Rosemary’s Baby: The Society for Psychical Research

This entry is part 5 of 15 in the series New Age Bible Versions

Historians researching this period reveal that other ‘Ghostly Guild’ members became its ‘front men’. Benson and Westcott were not above stalking impressionable students to recruit members. Henry Sidgwick, a student of Westcott’s and a cousin of Benson’s “joined the Ghost Society Henry Sidgwick, a student of Westcott’s before he took his degree in 1859; Westcott was then secretary [of the Ghostly Guild] and on his leaving Cambridge, Sidgwick appears to have succeeded him.” 41 The Founders of Psychical Research reports how the Ghostly Guild spurred Sidgwick’s “interest in the phenomena of Spiritualism” and incited his active involvement with them. 42 Sidgwick was among a number whose disillusionment with Christianity was spawned during Westcott’s tenure at Trinity College in Cambridge. Author of The Fabians, a history of communism and socialism in England, writes:

In this same period a group of young dons from Trinity College, Cambridge, were also turning to psychic research as a substitute for their lost evangelical faith…spiritism as a substitute for Orthodox Christian faith. 43

Sidgwick himself explains, sounding much like an echo from one of Westcott’s lectures.

Recent historical and textual criticism had shown beyond doubt that most of the evidence for the New Testament miracles (not to mention the Old Testament) can not be unfairly described as remote and hearsay…[I]t is quite certainly far weaker than the evidence for, let us say, the miraculous events associated with modern Spiritualism. 44

The Founders of Psychical Research notes the reaction of Orthodox Christian’s to Westcott’s ‘crowd.’

Christianity is about to die of self-inflicted wounds…It seemed to conservative Christians quite appalling that at a time when the impregnable rock of Holy Scripture was being undermined by Darwin and his allies, a group of those whose sacred duty should have been to shore it up again had conspired to hammer their wedge not under it, but into it. The reactions of the orthodox disgusted Sidgwick and those of his friends…He addressed a letter to The Times on the subject and was rather surprised that on the 20th February 1861 it was published. [It said in part] ‘Mr. Westcott expresses it, they love their early faith, but they love the truth more.’ 45

The Occult Underground unfolds the flowering of the Ghostly Guild and its transformation through time into the Society for Psychical Research. The Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology lists ‘the Ghostly Club’ as one in which “members relate personal experiences concerned with ghosts.” The snake uncoiled as the S.P.R. embraced “haunted houses…the divining rod …automatic handwriting and trance speaking…mediumship and communication with the dead.” 46 Webb elaborates:

It was a combination of those groups already working independently…of these the most important was that centered around Henry Sidgwick, Fredrick Myers, and Edmond Gurney, all Fellows of Trinity College Cambridge and deriving its inspiration from the Cambridge University Ghost Society founded by… Benson,[Westcott and Hort]…The S.P.R was a peculiar hybrid of Spiritualistic cult and dedicated rationalism; the S.P.R. fulfilled the function of Spiritualist Church for the intellectuals. 47

Rosemary’s baby, the S.P.R., concurs in its official history, the S.P.R.: An Outline of Its History, by W.H. Salter. It refers to the transmutation of “Westcott, Hort, Lightfoot and Benson’s” “Ghostly Guild” into the S.P.R., calling the Ghostly Guild “the parent society,” “a society from which our own can claim direct descent” and “the forerunner of so unorthodox a subject as ours.” They list their interests as “telepathy, pure clairvoyance, communication from ‘some spirit’ in or out of the body…the nature and extend of any influence which may be exerted by one mind upon another…disturbances in houses reputed to be haunted…physical phenomena commonly called spiritualistic.” 48

The Ghostly Guild gave birth to the S.P.R. which the author of Crash Course on the New Age cites in the lineage of the New Age movement and current channeling craze.

The evolution from traditional mediumship to contemporary channeling has been gradual. The original spiritualism had its start in 1848…Organizations like the Society for Psychical Research in Britain were formed… When Russian-born spiritualist medium Helena Petrovna Blavatsky founded Theosophy in 1875, the slow transition toward modern channeling began…her two chief works, Isis Unveiled, and The Secret Doctrine laid the foundation for the modern New Age belief system. 49

Marilyn Ferguson, author of The Aquarian Conspiracy, also cites the S.P.R.’s impact on today’s New Age movement. 50 Sidgwick predicted this saying, “I’m pretty confident that the whole scientific world will have accepted this [channeling] before A.D.2000.” 51 ‘Scientific’ is not a word that could be used to describe the work of the Ghostly Guild or S.P.R. during Westcott and Hort’s lifetime. “Grabbing the ectoplasm” at séances, as they put it, is no threat to Duke University.52 They had a number of sittings in the early part of 1874 mostly in private circles composed of their friends although occasionally with paid mediums.53

Like Benson and Westcott, the “friends” referred to did not all wish to be identified. For example, Sidgwick’s fiancé, Eleanor sister of England’s Prime Minister-to-be, did not list her name on the active S.P.R. roll “for fear apparently that an open connection with so unorthodox a venture might prejudice” the professional position held. “Though not technically a member, I was entirely cognizant of the doings of the society and its councils from the beginning,” she writes.54

Another ‘friend’ from the ‘Ghostly Guild’ was Alice Johnson. She wrote circular questions, learning directly from Westcott’s adept example. Her contribution was, “Have you ever, when believing yourself to be completely awake, had a vivid impression of seeing or being touched by a living or inanimate object or of hearing a voice?” She went on from Westcott’s ‘Ghostly Guild’ to become the secretary to S.P.R.’s President, Mrs. Sidgwick. Later Alice became editor of The Proceedings of the S.P.R. and finally in 1907 its Research Officer. 55 Other collaborators in the S.P.R. were Fredrick Myers, who wrote on the occasion of the suicide of his S.P.R. ‘girlfriend’,… “and strangely to myself I seemed a shade by shadowy Hermes led…” Edmond Gurney wrote for the Society, Phantasms of the Living, enumerating the “various psychological states that favor supernormal experiences.” One such ‘state’, chloroform induced mediumship, caused his untimely death by overdose. 56

Historians write of the importance of Westcott and Hort’s ‘training ground’ provided in the form of the Ghostly Guild.

It would have been impossible for the new society (S.P.R.) to undertake an inquiry of such a kind or on such a scale if several of its leading members had not already gained previous experience…57

Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby Westcott’s Cambridge cradle evidently nursed Rosemary’s Baby to long life. The Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology quips: There is a curious irony in the fact that the new premises of the American Society for Psychical Research are housed immediately behind the famous Dakota Apartments in Manhattan, the large Gothic building that was the setting for Rosemary’s Baby.58

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