The psychical research literature has many examples of séance room materialization phenomena. This article consists of a reprint of, and commentary about, Eric J. Dingwall’s paper “The Plasma Theory”, published in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research in 1921. Dingwall discussed some of the previously published ideas on the topic, and emphasized those related to mediums Eva C. and Kathleen Goligher. The purpose of the current article is not to provide evidence for the phenomena, but to present (...) relevant contextual information relevant to the article, additional bibliography, and theoretical concepts, some of which are forgotten today. (shrink)

Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (first published in 1966) is a classic of 20th-century parapsychology that can still be read with profit. Along with Children Who Remember Previous Lives (2001), it is an ideal introduction to Stevenson. The latter work, intended for the educated general reader, provides an overview of 40 years of research and includes capsule summaries of several cases, but Twenty Cases contains detailed reports that illustrate reincarnation-type cases much more fully. The cases reported in Twenty Cases come (...) from India, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Lebanon, Brazil, and the United States (the Tlingit Indians of Alaska). They were selected from about 200 personally investigated by Stevenson in order to show the variety of features this type of case presents. The subjects of all were young children at the time they claimed to have lived before. Collectively these twenty cases help define “cases of the reincarnation type,” as Stevenson came to call them, though they vary substantially in detail. (shrink)