Quoted from Robert Almeder, Death and Personal Survival (210-11):
In Psychic Adventures in New York Dr. Nevile Whymant tells of the time he was invited by Judge W. M. Cannon to attend a sitting with the medium George Valiantine. Judge Cannon told Dr. Whymant that voices had spoken in foreign tongues--European and Oriental--at previous sittings; and because Dr. Whymant (who, before coming to New York, had lectured in Chinese for many years at Oxford) spoke 30 dialects and languages, his attendance was desired in order that he might comment on the voices that none of the others could understand.
Dr. Whymant later confessed that he had found himself amused by the prospect of uncovering an ingenious hoax. Moreover, when Whymant met Valiantine, he formed the opinion that this medium was basically stupid, unlettered, and distinctly incapable of any form of acting. ...
As usual, the séance began with the Lord's Prayer followed by some singing; and then the first voices started coming through the entranced Valiantine, speaking of very personal matters to sitters other than Whymant. A voice spoke in Italian, and Whymant was kind enough to translate it for one of the sitters. Then, according to Whymant's narration, there suddenly came
a weird, crackling, broken little sound which at once carried my mind straight back to China. It was the sound of a flute, rather poorly played, such as can be heard in the streets of the Celestial Land but nowhere else. The next sound seemed to be a hollow repetition of a Chinese name, K'ung-fu-T'zo, "The Philosopher-Master-K'ung," the name by which Confucius was canonized. I was not sure I had heard aright and I asked in Chinese for another opportunity of hearing what had been said before. This time without any hesitation at all came the name, K'ung-fu-T'zo. Now, I thought, this was my opportunity.
Chinese I had long regarded as my own special research area, and he would be a wise man, medium or other, who would attempt to trick me on such soil. ... It was difficult to discover what was said next, and I had to keep calling for a repetition. Then it burst upon me that I was listening to Chinese of a dialect not now spoken in any part of China. As the voice went on I realized that the style of Chinese used was identical with that of a Chinese classic edited by Confucius 2500 years ago. Only among scholars in archaic Chinese could one now hear that accent and style, and then only when they intoned some passage from the ancient books. In other words, the Chinese to which we were now listening was as dead colloquially as Sanskrit or Latin. I thought suddenly of a supreme test. There are several poems in the Shih King (Classics of Poetry) which have baffled the commentators ever since Confucius himself edited the work and left it to posterity as a model anthology of early Chinese verse. Western scholars have attempted in vain to wrest their meaning, and Chinese classical scholars versed in the lore and literature of the ancient empire have long ago given up trying to understand them. I have never read any of these poems myself, but I knew the first lines of some of them through seeing them so often while looking through the book for others. At this moment it occurred to me that if I could remember the first line of them I might now get a chance to astonish the communicator who called himself "Confucius." I asked if the "Master" would explain to me the meaning of one of those long, obscure odes. Without exerting conscious choice I said, "Ts'ai Ts'ai chuan ehr," which is the first line of the third ode of the first book (Chow nan) of the Classics of Poetry. I certainly could not have repeated another line of this poem, for I did not know any of the remaining fifteen lines; but there was no need or even opportunity, for the voice took up the poem and recited to the end. I had a pad of paper and a pencil and I made notes of what the voice said and jotted down keys to the intonation used.
In declaiming the ode the voice had put a construction on the verses and made the whole thing hang together as a normal poem. Altogether there were about sixteen sittings at which I assisted in exactly the same fashion as that detailed in the first sitting. The self-styled Confucius was very regular in its incidence. Fourteen foreign languages were used in the course of the sittings I attended. They included Chinese, Hindu, Persian, Basque, Sanskrit, Arabic, Portuguese, Italian, Yiddish (spoken with great fluency when a Yiddish and Hebrew speaking Jew was a member of the circle), German, and modern Greek.
