Over the years I’ve read many books and watched many videos about mediumship, near death experiences and the like, but never quite let go of the scepticism instilled by my conventional upbringing and scientific education. I recently asked Claude AI to recommend some serious books on the subject, and one of those on the list turned out to be among the most remarkable I have ever read. Raymond, or Life and Death by Sir Oliver Lodge was published in 1916 and is a long book in three parts: a memoir about World War One, an extensive investigation of mediumship, and a discussion about what might be called consciousness studies. The author was an Englishman, a brilliant physicist and electrical engineer whose research into electromagnetic radiation contributed to the development of radio. He and his wife lived in the Birmingham suburb of Edgbaston, incidentally the place where I was born. They had twelve children and the youngest, Raymond, is the subject of the book.

Raymond, like his father and brothers, was a highly intelligent man with a passion for engineering. He was also by all accounts a very pleasant and thoughtful person whom everybody liked. When war broke out he volunteered to serve as an officer in the British Army and after a short training period was deployed to a secret location on the Western Front. His duties involved the design and construction of trenches and dugouts, and he was also trained to operate machine guns. His letters home are reproduced in full and though perhaps they put a positive slant on things he writes that he is happy and cheerful and even enjoying parts of the experience, despite the deaths and mental breakdowns of some of his comrades. I found it interesting and moving to read this detailed account of what life was like for these young men on the front line. After a few months he was struck by a German shell and died an hour or so later. He was 26 years old. Numerous tributes from his relatives, colleagues and friends are reproduced in the book. 

Oliver Lodge had already been involved in the Spiritualist movement, along with other eminent men of his time such as Arthur Conan Doyle. Very soon after learning of Raymond’s death, Lodge and his wife scheduled sittings with several different mediums, taking elaborate precautions to safeguard their anonymity. The early communications reported that Raymond had felt confused at first but was now happy in the afterlife, surrounded by many friends, and keen to come through to bring comfort to bereaved relatives on earth. General information of this kind might have been either genuine or fabricated, and in later sittings Lodge sought for more specific evidence. The first of many examples came from a detailed description of a photo of Raymond and his comrades, taken shortly before Raymond died. Lodge did not know about this photo until he was able to obtain a copy later, which rules out telepathy as the explanation. Many other sittings with various mediums provided convincing evidence of Raymond’s survival. Special techniques such as automatic writing and table tilting were sometimes used, and if Lodge had lived 100 years later he would no doubt have taken part in the current research which is using modern technology including AI.

The last part of the book called “Life and Death” draws on philosophy, biology, physics and the author’s own theories. I didn’t understand it all, but had the impression that our understanding of consciousness, mind-body-spirit connections and an afterlife has not changed all that much today. Lodge stresses the importance of keeping an open mind, being willing to revise firmly held beliefs and to admit the limitations of current scientific knowledge.