits of the dead can communicate with the living through mediums. Conan Doyle was drawn to spiritualism because he believed it provided evidence of life after death and offered comfort to those who had lost loved ones.

4. How did Conan Doyle's belief in spiritualism impact his writing?

Conan Doyle's interest in spiritualism had a significant impact on his writing. He included spiritualist themes and characters in some of his works, such as the short story "The Captain of the Polestar." He also wrote non-fiction books advocating for spiritualism, such as "The New Revelation" and "The Case for Spirit Photography."

5. Was Conan Doyle's belief in spiritualism widely accepted during his time?

Conan Doyle's belief in spiritualism was met with both acceptance and skepticism during his time. While he gained a significant following and became a prominent figure in the spiritualist movement, he also faced criticism and ridicule from skeptics. However, his belief in spiritualism remained unwavering until his death.

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