New Books and Media

From the publisher's website: Psychic Investigators examines British anthropology’s engagement with the modern spiritualist movement during the late Victorian era. Efram Sera-Shriar argues that debates over the existence of ghosts and psychical powers were at the center of anthropological discussions on human beliefs. He focuses on the importance of establishing credible witnesses of spirit and psychic phenomena in the writings of anthropologists such as Alfred Russel Wallace, Edward Burnett Tylor, Andrew Lang, and Edward Clodd. The book draws on major themes, such as the historical relationship between science and religion, the history of scientific observation, and the emergence of the subfield of anthropology of religion in the second half of the nineteenth century. For secularists such as Tylor and Clodd, spiritualism posed a major obstacle in establishing the legitimacy of the theory of animism: a core theoretical principle of anthropology founded in the belief of “primitive cultures” that spirits animated the world, and that this belief represented the foundation of all religious paradigms. What becomes clear through this nuanced examination of Victorian anthropology is that arguments involving spirits or psychic forces usually revolved around issues of evidence, or lack of it, rather than faith or beliefs or disbeliefs.

Further information at the publisher's website: University of Pittsburgh Press.

From the publisher's website: There have been important mediums and researchers throughout the history of psychical research in many parts of the world, but the period from the 1880s to the 1930s saw a coming together of outstanding scientific minds in Europe and the USA who probed the phenomena of mental mediumship with a diligence, intellectual discipline and degree of enthusiasm not encountered on such a scale before or since. This period saw the establishment of the Society for Psychical Research in Britain (1882), followed swiftly by the American Society for Psychical Research (1884), which resulted in close collaboration between people who, apart from their intellects, also had the financial means and the time to devote to the subject.

In this book Alan Gauld, whose works on mediumship, psychical research and psychic phenomena have become classics in the genre, offers important insights into aspects of the early days of mediumship research that over the years have largely gone off the radar. Here we see the great names of psychical research as real people in personal relationships, and we learn about the informal beginnings of serious investigations and explore their cultural context.

The Heyday of Mental Mediumship is destined to become Gauld’s magnum opus.

Further information on the publisher's website: White Crow Books. 

From the publisher's website: Why an Afterlife Obviously Exists is a philosophical argument demonstrating why the existence of an afterlife is beyond astronomically likely and hence empirically certain. It explains how we have every rational reason to think that people who have near-death experiences are not only telling the truth, but the book also argues that near-death experiencers are thoroughly justified in knowing that they visited the actual afterlife. 

Further information at the publisher's website: Iff Books

From the publisher's website: You don't have to 'be religious' to believe there may be a life after death!

The Medium and the Minister explores psychical and religious approaches to the possibility of an afterlife. The tensions and conflicts between these two approaches and the heated controversies they have generated are illustrated by a number of case studies. These focus on the challenges posed by psychical research and spiritualism to orthodox religion as the ultimate authority for information and teaching about the afterlife. Prominence is given initially to the campaigns of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sir Oliver Lodge which aimed to publicise the psychical evidence and to the Church’s reaction to them. Later developments and initiatives to try to reconcile the opposing positions are then examined in the light of further psychical research. The issues raised are shown to be still highly relevant to current beliefs and attitudes and to the question of what might constitute evidence for life after death.

Further information at the publisher's website: 6th Books.

Review by Melvyn Willin.

This book is a study of how people collaboratively interpret events or experiences as having paranormal features, or as evidence of spiritual agency. The authors study recordings of paranormal research groups as they conduct real life investigations into allegedly haunted spaces and the analyses describe how, through their talk and embodied actions, participants collaboratively negotiate the paranormal status of the events they experience. By drawing on the study of the social organisation in everyday interaction, they show how paranormal interpretations may be proposed, contested and negotiated through conversational and embodied practices of the group. 

The book contributes to the sociology of anomalous experience, and explores its relevance  to other social science topics such as dark tourism, participation in religious spaces and practices, and the attribution of agency. This book will therefore be of interest to academics and postgraduate researchers of language and social interaction; discourse and communication, cultural studies; social psychology, sociology of religious experience; parapsychology, communication and psychotherapy.

Further information about the book here: Springer. 

From the publisher's website: Exploring the paranormal through musical phenomena, this encyclopedia covers a range of anomalies, from musical mediumship to locations throughout the world where music has been heard with no obvious source. Other manifestations, such as the abilities of musical savants and the anesthetic use of music during surgical procedures, are included with a focus on paraphysical aspects. Entries describe examples from earliest history up to the present—interpretation is left to the reader. Broader themes and concepts are discussed in appendices, with additional references provided for further study.

Further information on the publisher's website: McFarland.

From the back cover: Have you ever read about a telepathic experience and wondered if it was true? Or heard about a fulfilled premonition and wondered if your future already exists? This unique book explores these questions through a rigorous re-examination of many cases of claimed telepathic, clairvoyant, and precognitive experiences, known collectively as Extrasensory Perception (ESP). The author finds non-ESP explanations for some famous cases, including three that are unlikely to have happened at all. However, there are many other cases where there seems to be no alternative but to accept ESP as a working hypothesis.

What conclusions will you reach about the fascinating cases re-examined in this book? Did Mark Twain foresee in a dream the body of his brother in a metal coffin six weeks before his brother died? What about the Chaffin Will case where a jury accepted post-mortem communication as legal evidence of a second Will? Did the deceased C.S. Lewis visit Canon Philips as an apparition? How is it possible that a stolen harp was found through map dowsing from 1800 miles away? Every case examined is full of unexpected twists and turns.

From the back cover: Does consciousness continue after death? For 150 years, scientists, doctors, and other highly qualified investigators have carefully collected evidence in hopes of answering this question. In this award-winning essay, Sharon Hewitt Rawlette analyzes the best of that evidence to date.

Starting with third-person phenomena such as after-death apparitions, mediumship, and telephone calls from the dead and moving on to first-person phenomena like near-death experiences, memories of previous lives, and memories of the period between lives, Rawlette lays out the vast landscape of evidence for life beyond the grave. She argues that extensive cross-validation between first- and third-person evidence cripples the strongest skeptical arguments brought against each type considered alone. Ultimately, she concludes that the survival of consciousness is the best explanation for the evidence taken as a whole and considers what implications this has for our understanding of the world we live in, even while we are still on this side of death.

From the publisher's website: The astonishing story of Henry Coombe-Tennant (1913–89), who served in the British Army in World War II, escaping from a POW camp, joining Special Forces and aiding the French Resistance, before working for the British Secret Service in Baghdad and ending his days as a Benedictine monk!

Review by Trevor Hamilton. 

From the back cover: When strange things happen to people, or when they experience bad luck, they may come to believe that they've been cursed. In this well-researched and well-referenced book, Dr Peter McCue looks at curses or alleged curses from an evidential and parapsychological perspective. He also examines what appear to be strange coincidences. He presents a wide array of cases, and asks how strange coincidences arise and how curses might work.

From the back cover: A sailor, a pilot, a film director, a plumber, a mother, a teenage girl - all heard a mysterious voice. At a critical moment in their lives, they received distinct instructions or a serious warning. In every case the spiritual message was totally unexpected. The impact on the person involved is seen to be profound and life-changing. In different countries, at different points in history, these are the stories of lives being saved and journeys made to discover how "the voice" is possible.

Review by Ciaran Farrell.

From the publisher's website: There are few things more in common across cultures than the belief in ghosts. Ghosts inhabit something of the very essence of what it is to be human. Whether we personally ‘believe’ or not, we are all aware of ghosts and the rich mythologies and rituals surrounding them. They have inspired, fascinated and frightened us for centuries – yet most of us are only familiar with the vengeful apparitions of Shakespeare, or the ghastly spectres haunting the pages of 19th century gothic literature. But their origins are much, much older…

The First Ghosts: Most Ancient of Legacies takes us back to the very beginning. A world-renowned authority on cuneiform, the form of writing on clay tablets which dates back to 3400BC, Irving Finkel has embarked upon an ancient ghost hunt, scouring these tablets to unlock the secrets of the Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians to breathe new life into the first ghost stories ever written. In The First Ghosts, he uncovers an extraordinarily rich seam of ancient spirit wisdom which has remained hidden for nearly 4000 years, covering practical details of how to live with ghosts, how to get rid of them and bring them back, and how to avoid becoming one, as well as exploring more philosophical questions: what are ghosts, why does the idea of them remain so powerful despite the lack of concrete evidence, and what do they tell us about being human?