E. W. Wallis, Quoting Emma

Perhaps when The Two Worlds is digitally recovered, we'll find the origin of this extended quote from Emma, by E. W. Wallis, in A Guide to Mediumship and Psychic Enfoldment (1903?) (available in a hermetically-sealed online version here:

By a party of eminent occultists who held strictly private -- or, I might say, secret -- circles for investigation, I was frequently invited, with other young persons, to become a subject for the magnetic operations of inquirers. In my own case, I was never rendered wholly unconscious by the will of the magnetisers, though nearly all the rest of the subjects they experimented with were made so. I believe now that the difference between the partial and total unconsciousness of the various subjects of these occult sciences corresponded to the different degrees of entrancement which we who are platform speakers experience. I realize that on the spiritual rostrum I am two distinct persons. I can go on speaking aloud, yet thinking of quite other matters, and when I can fix my mind on what I utter I have listened with a sense of strangeness, which brings conviction, to my mind, at least, that I am not the individual who originates the thoughts expressed, although they are undoubtedly shaped by the organism and linqual capabilities through which they are transmitted. From this state of what I may call waking trace, up to the somnambulic sleep in which the spirit's ideas are expressed automatically, I have observed many gradations, ranging, as above observed, from semi-consciousness to the deep somnabulic sleep. There is one striking difference, however, between the entrancement induced by human and spiritual magnetism. The former is much stronger, more direct, and, in general, may be considered as being a much coarser, or more material, element than the latter. Human magnetic control anniliates individuality, and even identity, for the time being, and substitutes the sensuous perception of the magnetizer in place of those of the subject. "A good magnetic subject" is helplessly in the power of the magnetizer, unless that subject passes away from the human to a spiritual control, when that of the human operator is at once lost. This was constantly my own case, and thus I, and others similarly influenced, have come to the conclusion that spiritual control is more subtle, finer and -- except in the case of obsession by evil spirits -- far purer. Mediums, when once they have become such, are scarcely ever susceptible again to human magnetism. To avoid such a possibility, I have always been strictly charged by spirit friends never to submit to be magnetized by human operators, and when preparing for the spiritual rostrum to wear silk, and avoid as much as possible conversation or contract with those around me.

There is a lot in this passage -- repetition, gesturing in the direction of the Orphic Circle, and quite a few finely-drawn distinctions: the sort that are demanded when one is conjuring with the elements of an entire cosmogony. That Emma remained partly conscious during the times she acted as a clairvoyante for the Orphic Circle is new information, as far as I am concerned, as is her observation that she was nearly unique in this regard among Orphic Circle subjects. That assertion -- if actually Emma's -- would tend to undercut several other public statements of Emma's, not least of which her assertion, in the Autobiography that she had, in effect, no understanding of the spirit world before her conversion in New York in 1856. Here, toward the end of her life, she is claiming -- pretty clearly, it seems to me -- that she in fact had spirit controls (in the late 1830s or early 1840s) who kept her from becoming, as a clairvoyante for the Orphic Circle, helpless and unconscious under the control of "the sensuous perceptions of the (human) magnetiser." Hmmmmm.....

I really need to get the bottom of Emma's beliefs about silk: did she think silk was a conductor, or an insulator?