ensure she ruled the waves by drawing up the first comprehensive, long-term plan for the British Navy. The first scholar to apply Euclidian geometry to navigation, he built the necessary instruments to do so, trained several of the greatest navigators of the Age of Discovery, and charted the Northeast and Northwest Passages accurately, without leaving his Surrey home.
Even where his magical work was concerned, Dee was ever on his guard for `illuders', or low-level (mischievous or time-wasting) spirits that masqueraded as angels. He took command of any ambivalent situations, on one occasion compelling an illuder to confess, and then consigning it to the flames, saying `Master Kelley, is your doubt of the spirit taken away?'g8
Yet whenever spirits are involved in any human endeavour, there must remain some questions about both their authenticity and their motives, even if they claim to be angels. In effect, the modus operandi of the Kelley-Dee team was closer to Spiritualism - Kelley is often referred to as `the first medium' - than much previous occult work, which is not without its problems, although perhaps less obviously so than the `cursed necromancy' itself. Indeed, Kelley (together with a magician called Waring)' is said to have successfully raised a corpse from its grave in the churchyard at Walton-le-Dale in Lancashire to command it to predict the future.
Montague Summers is, of course, swift to condemn trafficking with any kind of spirits as diabolism pure and simple. He notes apropos of allegations that witches `flew' to their Sabbats, that `.. . outside the lives of the Saints, spiritistic [sic] seances afford us examples of this supernormal phenomenon.'90 More in character, he declares forthrightly: `Camouflage it how you will ... this 'New Religion' [of] Spiritualism and its kindred superstitions ... is but the old Witchcraft' 91
Today when Spiritualists follow their own version of the Christian religion, and many famous mediums proved their astounding abilities repeatedly under strict conditions, besides giving untold comfort and hope to thousands, it is difficult to conceive of the movement having any possible association with anything devilish. However, even leaving the preconceptions of Summers aside, in the old heyday of `physical mediums', theirs was a considerably more ambiguous activity, often carrying a distinct whiff of sulphur.
In 1911 twenty-three-year-old Brazilian Carmine Mirabelli was sacked from his job in a shoe shop because the shoes insisted on flying around by themselves. Duly confined to a lunatic asylum for nineteen days, two doctors watched him closely. They concluded that he possessed an extraordinary excess of nervous forces - remarkably similar to the modern idea that poltergeist attacks usually centre on teenagers undergoing particularly tumultuous puberties. Mirabelli's mere presence caused some extraordinary phenomena: inanimate objects moved about and even apparently liquefied. He also produced reams of automatic writing92 in 30 languages, exhibited extraordinary powers of telepathy and clairvoyance - and was frequently reported to travel instantaneously, by teleportation (basically similar to the mode of transport celebrated in Star Trek's famous line: `Beam me up, Scottie').
Mirabelli's achievements allegedly included levitating himself nearly seven feet off the ground, an event that was photographed. However, there is some dispute about this: it is now claimed that the photograph has been tampered with to show the medium apparently in mid-air, whereas in fact he was simply standing on the top of a step-ladder - later erased in the finished picture - to indicate how high he had levitated.
A leading light of the Brazilian Spiritist movement (devotees of the French medium Alan Kardec), on one occasion, it is said, Mirabelli not only levitated while handcuffed, but as he rose into the air he dematerialized, the handcuffs clattering to the floor. He was discovered behind a locked door. But his most controversial feat was to materialize the dead - apparently more successfully and dramatically than even the practised necromancer Edward Kelley.
At Mirabelli's seances, sometimes held in brightly lit rooms, skeletons would gradually form in the air, clothed horrendously with ragged flesh - and stinking of decay . . . At his most successful, he is said to have eventually materialized solid human beings. In one case the man he apparently conjured out of thin air was clearly of African origin, while on another occasion a dead poet materialized between Mirabelli and a sitter - who not unnaturally is rigid with fear, the whites of his eyes showing like a terrified horse. This poses the important question: Mirabelli's mediumship may have been genuine - but was it nice? Was his laudable attempt to present evidence for an afterlife merely conjuring up dark forces? Like many cases from the annals of materialization (or `physical') mediums, the sheer horror involved surely rendered that form of continued existence akin to the obscene undead, vampires and ghouls. No one would like to think of their loved ones returning for an hour or so to stink of the grave, or indeed, to look forward with any enthusiasm to the prospect of doing so themselves.
Once, when a skull that Mirabelli had merely looked at began to move, the eminent psychiatrist Dr Franco da Rocha noted:
When I picked up the skull, I felt something strange in my hands, something fluid, as if a globular liquid were touching my palm. When I concentrated my attention further, I saw something similar to an irradiation pass over the skull when you rapidly expose a mirror to luminous rays 93
(It should be noted that Spiritualists describe necromancy as pretended communication with the dead, for they believe that the dead cannot be forced, under the normal `rules', to have any contact with the living. Spiritualists themselves believe they merely invite the dead to communicate.)
Mirabelli died in 1951 after being hit by a car. But although few researchers took an interest in him during his lifetime, in 1973 the Brazilian Institute for Psychobiophysical Research (BPP) appointed a team to compile a dossier on his extraordinary phenomena. Its members included the British writer-researcher Guy Lyon Playfair, who spread the word in Britain.
Mirabelli's sons, although sometimes highly sceptical of Spiritism, were adamant that their father had made astonishing things happen `almost every day, any time and any place' .9' His family were united in denying that he had cheated - or, indeed, that he had any motive for doing so.
Yet Theodore Besterman of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) had no hesitation in denouncing Mirabelli as a fraud, even though he had himself witnessed examples of apparent psychokinesis (mind over matter) in his presence, and seen the medium write a 1,700-word automatic script in under an hour in French - a language he did not know. (He also produced intelligible automatic writing in Hebrew, Japanese and Arabic, just like 'Hel'en Smith' and her alleged Martian, and Kelley and Enochian.)
The mysterious movement of objects Besterman ascribed to the use of `hidden threads', although neither he nor the other members of the research team managed to explain how they could have produced such a variety of phenomena. Despite Besterman's scepticism, however, Professor Hans Driesch of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) and May C. Walker of the American SPR found Mirabelli `most impressive',95 while Guy Lyon Playfair also discovered no evidence of cheating.
Perhaps the last word should be given to Dr Felipe Ache, who hazarded that Mirabelli's strange gifts were `the result of the radiation of nervous forces that we all have but that Mirabelli has in extraordinary excess.' In other words, perhaps we all have such astounding abilities in latent form, but only certain rare people, with a distinct psychological and perhaps even physiological make-up, will ever possess the weird talent to activate it. If it means conjuring up putrefying corpses, perhaps we should be grateful for that.
Another major case from the annals of the Golden Age of physical mediumship reveals the difficulty in separating apparently genuine phenomena from fraud, at least on a conscious level as far as the medium was concerned. And it shows how dramatic, but often unpleasant, the world of the seance room once was.
Eusapia Palladino remains the most thoroughly investigated medium in the history of psychical research, certainly over a protracted and chronological period. A Neapolitan, she was studied for more than twenty years by at least fifty scientists - many of them internationally acclaimed - from Italy, France, Poland, Russia, England and the US.
Eusapia's life began inauspiciously. Her mother died shortly after the future medium was born in 1854, and her father was murdered when she was twelve. Perhaps this trauma was in some way the cause of the phenomena that surrounded her first attendance at a seance the following year, at which the furniture moved towards her and rose into the air.
Then in 1872 the English wife of one Damiani, an Italian psychical researcher, attended a seance in London at which a spirit calling itself `John King' came through and informed her that there was a very powerful medium in Naples who was the reincarnation of his daughter Katie King, already a well known haunter of seance rooms herself. The ghostly John King then gave the complete address of the house where this reincarnation could be found. In due course, Damiani followed this up, finding the house - and Eusapia Palladino. Much impressed, as well he might be, Damiani helped to foster the Neapolitan's powers.
Soon she was a sensation in the neighbourhood, but it took twenty years for her talents to reach the notice of
