Why Mediums struggle with Names

Lisa Williams, the popular TV medium, had two sisters and a brother in tears as she passed on some very evidential messages from their deceased mother on one of her programmes a year or two ago. At the end of the reading, Ms Williams asked them if they had any questions before she lost contact with their mother. One of the young women asked if her mother had given her name. Ms Williams responded that she had not, and made no attempt to explain the problem in getting the mother’s name.

One could easily imagine the belly laughs of all the sceptics who might have been watching the programme. Here is this supposed medium passing on all this information and she can’t get a simple name. “How absolutely ridiculous!” “What a sham!”

Of course, if the sceptics had stopped to think about it, the failure to get a name actually lends credibility to Williams. After all, if the claim is that she researched in advance all the evidential information she passed on to the sitters, why wouldn’t she have known the name of their mother? Such reasoning, however, is usually beyond the sceptics.

In 1917, the Rev Charles Drayton Thomas, a respected psychical researcher and Methodist minister, began sitting with the renowned British medium, Gladys Osborne Leonard. He quickly made contact with his father, John D. Thomas, and his sister, Etta, receiving much veridical information proving their identities. However, he wondered why they had such difficulty in giving their names and the names of others.

The discarnate Thomas explained to his son the difficulties involved in communicating names: “One cannot sometimes get the names right. If I wish to speak about a man named ‘Meadow’, I may try that name and find that ‘Meadow’ is not spoken rightly by Feda [Leonard’s spirit control]. So I then wait and try to insert the idea of a green field, connecting it with the idea of the man described. We always try for a definite thing which will tell you exactly what we mean; but if we are unable to do that, we have to get as near to it as we can. Sometimes we have to depend upon slender links in giving you the clue.”

As another example, the discarnate Thomas mentioned that when he tried to get the name ‘Jerusalem’ through Feda, she gave the word ‘Zion’ instead. Etta explained to her brother that it was much easier to send ideas to Feda than it was to send words. She said that she could not get her husband’s name, ‘Whitfield’, through Feda. “Is it not strange that I cannot say my husband’s name?” she asked . “I can feel it, but cannot say it; that is, I cannot get it spoken. I get it on the surface, so to speak, but cannot get it into the medium’s mind.”

At a sitting four months later, Etta again attempted to get her husband’s name through, but only succeeded in getting the medium to say, “Wh, Whi-, Whit-”. Etta further explained to her brother that the more she tried to think on the name, the more difficult it was to get it through the medium’s brain, adding that she could not control the medium’s power of expression. “One may get a word into her mind and yet be unable to make her express it,” she explained.

“Because it is in the mind, it does not follow that her brain will take it. Unless the ideas in the mind are tapped on to the actual brain, one cannot express them.”

Thomas noticed that Feda could more easily catch a first syllable than a whole name, but sometimes she would catch only the first letter, which he understood was pictured for her by the communicator. When one communicating entity tried to get the word ‘Greek’ through, Feda struggled with “G-, Gre-, Grek, Greg, Greeg”.

Thomas further observed that when Feda had latitude in the selection of words, e.g. ‘Zion’ for ‘Jerusalem’, communication was easier. However, when it came to proper names, this alternative was not always possible.

The discarnate Thomas also told his son that when he entered the conditions of a sitting his memory would divide into its former earthly conditions of conscious and subconscious. Thus, the same forgetfulness he might have had when in the flesh with regard to names and other things still existed on his side of the veil.

Table-tilting was a more accurate method of getting names, Drayton Thomas pointed out, the communicator could dispense with the control and, assuming enough psychic energy, direct the tilting personally – so many tilts for each letter of the alphabet or a tilt for the proper letter when the sitter recited the alphabet. But this method is, of course, slow and cumbersome.

When a spirit well-known when incarnate communicated with the Rev William Stainton Moses through direct writing, his name was spelled incorrectly, leading Moses to suspect an impostor spirit. However, it was explained to Moses by Imperator, the advanced spirit who had been communicating with him, that the error was a result of several intermediate spirits who were assisting in the communication.

“Most frequently the actual writing is done by one who is accustomed to manifest in that way, and who acts, as it were, as the amanuensis of the spirits who wish to communicate,” Imperator informed Moses. “In many cases, several spirits are concerned.” In this case, the error was due to inadvertence on the part of one of the intermediary spirits, not the communicator himself, Imperator explained.

When Lady Barrett began receiving messages from her late husband, Sir William Barrett, shortly after his death in 1926, she found it strange that he would address her as ‘Florrie’. While it was her childhood name, she was known to her husband as ‘Flo’. Sir William explained that he couldn’t get ‘Flo’ through the medium’s mind.

At a sitting with another medium, Lady Barrett wondered why her husband identified himself as ‘William’ rather than ‘Will’, as she knew him. This made her suspicious that it was not him. At a later sitting with Mrs Leonard, Lady Barrett, a physician and Dean of the London School of Medicine for Women, asked him about this. Sir William explained the problem: “If you go to a medium that is new to us, I can make myself known by giving you through that medium an impression of my character and personality, my work on earth and so forth,” he related.

“Those can all be suggested by thought impressions, ideas; but if I want to say, ‘I am Will’, I find that is much more difficult than giving you a long comprehensive study of my personality. ‘I am Will’ sounds so simple, but you understand that in this case the word ‘Will’ becomes a detached word.

“If I wanted to express an idea of my scientific interests I could do it in twenty different ways. I should probably begin by showing books, then giving impressions of the nature of the book and so on, till I had built up a character impression of myself, but ‘I am Will’ presents difficulties.”

When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was told by a spirit entity known as ‘Pheneas’ that there was a fellow on his side who had played cricket with him, Sir Arthur requested his name. “Names are terribly difficult,” Pheneas responded. “You see, a name does not represent any sort of idea. It is an indigestible chunk. You can’t suggest it to the medium’s brain. But I will try.” Through the medium, in this case Lady Doyle, Pheneas then wrote a series of letters ending in CINI. It made no sense to Sir Arthur, and no further attempt was made to get the name.

However, he later found out that a cricket player named Paravicini had died two days earlier, although neither he nor the medium knew of the death at the time of the sitting. Whether this was the person attempting to communicate, Sir Arthur could not determine for certain. At a later sitting, Pheneas could not get the name of a man who he said had been helping Sir Arthur. “Names are extraordinary,” he communicated through the medium. “They are like a bubble that is burst. You cannot get the parts together again.”

Communicating through Geraldine Cummins, an Irish medium for automatic writing, Frederic W. H. Myers, a pioneering psychical researcher who died in 1901, talked about his attempts to communicate through Feda and Mrs Leonard. “I was invisible to Feda, but Feda, when she understood that she was to search for a new communicator, cast about her that net of psychic force with which she apprehends the symbols we try to display to her,” Myers wrote through Cummins’ hand. “It was difficult at first to drop my name within it, but at last success was mine...

I do not know which letter first met with her attention. I merely gave the suggestion of my Christian name and surname in letters, and I understood that the first letter was apprehended separately. “To me it is of little moment what first caught her attention; the image really was the sum of myself as I was then alive. Many figures in that sum were not perceived, were not snared in the net, but sufficiency was obtained and then she was able to get the name.”

Clearly, there are obstacles to communication with the Spirit World. “You have to reduce spirit to matter, two entirely different forms of expression,” explained Silver Birch, the spirit guide who spoke through Maurice Barbanell, “and in that process of stepping down, many things can go wrong.”

Michael E. Tymn is author of “The Articulate Dead,’ available from www.amazon.com,

and from which this article was taken.  Re-printed with the author’s permission.

Copyright Michael E. Tymn.

Check out a 10-minute video of Lisa Williams working on US TV by clicking here.

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A lot of people new to Spiritualism imagine that mediums talk pretty well face to face with spirit communicators. In fact, it is a much more complex exercise than this, as this article illustrates.

Revd Charles Drayton Thomas was a Methodist minister, given leave by his Church to investigate Spiritualism, in the early 20th century at a time before the Church’s attitude towards us hardened - to assess its relevance to the Christian faith.  He contributed hugely to our literature as this article illustrates.  Again, Gladys Osborne Leonard, a medium who was always ready to be tested by psychic researchers, features in this article.  

Lisa Williams (pictured right) is a UK medium, now living and working in America.  GG.