DR. LOMBROSO’S BIG SURPRISE
by Michael E. Tymn

“If ever there was an individual in the world opposed to spiritism by virtue of scientific education, and, I may say, by instinct, I was that person,” So wrote Dr. Cesare Lombroso, a world-renowned Italian neuropathologist, in his1909 book. After-Death, What? Lombroso went on to write that he had made it an indefatigable pursuit of a lifetime to defend the thesis that every force is a property of matter and the soul an emanation of the brain. For years he laughed at the reports he had heard about chairs levitating and spirits communicating through them.

However, Lombroso’s attitude began to change in 1891 when he somewhat reluctantly accepted an invitation to attend a séance in a Naples hotel with the medium Eusapia Paladino. “And when I then and there saw extremely heavy objects transferred through the air without contact, from that time on I consented to make the phenomena the subject of investigation,” he wrote, also mentioning that the séance was in full daylight.

By 1903, Lombroso had observed Paladino numerous times, but at a sitting with her in Genoa in 1903, he experienced something new. Before Paladino entered the trance state, Lombroso asked her for some special manifestation that days. Paladino consented. “…after half an hour of the séance had passed, I was seized with a very lively desire to see her promise kept,” Lombroso wrote. “The table at once assented to my thought by means of its usual sign-movements up and down; and soon after (we were then in the semi-obscurity of a red light) I saw detach itself from the curtain a rather short figure like that of my mother, veiled, and which made the complete circuit of the table until it came to me, and whispered to me words heard by many, but not by me, who am somewhat hard of hearing. I was almost beside myself with emotion and begged her to repeat her words. She did so, saying, ‘Cesar, fio mio!’ (I admit at once that this was not her habitual expression, which was, when she met me, ‘mio fiol’; but the mistake in expression made by the apparitions of the deceased are well known, and how they borrow from the language of the psychic and of the experimenters), and removing the veil from her face for a moment, she gave me a kiss.”

Lombroso wrote that his mother reappeared at least 20 times during Eusapia’s séances, although less distinct than on that first occasion.

While skeptics might jump on the difference in the greeting expression used by his mother, Lombroso had come to understand that the medium’s brain contributes to the communication, or the communicating spirit’s message must be filtered through the brain and may not necessarily be delivered in the way it is received from the spirit.

“I am ashamed and grieved at having opposed with so much tenacity the possibility of psychic facts – the facts exist and I boast of being a slave to facts.” Lombroso wrote. “There can be no doubt that genuine psychical phenomena are produced by intelligences totally independent of the psychic and the parties present at the sittings.”

ASPSI