SILVER BIRCH AND HIS MEDIUM

　Over forty years ago, an argumentative, clever young mam, whose own volubility as the eighteen-year-old secretary of a literary debating society had landed him into an unanticipated investigation of Spiritualism, mockingly went to his first seance in an East London tenement.

　Unimpressed by the subsequent home circle proceedings, he laughed when entranced sitters temporarily became the mouthpieces for Red Indian, African and Chinese guides. Incredulous, he lightly dismissed a sitter's rebuke, "You, too, will be doing this before long," but the remark was to prove prophetic.

　Halfway through the sceptic's second attendance at the humble circle, he found himself apologising to his com-panions for having "dropped off to sleep". To his astonish-ment he was told: "You have been a Red Indian while in trance. Your guide gave his name. He said he had been training you for years, having chosen you before your birth. He also said that before long you will be speaking on Spiritualist platforms."

　Again he laughed, this time not quite so light-heartedly. At subsequent seances he continued to be entranced by the unknown Red Indian who at the beginning could barely string a few words of English together.

　The young man was Maurice Barbanell. His guide was later named Silver Birch. Both were destined to become well known in contrasting but indissolubly linked spheres of activityーthe medium as a skilled propagandist, author and editor; his guide as a spirit teacher whose eloquence over the years has won for him, in the words of Hannen Swaffer,

　"more followers than any earthly preacher".

　He spoke authoritatively, for to this day the home circle of which Silver Birch is the guide is known as the Hannen Swaffer home circle. Also, in his own long career as an outstanding polemical journalistーthe title of "The Pope of Fleet Street" was well earnedーhe had frequently savoured with a connoisseur's delight the finest flights of earthly oratory, expressed by such masters of the art as Keir Hardie, Philip Snowden, Lord Samuel, Lady Bonham-Carter, Lloyd George, Sir Winston Churchill and Archbishop Temple.

　The secret of the Barbanell-Silver Birch psychic partner-ship was kept for over twenty years. As editor of Psychic News, and later Two Worlds, Barbanell had wisely insisted that while the teachings of his guide deserved the widest circulation in printーit was Swaffer who first urged their publicationーthey should stand or fall on their own merits. The fact that he was the medium for Silver Birch was not publicly revealed until a memorable Two Worlds article was written by Barbanell on August 24, 1957.

　Of Silver Birch Swaffer has told us: "He is not a Red Indian. Who he is we do not know. We assume that he used the name of the spirit through whose astral body he ex-pressed himself, it being impossible for the high vibration of the spiritual realm to which he belongs to manifest except through some other instrument. 'One day I will tell you who I am,' he told us. 'I had to come in the form of a humble Indian to win your love and devotion, not by the use of any high-sounding name, but to prove myself by the truth of what I taught. That is the law'.'

　Answering critics who asked, "How do you know all this teaching does not come from the medium's subconscious mind?" Swaffer pointed out that in vital respects the two personalities contradicted each other. Whereas, for example, Silver Birch teaches reincarnation, Barbanell eschews it, yet in trance, confounds his own conscious arguments.

　Silver Birch has also provided other evidence through the years that he is indeed an independent being and not a "secondary personality" of the medium, an assertion favoured by perplexed researchers. On one occasion, for example, he told Barbanell's wife, Sylvia, that at a subse-quent Estelle Roberts voice seance he would speak through the trumpet and repeat certain words she would have good reason to recall. The promise was strictly fulfilled. Barbanell, who was also among those present, had the thrill of hearing his guide speaking in direct voice.

　The eighteenth-century French writer, Georges-Louis Leclerc De Buffon, has declared, "Style is the man himself." If this literary dictum be accepted the case rests proven, not only in relation to personality traits, but, above all, in the manner of his teaching. Indeed Barbanell, in a personal tribute to Silver Birch's teachings, which he described as an outstanding example of "spirit alchemy", once told his readers:

　"As one who spends the whole of his working life in writing, I can appreciate that the faculty of being able to deliver, week after week, words of wisdom, full of eloquent simplicity, in this spontaneous fashion, is in itself evidence of supernormality. Like other journalists who live by their pen, I know that simple English is the most difficult to write. I know how you have to polish and repolish, alter words, delete others, change sentences, consult the dictionary and the thesaurus, before you are satisfied. Yet here is a 'dead' man who, without hesitation, can produce perfect prose. Everything he says is full of common sense, inspiring, up-lifting and ennobling. Silver Birch's words glisten like diamonds. I salute a master of English, a great literary crafts-man whom I have grown to love and admire."

　Similarly, Edmund Bentley, one of South Africa's leading Spiritualists, in his book, These Chariots of Fire, has described the difference between Silver Birch and his medium as "startling". The contrast, he wrote, was most pronounced in speech and oratory. Bentley wrote:

　"Barbanell is a competent public speaker. Long familiarity with the public platform, with banquet and with hustings, with meetings at which the audience has numbered thou-sands, has given him a command of words, the ability to tell a witty story and, above all, to present a case in the manner of a court-room barrister.

　"But Silver Birch wipes all this clean from the human slate. He brings a grandeur and authority, compound of that higher realm of simplicity and love which has the hall-mark of kingship. His mighty range of description, his immaculate choice of words and his sheer silver, glowing oratory combine to prove, if any proof were needed, that here is another being, a visitor from the realms of spirit, one who has taken over the earthly vessel and filled it with an authentic cornucopia, distinct, individual and apart."

　Describing the slow evolution of complete trance control, Barbanell tells us it took years before he achieved complete unawareness of what was said: "At first I was conscious of every word uttered, even though sometimes I appeared to be either standing a few feet away from my body or sus-pended a few feet above it. During this period, the spirit entity gained a growing mastery over the English language, the original guttural accent gradually being replaced with a pleasant but deeper sounding voice than my own.

　"So far as I am concerned, trance is a willing surrender. I compose myself, try to make myself passive and mentally offer myself, praying that the highest, best and the purest that are possible shall come through me. Then an unusual feeling of warmth steals over me. This I have experienced occasionally in my normal life. To me it is an indication of spirit presence. It is not heat in the thermometer sense, for I am sure that this instrument would not register anything more than my normal bodily temperature. Soon I feel that my breathing is becoming heavily rhythmic and even stertorous. Gradually I lose awareness of my surroundings and appear to be enveloped in a comforting kind of blanket and then 'I' have gone. Where 'I' have gone to I do not know. Perhaps, here or hereafter, I shall find out.

　"I am told that the trance is achieved by the guide blend-ing his aura with mine and then taking control of my sub-conscious mind. The awakening is a process that reverses the entry into trance. Usually, however warm the room is, there is a curious feeling of coldness in my lower limbs. Sometimes I know that my own emotional make-up must have been utilised, for there is a feeling almost as if I have shed tears.

　"However long the trance state may last, I always awaken refreshed, no matter how tired I may have been beforehand. All I seem to require to achieve normality is a drink of some cold water which I also always have soon after the seance begins. A busy life has often meant that I go straight from the hurly-burly to the seance room, but however exhausting or stimulating the day has been it seems to make no differ-ence to the trance state. I have been surprised on occasions, feeling so tired that it seemed purposeless to have a sitting. Yet the results have been up to their usual standard. Ex-perience has taught me to avoid heavy meals for as long as possible before the sitting as these seem to produce a clog-ging effect. In opposition to what sceptics say, I find that trance mediumship functions better when nothing is known about visitors who attend the seance. Any knowledge about them presents an obstacle to a clear channel."

　My own first attendance at the Silver Birch circle on an autumn evening in 1963 proved memorable, not least because it provided a fascinating first glimpse of physical phenomena. Including the six regular members of the circle, we were about a dozen in number. The atmosphere was relaxed and friendly. The seance was held in the attractive book-lined living-room of the medium's pleasant first-floor flat, situated in a tree-shaded street in one of London's inner ring suburbs.

　I had heard that a "rocking table" usually initiated the sittings of the Hannen Swaffer circle, but hearing is one thing, seeing entirely another. Did not the twitching legs of dead frogs drying on an Italian balcony in the sun, observed with accidental closeness by a brilliant scientist, help usher in the age of electricity?

　For me the commonplace began to crash in ruins at my feet when, placing the tips of my fingers side by side with those of my companions on the surface of the small wooden seance table, I not only observed but felt it astoundingly come to life. Persuaded of the undeniable integrity of my companions, my accustomed, uncritical acceptance of Newtonian laws evaporated with every successive and seem-ingly intelligent "response" of the table to greetings voiced to unseen and seemingly highly differentiated personalities.

　Varying from a creaking shudder within the woodーun-cannily akin to a mere nod of the headーthe movements of the undeniably inorganic and homely object ranged back and forwards through rapid swayings to violent motions of agitation.

　As the sitters returned to their chairs and the medium, seated on a sofa, went into trance, the impression persisted that proceedings were being watched by an unseen assembly. I began to glimpse what mystics mean when they talk of 

"grace descending".

　The next shock was the transformation of human per-sonality. What had happened to the caustic-tongued, cigar-smoking, wisecracking journalist to whom I was daily professionally accustomed? Freud has long familiarised us with the dynamics of the subconscious in his analyses of psychoses and the tell-tale creative activity of our dream life.

　They were all inadequate to explain what I now saw and heard in the next eighty minutes. Like customs officers, over the fast-paced years of interminable news gathering, the journalist acquires an instinct for the nuances of per-sonality expressed in speech and gesture. This was another personality speaking through the body of the man I knew well in daily life. But it was not the man himself; it was not his style.

　To each of us, that "Through-the Looking-Glass" Friday evening, the message of Silver Birch was personal in context but universal in application. I need only add that his elo-quence won from three of his recipientsーthis hard-bitten writer includedーthe orator's finest feminine tribute, tears, not of sorrow, but of acceptance. Such a confession will only enhance the prejudice of the sceptic, For him summer lightning has not struck out of a cloudless sky. But the Greeks knew a thing or two. I can now understand why an empire rocked to its foundations when the stupefied Croesus received a seemingly trite message from the Delphic oracle.

　In accordance with the time-honoured custom of the circle I was invited by Silver Birch to ask him any question which troubled me. I told him, "I still find it very difficult to accept the problem of the suffering that seems unavoidable in this world and turns many, myself included, against God."

　He replied: "Yes, but it does not turn God against them. How else would you have it? Would you expect to achieve victory without difficulty, to receive prizes without earning them."

　"Suffering there must be. How is the spirit to come into its own, by lotus eating? Because it is not easy it is worth doing. If it were easy it would not be worth doing. It is easy when you have learned that; it was not easy before you learned it. You come again and we will take the world to bits, and we will put it together again. We will learn something from one another. Do not ever despair."

　When the full story of the Hannen Swaffer home circle is eventually revealed, it will present many psychic riddles for the attention of science whichーand there are increasingly encouraging signs to make us hopefulーmay emerge from its present perilous crossroads less aggressively materialistic and more humbly alive to the grandeur of the cosmic horizons which beckon questing, bewildered, suffering mankind.

　Meanwhile, in presenting to readers old and new this further selection of Silver Birch teachings, which are con-tained in the pages that follow, may I express the modest hope that no single one of you will close its pages without some solace or food for fruitful reflection in your own pilgrimage along the roadway of life.