| The earnest but rather preposterous adventures of the
Metaphysical Research Group of Richmond, Virginia who channel and help earthbound spirits
move on. In the very first instance, the author’s wife spontaneously began to channel
a distraught Civil War era girl named Angelica who was searching for her lost
"Andrew." One of the group’s members then went into trance to channel her
"Superconscious," which told her how Angelica was Andrew’s 17-year-old
fiancee. She went to visit her beloved, a wounded Confederate officer, only to find that
she was too late, whereupon she stumbled and fell on a sharp instrument "something
similar to a bayonet" and died with Andrew’s name on her lips. I’m afraid
that this strikes me as the stuff of a TV miniseries, rather than a source of true
historical data. The group later met a local lady who recalled hearing a story about a
young lady nicknamed "Angelica" for her fluffy golden hair, who was killed in an
accident at a Richmond field hospital—but the question remains—did she
"recall" the story before or after hearing the details told by the channeler? Coddington
writes, "As later chapters will confirm, hard proof of a ghost’s presumed mortal
lifetime is often tantalizingly elusive." Read Hungry Ghosts, by Joe Fisher,
if you want to know just how maddeningly elusive--and malicious. Coddington is aware of
the book, as he discusses it in the last chapter, and he warns against gullibility. But
for some reason he feels that the ghosts his group channels have no bad intentions, since,
after all, the group wants to help those earthbound spirits. These entities have
not tried to manipulate us, says Coddington. But they manipulate by the lies that they
tell and they manipulate the group emotionally.
I was troubled with by some silly leaps of logic, and the group’s general lack of
historical discrimination. In one case, a child who supposedly died in the influenza of
1918, mentioned only a fever and her tummy hurting—not the drowning pneumonia that
characterized the 1918 influenza—which was nothing like the stomach flu we all know.
In the most ludicrous case, an English spirit with a cockney accent claimed to be a foot
soldier from 1775. There is debate over when the cockney accent emerged—some experts
put it as late as the mid-1800s--and the spirit used words like "classy"
(earliest appearance in print: 1891) and "Coo-ee" (of Aboriginal Australian
origin, 1780-90.). I’m sure this group is quite sincere, but they do not seem to have
the historical background to know that what they are being fed by the spirits is a lot of
nonsense. You simply can’t trust material gotten this way! |
|
there are 7
pieces of merchandise in this room
there are 7 pages in this section--click
Ref. & Case
Studies