SPIRITUALISM

SPIRITUALISM is a religious movement whose adherents seek contact with spirits through mediums in gatherings called séances. It emerged in the Northeast amid the transformations of capitalism, industrialization, urbanization, religious revivalism and experimentation, social reform, democratization, and the rising authority of science.

Spiritualism originated in 1848 in western New York, a region swept by religious revivalism and ferment after the opening of the Erie Canal. Radical ex-Quakers and abolitionists there decided that mysterious knockings in the Hydesville home of sisters Kate and Margaret Fox were communications by spirits. Press coverage generated interest in these "spirit manifestations" after the Fox sisters began a series of demonstrations in Rochester, and

they were referred to as the "Rochester Rappings." Advocates claimed scientific proof of immortality. Many Americans thought they could serve as mediums.

Meanwhile, "Poughkeepsie Seer" Andrew Jackson Davis's involvement with mesmerism had by 1847 produced "harmonialism," a system of religious philosophy and social reform he claimed he had received in a trance from the eighteenth-century scientist-mystic Emanuel Swedenborg and other spirits (see Swedenborgian Churches). Rejecting Calvinist doctrines of innate depravity and eternal punishment and advocating perpetual spiritual growth, harmonialism attracted Universalists, Unitarians, Quakers, Swedenborgians, deists, members of evangelical denominations, and radical social reformers, especially abolitionists and women's rights advocates. Spiritualis memerged when Davis and his followers linked harmonialism to mediumship.

Spiritualism spread across the North during the 1850s and subsequently to the West Coast. Associated with abolitionism and other radical reforms, it was less popular in the South. Mediums were usually women, whom Victorian Americans believed had a heightened piety and sensitivity to spirit communication; many were empowered to public social activism by their mediumship. Spirit messages often urged Americans to counteract expanding commercialization, industrialization, and urbanization by retaining communal and republican values thought to be threatened by the emerging order. Spiritualism appealed across race and class lines but was promoted primarily by an anxious new middle class.

Spiritualism had its critics. Ministers, feeling their authority threatened, labeled it necromancy, witchcraft, and a stimulus to free love. Most scientists rejected it, especially after unfavorable investigations in the mid to late nineteenth century, although a few became defenders, and some examined it within the framework of psychic phenomena from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. Debunkers from the 1850s forward have charged mediums with fraud. Some early sympathizers bolted to found Christian Science and Theosophy.

Such challenges limited Spiritualism's growth and appeal, but the new religion persisted and, despite its strong anti-organizational thrust, became institutionalized. Spiritualists formed perhaps thousands of circles nationwide. They founded over 200 newspapers by 1900 and publishing houses in New York City, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco. The federal census listed 17 Spiritualist churches in 1860, 95 in 1870, 334 in 1890, and 455 in 1906, with tens of thousands of members in 1890 and 1906. Beginning in the 1870s, Spiritualists established camps in New York, Massachusetts, Indiana, Florida, and several other states. National organization efforts began in the 1860s, and the National Spiritualist Association of Churches was founded in Chicago in 1893. Although over-all numbers subsequently declined, large-scale organizations proliferated (the NASC remained the largest), giving Spiritualism a permanent institutional presence and an increasingly ecclesiastical character.

Spiritualism revitalized during the 1960s amid increased interest in alternative spiritualities, psychic phenomena, and the subsequent New Age Movement, whose eclectic practices include spirit "channeling." Yet it remained distinct from New Age religions and continues to express Americans' desire for spiritual grounding amid ongoing change.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Braude, Ann. Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989.

Carroll, Bret E. Spiritualism in Antebellum America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.

Moore, R. Laurence. In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Bret E.Carroll

See alsoParapsychology ; Religion and Religious Affiliation ; Women's Rights Movement: The Nineteenth Century .

Spiritualism, a quasi‐mystical movement that began in Hydesville, New York, on 31 March 1848 when mysterious rapping sounds in the farmhouse of John D. Fox were said by the family to emanate from a spirit communicating with Fox's daughters, Margaret (age thirteen) and Kate (age twelve). The girls were soon taken by their older sister, Leah Fox Fish, to Rochester, which became the center of the new movement. The three Fox sisters, the first “mediums,” introduced the major features of subsequent Spiritualism: the séance; the trance of the medium (borrowed from still‐novel demonstrations of hypnotism); and the asking of questions through the medium to spirits, who supposedly answered by rapping or by other phenomena such as jiggling the table at which the medium and her clients sat. (Mediums were usually, though not always, women.)

Spiritualism spread quickly through the United States in the 1850s, and into Europe as well. The novelist William D. Howells reported, with doubtless some exaggeration, that in the Ohio of his boyhood every household had its medium and its tipping table. Séances, as Howells's comment indicates, were conducted by amateur as well as professional mediums, and many occasional practitioners regarded Spiritualism simply as a parlor pastime. The proportions of genuine belief, casual entertainment, and outright fraud in the movement are impossible to assess. Spiritualism waned in the late 1850s, but regained popularity after the Civil War as bereaved families attempted to communicate with the spirits of lost soldiers.

In 1888 Margaret Fox recanted, explaining how she and her sisters produced the original rapping noises by cracking their toe joints. This date may be considered the effective end of the movement, though mediums continued to practice their craft in the twentieth century.

Spiritualism in its prime had many of the qualities of a religion, since to believers it offered proof of an afterlife. It was thus to some degree in competition with the older Protestant orthodoxies and profited from their decline. The growth of Spiritualism paralleled for a time that of Mormonism and Christian Science, although these others movements had a strength of leadership and coherency of belief that the Rochester movement never attained. The prolific Spiritualist writer Andrew Jackson Davis (1826–1910), among others, did attempt to compose a Spiritualist theology, and the movement established some links with reforms such as feminism and utopian socialism. The sex reformer and woman‐suffrage advocate Victoria Woodhull (1838–1927) and Robert Dale Owen (1801–1877) of the New Harmony community in Indiana were proponents of Spiritualism, as was, for a time, the Populist writer Hamlin Garland.
See also Antebellum Era; Gilded Age; Protestantism; Utopian and Communitarian Movements.

Bibliography

Howard Kerr , Mediums, and Spirit‐Rappers, and Roaring Radicals: Spiritualism in American Literature, 1850–1900, 1973.
Howard Kerr and Charles L. Crow, eds., The Occult in America: New Historical Perspectives, 1983.

Charles L. Crow

spir·it·u·al·ism / ˈspirichoōəˌlizəm/ • n. 1. a system of belief or religious practice based on supposed communication with the spirits of the dead, esp. through mediums. 2. Philos. the doctrine that the spirit exists as distinct from matter, or that spirit is the only reality. DERIVATIVES: spir·it·u·al·ist n. spir·it·u·al·is·tic / ˌspirichoōəˈlistik/ adj.

spiritualism Belief that, at death, the personality of an individual is transferred to another plane of existence, with which communication from the world of the living is possible. The channel of such communication is a receptive person called a medium. Spiritualism as a movement began in the USA in 1848.

604. Spiritualism

1. Arcati, Madame medium who materializes her client’s two successive wives. [Br. Drama: Noel Coward Blithe Spirit in On Stage, 236]
2. Medium, The Menotti’s opera of a medium haunted by her own hoax. [Am. Opera: Benét, 653]

spiritualism see spiritism .