Purported communications from dead persons through mediums are sometimes explained away by appealing to telepathy. A medium engaging in automatic writing may consciously or unconsciously tap into memories of various living persons who knew the dead person and thus obtain the confidential information that appears in the messages. In other words, although the information in the message may have been acquired by paranormal means, the information might not be coming from a surviving spirit. One might therefore ask, “How could a dead person attempting to communicate with the living overcome this objection?” H. F. Saltmarsh, in his book on the Myers communications, explained (1938, pp. 33–34): “Suppose a message in cryptic terms be transmitted through one automatist [receiver of automatic writing], and another message, equally incomprehensible, through a second at about the same time, and suppose that each automatist was ignorant of what the other was writing, we have then two meaningless messages entirely disconnected with each other. Now, if a third automatist were to produce a script which, while meaningless taken by itself, acts as a clue to the other two, so that the whole set could be brought together into one whole, and then show a single purpose and meaning, we should have good evidence that they all originated from a single source. . . . Telepathy between the automatists . . . would not explain these facts, for none of them is able to understand the meaning of their own particular fragment, and so could not possibly convey to the other automatists the knowledge required to supply the missing portions. In most cases [involving the Myers communications] the puzzle . . . has been solved by an independent investigator, in fact, frequently the automatists themselves have remained in ignorance of any scripts but their own.” In other words, the cross correspondences among the independent communications, each apparently meaningless on its own, reveals the action of a departed intelligence.
Here is an example of such a cross correspondence. Early in 1907, Mrs. Margaret Verrall got a communication from the departed Myers that mentioned “celestial halcyon days.” This inspired her to telepathically send back to Myers a Greek quotation from Plotinus: autos ouranos akumon, which means “the very heavens waveless” (Saltmarsh 1938, p. 73). In the passage in which this phrase occurs, Plotinus had said that the soul, in order to attain enlightenment, must be peaceful, that the earth, sea, and air should be calm, and “the very heavens waveless.” Verrall knew that Myers had used this Greek phrase as a motto for a poem he had written about Tennyson. She also knew that he had included an English translation of the phrase in his book Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death. Mrs. Verrall telepathically sent the phrase to Myers on January 29, 1907, in the presence of the medium Mrs. Piper.
On January 30, Mrs. Verrall noticed the names of the trees “larch” and “laburnum” appearing close to each other in a communication to Mrs. Piper from Myers (Saltmarsh 1938, p. 74). She recalled that these trees are mentioned in a poem by Tennyson, “In Memoriam.” The verse that mentioned larches ended with the line “the sea-blue bird of March.” This is the kingfisher, and another name for the kingfisher is halcyon. According to ancient legend, when the kingfisher nests by the sea around the time of the winter solstice, this causes the seas to become calm and waveless, recalling the phrase from Plotinus, autos ouranos akumon (“the very heavens waveless”). Mrs. Verrall believed that Myers was deliberately responding to her by introducing these subtle allusions into his communications with Mrs. Piper.
On February 25, Mrs. Verrall received another phrase from Tennyson: “the lucid interspace of world and world.” On February 26, the communication from Myers contained the above mentioned quotation from Plotinus (autos ouranos akumon) written in Greek characters. The script also contained these words: “And may there be no moaning of the bar—my pilot face to face.” This was a reference to Tennyson’s poem “Crossing the Bar.” The names of Tennyson and Browning were also in the script. On March 6, Mrs. Verrall’s script from Myers contained many references to calm, including a passage from “In Memoriam” by Tennyson: “And in my heart if calm at all. If any calm, a calm despair.” In her final script in this series, produced on March 11, one can, according to Saltmarsh (1938, p. 75), find allusions to Plato and Tennyson, with “phrases about unseen and half-seen companionship—voiceless communings—unseen presence felt.” Tennyson’s poem “In Memoriam” is about the poet communing with a departed friend. That these particular references should appear in the Myers scripts is, of course, meaningful, especially in the context of the complicated connections between Plotinus, Tennyson, the Greek phrase about the stillness of the heavens, and the many references to stillness and calm that appeared in the scripts. Some of these connections were discovered long after the scripts were produced.
Cross correspondences to these references in the communications to Mrs. Verrall occurred in separate communications received by Mrs. Piper. On March 6, 1907, these words from Myers appeared in the Piper communications: “Cloudless sky horizon, followed by a cloudless sky beyond the horizon; in the waking stage following came the words: moaning at the bar when I put out to sea . . . Goodbye. Margaret.” Mrs. Verrall’s name was Margaret. The references to calm heavens and the bar are strikingly similar to images in the scripts of Mrs. Verrall, which are references to Tennyson’s poems “In Memoriam” and “Crossing the Bar.” According to Saltmarsh (1938, p. 77), neither Mrs. Piper nor the person sitting with her during this session, Mr. Piddington, had enough knowledge to bring these obscure literary allusions together on their own. Saltmarsh (1938, p. 77) also said, “As regards Mrs. Verrall, it must be noted that she had not grasped the significance of the combination of quotations from ‘In Memoriam’ and ‘Crossing the Bar’ until after this sitting with Mrs. Piper.” So that means it would not have been possible for Mrs. Piper to access this information from Mrs. Verrall’s mind by some kind of telepathic process, indicating that the best explanation for the information was the surviving persona of Myers himself.
On April 29, Mrs. Verrall sat with Mrs. Piper, whose scripts revealed not only words connected with “halcyon days” but also some mysterious and apparently disconnected references to Swedenborg, St. Paul, and Dante. On the next day, Myers, in a script produced by Mrs. Piper, said the Greek quotation from Plotinus reminded him of Socrates and Homer’s iliad. The connection between Plotinus, who lived in the third century ad, and Socrates, who lived in the fourth century bc, and Homer, who lived in the eighth century bc, was not immediately apparent. On May 1, Mrs. Verrall’s automatic writing session produced the words “eagle soaring over the tomb of Plato.” Mrs. Verrall recalled that Myers, in his book Human Personality, had used this phrase to describe Plotinus. Investigating further, she found that in the epilogue to Human Personality, Myers had mentioned a vision of Plotinus. Just before this comes the story of how Socrates had a vision of a fair woman dressed in white robes. (This story is from Plato’s Krito.) The woman in the vision of Socrates recites a line from the iliad of Homer. Saltmarsh (1938, p.
78) notes: “A further, and even more significant discovery was made. On the same page that contains the phrase ‘eagle soaring over the tomb of Plato,’ there is a list of ‘the strong souls who have claimed to feel it’ (ecstasy) and among these, after Plotinus and before Tennyson occur Swedenborg, St. Paul and Dante.” So here we can see that elements in the scripts of one medium gave clues to the meaning of elements in the scripts of another medium, which at first appeared meaningless, showing all the elements were known to Myers and associated by him in particular ways in obscure passages of his written works. Finally, on May