Cross-correspondences

What it is

The cross-correspondences are a body of writing produced by mediums in the early twentieth century, mostly by automatic writing, where the hand is said to move without the writer's conscious control. Members of the Society for Psychical Research collected the scripts and set them side by side. Taken one at a time the fragments made little sense. Read together, the researchers argued, they carried a message, either from people who had died or by telepathy between living minds. The name refers to scripts that seemed to answer or complete one another.

Where it comes from

The affair is also called the Palm Sunday Case, after the day May Lyttleton died. She was in love with Arthur Balfour, then a Member of Parliament and later Prime Minister, and he had not declared his intentions when she fell ill; she died on 21 March 1875. Over the next thirty years the Society for Psychical Research gathered scattered messages from many mediums which, read as a whole, seemed to show her trying to reach Balfour, with help from Edmund Gurney, Henry Sidgwick and Frederic Myers. In 1891 Myers sealed a written message in an envelope and asked Oliver Lodge to open it after his death, before witnesses, should the message arrive through a medium. Myers died in 1901.

How it is done

Sittings were arranged in different places at the same time, with notes kept of whatever the mediums said or wrote. The scripts were then set beside each other. Individually the phrases were obscure, even to the medium who produced them; the argument was that across many sittings and a long stretch of years a pattern emerged which pointed to a single mind behind the writing.

Tools and materials

The sealed envelope is the best known object in the case, holding a message written in 1891 and opened before witnesses in 1904. Latin and Greek allusions appear in some of the scripts, noted by critics because one of the mediums was a trained classicist.

What it is for

The aim was evidence that something of a person survives death and can make itself known through a medium. The envelope was designed as a test that could be checked afterwards, not simply felt. The principal recipients of the messages were Margaret Verrall and her daughter Helen, Winifred Coombe Tennant, who wrote as Mrs Willett, and Alice Fleming, Rudyard Kipling's sister, who wrote as Mrs Holland.

Who does it

The writing came through mediums, several of them women working under pseudonyms: Mrs Willett was Winifred Coombe Tennant, and Mrs Holland was Alice Fleming. Some names were kept from the public, and Mrs Willett's identity became known only after her death. Other mediums connected with the case were Leonora Piper, Mina Crandon and George Valiantine; Crandon and Valiantine were exposed as frauds. Behind them stood the psychical researchers of the Society for Psychical Research, who set up the sittings and read the results.

What people believe

Underneath the case is a claim about how minds work after death. Spirits of the dead are held to be able to influence a medium's hand or speech, so that a message arrives in fragments that need assembling. A second reading, offered by psychical researchers themselves, is telepathy: living minds in different rooms picking up each other's thoughts. Either way the argument depends on an intelligence being present behind the scripts, a view the Society for Psychical Research put forward and critics rejected.

When it is done

The case is tied to one date above all: Palm Sunday, 21 March 1875, the day May Lyttleton died, which gives the affair its other name. On 13 July 1904 a manuscript said to come from Myers was produced through Mrs Verrall, and the sealed envelope was opened at a meeting on 13 December 1904. The sittings themselves ran across many years rather than on a fixed day.

How scholars and sceptics see it

Amy Tanner, a psychologist, noted that Mrs Verrall and her daughter were allowed to sit with Mrs Piper while the case was running, a possible route for information to pass between mediums. She said the researchers ignored the association of ideas and the closeness of English and Latin words, and read meaning into whatever appeared. Eric Dingwall, himself a psychical researcher, wrote that the Society refused outside examination and kept some mediums' names secret. Ivor Lloyd Tuckett found vagueness and error in the detail; Charles Mercier said two cases could be twisted to fit. John Booth in 1986 suggested chance, averages, fraud or self-delusion, and John Grant in 2015 warned of "intellectual pareidolia".

Compare and confuse

The case belongs with spiritualist mediumship, where a person in trance is said to speak for the dead, and with the wider psychical research of the late nineteenth century. Its alternative name, the Palm Sunday Case, comes from the day May Lyttleton died. The word correspondences here describes separate scripts that were said to match or answer each other.

Today

The correspondences are a historical episode, not a living practice. They remain a reference point in writing on mediumship and survival, and were re-examined by John Booth in 1986 and John Grant in 2015, both of whom rejected them as evidence. The Society for Psychical Research's own journal carried the failure of the sealed-letter test, and psychical researchers and critics have argued over the file ever since.

Questions people ask about Cross-correspondences

Good reading and sources

• Cross-correspondences on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• Wikidata recordOpen data