Helen Duncan became famous or infamous (depending on your perspective) as the last person in England to be tried under the eighteenth century Witchcraft Act. Not, one might suppose as a hangover, say in the dawning age of secularism in the mid-nineteenth century say but, in fact, in 1944.
The offense was the pretended conjuring of spirits (in a paid performance) at a séance in Portsmouth but why this act and not the Vagrancy Act, usually deployed for these purposes? Was it because Duncan was privy to secrets she might only know by psychic means - the destruction of a British battleship in the Mediterranean for example - at a time of heightened security in the lead up to the D-Day Landings?
She certainly became a martyr for the Spiritualist cause - and the aftermath of the case, imprisonment; and, a subsequent botched arrest may have shifted the landscape towards reform, the act's abolition and the seeing of pretended conjuring of spirits as simply falling within the ordinary legal arrangements for fraud of any kind.
In the hands of the distinguished historian of early modern witchcraft, Malcolm Gaskill, Duncan's life is explored with sympathetic skepticism against the background of the nineteenth century rise of Spiritualism, of the unfolding nature of physical mediumship; and, the various attempts to investigate it from a scientific perspective.
Duncan presents a familiar pattern - a person who appears from an early age to have certain psychic gifts, who develops the apparent requisite skills of a medium and who proceeds to encourage, baffle, and alienate those who come into contact with her from then on. For some she is a comforter sent from heaven - heightened by the emotional turmoil many were thrown into by the bereavements of the First World War, to others she was a strange admixture of the potentially genuine and the potential trickster; and, to others simply a fraud.
Though Gaskill diligently and entertainingly weaves the history as far as the records allow, there can be now no definitive answer or even likely consensus. What is probably clear is that though not specifically charged with the Witchcraft Act because the authorities specifically thought her a psychic danger, the paranoia of secrecy in 1944 probably did lend itself to harsher treatment than at other times (and the Witchcraft Acts burden of proof was so ambiguous as to make it a safer bet than that of Vagrancy). It is, also, true, though not certain, that she may have heard of the battleships sinking by the more conventional means of rumor and gossip than through a helpful spirit guide.
For my own part, I think the book needed a better framing of the wider exploration of 'psychic phenomena' not least sense that they do tend, for whatever reason, to fall under the shadow of Hermes. They appear to be inherently 'tricky' - you are always in a liminal realm that resists sharp definition, though as to why we might only speculate - perhaps the truth likes to hide and be sought, rather than simply to give itself in the clear light of day for reason that only truth knows? In other words we need a better hermeneutic that helps us to navigate such phenomena rather than the rather shallower, if useful, psychological/ sociological observations we are offered.
However, it certainly appears, especially over 'physical manifestation' (all that ectoplasm), Duncan undoubtedly, at least some of the time, was cheating. The pressures to perform (including monetary ones) may have tempted (and ruined) many a medium. If these states are inherently tricky (or purposefully come and go according to their own logic) then a medium imagining she (or he) has them on tap is going to be inherently disappointed yet the pressures to perform remain. There is, to my mind, sufficient of the uncanny about Duncan (especially her reported dreams and premonitions) to suggest that there was something there but, sadly, too much of her history equally suggests that it was obscured by the performing aspects of what became her trade.
Maybe the moral is that all good spiritual work is done in the privacy of small groups or individual contexts, is not ours simply to manage, and requires a greater sense of discipline and grace than, sadly, Duncan had access to.
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