William Stainton Moses
William Stainton Moses (born November 5, 1839 in Donington , Lincolnshire , † September 5, 1892 in Bedford ) was an English clergyman and a medium .
Life
Moses was born in the village of Donington in Lincolnshire, England. His father William Moses was head of the high school there, his mother the daughter of Thomas Stainton from Alford . He went to school in Bedford, later on to University College School in London (UCS) and to Exegeter College in Oxford. In 1870 he was ordained a priest in the Church of England .
In 1872 he began attending media and seances: first Lottie Fowler, later Charles Williams and Daniel Dunglas Home . Five months after his introduction to spiritism, he claimed to be able to induce levitation . At the same time, he published books that he alleged that ghosts gave him the content. The scripts for the period between 1872 and 1883 filled 24 notebooks.
In 1878 he published Psychograpfy. A Treatise on One of the Objective Forms of Psychic or Spiritual Phenomena . In it he invented the word psychography as a name for the automatic writing claimed by the spiritualists . The phenomenon is said to come about when a medium, guided by a spirit, writes down things over which it has no influence.
Moses was a very early member of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). In 1886 and 1887 the SPR published a series of publications in which they exposed the scams of the alleged medium William Eglinton. As a result, many early members, including William Stainton Moses, left the SPR. His attitude towards other frauds that have already been uncovered was also made clear by the fact that he continued to support the spirit photography of Edouard Isidore Buguet, although the latter had already been exposed as a fraud.
reception
Moses himself only demonstrated his skills to a small group of friends and forbade everyone else, especially scientists, to attend his seances. This led to the suspicion that all seemingly supernatural events were only caused by the participants in the seances themselves. He was also accused of relying primarily on reading weekly newspapers in answering relatives' questions about the recently deceased. The light phenomena cited as evidence for his supporters were exposed by scientists such as Sherrie Lynne Lyons as simple sleight of hand, in addition to the fact that he himself was seen several times with the ingredients necessary for these tricks.
In addition, many of the messages he created through automatic writing can be proven wrong afterwards.
Publications
Under the pseudonym "MA Oxon", Moses published the following books on spiritualism:
- 1879: Spirit Identity
- 1880: Higher Aspects of Spiritualism
- 1882: Psychography
- 1883: Spirit Teachings ( digitized version )
He also edited Light magazine and wrote about Spiritism for Human Nature .
literature
- JM Rigg: Moses, William Stainton (1839-1892) , In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Janet Oppenheim. (1988). The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850-1914. Cambridge University Press. pp. 139-140.
- ↑ Joseph McCabe. (1920). Spiritualism: A Popular History From 1847. Dodd, Mead and Company. pp. 151-173
- ↑ Hereward Carrington. (1907). The Physical Phenomena of Spiritualism. Herbert B. Turner & Co. p. 14th
- ↑ Frank Podmore. (1902). Modern Spiritualism: A History and a Criticism. Volume 2. Methuen & Company. pp. 283-287
- ↑ Sherrie Lynne Lyons. Species, Serpents, Spirits, and Skulls: Science at the Margins in the Victorian Age. State University of New York Press. p. 95
- ↑ Joseph McCabe. (1920). Is Spiritualism Based On Fraud? The Evidence Given By Sir AC Doyle and Others Drastically Examined. London Watts & Co. p. 186
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Moses, William Stainton |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | English clergyman and medium |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 5, 1839 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Donington (Lincolnshire) |
| DATE OF DEATH | September 5, 1892 |
| Place of death | Bedford |