Spiritualism

The religion of the talking dead — born from two girls and a knocking sound in 1848, swept through a grieving Victorian world of darkened parlors and rapping tables, tested by the founders of psychical research and by the greatest magician of the age, and honest about the difference between the consolation it gave, which was real, and the communication it claimed, which was not.

The rappings at Hydesville

In March 1848, in a small farmhouse at Hydesville, New York, two sisters — Kate Fox, aged eleven or twelve, and Margaret, a little older — announced that they were hearing mysterious rapping sounds, and that the raps answered their questions: one knock for no, two for yes, and, with a run through the alphabet, whole sentences. The spirit, they said, was a murdered peddler buried in the cellar. The news spread like fire. Within a few years the Fox sisters were famous, public mediums, managed by their older sister Leah, and a new religion had been born — Spiritualism, built on a single electrifying claim: that the dead are not gone, and that the living can talk to them.

Forty years later, in 1888, Margaret Fox stood on a New York stage and confessed that it had all been a trick: the raps were made by cracking the joints of her toes and knuckles, a childish prank that had grown into a worldwide movement. She later recanted the confession, and died in poverty soon after. But the shadow it cast — a movement whose very origin was, by its founder's own account, a fraud — is the honest frame for the whole chapter.

Before the Fox sisters: Swedenborg, Mesmer, and the Poughkeepsie Seer

Spiritualism did not appear from nothing. It grew from two eighteenth-century roots. The Swedish scientist and visionary Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) claimed, in trance, to have travelled the spirit world and conversed with its inhabitants, and left a vast, orderly description of the afterlife as a realm of continuing moral progress. The Viennese physician Franz Mesmer (1734–1815) taught that an invisible fluid, "animal magnetism," could be channelled to heal — and his followers found that "mesmerized" subjects fell into trance states in which they spoke, it seemed, with uncanny knowledge.

The two streams met in a young American, Andrew Jackson Davis (1826–1910), the "Poughkeepsie Seer," who in mesmeric trance dictated The Principles of Nature (1847) — a Swedenborgian cosmology of ascending spirit spheres — and who wrote, months before Hydesville, that the world stood on the verge of a "living demonstration" of communion with the dead. When the Fox sisters' raps came, Davis supplied the ready-made theology, and Spiritualism had both its spark and its philosophy at once.

What Spiritualism is

Spiritualism is the belief — and, for many, the organized religion — that the human personality survives death and that the living can communicate with the surviving spirits, most often through a specially gifted intermediary called a medium. Its promise was intimate and immense: not a distant heaven argued over by theologians, but your own mother, your own dead child, speaking to you across the dark of a parlor. Its theology was optimistic and this-worldly — the dead progress through ever-higher spheres, there is no hell, and the spirit world is a place of growth — and it dovetailed neatly with the era's liberal reform.

It also organized itself. Loose at first, it hardened into churches: the National Spiritualist Association of Churches was founded in the United States in 1893, and in Britain the Spiritualists' National Union (1901) codified a creed of "Seven Principles," beginning with the fatherhood of God and the "continuous existence" of the soul. Spiritualist camps and communities — above all Lily Dale in New York, still active today — became its shrines, and Spiritualist churches survive into the present, holding services where mediums deliver messages from the dead as part of worship.

The séance and its wonders

Spiritualism's central rite unfolded in the séance circle — a group seated around a table in low light, hands joined, a medium in their midst. Through the medium the spirits were said to act: rapping out answers, tipping and levitating the table, guiding a hand in automatic writing, speaking in a trance in the voice of a "spirit control," and, in the boldest séances, producing full materializations — ghostly forms, floating instruments, and the pale extruded substance called ectoplasm. The age's new technologies were pressed into service: spirit photography claimed to catch the dead on film, and the planchette and talking board — the Ouija board, patented in 1890 — spelled out messages letter by letter.

The great mediums

Spiritualism was carried by its star performers, and their careers map the whole arc of belief and doubt.

The Scottish-American Daniel Dunglas Home (1833–1886) was the most celebrated physical medium of the century — levitating tables, handling live coals, and, in the famous "Ashley House" episode of 1868, reportedly floating out of one third-floor window and in at another before witnesses. Remarkably, across some twenty-five years before kings and scientists, Home was never caught in fraud, and he remains the movement's hardest single case. Others were not so lucky in the long run: Florence Cook produced a full-form materialized spirit, "Katie King," vouched for by the eminent chemist Sir William Crookes — an endorsement later shadowed by suspicion of both fraud and a personal entanglement. The Italian Eusapia Palladino dazzled investigators and was repeatedly caught cheating, yet drew them back. The Davenport Brothers toured with a spirit cabinet that magicians could readily reproduce.

The subtlest cases were the "mental" mediums who produced not floating trumpets but uncanny knowledge. The Boston medium Leonora Piper so impressed the Harvard psychologist William James that he made her his one exception to universal skepticism: "If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black … it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white. My own white crow is Mrs. Piper." And in the 1920s the Boston medium Mina "Margery" Crandon became the center of the age's great test (below), the last superstar of the séance.

Why the Victorians believed

Spiritualism swept the United States and Britain for reasons both deep and specific. It rode a tide of grief: the mass death of the American Civil War, and later the First World War and the 1918 influenza pandemic, left millions desperate to reach the dead. The physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, having lost his son Raymond at the front in 1915, published Raymond, or Life and Death (1916), a best-selling account of messages from his dead boy; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the supremely rational Sherlock Holmes, lost a son and a brother and became Spiritualism's most tireless evangelist.

It gave women — who dominated its ranks as mediums — a rare platform of public spiritual authority in an age that allowed them almost none, and its trance-podium ran alongside the era's reform movements, from abolition to women's suffrage. And it claimed to be not superstition but science: a demonstrable, experimental contact with the beyond, fit for a confident scientific century — which is exactly why science came for it.

Kardec and the spirits of Brazil

While Anglo-American Spiritualism was being exposed in its séance rooms, a parallel movement took a very different and more durable path. In France the educator Hippolyte Rivail, writing as Allan Kardec, gathered the messages of many mediums into a systematic doctrine and published The Spirits' Book (1857), the founding text of Spiritism (Espiritismo). Kardec deliberately distinguished his creed from Spiritualism by one decisive doctrine: reincarnation. Where most Anglo-American Spiritualists imagined a single afterlife, Spiritists hold that the soul returns through many lives, each an opportunity to learn and to advance morally toward perfection — a fusion of séance-contact with a law of progress and near-karmic justice. Carried to Brazil, Spiritism became something Kardec never saw: a mass religion. There the medium Chico Xavier (1910–2002) produced, by "psychography" (spirit-guided automatic writing), more than four hundred books and, through television, made Spiritism a household faith; Spiritist charitable hospitals and centers spread across the country. Today Brazil has the largest Spiritist population on earth — millions of adherents — making this quiet French offshoot of the séance one of the most successful of all the new religions of the modern age (and a direct feeder, too, of the Umbanda of Chapter 40).

The believer's lens

To the Spiritualist, the séance was not entertainment and not superstition but the empirical proof of the soul — the one place where the promise every religion made about the afterlife could be demonstrated, here, tonight, in your own parlor. The consolation was the point and the doctrine at once: a grieving mother did not have to believe her child survived; she could hear him. The movement's theology of endless progress through the spheres, and its insistence that there is no damnation, offered a gentler heaven than the churches taught, and its podium gave ordinary women a voice as vessels of the spirit world. For the sincere medium — and many were sincere, some slipping into genuine trance and dissociation without conscious fraud — the experience was not deception but a real gift exercised in service of the bereaved. Spiritualism, seen from inside, was Christianity's afterlife made testable and kind, and its adherents were not credulous fools but mourners and reformers who believed they had found, at last, hard evidence for hope.

The skeptical lens

Because Spiritualism claimed to be testable, it was tested — and the results were damning. The founding of the Society for Psychical Research in London in 1882, by the Cambridge philosopher Henry Sidgwick, the classicist Frederic W. H. Myers (who coined the word "telepathy"), and Edmund Gurney, put mediumship under sustained, sympathetic scrutiny. The SPR was no debunking squad — several founders hoped to find survival — yet in decades of work it exposed fraud after fraud and never established a single accepted case of communication with the dead. Its most famous positive subject, Leonora Piper, remains genuinely unexplained to some and, to most, a case of skilled cold reading never caught but never proven.

The stage magicians did the rest. William Mumler, the inventor of spirit photography, was tried for fraud in New York in 1869 — P. T. Barnum testified against him with a faked "ghost" photo of himself beside Lincoln — and though Mumler was acquitted for want of conclusive proof, the double-exposure trick was plain. Above all, Harry Houdini, who knew every method of stage illusion, spent his last years unmasking mediums; his once-warm friendship with Doyle collapsed when Doyle's wife produced automatic writing purporting to come from Houdini's adored dead mother — in English she barely spoke, dated wrongly, and topped with a cross she, as a rabbi's wife, would never have used. In 1924 Houdini joined the Scientific American committee offering a prize for proof of the paranormal and exposed the celebrated "Margery" (Mina Crandon) as a fraud, over the objections of committee members she had charmed.

The mechanism behind the honest cases has a name. The drift of hands on the Ouija planchette, the tilt of the table, the movements of "automatic" writing are produced by the ideomotor effect — small, unconscious muscular actions the sitters make and do not feel themselves making, and experience as an outside force. The contested residue — telepathy, the "cross-correspondences" the SPR pursued after Myers's death — has never crossed the threshold of accepted evidence. The empirical question, unlike the emotional one, is settled.

Symbology and sacred encoding

Spiritualism was, distinctively, a religion of codes and channels — and it took its model from the technology of its age.

• The rap was a literal binary code: yes and no, and the laborious spelling-out of messages letter by letter through the alphabet — the dead reduced to Morse, in the very decades Morse's telegraph was reducing the living to it.
• The talking board (Ouija) and its planchette encode the séance's central act: a message assembled letter by letter as the sitters' hands drift across the board, the motion produced unconsciously by the sitters themselves (the ideomotor effect) yet experienced as the touch of the dead. The board's own commercial name, coined in the 1890s, dressed a parlor game as an oracle.
• Spirit photography and ectoplasm encoded the dead in the media of modernity — the photographic plate, the cheesecloth-and-flashbulb apparition — claiming the authority of the camera, the century's great machine of proof, for the least provable of things.
• The whole movement arose as the twin of the telegraph: Spiritualism was explicitly imagined as a "spiritual telegraph" (the phrase titled its early newspapers), communication-at-a-distance with the other world in the very decade the electric telegraph made communication-at-a-distance ordinary. The medium was the operator; the séance, the receiving station.

Connections

Spiritualism is a modern, scientific-age form of one of the most ancient human practices — the consultation of the dead, the necromancy and ancestor-contact found from Mesopotamia (Chapter 3) and the Witch of Endor (Chapter 7) to the African and diaspora traditions of the neighboring chapters (33, 40). It fed directly into the two movements beside it: Theosophy (Chapter 37), which built a whole cosmology on communication with hidden Masters, and the broader occult revival, and onward into the twentieth-century New Age and the paranormal (Chapter 35). Its deepest legacy, though, may be in psychology: the study of mediums, trance, dissociation, and automatic writing fed directly into the exploration of the unconscious mind — Frederic Myers's theory of the "subliminal self" was an ancestor of the dynamic unconscious, and William James's psychical research was of a piece with his psychology. Its churches survive, and the séance never entirely ended.

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