By the end of his life, Lang had come to be strongly associated with psychical research, and was by many credited with bringing it such credibility and respectability as it had. A selection of his interventions in the topics of psychical research are presented here, although the selection makes clear how integrated his interest was with his other work and interests – with his anthropological work and his history in particular. His defence of Jeanne d'Arc in ‘Three Seeresses’, for example, links his absolute insistence on rigour and logic in the use of historical evidence, as in his challenges to Anatole France's history of Jeanne (see Volume 2, pp. 236–48), to his belief that psychical experiences can be genuine, rather than fraudulent or the result of fantasy. ‘Science and ‘Miracles'’ uses his reading in the intellectual history of Europe to challenge contemporary scientific disdain for interest in psychical phenomenon as part of his argument that anthropology needs to consider all the evidence.

The selection makes clear also Lang's vacillation between insider and outside status with regard to psychical research. In ‘Ghosts Up to Date’, part of the material of which also appears in ‘Apparitions, Ghosts, and Hallucinations’ in Cock Lane and Common Sense (London: Longmans, Green and Co.,1894), Lang jumps between the methods and assumptions of folklore, mainstream science, psychical research and the literary, playing one off against the other in order to be constrained and held by the boundaries of none of them. In ‘Science and Demonology’ too Lang resists the already existing positions in the debate – those represented by T. H. Huxley and Alfred Russel Wallace – and forges instead a third position beyond the limits of these.

Lang wrote a number of times on crystal-gazing, and of all the psychical phenomenon he considers throughout his work, it seems to be the one he was most convinced by. His most extensive considerations of it are ‘Magic Mirrors and Crystal Gazing’, reproduced here; ‘Crystal Visions, Savage and Civilised’, chapter 5 of the second edition of The Making of Religion (1898; London: Longmans, Green and Co., 2nd edition 1900); and in his ‘Intro duction’ to Northcote W. Thomas, Crystal Gazing: Its History and Practice (London: Alexander More Ltd, The De La More Press, 1905), pp. ix–xlvii.