Spiritualism

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SPIRITUALISM

SPIRITUALISM is a widespread and generally unorganized movement that arose in the United States at the end of the 1840s, was influential through the nineteenth century in the United States and elsewhere, and persists at the beginning of the twenty-first century. At its core is the belief that the living can conduct conversations with spirits of the deceased through a sensitive instrument (either a mechanical or electronic device) or a human medium.

Spiritualism's advent was occasioned by two events. The first was the publication of Andrew Jackson Davis's visionary cosmology and universal history, The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind, in 1847. The second was the production of audible rapping that was interpreted as coded responses of spirits to questions posed by two young sisters, Margaret and Kate Fox. Others soon reproduced the sounds during "spirit circles" or séances around the country. Spiritualists later annually commemorated the rappings as having begun on March 25, 1848.

Practitioners said Spiritualism was precipitated when spirits, including that of electrical experimenter Benjamin Franklin, established a practical "spiritual telegraph" between this world and the spirit world. Those who were not Spiritualists looked elsewhere for the sources of the movement, crediting demons, mass delusion, human folly, fraud, or simply to the influence of social and religious trends in the larger culture.

Spiritualism's Theory and Cultural Background

The "harmonial philosophy" of Davis and his sympathizers envisioned a harmonization of past, present, and future; of matter and spirit; of reason and intuition; of men and women; and of individuals and society. It provided an ostensibly rationalist stock onto which was grafted a variety of exotic psychic phenomena, such as mesmeric trance and the Fox sisters' rappings. The result was "Modern Spiritualism," as it was called, which was optimistic about the destiny of each individual after death and of human society in the long run, and egalitarian insofar as it accepted the revelations of women, children, and others who lacked education or credentials.

Spiritualism was part of the larger culture's effort to reconcile science and religion. In the United States and Europe the intersection of matter and spirit had been explored in experiments with mesmerism. Influential books included the 1845 translation of Justinus Kerner's case study of a somnambulist, The Seeress of Prevorst, and the 1855 translation of Louis Alphonse Cahagnet's description of conversations with entranced clairvoyants, The Celestial Telegraph. The term Spiritualism came from mesmerism and referred to the concept of an exalted expanse opened to clairvoyants traveling without the body to realms where spirits could communicate secrets to them.

The disappearance or surrender of one's identity to another was a theme of the seventeenth-century mystical writings of Madame Guyon and Francois Fénelon, who emphasized the individual's surrender of the will to divine love. These writings were popular among American antebellum Protestant intellectuals. The Romantic movement fostered a similar surrender of the self, or hypersensitivity to spiritual or psychic "impressions." Goethe had depicted such sensitivity in his novels The Sorrows of Young Werther (1744) and Elective Affinities (1809), and it was exemplified in Bohemian wanderlust, the desire to follow personal "monitions" rather than conventional expectations. The abandonment of the self to holy enthusiasm and impulse was also encouraged in the religious revivals of the time. The Gothicism of the period resulted in the enormous popularity of Catherine Crowe's 1848 collection of stories about uncanny phenomena, The Night-Side of Nature.

The concern with reconciling science and religion, as well as matter and spirit, coincided with a popular interest in the newly translated writings of Swedish engineer and visionary Emanuel Swedenborg, who had conversations with spirits about their lives in other worlds that intersected with this one. Transcendentalists urged a spiritualization of the natural world, and Perfectionists suggested that the earthly could be reformed into, or revealed to be, the heavenly, stimulating seekers to set up utopian communities founded on the ideas of French socialist Charles Fourier. Also influential in the birth of Spiritualism was an efflorescence of trance visions among Shakers during the late 1830s and 1840s, which presaged many of the features of Spiritualism.

Spiritualism promoted the notion of surrendering the will to the inspiration of spirits, but it simultaneously elevated the importance of the individual's perception and judgment. It assented to testing the reality of the spirits, ranking empirical experience over traditional authority. It made a "scientific" appeal to evidence available to anyone. It also adopted the individualism and anticlericalism of the Protestant dissenting tradition, evident in the Pietistic origins of the religious groups—such as the Universalists, the Unitarians, and Quakers—among whose members Spiritualism flourished. Spiritualism, by and large, was antiauthoritarian and Spiritualists valued the liberty of individual conscience. The movement was associated with progressive politics and social theory, and was most popular in the northern United States. Southerners often saw spiritualism as one strand of a twisted skein of Yankee fanaticism that also included such causes as utopian socialism, women's rights, and the abolition of slavery.

Spiritualists accepted the naturalistic idea of geological and biological change and development, and they extended the idea to religion, which they believed also evolved and progressed. Spiritualists supposed that individuals progressed as well, continuing beyond this life into the afterlife, and Spiritualism thus expanded the realm of natural law into the supernatural. They did not view the Fox sisters' rappings or other Spiritualistic phenomena as miracles in the sense of a suspension of natural law, but they saw such phenomena as the ultimately rational—although not yet understood—effects of the interaction between this world and the higher world. The clairvoyant travels of spirit mediums also resembled the travels of naturalist explorers of exotic cultures, such as, for example, A. J. Davis's travels while in "the superior state" to the afterlife, which he envisioned as "The Summerland," a socialist community of enlightened souls. The "scientific" tendencies of Spiritualists led some of their early religious opponents to refer to them as "rationalists."

Many personal accounts described conversion to Spiritualism as a joyful liberation from a bleak Calvinist belief that the soul was powerless to affect its final disposition, or even liberation from an arid materialist belief that denied life after death. Other accounts described the adoption of Spiritualism as only a small step from the beliefs of liberal churches that already had a tenuous relationship with traditional Christian doctrine. Many Spiritualists saw themselves as "come-outers," that is, as part of a group that had left Christianity, just as their spiritual forebears had left corrupted churches. Many other Spiritualists, however, believed that they were simply finding their way back to the true core of Christianity and called themselves "Christian Spiritualists." Spiritualists were early advocates of "higher criticism" of the Bible and they were convinced that apocrypha, such as Gnostic texts, contained a true picture of Jesus's life and teachings. Spiritualists generally accepted the rococo speculations of comparative religion as it was practiced by such savants as Louis Jacolliot, who believed that the biblical story of Christ was a fiction based on the Hindu myth of Kṛṣṇa.

Traditional churches vigorously opposed Spiritualism, attributing it to the devil and equating it with previous forms of necromancy. Traditional churches also opposed Spiritualism because it made revelation deliberately open-ended and subject only to individual judgment. Spiritualism moved religion from churches, which were public places subject to the control of traditional (male) authority, to home parlors, which were private places subject to domestic (female) sentiment, or, as opponents put it, dark places where people were free of restraint. Opponents also took issue with Spiritualists' equating the authority of the Bible with that of the messages and wonders produced at séances and in other religions.

Most of the public and most scientists, with a few exceptions, treated Spiritualism as delusion, fraud, or mental disorder. Some scientists attributed séance messages to the medium's ability to read the thoughts of others in the spirit circle, rather than to the medium's ability to hear the whisperings of spirits. These scientists believed this explanation was more naturalistic.

In nineteenth-century America, Spiritualism bore the marks of the progressive wing of Protestantism. Local varieties, however, sometimes drew from other sources, such as the Spiritualism of New Orleans, which incorporated Catholicism's traditions of intercessory saints and sacraments, as well as voodoo. The Spiritualism practiced in some parts of the United States incorporated Native American methods of divination, trance induction, and spirit possession, and white mediums often discovered that their spirit guides were Indians. Modern Spiritualism was largely a phenomenon of white Americans, however, with some notable exceptions, such as Sojourner Truth and Pascal Beverly Randolph. Nevertheless, Spiritualists believed that spirit contact was at the heart of all religion, and they believed they found support for this view in the Bible, in ancient accounts of the Sibylline oracles and of prophets and druids, and in historical records of witchcraft and haunting.

Some opponents of Spiritualism argued for replacing the term Spiritualism with spiritism. As they saw it, Spiritualism was a word with wide application but only appropriate as a contrast to materialism. They insisted that spiritism was the proper term for what was commonly called "Spiritualism," which, according to them, was merely a submission or unhealthy attachment to spirits. Their argument had little effect on popular usage, and gained no acceptance by Spiritualists.

Spiritism, however, was used by French seer Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail, writing under the pseudonym Allan Kardec. Kardec's publications in the late 1850s and 1860s influenced many in the French-speaking world to accept the reality of spirit contact. They also accepted the existence of reincarnation, whereas American and English Spiritualists, at least for the first decades of the movement, rejected it.

In general, European Spiritualism was more influenced than was American Spiritualism by occult traditions, such as Hermeticism, Rosicrucianism, irregular orders of Freemasonry, and ideas from the eastern lands that Europeans had colonized. Nevertheless, American spirit mediums spread their variety of Spiritualism to Europe by lecturing and holding séances there. Maria Trenholm Hayden, for example, visited England and made an early convert of socialist Robert Owen. Daniel Dunglas Home traveled throughout Europe and gave spectacular performances, some of which powerfully affected the czarist court.

Doctrinal controversies arose within the movement: Did spirits provide tangible assistance or mere comfort? In trance, was the will erased or exalted? Was Spiritualism's essence a public platform of progressive reform, or the phenomenal manifestations of the séance? Why were revelations from trance mediums contradictory? Controversies also arose on the specifics of the afterlife (Were animals reborn there? Was retrogression possible after death?) and on the interaction between spirit and body (Did sexual prompting signal an attraction of true spiritual "affinities"?).

The Forms and Practices of Spiritualism

Spiritualists developed their own church services, with congregational singing of hymns, lectures, and Sunday schools ("lyceums") for children. Spiritualists also encouraged the development of mediums who could conduct séances or give lectures under the influence of spirits.

The séance was meant to be a ritual communion of the saints still in the flesh with those who had left it, but the séance was also meant to be a proof test of the reality of the afterlife. The earliest Spiritualists formed spirit circles similar to those that mesmerists already used to investigate "animal magnetism," where men and women touched hands around a table, forming a "magnetic battery." Mesmeric investigators had produced trance, clairvoyance, eruptions of tics or automatisms, sometimes involving writing or speaking, and the tilting of tables and levitating of people, furniture, and musical instruments. Now sitters attributed these to discarnate spirits rather than to their own manipulations of energy.

Personal messages voiced or written by the medium from the sitters' deceased friends and family were always the main products of a séance, with the sitters conducting their conversation with the spirits through the medium. But the medium might also give voice to the spirits of famous people who corrected or supplemented the ideas for which they had been known while living. Other phenomena produced at a séance might include musical sounds, disembodied voices, floating lights and phosphorescent hands, and the materialization of coins, flowers, letters, or birds. Mediums produced spirit-inspired songs, poetry, paintings, scriptures and narratives of travel to other times or worlds, revelations of hidden treasures or lucrative business opportunities, chalk messages on slate boards, spirit images on photographic plates, and novel plans for inventions and for political or social reforms. Mediums also reported the ability to read minds, to see the future, and to escape from tied ropes or locked jail cells. At séances in the 1870s and 1880s mediums might extrude from their bodies a pale diaphanous substance eventually called "ectoplasm," or they might conduct "dark cabinet materializations" in which they were locked in a cabinet and produced spectral forms who walked among the audience.

Mediums also diagnosed disease. Their reputed clairvoyance allowed them to see into a person's body to the source of illness, and, sometimes with assistance of the spirits of famous physicians, to prescribe treatment. This often included the medium's manipulation of the energy "aura" surrounding the patient's body through the laying on of hands. Many mediums made their living through healing, rather than through conducting séances or giving lectures.

Far more women than men were spirit mediums, and male mediums often characterized their sensitivity as a feminine power. Spiritualist lecturers, on the other hand, were often men, although the exceptions—such as self-styled "trance lecturers" Cora L. V. Scott Richmond, Emma Hardinge Britten, Hannah Frances Brown, Achsa White Sprague, Lizzie Doten, Ada Hoyt Foye, and Amanda Britt Spence—drew enthusiastic audiences, thrilled to see women on a platform speaking fearlessly and authoritatively.

Spiritualists believed that one feminine aspect of Spiritualism was its focus, not on the abstract intellect, but on subjective feeling and on the body. They believed that spirits had begun to affect the biological elevation of the human race by exerting spiritual influence over the conception and development of the human embryo. They also believed the spirits could free women from undesired sex, which literally degraded their offspring. Women had to be made equal to men, and each woman had to be given sole authority over when, and how often, and with whom she would have sex and children. Some Spiritualists were the first public advocates of women's reproductive rights, and Spiritualists occupied the most radical wing of the early women's rights movement.

Spiritualists made effective prophets, perhaps, but not loyal group members. They attempted to organize, but with only sporadic successes. Many were leery of setting up a hierarchy that would judge individual practices or experiences. On the other hand, they valued communion, association, and small spirit circles as aids to amplify a medium's sensitivity. In addition, groups fortified the camaraderie of believers, inculcated children in the belief in spirit communion, trained mediums, and sponsored lecturers. Local associations licensed mediums, ministers, and lecturers to protect them from ordinances against fortune telling and "jugglery." They also investigated charges of mediumistic fraud or immorality to protect Spiritualism from abuse by con artists or from embarrassment by anti-Spiritualist opponents.

Spiritualists also formed state, regional, and national associations, with varying success, and they held conventions. Propaganda for the movement was carried out by word of mouth, by experiments with séances, by lectures from traveling mediums, and by the publication of pamphlets and books. Spiritualist newspapers connected far-flung and often isolated believers into a community of faith. The most influential were Spiritual Telegraph, New-England Spiritualist, Herald of Progress, Religio-Philosophical Journal, and Banner of Light.

The first Spiritualist camp meeting was held in a field outside Malden, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1866. Camp meetings became very influential in the movement, sometimes drawing as many as twenty thousand attendees to such rural surroundings as Lake Pleasant, Massachusetts, or Cassadaga, New York (the forerunner of the center for the Spiritualist movement today at Lily Dale, New York, and the namesake for another settlement in Florida).

Spiritualism's Progress through the Nineteenth Century and Beyond

The popularity and influence of Spiritualism rose and fell. Little solid evidence exists for judging the number of Spiritualists during these years because the organizations of Spiritualism were transient, and the criteria of who counted as a Spiritualist were extremely elastic. In the United States population of thirty million on the eve of the Civil War in 1860, estimates of the number of Spiritualists have varied from a few hundred thousand to eleven million. At the time, however, both proponents and opponents of Spiritualism often accepted as reasonable the figure of two to three million Spiritualists.

By the 1880s, Spiritualism's influence had receded. Some Spiritualists defected to the newer systems of Christian Science, New Thought, and Theosophy. Some who were more politically radical were drawn into Freethought, Anarchism, and Communism, losing their religious outlook. At the same time, Spiritualism's influence had diffused through the culture, most notably in the idea of artistic and religious inspiration.

Meanwhile, Spiritualism's séance phenomena had devolved into elaborate materializations that were often indistinguishable from stage magic, inviting well-publicized exposures of fraudulent mediums by such people as magician Harry Kellar, who blazed a trail later followed by Harry Houdini. Scientists investigating Spiritualism also developed more rigorous protocols for what they began to call "psychical research," which eventually allowed the field of psychology to distance itself from the need to consider spirit as a subject for empirical research. Sigmund Freud's development of a compelling theory of the unconscious also helped render the notion of the paranormal uninteresting to psychologists, with some exceptions, notably Carl Jung. By the turn of the century, Spiritualism no longer seemed to many potential converts as a progressive, avant-garde reconciliation of religion and science, but as an antique.

Nevertheless, Spiritualism has continued throughout the world, with periodic revivals, to this day, with an umbrella organization—the National Spiritualist Association of Churches—founded in 1893, forty-five years after the Fox sisters' rappings. Interest in Spiritualism grew in England after World War I, sometimes linked to the desire by survivors for comfort and reassurance, not just concerning the fate of their loved ones who had died, but perhaps also for the old order of society. Since the late 1960s a revival of Spiritualism has taken place under the banner of the New Age movement. A strong element of theatrics, nearly always present in Spiritualism, is continued in television shows in which psychics face studio audiences in order to contact, or even "channel," the spirits.

From the beginning, Spiritualists criticized Christian miracles and superstition. Nevertheless, they also claimed as true the manifestation of physical phenomena that have yet to be empirically verified. Spiritualists sometimes said that the evidence was real but only anecdotal, and that the spirits' ability and willingness to manifest themselves were constrained by the testing requirements imposed by skeptical investigators. On the other hand, like ancient Gnosticism and present-day postmodernism, Spiritualism judged the objective, external, matter-of-fact world to be essentially devoid of truth. Truth lay instead in a dematerialized, spiritual, inner realm. One goal of Spiritualism was to demonstrate this. As a result, some Spiritualists tacitly believed that if intransigent fact had to be helped along by hidden manipulation, hoax, fiction, or impersonation in order to turn the world into, or reveal it as, or convince an observer that the world was, a magical one in which mind ruled matter, then there was little or no fault, but rather virtue, in doing so.

Bibliography

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Britten, Emma Hardinge. Modern American Spiritualism: A Twenty Year's Record of the Communion between Earth and the World of Spirits. New York, 1870; reprint, New Hyde Park, N.Y., 1970.

Buescher, John B. "More Lurid than Lucid: The Spiritualist Invention of the Word Sexism." Journal of the American Academy of Religion 70, no. 3 (2002): 561–593.

Buescher, John B. The Other Side of Salvation: Spiritualism and the Nineteenth-Century Religious Experience. Boston, 2003.

Carroll, Bret E. Spiritualism in Antebellum America. Bloomington, Ind., 1997.

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John B. Buescher (2005)

Encyclopedia of Religion