Dictionary:

communication

  (kə-myū'nĭ-kā'shən)

1. The act of communicating; transmission.
2. 1. The exchange of thoughts, messages, or information, as by speech, signals, writing, or behavior.
   2. Interpersonal rapport.
3. communications (used with a sing. or pl. verb)
   1. The art and technique of using words effectively to impart information or ideas.
   2. The field of study concerned with the transmission of information by various means, such as print or broadcasting.
   3. Any of various professions involved with the transmission of information, such as advertising, broadcasting, or journalism.
4. Something communicated; a message.
5. communications A means of communicating, especially:
   1. A system, such as mail, telephone, or television, for sending and receiving messages.
   2. A network of routes for sending messages and transporting troops and supplies.
6. communications The technology employed in transmitting messages.
7. Biology. The transfer of information from one molecule, cell, or organism to another, as by chemical or electrical signals or by behaviors.
8. Anatomy.
   1. An opening or connecting passage between two structures.
   2. A joining or connecting of solid fibrous structures, such as tendons and nerves.

In the electronic world, it is the transfer of data and information from one location to another. "Data communications" or "datacom" refers to digital transmission. "Telecommunications" or "telecom" refers to a mix of voice and data, both analog and digital. However, due to digital convergence, "telecommunications" implies "data communications."

"Networking" generally refers to a local area network (LAN), but it may refer to a wide area network (WAN), which is commonly called a telecom network.

The term "communications" may refer only to voice-related subjects such as PBXs, modems, call centers and the like. However, the word is also a common English word such as in the "Analog Vs. Digital Communications" headline below. Thus, "communications" is used specifically in some cases and generically in others.

The Protocol

The way data communications systems "talk to" each other is defined in a set of standards called "protocols." Protocols work in a hierarchy starting at the top with the user's program and ending at the bottom with the plugs, sockets and electrical signals. See communications protocol and OSI.

Analog Vs. Digital Communications

Prior to the Internet, the world's largest communications system was the telephone network, a mix of analog and digital lines. It used to be entirely analog and transmitted only voice frequencies, but is today almost entirely digital. The only analog part is the line between the telephone and a digital conversion point (digital loop carrier) within about a mile of the customer.

Amplifiers Boost the Noise

Analog systems are error prone because the electronic frequencies get mixed together with unwanted, nearby signals (noise). In long distance analog telephone networks, amplifiers were placed in the line every few miles to boost the signal, but they also boosted the noise. By the time the person or modem received the signal at the other end, it may have been impossible to decipher.

Repeaters Regenerate

In a digital network, only two (binary) distinct frequencies or voltages are transmitted. Instead of amplifiers, repeaters are used, which analyze the incoming signal and regenerate a new outgoing signal. Any noise on the line is filtered out at the next repeater. When data are made up of only two signals (0 and 1), they can be more easily distinguished from the garble. Digital is simple.

The First Analog Communications

In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell sent the first electronic communications over a wire when he said, "Mr. Watson. Come here! I want you!"

noun

1. The exchange of ideas by writing, speech, or signals: communion, intercommunication, intercourse. Obsolete converse. See knowledge/ignorance.
2. Something communicated, as information: message, word. See words.
3. A situation allowing exchange of ideas or messages: contact, intercommunication, touch. See connect, touch/not touch.

Definition: giving, exchanging information, ideas
Antonyms: concealment, cover, quiet, suppression, withholding

The technique of conveying thoughts or ideas between two people or groups of people.

The transmission of information. Problems in the philosophy of communication include the question of whether communication is essential to thought, whether we can do better than thinking of words as mere vehicles for independent thoughts or ideas, and what distinguished a primitive signalling system, such as animals may possess, from full-fledged meaningful language. See also Grice.

Because of the Middle East's central location and the relatively high percentage of its people who engage in commerce, ease and speed of information transmission have long been major concerns.

Early Muslim dynasties, including the Abbasids, the Zengids, and the Mamluks, used carrier pigeons to convey military intelligence or vital state information. Messengers mounted on camels or mules carried official information throughout the Umayyad and Abbasid realms. Although this service (barid) was unavailable for private or commercial use, unofficial couriers (fuyuj) carried mail on land and sea, and some merchants used private messengers. The Ottoman and Safavid states had postal and courier services. Modern postal service began in the Ottoman Empire as early as 1823 and was extended to most cities by 1856. Private courier services existed in Egypt by the 1830s; the government post office, founded in 1865, carried mail from the outset and money orders from 1868.

France's occupation of Egypt in 1798 and the spread of European commerce in the Middle East in the early nineteenth century led to the introduction of new courier services and communication devices, including semaphores and heliographs. The electric telegraph first came to Constantinople (now Istanbul) in 1839; Sultan Abdülmecit I authorized a telegraph line from the capital to Edirne in 1847 (it was not completed until 1855); and the first cable was laid under the Black Sea, from Varna to the Crimea, in 1854. Companies based in Britain vied to extend telegraph lines across the empire to Egypt and the Persian Gulf, but the Ottoman government undertook the task; the lines reached Baghdad by 1861. A telegraph line was built between Alexandria and Cairo in 1854, at the same time that Egypt's first railway was built. Under Saʿid Pasha (1854 - 1863) and Khedive Ismaʿil (1863 - 1879), telegraph lines were extended to all inhabited parts of Egypt.

The Sepoy Mutiny (1857), news of which took forty days to reach London, made Britain aware of its need for telegraphic communication with India. After an abortive attempt to lay an underwater cable from Aden to Bombay, Britain's government negotiated with the Ottomans and the government of Iran for the right to extend lines across their territories. The Indo-European Telegraph Department of the government of India began to string lines across Iran in 1863; two years later the telegraph was operational from Baghdad to Baluchistan, although problems arose, both from attacks by nomads and from official obstructionism. The Indo-European Telegraph Company, which was formed in 1867, built a more efficient line across Iran and Russia to Germany that began service in 1870. Telegraph operators, whether French-speaking Turks and Armenians in the Ottoman Empire or English-speaking Indian officers in Iran, soon became potent agents of Westernization and of tighter state control over provincial and local government.

The telephone was introduced to Constantinople and Alexandria in 1881. Used at first by European merchants, this new medium of communication was soon adopted by Egypt's government and later by businesses and households. The telephone's spread in the Ottoman Empire was upheld by Sultan Abdülhamit II (1876 - 1909), who was fearful of electricity, then accelerated by the Young Turks (1909 - 1914). Wireless telegraphy was introduced into the Ottoman Empire and Egypt in 1913.

World War I accelerated public familiarity with modern means of communication. After 1918, the governments of the states in the Middle East, new and old, set up ministries to manage the postal, telegraph, and telephone services for both official and private uses. Radio broadcasting began in Egypt in 1932 and soon spread to most other countries in the area, which established transmission facilities and radio stations under government auspices. During World War II and later, during regional conflicts such as the Arab - Israel War of 1948, extensive state censorship was imposed on all communications; this has been maintained in some
countries in the area. Television broadcasting began in Iraq in 1958 and soon spread to all other countries of the Middle East, generally under state control. In the last three decades of the twentieth century, governments expended large sums in updating their communications systems, replacing telegraphs with telex facilities and, later, augmenting telephones with fax machines.

The 1990s saw the region further revolutionized by the introduction of satellite dishes, mobile telephones, and the internet. Although some countries tried to regulate new technology - Iran and Iraq, for example, were among those banning satellite dishes, and Saudi Arabia and Syria tried to control internet access - such media allowed an unprecedented exchange of ideas, news and information, and entertainment to wide audiences in a region where censorship has reigned and the free exchange of ideas has been tightly controlled.

Bibliography

Davison, Roderic. "The Advent of the Electric Telegraph in the Ottoman Empire." In Essays in Ottoman and Turkish History, 1774 - 1923: The Impact of the West, edited by Roderic Davison. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000.

Hershlag, Z. Y. Introduction to the Modern Economic History of theMiddle East, 2d edition. Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1980.

Shaw, Stanford J., and Shaw, Ezel Kural. History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, Vol. 2. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977.

— ARTHUR GOLDSCHMIDT UPDATED BY MICHAEL R. FISCHBACH

The possibility of communication between the living and the world of the dead (spirits and nonhuman intelligences) was the dominant issue raised by Spiritualism in the mid-nineteenth century, and the verification of Spiritualist claims dominated psychical research through the first half of the twentieth century. Spiritualist claims that certain individuals could regularly demonstrate communication with the dead and psychical research's quest for scientific proof of this alleged phenomenon emerged in response to the Enlightenment's critique of super-naturalism and demands for scientific verification of any such assertions.

Claims of communication with the dead have been an integral part of human experience since the beginning of history. Accounts of spontaneous contact date to ancient times, as do reports of specialists who claimed an extraordinary ability at regular contact with the dead. Such specialists were known by a variety of names, but in Spiritualism they have been referred to as mediums. Most Spiritualists have been satisfied that the human organism of a talented medium is the best mechanism for communication with spirits. The clarity and reliability of communication are usually considered dependent upon whether unseen operators can make use of the medium's sensitivity when his or her will and consciousness are passive. This function has been termed sensory automatism by psychical researchers.

Sometimes communication is assisted by a mechanical indicator such as a planchette or Ouija board. Throughout the twentieth century mechanical devices to effect communication without using the human organism, such as the Ashkir-Jobson Trianion, have been invented. Such devices, of course, involve the presence of human observers, who, it might be supposed, could exert a mediumistic element, if only subconsciously. It was long hoped that a suitable instrument could be invented that would elevate communication with the dead to the domain of pure physics, but, with some notable exceptions, few scientists have been willing to risk ridicule by devoting their energies to such a project. One exception was inventor Thomas A. Edison, who hoped to construct an instrument for communicating with departed spirits. A review of mechanical devices used in spirit communication follows.

Mechanical Communication

In his book Startling Facts in Modern Spiritualism (1874), N. B. Wolfe records a spirit prediction that a "thought indicator" instrument for spirit communication would be invented about 60 years later. In fact, during the 1930s a group of British psychical researchers formed the Ashkir-Jobson Trianion and devised several apparatuses, among them the communigraph and the reflectograph, to facilitate spirit communication by mechanical means.

From time to time other experimenters have also attempted to develop mechanical methods of spirit communication. In 1948 N. Zwaan, a Dutch delegate to the International Spiritual-ist Federation Congress in London, demonstrated an electrical device he claimed produced a field of energy capable of stimulating the psychic senses into activity. In 1949 Mark Dyne called a meeting of Spiritualists in Manchester, England, where Dennis Russell demonstrated a Zwaan ray apparatus, and the Spirit Electronic Communication Society was founded. In 1952 the Teledyne Research Unit was formed with Don Emerson as medium, and with spirit guidance the Teledyne instrument was constructed employing Zwaan ray principles.

Other devices included the dynamistograph and the Vandermeulen spirit indicator.

In the 1970s there was widespread interest expressed in the electronic voice phenomenon or Raudive voices, developed by Friedrich Jürgenson in Sweden and Konstantin Raudive in Germany. Jürgenson and Raudive claimed that voices of dead people could be recorded on a tape recorder, that these voices could answer questions and/or offer verifiable evidence of survival. The simplest technique involved merely making a recording in a quiet room with an open microphone, with a preliminary announcement, then to playing the tape back at maximum volume. A second method involved connecting the tape recorder to a simple diode circuit. A third method consisted of coupling an ordinary broadcast receiver to the tape recorder, which was tuned to a frequency that appeared devoid of normal signals.

Paranormal voices distinct from either radio signals, extraneous sounds, or the "white noise" backgrounds were said to have been recorded. In some cases the voices occurred at a different speed from the recording. They were sometimes noted to have broken through or interrupted radio sounds.

Because of the ambiguity of so many of the claimed paranormal voices and the susceptibility of a listener to hallucinate sounds from faint signals, there was initially a good deal of skepticism about the electronic voice phenomenon, but there was also much responsible scientific support. Interest in the phenomenon declined since it failed to produce results over a period of time.

Motor Automatism

Motor automatism refers to the action of the body, independently of the conscious will, in the production of extraordinary phenomena. Such motor automatism is seen in the movement, under the hand, of the séance table, Ouija board, planchette, coin, tumbler, or pendulum inside an alphabetical circle; in the striking of the pendulum against a glass; in raps when a nervous explosion appears to explain the phenomenon; in automatic writing, and in trance speaking. A stranger manifestation of motor automatism has been reported in some rare cases of stigmata, in which messages appear in raised letters on the surface of the medium's skin.

On occasion, the motor effects of the divining rod employed as a means of communication. According to Professor E. Garnett of the Transvaal University College is quoted in Stanley de Brath's book The Physical Phenomena of Spiritualism (1947), "During the past few months my son has discovered that in reply to definite question, the rod [divining rod] behaves as planchette. The method he adopts is as follows: The rod is held at forehead level, almost vertical. Questions are asked in usual tone and pitch of voice. For 'Yes' the rod moves forward and downward. For 'No' the rod moves backward and downward."

The tilting of the table in table turning séances or the gentle tapping by a table leg indicating a letter of the alphabet was a crude and laborious, but popular form of communication during the nineteenth century. The Ouija board and other alphabetical arrangements represent a simplification of the process. Raps are more effective, and they eliminate the medium's sub-conscious to a greater degree, but they are rarer. The plan-chette approaches automatic writing, and trance speaking is motor automatism at its most effective.

Sensory Automatism

Sensory automatism may involve some degree of mediumistic consciousness and is witnessed in the delivery of messages by clairvoyance, clairaudience, and telepathy, or in the perception of symbolic visions. The clairvoyant messages may be presented pictorially to the medium's mind, externalized in a crystal ball or other shining surface, or heard in seashells or by inner audition.

Many instances of message-bearing symbolic visions are recorded by Ernest Bozzano in the Annals of Psychical Science (volume 6, 1907). In one instance, a mother saw a little bird flying in a deserted plain a little bird whose wings suddenly fell off. Soon after the vision her son died.

Independent Physical Signals

In a third and further-developed stage of communication, Spiritualists have claimed that both motor and sensory automatism are dispensed with and messages occur in apparent independence through the operation of a mysterious psychic force. Observers have seen tables move without being touched and heard percussive sounds that could not be traced to the medium's organism.

Sir William Crookes recorded the following observations with the famous medium D. D. Home: "One of the most amazing things I have seen was the levitation of a glass water-bottle and tumbler. The two objects remained suspended above the table, and by tapping against each other answered 'yes' to questions. They remained suspended about six to eight inches above the table for about five minutes, moving in front of each person and answering questions."

At another time Crookes observed: "During a séance with Mr. Home a small lath moved across the table to me in the light and delivered a message to me by tapping my hand; I repeating the alphabet and the lath tapping me at the right letters. The other end of the lath was resting on the table, some distance from Mr. Home's hands.

"The taps were so sharp and clear and the lath was evidently so well under control of the invisible power which was governing its movements, that I said 'Can the intelligence governing the motion of this lath change the character of the movements, and give me a telegraphic message through the Morse alphabet by taps on my hand.' Immediately I said this the character of the taps changed and the message was continued in the way I had requested. The letters were given too rapidly for me to do more than catch a word here and there and consequently I lost the message; but I heard sufficient to convince me that there was a good Morse operator at the other end of the line, wherever it might be."

Deceiving Spirits and the Play of the Subconscious

To anyone seriously pursuing the possibility of spirit communication, the questions that present themselves are numerous. Are the communications to be accepted at their face value as emanating from spirits? Can they be explained by the sub-conscious powers of the medium, of the sitters, or of others?

As early as 1853 G. H. Lewes observed (and exploited for purposes of derision) that suggestion may play an important part in the shaping of the contents of mediumistic verbiage. He described a sitting for raps with Maria B. Hayden when, by carefully emphasized hesitation at the appropriate letters he had a conversation with one of the Eumenides. At the same sitting he induced the table to confess, in reply to his mental question, that Hayden was an impostor and that the ghost of Hamlet's father had 17 noses!

In The Book of Mediums, French medium Allan Kardec writes of an instance in which the medium evoked Tartuffe, who he showed himself in all his classical peculiarities. When the medium asked, "How is it that you are here, seeing that you never had any real existence?" Tartuffe answered "I am the spirit of an actor who used to play the part of Tartuffe."

But no such fencing was possible in the following case, also recorded by Kardec: "A gentleman had in his garden a nest of little birds. This nest having disappeared one day, he became uneasy as to the fate of his little pets. As he was a medium he went into his library and invoked the mother of the birds to get some news of them. 'Be quite easy,' she replied to him, 'my young ones are safe and sound. The house-cat knocked down the nest in jumping upon the garden wall; you will find them in the grass at the foot of the wall.' The gentleman hurried to the garden and found the little nestlings, full of life, at the spot indicated."

Highly improbable communications came sometimes even through mediums of established reputation. In a sitting with Lenora Piper in 1899, the biblical Moses reportedly communicated prophecies as well as a variety of meaningless utterances.

There have been numerous communications attributed to "deceiving" spirits. Theodor Flournoy, in his 1911 classic text Spiritism and Psychology, records instances in which mediumistic conversations were carried on for days with the spirits of friends who announced their sudden death. It was found afterward that they were in flourishing health and had no idea of the distress they had caused.

It was known from early times that communications allegedly coming from the spirits cannot always be trusted. Emanuel Swedenborg wrote in his spiritual diary: "When spirits begin to speak with man he must beware lest he believe them in any thing; for they say almost anything. Things are fabricated by them and they lie. If man then listens and believes, they press on and deceive and seduce in divers ways."

To some extent the character of an established control may be responsible for untrustworthy communications. Hester Dowden observed that the controls seem to have a private circle of acquaintances to draw from. These acquaintances always choose to come through the same control and are generally as trustworthy as the keeper of the unseen barrier. When the control was seeking a communicator Dowden often noticed that quite foolish and irrelevant little messages were spelled out as if spirits of the poltergeist type had been playing with the Ouija board.

Communications that seem to originate in an extraneous mind are sometimes followed by others in which the subconscious element is overwhelming. Dowden cited a case in which description of a haunted castle was given. She wanted to stop the communication as one of no interest when her guest interrupted and said that he was very much interested, since the story that came through was the plot of his new play.

Generally the communications are earnest and their tone is moral and religious. In discussing the various angles presented by the contents of mediumistic communications, F. W. H. Myers concluded: "The high moral quality of these automatic communications is a phenomenon worth consideration. I must indeed confess myself unable to explain why it is that beneath frequent incoherence, frequent commonplaces, frequent pomposity of these messages, there should always be a substratum of better sense, of truer Catholicity than is usually to be heard, except from the leading minds of the generation. The almost universally high tone of genuinely automatic utterances—whether claimed as spirit communications or proceeding obviously from the automatist himself—has not, I think, been sufficiently noticed or adequately explained."

The Personal Character—Difficulties and Complications of Communications

The great question in all communications that originates in the subconscious is why they should take on the form of personal character. William James offered an explanation, that "all consciousness tends to personal form." He believed that genuine communications are extremely rare and that the information occasionally imparted by supernormal means is immediately seized upon by the subconscious mind and presented in a dramatized and elaborated form. His supposition is borne out by the observations of Frederik van Eeden with the medium Rosina Thompson. The sum total of his findings was that after the genuine information has ceased, the role of any spirit is easily and imperceptibly taken up by the medium.

What is the mechanism of communication? In the trance mediumship of Leonora Piper the controls took pains to give an explanation, later summarized by Richard Hodgson:

"We all have bodies composed of luminiferous ether enclosed in our flesh and blood bodies. The relation of Mrs. Piper's ethereal body to the ethereal world, in which communicators claim to dwell is such that a special store of energy is accumulated in connection with her organism, and this appears to them as 'light.' Mrs. Piper's ethereal body is removed by them and her ordinary body appears as a shell filled with this 'light.' Several communicators may be in contact with this light at the same time. There are two chief masses of it in her case, one connected with the head, the other in connection with the right arm and hand. Latterly, that in connection with the hand has been brighter than that in connection with the head. If the communicator gets into contact with the light and thinks his thoughts, they tend to be reproduced by movements in Mrs. Piper's organism. Very few can produce vocal effects, even when in contact with the light of the head, but practically all can produce writing movements when in contact with the light of the hand. Upon the amount and brightness of this light, caeteris paribus, the communications depend. When Mrs. Piper is in ill health the light is feebler and the communications tend to be less coherent. It also gets used up during a sitting and when it gets dim there is a tendency to incoherence even in otherwise clear communicators. In all cases coming into contact with this light tends to produce bewilderment, and if the contact is continued too long or the light becomes very dim the consciousness of the communicator tends to lapse completely."

Multiple Communications

To obtain communications from two different intelligences at the same time, one writing and the other speaking, was nothing unusual in Piper's mediumship. Attempts were even made at gaining the use of the left hand by a third intelligence for simultaneous communication. Hodgson reported that at a sitting where a lady was engaged in a profoundly personal conversation with Piper's control "Phinuit" concerning her relations, "the hand was seized very quietly and, as it were, surreptitiously, and wrote a very personal communication to myself purporting to come from a deceased friend of mine and having no relation whatsoever to the sitter; precisely as if a caller should enter a room where two strangers to him were conversing, but a friend of his is also present and whispers a special message into the ear of the friend without disturbing the conversation."

The attempt to write with the left hand was successfully made on March 18, 1895, in a sitting with a Miss Edmunds. Her deceased sister wrote with one hand and "G. P." with the other, while "Phinuit" was talking—all simultaneously on different subjects. Very little, however, was written with the left hand. The difficulty appeared to lie chiefly in the deficiencies of the left hand in writing.

Piper's case was not unique. Dr. David Underhill (later the husband of Leah Fox), in his story of the mediumship of Abby Warner (related in E. Hardinge Britten's Modern American Spiritualism), quotes affidavits and writes from his own experience that Warner often gave three separate communications at once—one with her right hand, another with her left, and a third through rapping.

Robert Dale Owen testified to the same versatility in Kate Fox. William Crookes confirmed Owen's observations: "I have been with Miss Fox when she has been writing a message automatically to one person present, whilst a message to another person on another subject was being given alphabetically by means of raps and the whole time she was conversing freely with a third person on a subject totally different from either."

Confusion and Incoherence

The incoherency of some of the messages received through mediums and the difficulties in communicating with the dead presented a very complex problem. Richard Hodgson, on the basis of his experiences with Piper, arrived at the following conclusions: "If, indeed, each one of us is a spirit that survives the death of the fleshly organism, there are certain suppositions that I think we may not unreasonably make concerning the ability of the discarnate spirit to communicate with those yet incarnate. Even under the best conditions for communication which I am supposing for the nonce to be possible, it may well be that the aptitude for communicating clearly may be as rare as the gifts that make a great artist, or a great mathematician, or a great philosopher. Again, it may well be that, owing to the change connected with death itself, the spirit may at first be much confused, and such confusion may last for a long time; and even after the spirit has become accustomed to its new environment, it is not an unreasonable supposition that if it came into some such relation to another living human organism as it once maintained with its own former organism it would find itself confused by that relation. The state might be like that of awaking from a prolonged period of unconsciousness into strange surroundings. If my own ordinary body could be preserved in its present state, and I could absent myself from it for some days or months or years, and continue my existence under another set of conditions altogether, and if I could then return to my own body, it might well be that I should be very confused and incoherent at first in my manifestation by means of a human body. I might be troubled with various forms of aphasia and agraphia, might be particularly liable to failures of inhibition, might find the conditions oppressive and exhausting, and my state of mind would probably be of an automatic and dream-like character. Now the communications through Mrs. Piper's trance exhibit precisely the kind of confusion and incoherence which it seems to me we have some reason a priori to expect if they are actually what they claim to be."

Myers pointed out the resemblance of such communications to the fugitive and unstable discourse between different strata of personality of which embodied minds offer an example. He suggested that multiple personality may occur in the disem-bodied as well.

The explanations of Piper's control "George Pelham" presented a Spiritualist explanation of the communication process: "In trance the ethereal body of the psychic parts from the physical body just as it does in dreams and then we take possession of it for the purpose of communication. Your conversation reaches us as if by telephone from a distant station. Our forces fail us in the heavy atmosphere of the world, especially at the end of the séance…. If I often blunder it is because I am mak ing use of an organism which does not fit me well…. When clear communications are wanted you must not stun them with questions. In order to reveal themselves to you the spirits put themselves in an environment that discommodes them a good deal. They are like persons who have received a blow on the head and are in a state of semi-delirium. They must be calmed, encouraged, assured that their idea will immediately be of great importance. To put ourselves into communication with you we must penetrate into your sphere and we sometimes become careless and forgetful as you are. That is the reason why we make mistakes and are incoherent. I am as intelligent as I ever was, but the difficulties of communicating with you are great. In order to speak with you it is necessary for me to re-enter the body and there dream. Hence you must pardon my errors and the lacunae in my speech and memory."

A message claimed to be from the deceased W. T. Stead, recorded in Julia's Bureau on June 2, 1912, is similar: "When I see now for myself the extraordinary difficulties in getting messages through from this side, I marvel not that we got so little in all our searchings when I was with you but that we got as much as we did. For it is you, your conditions which make the barrier."

Piper's controls could not hold on long in the body of the medium and often got confused through the eagerness of the interrogator. The spirit of Robert Hyslop said to his son, "You interrupt me, I ought to go now for my power is failing me and I don't know what I am doing." Another time he said "James, I am getting weaker, wait for me, I am coming back." This experience was common with all the communicators. Free, easy chatter, safe from concentration on tests is conducive to better communications. James H. Hyslop, in his sixteenth sitting with Piper, when he adopted the methods of the Spiritualists, obtained more identity proofs than in all the previous 15 sittings.

The first attempts in getting through are usually fraught with greater difficulties. By a curious process of inversion, the recently dead individual reproduces the symptoms of his last bodily illness in the body of the medium without conscious effort and causes her great discomfort. At the same time the communicator lapses into the mental state he was in as he was dying. Hyslop wrote on this point: "The mental confusion relevant to the death of my father was apparent in his first attempt to communicate through Mrs. Piper, and when I recalled this period of his dying experience, this confusion was repeated in a remarkable manner, with several evidential features in the messages. Twice an uncle lost the sense of personal identity to communicate. His communications were in fact so confused that it was two years before he became at all clear in his efforts. He had died as a result of a sudden accident. Once my father, after mentioning the illness of my living sister and her name, lost his personal identity long enough to confuse incidents relating to himself and his earthly life with those that applied to my sister and not to himself." Hy-slop further observed: "We may well suppose it possible that this coming back produces an effect similar to the amnesia which so often accompanies a shock or sudden interference with the normal stream of consciousness. The effect seems to be the same as that of certain kinds of dissociation which are now being studied by the student of abnormal psychology, and this is the disturbance of memory which makes it difficult or impossible to recall in one mental state the events which have been experienced in another."

The extent to which the medium is affected by the psychic state of the communicator at the moment of death is well illustrated by Emma Hardinge Britten's description of her famous prediction of the loss of the steamer Pacific:

"That evening, just as my mother and myself were about to retire for the night, a sudden and unusual chill crept over me, and an irresistible impression possessed my mind that a spirit had come into our presence. A sensation as if water was streaming over me accompanied the icy chilliness I experienced and a feeling of indescribable terror possessed my whole being. I begged my mother to light up every lamp we had at hand; then to open the door that the proximity of people in the house out-side our room might aid to dissipate the horror that seemed to pervade the very air. At last, at my mother's suggestion, I consented to sit at the table, with the alphabet we had provided turned from me and towards her, so that she could follow the involuntary movements of my finger, which some power seemed to guide in pointing out the letters. In this way was rapidly spelt out: 'Philip Smith: Ship Pacific.' To my horror I distinctly felt an icy cold hand lay hold of my arm; then distinctly and visibly to my mother's eyes, something pulled my hair, which was hanging in long curls; all the while the coldness of the air increasing so painfully that the apartment seemed pervaded by Arctic breezes. After a while my own convulsed hand was moved tremblingly but very rapidly to spell out: 'My dear Emma, I have come to tell you I am dead. The ship Pacific is lost and all on board have perished; she and her crew will never be heard from any more.' "

Just as the medium may prove hypersensitive to the thoughts of the sitters when in trance, so it appears that thought impressions of the spirits congregating around the "light" may have a garbling influence on the message of the control. This possibility was strongly borne out by the attitude of Piper's control "George Pelham," who many times asked the waiting sitters to withdraw until he was through with his first messages. The assumption was that at the same time the spirits on the other side also left and saved him much confusion. Hyslop noted several instances in which the communication came through unintentionally.

The communication of names that have no special meaning is usually difficult for the controls when the messages are sent by telepathic or pictorial impressions. There is often confusion of the letters.

Hyslop also believed that the nature of the communicator's mind can present another difficulty in clear communication. If, for instance, the communicator was a good visualizer and the medium is a poor one, the pictorial messages impressed on the medium may come through imperfectly.

Hyslop made statistical calculations regarding the more important communications through Piper in 15 sittings. There were 205 in all; of these 152 were found to be true, 16 false, and 37 indecisive. In regard to 927 matters of detail alluded to in these communications, 717 were true, 43 false, and 167 undecided.

According to Hodgson, three kinds of confusion could be distinguished in the Piper communications: (1) confusion of the spirit as to whether it was communicating or not, primarily because of mental or bodily conditions when living; (2) confusion in the spirit produced by the conditions into which it came when in the act of communicating; and (3) confusion about the result because of lack of complete control over the writing (or other) mechanism of the medium.

Hodgson found that the best communicators were recently deceased children and adults who had died in the prime of a healthy life, like George Pelham, who only complained that the dreams of the medium got in his way.

In his first report on Piper, Sir Oliver Lodge stated that when "Dr. Phinuit" vacated his place for another communicator the speeches were "more commonplace, and so to say 'cheaper' than what one would suppose likely from the person himself." Phinuit said that after "entering the medium" he only remembered the messages entrusted to him for a few minutes and then became confused. Apparently he was not able to depart at once and kept on repeating incoherent statements.

Considering that in messages from the living the agents do not appear to exercise control over the contents any more than thoughts in dreams are controlled, it is a legitimate supposition that, in some cases, the dead may not be more conscious of sending a message than the living. Again, the communicator may be perfectly conscious of the message, yet uncertain of its receipt. The deceased Myers, purporting to communicate to Alice Kipling Fleming (Mrs. Holland), said, "Does any of this reach you, reach anyone, or am I only wailing as the wind wails—wordless and unheeded?" (Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. 21, p. 233).

Other Forms of Communication

Communication from the dead may come in dreams. One of the oldest instances is given by Cicero in De Divinatione: Two friends go to Megare, one lodges at an inn, the other at a private house. The latter, in his dream, hears his comrade call him for assistance against an assassin. He awakens, then sleeps again. The friend appears and tells him he has been killed and thrown into a wagon by the innkeeper and that manure had been thrown over his body. In the morning the friend finds the story true in every detail.

Communicating with the spirits through raps is commonly dated from the time of the so-called Rochester rappings at Hydesville, New York, in 1848. Four months after the Hydesville outbreak Isaac Post, a Quaker, revived David Fox's idea of asking the spirits to rap at the corresponding letter of the alphabet. The Hydesville discovery was not without precedent, however, as early as 858 C.E. it was described in a chronicle, Rudolf of Fulda. Also, before 1848 a spiritualistic interpretation was accepted by many for the phenomena of magnetic trance. The Shakers experienced a special influx of spirit manifestation between 1837 and 1844.

The Rochester rappings and the physical phenomena followed only appeared to confirm the existence of another world. At first it seemed to be inhabited by nonhuman spirits, angels, and other exalted beings. The manifestation of "John King" in the log house of Jonathan Koons marked a transition between nonhuman and human communicators. At first King said he was semidivine, one of "the most ancient angels," and claimed kingly attributes. Later he confessed to have been Morgan, the pirate king. From his early identity as the ruler of a primeval Adamic race, King evolved into a more humble entity who, in manifesting through mediums succeeding Jonathan Koons, laid no more claim to royalty.

Sources:

Bander, Peter. Carry on Talking: How Dead are the Voices? U.K.: Colin Smythe, 1972. Beard, Paul. Survival of Death: For and Against. London, 1966.

Broad, C. D. Personal Identity and Survival. London: Society for Psychical Research, 1968.

Cummins, Geraldine. Swan on a Black Sea: A Study in Automatic Writing: The Cummins-Willett Scripts. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965. Reprint, New York: Samuel Weiser, 1970.

Ducasse, C. J. A Critical Examination of the Belief in a Life after Death. Springfield, Ill.: Charles Thomas, 1961.

Ellis, D. J. The Mediumship of the Tape Recorder. Harlow, England: David J. Ellis, 1978.

Hart, Hornell. The Enigma of Survival: The Case for and against an After Life. Springfield, Ill.: Charles Thomas, 1959.

Hill, J. Arthur. Spiritualism: Its History, Phenomena and Doctrine. New York: George H. Doran, 1919.

Holms, A. Campbell. The Facts of Psychic Science and Philosophy Collated and Discussed. London, 1925. Reprint, New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1969.

Hyslop, James H. Contact With the Other World: The Latest Evidence as to Communication with the Dead. New York: Century, 1919. Reprint, Finch Press, 1972.

Kautz, William H., and Melanie Branon. Channeling: The Intuitive Connection. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987.

Leonard, Gladys Osborn. My Life in Two Worlds. London: Cassell, 1931.

Myers, Frederic W. H. Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. 2 vols. London: Longmans Green, 1903, 1954.

Piper, Alta L. The Life and Work of Mrs. Piper. London: Kegan Paul, 1929.

Richmond, Kenneth. Evidence of Identity. London: G. Bell, 1939.

Salter, W. H. Trance Mediumship: An Introductory Study of Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Leonard. London: Society for Psychical Research, 1962.

Sargent, Epes. Planchette: or the Despair of Science. Boston, 1869.

Communication between animals depends on sight and hearing and, especially in dogs, on the sense of smell. The matters about which animals communicate include (1) for recognition between dam and newborn; (2) for mating; (3) for initiating aggression or welcome; (4) for signaling danger or safety. See also vocalization.

• auditory c. — communication by all kinds of vocalization.
• chemical c. — communication by smell, especially by pheromones.
• visual c. — besides size and color other modes of visual communication which are of great importance in animal life include stance, demeanor, behavior, and the synthesis of all of these in ‘body language’.

Quotes:

"You people are telling me what you think I want to know. I want to know what is actually happening." - Creighton Abrams

"For parlor use, the vague generality is a life saver." - George Ade

"Pure truth cannot be assimilated by the crowd; it must be communicated by contagion." - Henri Frederic Amiel

"The art of conversation consist as much in listening politely, as in talking agreeably." - Atwell

"I've not got a first in philosophy without being able to muddy things pretty satisfactory." - John Banham

"The ability to express an idea is well nigh as important as the idea itself." - Bernard M. Baruch

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