An investigator with knowledge of performance
Carrington was born in St Helier, Jersey, and attended school in England before moving to the United States. By 1904 he was living in New York and working as an assistant editor for Street and Smith. He joined psychical research societies and founded the American Psychical Institute and Laboratory in 1921.
His familiarity with conjuring helped him expose deceptive methods, but did not lead him to reject every claimed phenomenon. In the 1908 Naples investigation of Eusapia Palladino, he and his fellow investigators judged some effects genuine. His subsequent management of her American tour was followed by further accusations of cheating. These episodes place him within contested research rather than outside it. His theories also proposed a vital energy linking bodily and psychic processes.
Two writers, two kinds of contribution
The Projection of the Astral Body names both Sylvan J. Muldoon and Carrington. Muldoon’s signed preface describes experiences beginning when he was twelve; Carrington supplies a separate introduction, placing those first-person accounts within a wider field of psychical research.
Carrington places the proposed astral body beside terms from several traditions and earlier reports of leaving the body. This supplies an interpretive framework for the sensations and sleep experiences that follow. The book’s diagrams and invisible anatomy develop a theory beyond the initial reports. Its collaboration brings an experiencer and a researcher into conversation, while neither similarity between names nor a researcher’s endorsement independently establishes the mechanism they propose.
