Stephen Braude, PhD, served as chairman of the philosophy department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He has also served as president of the Parapsychological Association. He is author of Crimes of Reason, The Gold Leaf Lady, Immortal Remains, The Limits of Influence, First Person Plural, and ESP and Psychokinesis. He is the recent recipient of the prestigious Myers Memorial Medal awarded by the Society for Psychical Research for outstanding contributions.
Here he discusses large-scale psychokinetic phenomena, typically observed during séances in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These phenomena included table rapping, table levitation, human levitation, apports and materializations. Of particular interest is the case of Daniel Dunglas Home, perhaps the greatest spiritualist medium known in history, who produced such phenomena consistently for a period of twenty-five years. Another well-attested case of human levitation is that of the Catholic saint, Joseph of Cupertino. Braude takes issue with those who believe that the reports of such phenomena are untrustworthy.
(Recorded on September 6, 2015)
Published on September 8, 2015