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Two Theories to explain the Daguerre film
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Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research: The Scole Report
Plate 16 (Daguerre film): The last, and longest, film produced during the investigation gives: an apparently symbolic message, the name of a pioneer of photography, Louis Daguerre, some mysterious and as yet unidentified initials said to be related to Daguerre and his work, and a totem pole drawing of glyphs which invite expert comment and analysis. This is from a 36-frame roll of Kodachrome 200 film taken from the padlocked ‘Alan’ box (see Chapter IX and Appendix K)
Plate 16 (Daguerre film): The last, and longest, film produced during the investigation gives: an apparently symbolic message, the name of a pioneer of photography, Louis Daguerre, some mysterious and as yet unidentified initials said to be related to Daguerre and his work, and a totem pole drawing of glyphs which invite expert comment and analysis. This is from a 36-frame roll of Kodachrome 200 film taken from the padlocked ‘Alan’ box (see Chapter IX and Appendix K)
The Scole Experiment: Scientific Evidence for Life After Death
Plates 26 and 27: Daguerre and ‘Can You See Behind the Moon’ – this photographic image was one metre in length! It is not known what this phrase means. Louis Daguerre, an early pioneer of photography, is famous for ‘Daguerreotypes’. This image bears his name, but it is not his signature. Why is it on the film? What do the glyphs mean?
Plates 26 and 27: Daguerre and ‘Can You See Behind the Moon’ – this photographic image was one metre in length! It is not known what this phrase means. Louis Daguerre, an early pioneer of photography, is famous for ‘Daguerreotypes’. This image bears his name, but it is not his signature. Why is it on the film? What do the glyphs mean?
One of the enduring mysteries left behind by the Scole experiment was the so-called Daguerre film, a roll of 36 frame Kodachrome 200-transparency film brought in and handled exclusively by the SPR investigators. When it was developed by Kodak and found to contain the longest extension of messages ever to be created by the spirit team, we were confronted with several puzzles. None of them has been satisfactorily resolved, but two brave attempts have recently been made.
As the accompanying reproduction shows, there were several puzzles stretching along the length of the film. We had to decide:
Students of the SPR's bulky report on the Scole sittings will be aware that over the weeks that followed this remarkable and, as it turned out, sadly final, film strip, we took the opportunity to crave further information.
Various crumbs were offered by the spirit Team. They failed to put us out of our misery.
We knew all about Louis Daguerre, the French pioneer of a primitive form of photography immortalised as the Daguerreotype, whose popularity swept across Europe and the USA in the middle of the 19th century, but we could trace nothing which linked him with anyone bearing the mysterious RS initials.
We were told to look behind the meaning of the lunar words, that there was a Frenchman involved, and some sort of experiment with which he was concerned, and which we ought to investigate further.
Moreover, there were skeletons, or at least one skeleton, in
someone's cupboard. This seemed appropriate for investigation into the afterlife, but not particularly enlightening.
We had, of course, proceeded on the assumption that not only was the film strip genuine - fraud on the part of the Scole Group having by then become a preposterously improbable theory, flatly at variance with all the evidence we and others had accumulated - but that clearly intelligent communicators would not waste their time and ingenuity concocting meaningless scribbles.
When all's said and done, they had achieved a unique and momentous accomplishment in creating images on sealed rolls of film in another dimension of reality down here on earth. So they were hardly likely to provide us with nonsense.
Now there were good reasons for believing that the team were operating in concert with some of the pioneers of the Society for Psychical Research.
These pioneers had been responsible during the first three decades of the last century for that impressive, complex, but neglected mass of evidential communications known as the cross-correspondences. These were fragments of messages, meaningless in themselves, scattered around the automatic scripts of half a dozen different mediums in different places at different times, but later found to fit together to make meaningful references.
They were designed to prove that mere telepathy between mediums, or any other living persons, could not have been responsible for messages whose content and meaning no living soul could have known.
One of the earliest film strips, the ill-fated Diotima Polaroid film which alarmed us by starting to fade within days of the time we developed it in the Foys' dining room, had one message which hearkened back to what was probably the earliest of these cross-correspondences.
So maybe they were still toying with this brilliantly ingenious but fearfully complicated device.
This notion is prompted by the work of Professor X, one of the rare luminaries who combines expertise in physics and mathematics with a great depth of knowledge of our subject, but who modesty prefers anonymity. He has identified the mysterious RS as none other than the celebrated author, Robert Louis Stevenson.
This was a notion I had immediately rejected when we were discussing the identity of ‘RS’, if only because he was always known by all three initials. But Professor X began to unearth more and more reasons why I must have been mistaken.
Here are some of the clues:
All of this sounds improbable enough, especially since some of it appears to conflict with the information we were given as crumbs or hints by the spirit Team, but more recently I unearthed a long-buried bit of information which seems to support the notion that the soul of the great author may, after all, be behind the mystery.
As the accompanying reproduction shows, there were several puzzles stretching along the length of the film. We had to decide:
- what was meant by ‘Can you See Behind the Moon?
- what Louis Daguerre had to do with it?
- what the totem pole of glyphs were intended to mean, if anything?
- and who or what the repeated initials of ‘RS’ (not easy to see, but there all the same) signified?
Students of the SPR's bulky report on the Scole sittings will be aware that over the weeks that followed this remarkable and, as it turned out, sadly final, film strip, we took the opportunity to crave further information.
Various crumbs were offered by the spirit Team. They failed to put us out of our misery.
We knew all about Louis Daguerre, the French pioneer of a primitive form of photography immortalised as the Daguerreotype, whose popularity swept across Europe and the USA in the middle of the 19th century, but we could trace nothing which linked him with anyone bearing the mysterious RS initials.
We were told to look behind the meaning of the lunar words, that there was a Frenchman involved, and some sort of experiment with which he was concerned, and which we ought to investigate further.
Moreover, there were skeletons, or at least one skeleton, in
someone's cupboard. This seemed appropriate for investigation into the afterlife, but not particularly enlightening.
We had, of course, proceeded on the assumption that not only was the film strip genuine - fraud on the part of the Scole Group having by then become a preposterously improbable theory, flatly at variance with all the evidence we and others had accumulated - but that clearly intelligent communicators would not waste their time and ingenuity concocting meaningless scribbles.
When all's said and done, they had achieved a unique and momentous accomplishment in creating images on sealed rolls of film in another dimension of reality down here on earth. So they were hardly likely to provide us with nonsense.
Now there were good reasons for believing that the team were operating in concert with some of the pioneers of the Society for Psychical Research.
These pioneers had been responsible during the first three decades of the last century for that impressive, complex, but neglected mass of evidential communications known as the cross-correspondences. These were fragments of messages, meaningless in themselves, scattered around the automatic scripts of half a dozen different mediums in different places at different times, but later found to fit together to make meaningful references.
They were designed to prove that mere telepathy between mediums, or any other living persons, could not have been responsible for messages whose content and meaning no living soul could have known.
One of the earliest film strips, the ill-fated Diotima Polaroid film which alarmed us by starting to fade within days of the time we developed it in the Foys' dining room, had one message which hearkened back to what was probably the earliest of these cross-correspondences.
So maybe they were still toying with this brilliantly ingenious but fearfully complicated device.
This notion is prompted by the work of Professor X, one of the rare luminaries who combines expertise in physics and mathematics with a great depth of knowledge of our subject, but who modesty prefers anonymity. He has identified the mysterious RS as none other than the celebrated author, Robert Louis Stevenson.
This was a notion I had immediately rejected when we were discussing the identity of ‘RS’, if only because he was always known by all three initials. But Professor X began to unearth more and more reasons why I must have been mistaken.
Here are some of the clues:
- the film has 8 8... 8 8. They could be the Pieces of Eight familiar to every reader of Stevenson's greatest work for children, Treasure Island.
- Stevenson wrote a poem called The Moon, and refers to the ‘pale moon lying on her back as though the wind had tilted her’ in his famous tale of Dr JekylI and Mr Hyde.
- The C and D in the film refer to Stevenson's two great loves, Fanny Colvin and Fanny Osbourne.
- The 'a' and 'W', refer to Archie Weir, hero on the brink of imprisonment in Stevenson's last, unfinished novel.
- And the association with prison? Well, that comes in the novel Kidnapped, whose hero was David Balfour imprisoned, at least metaphorically, in a ship and identified by a Greek letter, Beta, in the column of glyphs.
- The spirits' references to a Frenchman could well have meant Stevenson himself, since he spent several years in France; and as for the name of Louis Daguerre, that was included to draw attention to the importance Stevenson attached to ensuring that the world appreciated the deliberate conversion of his original name of Lewis to the French Louis.
- The vaguely Polynesian designs in the glyphs are characteristic of the area to which Stevenson emigrated in 1888.
All of this sounds improbable enough, especially since some of it appears to conflict with the information we were given as crumbs or hints by the spirit Team, but more recently I unearthed a long-buried bit of information which seems to support the notion that the soul of the great author may, after all, be behind the mystery.
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Stevenson turns out to have been a member of the SPR.
He died several years before the cross-correspondences started coming through various mediums, but some of those references are to his novel Catriona, and used the names of the hero, David Balfour. Catriona is the Scottish equivalent of Catherine, and Catherine was one of the vital name clues in perhaps the most celebrated of all the cross-correspondences, one which involved a revelation about the hitherto secret love of Prime Minister Arthur James Balfour. |
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 1850-1894
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Just as I was beginning to accept that this was the most persuasive explanation of the Daguerre film strip, a Paris correspondent emerged from three years' silence to announce his alternative version.
This gentleman had also been busy rummaging dusty archives, and has found that the mysterious R. and S. could well represent two figures who were carrying on work initiated by - or at least of great interest to - Louis Daguerre.
We had been told to examine the photographic pioneer's other interests, apart from the creation of images on plates and illusionistic dioramas he made for sets on the Parisian stage.
Daguerre was indeed interested in astronomy, and had actually made a picture of an eclipse. In the year he died the Great Exhibition of 1851 showed an eclipse of the sun using a Daguerreotype method. It was produced by a man called Secchi who, in 1860, joined with Warren de Ia Rue to photograph a total eclipse of the sun by the moon. This picture at last resolved the controversy over the origin and nature of the flares or protuberances first observed during an eclipse 18 years earlier. Thus it was R and S, Daguerre's successors in this endeavour, who were able to see behind the moon.
But we still have no idea why the writing was in the Art Nouveau style, which was popularised around 1900 in the decorative archway entrances to the Paris Metro by an architect born a year after Daguerre's death; or why the spirit Team's references pointed very clearly to RS as a single individual.
Both explanations, despite considerable scholarship and ingenuity, leave anomalies unanswered. It may be that neither is correct.
Certainly they can't both be right.
What they illustrate, however, is the extent to which it is possible to find clues, and perhaps magnify their significance, to fit into and bolster a theory which may be insubstantial.
The pathway of the psychical researcher is strewn with such pitfalls.
Montague Keen
This gentleman had also been busy rummaging dusty archives, and has found that the mysterious R. and S. could well represent two figures who were carrying on work initiated by - or at least of great interest to - Louis Daguerre.
We had been told to examine the photographic pioneer's other interests, apart from the creation of images on plates and illusionistic dioramas he made for sets on the Parisian stage.
Daguerre was indeed interested in astronomy, and had actually made a picture of an eclipse. In the year he died the Great Exhibition of 1851 showed an eclipse of the sun using a Daguerreotype method. It was produced by a man called Secchi who, in 1860, joined with Warren de Ia Rue to photograph a total eclipse of the sun by the moon. This picture at last resolved the controversy over the origin and nature of the flares or protuberances first observed during an eclipse 18 years earlier. Thus it was R and S, Daguerre's successors in this endeavour, who were able to see behind the moon.
But we still have no idea why the writing was in the Art Nouveau style, which was popularised around 1900 in the decorative archway entrances to the Paris Metro by an architect born a year after Daguerre's death; or why the spirit Team's references pointed very clearly to RS as a single individual.
Both explanations, despite considerable scholarship and ingenuity, leave anomalies unanswered. It may be that neither is correct.
Certainly they can't both be right.
What they illustrate, however, is the extent to which it is possible to find clues, and perhaps magnify their significance, to fit into and bolster a theory which may be insubstantial.
The pathway of the psychical researcher is strewn with such pitfalls.
Montague Keen
