Guinefort
A strange story has been left on record by Father Etienne Bourbon, a Dominican, who died in 1262. He relates that while he was preaching in the diocese of Lyons, many women came to him confessing that they had taken their children to St. Guinefort. Curious to know what sort of saint it might be whose cult called for confession, Father Bourbon enquired into the matter, and found that Guinefort was a dog! It was, in fact, that dog which had given rise to the well-known fable of the dog and the serpent, wherein a dog is killed under the unjust suspicion that it has slain a child, which in reality it has saved from the attack of a serpent. This dog-martyr it was to whose "shrine" the women brought their children.
A similar story is told of a dog named Ganelon, whose tomb was in Auvergne, in the neighbourhood of a fountain. The adventure took place during the reign of Louis le Debonnaire. Two or three centuries later it was found that the waters of the fountain possessed medicinal virtues, but cures were attributed to the unknown occupant of the tomb-that is, until a certain bishop found among the archives of the Château the anecdote of Ganelon.
Guldenstubbe, Baron de: A famous mystic, who was one of the first in France to recognise the importance of spiritualistic phenomena. With the Comte d'Ourches, he held many experiments in table-turning, automatic writing, and so forth, and published a work entitled Practical Experimental Pneumatology or The Reality of Spirits and the Marvellous Phenomenon of their Direct Writing. (See article France and Circles.) 66 Guppy, Mrs.: Née Miss Nichol, a celebrated English medium wno began to exercies her powers about 1866. At that time she lived with Mrs. Sim, a sister of Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace, who was a frequent witness of her phenomena. Thereafter her mediumistic powers developed apace and the circle of her sitters grew as the manifestations became more ambitious. Raps were heard and apports of fruit and flowers conveyed to the séance-room. A. R. Wallace states that on one occasion the room and the table shook violently," and Miss Nichol herself was several times levitated-(See Levitation). Soon after the formal commencement of her mediumship she married Mr. Samuel Guppy. In January, 1872 she gave a materialisation séance, the first serious attempt of the kind in this country, She and her husband were also instrumental in introducing spirit-photography (q.v.) into England. On the death of Mr. Guppy she was married a second time to Mr. W. Volckman.
Guppy, Samuel: (See Spiritualism.) Gurney, Edmund: A distinguished psychologist and student of psychic science. He was born at Horsham in 1847, and educated at Blackheath and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he obtained a fellowship. He devoted himself thereafter to the study of medicine and passed the second M.B. Cambridge examination in 1880. Thus equipped, he turned to the investigation of psychical research, seeking, in common with most psychical researchers, to find evidence for the survival of consciousness and personality after death. He chose for exploration the region of unconscious or subconscious activity-what Mr. Myers, himself a worker in the same field, has designated the subliminal consciousness." From 1874 to 1878 Gurney and Myers worked with professional mediums, getting but poor results, but on the founding of the Society for Psychical Research experiments of a more scientific nature were made. These resulted in two volumes of Phantasms of the Living, by Messrs. Myers, Podmore, and Gurney, which went some way towards establishing telepathy on a sound basis. To the same end were directed Mr. Gurney's careful hypnotic 66 experiments between 1885 and 1888, and his contributions to the Proceedings of the S.P.R. He was, indeed, an ideal student of psychic research, acute, patient, exact, logical, and entirely disinterested. Besides his psychological works he wrote The Power of Sound (1880), an essay on music, and a collection of essays entitled Tertium Quid (1887). He died in June, 1888, from an overdose of narcotic medicine.