SPIRITUALISM

Modern spiritualism began in the spring of 1848, with the appearance of a pamphlet describing a series of uncanny tapping noises in the Fox family home, a tiny wood-frame house in Hydesville, New York. These "raps," which appeared to emanate from a variety of hard surfaces, always occurred in the presence of the two youngest Fox daughters, eleven-year-old Kate and fourteen-year-old Margaret. The Fox family quickly discovered that the force producing these raps could answer questions by tapping in a simple alphabetic code. Through this cumbersome method, the noise-producing force declared itself to be the disembodied soul of a murdered peddler. As word of this strange phenomenon spread, visitors flocked to the house.

Within a few weeks, Kate and Margaret discovered they could produce these noises anywhere, and on behalf of a vast array of different spirits. These raps were a telegraphic code through which any disembodied soul could send dispatches to loved ones still living. As word of this development spread, others followed the example of the Fox girls, discovering their own varied talents as mediums: trance speech, table-moving, and automatic writing emerged alongside raps as means of relaying spirit messages. The most gifted mediums, many of whom were women, became celebrities whose exploits were reported in a burgeoning spiritualist press. Soon, it was possible to speak of modern spiritualism, a fully-fledged movement founded on the belief that the living could enter into regular communication with the dead.

In the early 1850s, this new movement traversed the Atlantic. Visiting American mediums caused a sensation in Great Britain, inspiring a nationwide interest in these phenomena. In elite circles, celebrity mediums impressed their audiences with spectacular manifestations. Beginning in 1855, for example, the American-born Daniel Dunglas Home (1833–1886) became famous for his ability to produce luminous spirit hands, to divine intimate secrets about strangers and their deceased relatives, to cause musical instruments to play of their own accord, and to hold himself suspended in mid-air. Aristocrats and eminent writers like Charles Dickens, Anthony and Rose Trollope, William Makepeace Thackeray, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, John Ruskin, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton attended these gatherings. British spiritualism also flourished in humbler circumstances, where visionary communications tended to be more important than spectacular phenomena. Beginning in the mid-1850s, skilled workers formed spiritualist societies in industrial regions like Yorkshire, and in the burgeoning manufacturing cities of Manchester, Nottingham, Belfast, and Glasgow.

Spiritualism spread rapidly to the Continent as well. By 1853, séances had become a topic of fashionable discussion in France and Germany. As in Britain, these strange phenomena captured the interest of both elite and ordinary people. The author Victor Hugo received whole poems through an animated table, the French empress Eugénie (r. 1853–1871) figured among the glamorous guests at Home's séances, and the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer published an essay on "Spirit Sight." At the same time, pamphlets aimed at large audiences, containing instructions on how to produce the new phenomena and explanations of their significance, sold briskly.

Despite this initial burst of popularity, however, it took nearly a decade for organized spiritualism to emerge fully on the Continent—it began in the late 1850s in France, and in the 1870s traveled across the Rhine. By the 1880s, spiritualist circles were

thriving from San Francisco to Moscow. On the Continent, the movement took very different forms than it did in Britain or the United States. In France, and later in Italy and Spain, for example, believers referred to their ideas and practices as "Spiritism." Spiritist groups, perhaps echoing the hierarchical structure of the Catholic Church, tended to be considerably more centralized than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts. They also espoused a distinctive cosmology based on French thought, which incorporated Auguste Comte's positivist vision of history as a sweeping march of progress, and the utopian socialist Charles Fourier's belief in reincarnation—an idea Anglo-Saxon spiritualists found repellent. German spiritualists conceived of the movement from yet a different perspective: as a vehicle for social progress and as a new element in an ongoing debate between the philosophical schools of idealism and materialism.

As spiritualism became a fixture of the period's cultural and intellectual life, an increasing number of scientists turned their attention to the mysterious phenomena mediums produced. At first, these studies were isolated endeavors. In the early 1870s, for example, Sir William Crookes (1832–1919), discoverer of the element thallium, attempted to measure the "psychic force" Home seemed to exude in séances. Similarly, in 1878, Carl Friedrich Zöllner (1800–1860), founder of the discipline of astrophysics, published a study of the medium Henry Slade (d. 1905), in which he hypothesized that some phenomena were the work of beings from an invisible fourth dimension. By the early 1880s, many believed the subject had become pressing enough to demand a more systematic response. To accomplish this goal, the Cambridge philosopher Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900) founded the Society for Psychical Research, an organization devoted to the experimental study of the mysterious powers of mind mediums exhibited. This current of scientific inquiry, as explored by thinkers like Frederick Myers (1843–1901), Pierre-Marie-Felix Janet (1859–1947) and Theodore Flournoy (1854–1920), played a crucial role in the development of a new psychological conception of subjectivity—one that posited the existence of a complex and active "subliminal" or unconscious mind.

During this period, spiritualism appealed to a remarkably broad range of people—from famous writers and scientists to housewives and industrial workers. This striking breadth mirrored the breadth of the anxieties and aspirations the movement addressed. For some, communication with the beyond was simply an attractive form of consolation, a way to remain in reassuring contact with deceased loved ones. For others, especially those who became mediums, spiritualism could be a source of social power and mobility. Mediumship gave women an opportunity to speak publicly in ways that were otherwise unavailable to them. It also provided people of humble social origin—like Home, or

the Italian peasant Eusapia Palladino (1854–1918)—access to undreamt of status and fame. More broadly, spiritualism seemed to address what many considered to be a fundamental problem of the age: the ever-growing incompatibility of scientific and religious knowledge. Where scientific truth was based on material data, gathered through a careful process of experimentation, religious truth was based on faith—an emotional, intuitive sense of commitment and acceptance. Spiritualism seemed to resolve this conflict by giving religious knowledge an empirical foundation as solid as the one scientific knowledge enjoyed. For seekers in the nineteenth century, an era of uncertainty and transition, this prospect proved attractive indeed.

See alsoPopular and Elite Culture; Science and Technology; Secularization.

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Monroe, John Warne. "Cartes de visite from the Other World: Spiritism and the Discourse of Laïcisme in the Early Third Republic." French Historical Studies 26, no. 1 (2003): 119–153.

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Treitel, Corinna. A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern. Baltimore, Md., 2004.

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John Warne Monroe