BUILDING A FORTEAN LIBRARY
“Life after death will hardly be worth calling life if it remains merely static. That is one reason why nobody believes any more in the playing of harps.” So writes our chosen author, the late Paul Beard – reminding one of the excellent Rabbi Isodore Epstein, who in his Judaism similarly scorned the idea that the hereafter might be spent “in sheer idleness”. Judaism as a whole is really rather vague, undecided even, about whether there actually is an afterlife, and modern Christianity doesn’t seem to have come up with a decent alternative to the harps, as far as we know. Beard’s compact book, on the other hand, is pretty definite about the work we should expect to do on the ‘other side’, regardless of our Earthly religious predilections. Indeed, these and the preconceptions that go with them may sometimes be an obstacle to passing through the various states and stages he confidently describes. Which naturally leads to the question: how can Beard be so confident in his account?
Beard was a member of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) for a quarter of a century, and President of the College of Psychic Studies for 16 years. Unlike the SPR, the latter has a distinct corporate point of view, which is firmly of a spiritualist Spiritualist) persuasion. Beard thus had access to the full range of records of communications from the ‘other side’ – acquired through automatic writing, direct voice, ouija board, whatever – and sifted these for the reliability of both communicator and medium. He spends three chapters and 50-plus pages discussing and explaining his criteria. It is pretty dry stuff, but he does suggest that the reader can skip this part and go back to it at his leisure. If nothing else, one is reassured that Beard has impartially unearthed the most articulate and most trustworthy accounts that he can find. After that, the reader’s on his or her own as to whether he or she believes what is here. Fairly obviously, there is no absolutely reliable way of knowing whether our mortality is a (dead) end, an utter cessation of consciousness, or a stepping stone to something else, new and strange. And to compound the difficulty, as Beard says, rather wryly: “Unfortunately, one consequence of dying is that one loses thereby some of one’s credibility as a witness.”
