Spiritualism

views updated

Spiritualism

The basic distinguishing feature of religious Spiritualism is belief in the reality of communication with the deceased, especially through mediumship, and the practice of this communication as a religious activity. Like the somewhat later Pentecostalism, modern Spiritualism originated within the free-spirited religious life of the United States, and then spread beyond its borders to become a significant presence worldwide. The Spiritualist movement is important historically not only for its own sake, but also because of its early connections with feminism, abolition of slavery, and other reformist movements; its provocative interaction with science and the mass media; and its role as a catalyst of popular religious liberalism.

The origin of the modern Spiritualist movement is conventionally attributed to the "Rochester rappings" experienced by the Fox sisters Kate (1841–1892) and Margaretta (1838–1893) in their upstate New York farmhouse in 1848. These young girls claimed they heard unusual tappings that seemed to have no natural origin or explanation. Perhaps inspired by the recently invented Morse code, they took them to be messages from the other world, later claimed to have been sent by the spirit of a murdered peddler. The news created a media sensation, and soon similar tappings were heard across the land. Indeed, rappings quickly proved to be cumbersome, and were superseded for the most part by trance mediumship. Spiritualist circles, formed to explore the new adventure, soon spoke of such other mysterious phenomena as table-tilting, spirit trumpets, apports (physical objects brought to a location by spiritual means), levitation, and the visible manifestation of the spirits in bodies composed of a fine substance called ectoplasm.

The intellectual background of early Spiritualism was twofold. First, mesmerism, experiments with hypnotism and trance induction in the tradition of the celebrated Viennese physician Anton Mesmer, were popular as stage and parlor performances in the 1840s. Together with Mesmer's own spiritualistic and parapsychological theories they afforded an easy transition to the mediumistic trance and séance states of religious Spiritualism. At the same time, the philosophy and example of Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish scientist who reported visits to Heaven and Hell, provided a plausible metaphysical framework for nascent Spiritualism.

Swedenborgianism was as popular as mesmerism in the cultural environment out of which Spiritualism emerged; the 1830s were called the "Swedenborgian decade" in America, and John Chapman, "Johnny Appleseed," had spread Swedenborgian tracts as well as appleseeds through the northern frontier areas where Spiritualism was to take especially firm hold. The two trends had already come together in 1847 in a massive book by Andrew Jackson Davis, The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind, a work delivered in trance (Davis had been a mesmerist) that combined Swedenborg's cosmology with the socialism of Charles Fourier. Davis was soon adopted as Spiritualism's chief theoretician, his highly optimistic view of personal and social progress in this world and the worlds to come shaping its open and liberal temper. In the 1830s the Shakers also reported experiencing a series of impressive spiritualistic manifestations, called "Mother Ann's work."

Spiritualism became an American vogue in the 1850s. Apologists for the new faith confidently proclaimed it to be the religion of the future, the faith most compatible with democracy, progress, and the new scientific world. All this was contrasted with the alleged oppressiveness and blind dogmatism of religions brought over from the past. Significantly, though, Spiritualism was also referred to as "the oldest religion in the world," its advocates being aware of its similarity to the shamanism of Native American and other primal societies, as though the vanguard of progress had now reached a point where it could reconcile itself with human beginnings. At the same time, Jesus was spoken of as a Spiritualist, and the early Christian church was said to have been Spiritualistic.

All these features relate much about early Spiritualism and its times. As a religion suited to the young republic's proud democracy, it affirmed the spiritual equality of all, since gifted mediums could be found in any sector of society, not only among the properly educated and ordained. In particular, in the 1850s Spiritualism was one of very few venues in which women could exercise religious leadership on a par with men. If women could rarely preach directly, they could give voice to wise spirits speaking through them. Those messages often endorsed feminism, and attracted the attention of women leaders such as Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Victoria Woodhull. Many spirits were no less eager to advocate other major reform projects of the 1850s, including abolition of slavery, humane childbearing, prison reform, and the ending of capital punishment.

The science connection had several facets. At times contemporaries might have had some uncertainty as to whether the movement represented a new religion or popular science. While the subject matter, life after death, is traditionally associated with religion, the Spiritualist investigation of it sometimes involved careful scientific methods and precautions rarely before associated with matters of faith. Spiritualism boldly called for religious doctrine to be tested against modern science and the rationalistic assumptions of the Enlightenment. Spiritualists held that now, in the present enlightened age, as basic an aspect of religion as the soul's survival of physical death could be as much a matter of certainty as the composition of water. To be sure, the results of the scientific testing of mediumship were often ambiguous and controversial; but in the end, that only confirmed believers in their sense that theirs was a new kind of religion, with new standards of truth and generating new forms of opposition.

Hardly less important was the way Spiritualism was a new kind of religion in its manner of dissemination. As the first major religious movement of the age of widespread literacy, mass-market newspapers, and even the telegraph (significantly, one of the early Spiritualist magazines was called The Spiritual Telegraph), Spiritualism—ever a media sensation—was the first new religion to benefit from popular print reports as well as word of mouth and itinerant preachers. Not only that, but the new movement, which depended heavily on traveling star mediums and lecturers, could now send them around the world with the relative speed and comfort of hurtling trains and steamships, and did.

Despite these advantages, by the end of the 1850s Spiritualism was in some disarray. Not only had the impending Civil War crisis attracted nearly all the nation's attention, but also scandals involving fraudulent mediums had tarnished the image of the faith of the future. After the war it revived somewhat, as Spiritualism generally has after wars, when many of those who lost loved ones to the demons of battle turn to it in hope of contact and reassurance. By now, however, disparities among three aspects of the maturing movement could no longer be ignored and called out for resolution or separation. These might be called the religious, the philosophical, and the scientific aspects of Spiritualism, and in the latter third of the nineteenth century they more and more went their separate ways.

The religious aspect was focused on the original premise of communication with departed kin and with ancient spiritual teachers. Even in the early days there had been no lack of the latter, including mighty figures from the Bible or classical philosophers now returned to speak again. In Spiritualism's second, post–Civil War phase, those for whom this kind of mediumship was of special importance and who wished to experience it in an atmosphere of faith and belief moved toward making Spiritualism essentially an organized church. Problems obtained; in the late nineteenth century and even after, religious Spiritualism was divided over the teachings of the French Spiritualist H. L. D. Rivail, who wrote as Allan Kardec, and who, unlike Andrew Jackson Davis and most other early Anglo-American Spiritualists, espoused reincarnation. (Kardecist Spiritualism remains popular in Latin America, especially in Brazil.) In North America scattered Spiritualist churches appeared toward the end of the nineteenth century, offering regular Sunday services in a Protestant style but including spirit messages and mediumship in the service program. In 1893 a number of such churches formed the National Spiritualist Association, the most successful of numerous Spiritualist denominations.

Others wanted the Spiritualist worldview but did not care for the churchlike atmosphere or "trivial" mediumship associated with the conventional movement. Some, however, were willing to accept more intellectually sophisticated teachings from lips and pens reported to be inspired by great masters of wisdom, Eastern or Western. Many of these found their way to groups such as the Theosophical Society, founded in 1875, chiefly by two former ardent Spiritualists, Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott. Others turned to "New Thought," Mormonism, or imported Eastern religions.

Still others were always really most interested in the scientific investigation of psychic phenomena promised by the Spiritualist upsurge, and were put off by religious or occultist overtones. Some of these were among the founders of the 1882 Society for Psychical Research in England and its U.S. ally the American Society for Psychical Research.

In each case, though, it is clear that Spiritualism first had the effect of liberating persons from dogmatic slumbers, or even from the great nineteenth-century revivals; significantly, the Fox sisters' original rappings had occurred in the "burnt-over country" of upstate New York. Whether or not converts stayed with the spirit faith, and wherever they went after it, they could not go back to exactly what they were before.

The 1920s might be called the "Silver Age" of Spiritualism. Then, in the aftermath of World War I, the faith enjoyed a revival of interest, and attendance at Spiritualist churches grew. That decade's best-known Spiritualist advocate was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the celebrated creator of Sherlock Holmes. Doyle's writings and tireless world-ranging lecture tours, including visits to the United States in 1922 and 1923, and above all his dramatic presentations of psychic photographs alleged to show spirits, attracted great attention and controversy. Another feature of this period was the development of African-American Spiritualism. A prominent example was the Universal Hagar's Spiritual Church, organized in Detroit in 1923 by George W. Hurley and numbering some thirty-seven churches by the time of Hurley's death in 1943.

However, no comparable upsurge of conventional religious Spiritualism obtained after World War II, despite growth of interest in psychical research, much publicity given celebrated independent mediums and psychics such as Arthur Ford or Edgar Cayce, and the 1960s fascination with alternative spirituality. Perhaps by now Spiritualist churches had become too conventional and fusty for what was essentially a countercultural concern.

Church-based Spiritualism continued to the end of the century in a number of loosely organized denominations. The movement has rarely submitted to tight institutional structures, for sociologically it has been largely a matter of the followers and clients of individual charismatic mediums/ministers, who usually prefer to operate independently, under their own inspiration. Its most characteristic institution apart from the local Spiritualist church is the "camp," representing a tradition going back to the nineteenth century. There is Cassadaga in Florida, originally a winter haven for northern Spiritualists who could there enjoy intensive study and experience in a balmy climate, and now an exemplary Spiritualist community. Lily Dale in upstate New York boasts the modest Fox home where the original rappings took place, now moved to this location, and Camp Chesterfield in Indiana has long drawn midwestern Spiritualists for summer activities. In general, though, contemporary Spiritualism in its church form seems to have little of its earlier vibrancy.

However, it could be argued that Spiritualism, fundamentally a fluid concept that has taken different forms in different ages, from primal shamanism to the nineteenth-century movement, emerged in the second half of the twentieth century in new forms. The UFO "contactees" of the 1950s and thereafter often continued the relation they claimed to an extraterrestrial mentor by allowing that entity to deliver trance discourses through the earthling's voice. The contact phenomenon thus showed similarities to the Spiritualist medium, believed to be giving expression to a high, godlike teacher; in fact, some contactees had a background in Spiritualism. Where once spirit entities were understood to be ancient masters of wisdom, now for UFO aficionados they were "space brothers," superior entities from other worlds come to give earthlings warning and encouragement.

Then, as the "New Age" movement took shape later in the century, one of its most striking aspects was "channeling," the communication in trance of messages thought to come from high teachers. The similarity to Spiritualism, especially to what J. Gordon Melton has called "teaching spiritualism," in contrast to the mediumship of "ordinary" departed relatives and others, is obvious. However, channeling has no evident direct link to classic Spiritualism, and its reported entities are often Eastern, or teach Eastern-type doctrines such as karma and reincarnation, in contrast to the largely Western bias of the older faith in North America. Thus has Spiritualism and its fundamental ideas survived.

See alsoAfterlife; Channeling; Death and Dying; Extraterrestrial Guides; New Age Spirituality; New Thought; Occult; Psychic; Seance; Shamanism; Theosophical Society; Trance; Unidentified Flying Objects.