Arthur Findlay (1883-1964) makes a sweeping but at the same time intuitive statement when he says that ‘All religions are based on psychic phenomena, but are encrusted with theological error, which sooner or later must be dismissed as the drapings of an age of ignorance’. Findlay became convinced as to the reality of life after death after attending séances in Glasgow with the direct-voice medium John Campbell Sloan (1869-1951) in the years immediately following the Great War, experiences which were later reinforced in February 1936 when, at the headquarters of the London Spiritualist Alliance, he sat with clairvoyant and trumpet medium Agnes Abbott (1885-1942), who brought him convincing proof of the survival of his mother. Findlay ultimately bequeathed his estate, Stanstead Hall, to the Spiritualists’ National Union as a teaching college for mediumship and psychic subjects on the understanding that his extensive series of books on Spiritualism and survival, including the movement’s first real bestseller On the Edge of the Etheric (1931), remained in print for perpetuity.
