Parlour Tricks
Daniel Dunglas Home was born near Edinburgh on March 20th, 1833. His father, William Home, was the illegitimate son of Alexander, tenth Earl of Home. As early as the age of four he started to "see" pictures of future events. The family showed little suprise at Daniel's "second sight," for his mother was herself a clairvoyant descended from a clan of Highland seers. Mr and Mrs Home later left him in the care of an aunt, who took him to America, where, in 1850, the 17-year-old Daniel became a convert to the new doctrine of spiritualism.
Three years earlier at Arcadia, New York, the Fox sisters had sparked a psychical mania after convincing the gullible that spirits of the departed were communicating from the "other side" by rapping on the walls of their home. Home's conversion to "Modern Spiritualism" came about when he realised that he too possessed a psychic talent which manifested itself by knocking sounds. When furniture started to glide his family tried to get him exorcised but they could not halt the manifestations. On several occasions his father caught him smirking at the sight of distraught family members being chased by furniture, so they kicked him out and he drifted aimlessly for a number of years; using his "talents" to earn a crust. He gave seances and developed a repertoire that was similar to that of contemporary spirit mediums. Home would arrange for the guests to sit round a table, he would go into a trance, and soon rappings and voices would manifest. These seances were always staged in well-lit rooms and never Home's own house.
When Home returned to Britain in 1855, he put up at Cox's Hotel in Jermyn Street, London. His London seances put him in a different league from the psychics of his day, but he had his detractors, notably the poet Robert Browning. Still, Home also had no shortage of eminent admirers, including Queen Victoria, Dickens, Lord Lytton, Thackeray, Ruskin and Elizabeth Barrett-Browning. By this stage in his career, Home had added levitation, apports and bodily elongation to his routine.
An early account of his gravity-defying ability reads:
"I had hold of his hand at the time, and I felt his feet - they were lifted a foot from the floor! Again and again he was taken from the floor; and the third time he was carried to the lofty ceiling of the apartment, with which his hand and head came into gentle contact.
Between 1855 and 1864 Home travelled around Europe, performing at the courts of Holland, France, Russia and Prussia. His seances in the Tuileries in Paris greatly impressed Napoleon III and the Empress Eugenie and he even received an audience with the Pope. In 1859, he married a god-daughter of the Tsar, but she died four years later.
In 1871, the physicist Sir William Crookes investigated Home. He subjected him to a number of tests, beginning with a simple experiment designed to measure Home's ability to move objects at a distance. Crookes asked him to move a spring balance at the end of the room. Home easily achieved this. He then instructed Home to sit at a table under which a closed copper cage was situated. The cage contained an accordion, which Crookes asked Home to play using his telekinetic powers. Home obliged.
It continued to play even when Home moved away from the table.
Home also gave a demonstration of his immunity to flame by reaching into an open fire in front of Crookes and stirring the burning coals with his hand. When Crookes examined Home's hand, he was baffled to find no burns. Crookes carried out more tests and made a list of the strange phenomena witnessed. He catalogued the following:
| Movement of heavy bodies with contact but no physical pressure.
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| Currents of air and changes of temperature. |
| Percussive noises - raps, faint scratchings, detonations.
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| Alteration in the weight of objects.
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| Movement or levitation of furniture. |
| Levitation of Home himself.
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| Luminescences, phantoms and materializations . |
| "Direct writing" - where hands, visible or invisible, took up pens to write messages. |
| Points of light darting about and settling upon heads. |
Other scientists were unwilling to be seen in the same street as Home, let alone in a lab, so Crookes put his reputation on the line by publishing his findings and his theory that Home was:
" connected with the human organisation, which for convenience may be called the Psychic Force."
He faced the derision of colleagues.
At the age of 40, Daniel Dunglas Home went to live in the Mediterranean because of a tubercular condition, which essentially ended his psychic career. He died in 1886, one of the few "psychics" never to have been effectively debunked.
We believe that such abilities as Daniel Home exhibited have a material cause and are rooted at the genetic level. It is now our intention to unravel the chromosomal threads which give rise to such phenomena. Thus every man, woman and child will be able to levitate from this planet under their own "steam" and also be fireproof so as to withstand re-entry!
Consequently our researchers have investigated the genealogy of Mr Home to trace his descendants. So it was, with not a little surprise, that we discovered (you guessed it) that Home's paranormal DNA is now encoded in one Stewart "Ramsey" Home, author, "critic", Druid, ultra-left and lover of fine wines etc.
We have, therefore, sent out many and varied agents into the field to secure a sample of this chirpy cockney gent's genetic wealth, his Druid fluid, for cloning experiments.
If any of our readers should already have access to Mr Home's liquid DNA perhaps they could send some in a jiffy bag to our usual address, for the attention of Prof Levity.
Remember, you do not have to give your name. A reward may be offered.
Astrid, for Parasol Association of Autonomous Astronauts.
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