Historians Flashcards
Pimple on origins of spiritualism
from the traditional Western European and North American folklore of ghosts
3 Reasons for increased popularity of Spiritualism in SPR after 1900 (Asprem)
- Theoretical. Failure of the generally mechanistic theories of telepathy. Lodge and other physicists noticed that the positive studies of telepathy did not seem to respect the inverse square law: telepathic effects did not diminish with distance. This meant that whatever was going on, it could have nthing to do with the fields and waves of physics. In presidential address to the SPR in 1902, Lodge instead opened door to non-physical thoeries, whether in the style of Myers’ ‘subliminal self’ or the disembodied souls of the Spiritualists
- Experimental. Ghostly return of Myers and other first-gen SPR researchers. Cross-correspondence experiments: spirit of Myers spoke through a number of mediums working as far away from each other as Boston, Bombay and Cambridge. The statements were collected at the central offices of the SPR and analyzed through an increasingly esoteric set of hermeneutical strategies. This was persuasive for many in the Society, including some of the most scientifically minded researchers
- Horrors of WW1
Asprem, disenchantment
thesis does not sufficiently acknowledge or account for the plurality of epistemological positions available within post-Enlightenment intellectual culture.
propose to abandon the notion of disenchantment as a sociohistorical process, and instead reconceptualise it as a specific intellectual and cultural problem faced by historical actors. This move may in fact make “disenchantment” more consistent with Weber’s broader methodological project: it prioritises the agency of individuals above the machinations of nebulous structural processes
Asprem, scientific naturalism
a dominant epistemological current at the turn of the century, but it was also a flexible one: self-identifying “naturalists” would define the domain of “nature” in conflicting ways, thus allowing a broad space of possibilities for how to answer the problem of disenchantment. In practice this means that scientists, occultists, and religious spokespersons were able to share a flexible epistemological foundation that allowed them to speculate on questions such as the possibilities and limitations of science and the relation between science and religion in roughly comparable terms.
an “open-ended” understanding of scientific naturalism became the framework for establishing new natural theologies, research programmes focused on “naturalising the supernatural”, and attempts by occultists to recreate their practices in line with “legitimate” science.
Asprem, psychical research and naturalism
British psychical research should furthermore be seen as part of the general movement of Victorian naturalism, but one that challenged the dominant position taken by such demagogues as John Tyndall and T.H. Huxley. Whereas Huxley had launched the concept of “agnosticism” to describe the proper naturalistic attitude towards religion and the various claims related to religion in all its forms, psychical researchers emphasised the empirical dimension of religious claims. To these researchers, the survival of the soul after death, for example, was a strictly empirical question that could be investigated through scientific experiments with spiritualist mediums, and through the study of apparitions and so-called “veridical hallucinations”.18 Furthermore, one believed that knowledge of the soul’s qualities and potentials, far beyond that of normal physical existence, could be achieved through the study of such “supernormal” faculties as telepathy and clairvoyance, vindicating a minimum of “spirituality” on which a “scientific religion” could be based
Asprem, open-ended naturalism
This position was based on anti-agnosticism, and, implicitly, antiKantianism. In order to defend such a view, however, it was also necessary to rethink the category of the “supernatural” itself. The supernatural seemed to suggest either a contrariety to nature and natural law, or a complete ontological breach from it; on these grounds it signified something which, even if it did exist, would be impossible to study in a satisfactorily fashion from the position of natural science. Myers’ solution to this problem was to dispense of the term supernatural altogether, proposing the term “supernormal” instead.
As he explained: The word supernatural is open to grave objections; it assumes that there is something outside nature, and it has become associated with arbitrary interference with law. Now there is no reason to suppose that the psychical phenomena with which we deal are less a part of nature, or less subject to fixed and definite law, than any other phenomena.34
By emphasising that nature was changing, and claiming to be studying the cutting edge of that evolutionary movement, Myers would remain a naturalist while allowing for a broader range of phenomena to be taken seriously as part of (emerging) nature
Asprem, main difference between a Huxley and a Myers
comes down to how they do the weighing, and what they consider, prima facie, to be plausible entities to find in nature. Whereas the agnostic would call for a patient suspension of judgement concerning extraordinary phenomena that appear unexplained, the psychical researchers were not afraid to start theorising and hypothesising on the assumption that things are, more or less, what they appear to be. They were also less concerned with restricting explanations to wellunderstood mechanisms, such as psychopathology, hallucination, or perceptual illusion. When Myers wrote that the supernormal comprised any ‘faculty or phenomenon which goes beyond the level of ordinary experience, in the direction of evolution, or as pertaining to a transcendental world’, he in fact opened the door for an entirely new order of explanations.
Asprem, battle against agnosticism
has remained a recurring theme for psychical researchers, particularly through their defence of a radical and extended form of empiricism against any a priori distinctions and epistemological arguments that would threaten the field as a whole
Quite contrary to the transcendental critical philosophy of Kant and his followers, the question of where the boundaries of natural knowledge are to be drawn is itself an empirical matter, to be settled through scientific trial and error. In fact, this was the only truly scientific and truly empirical manner of proceeding
Asprem, 3 types of naturalisation in psychical research
- Spiritualism.“spirit hypothesis” of mediumism, construed here as a naturalising approach that allows for the existence and activity of disembodied spirits within nature.
- Animism. Denotes a strategy that seeks the origin of psychical phenomena in the organism of human beings – whether through the use of extraordinary faculty by especially “gifted” persons, or through spontaneous cases in ordinary people
- Reductionism.
Positive Reductionism: considers most of the cases of psychical research to be genuine, but proceeds by suggesting specific lower-level mechanism at work behind the phenomena. The classic example of positive reductionism in this sense is the brain-wave hypothesis of telepathy.
Negative Reductionism:
reducing away the phenomena entirely. This naturalistic strategy would explain the phenomena as illusory, holding that they are really the result of some other and well-known phenomenon, such as trickery, illusion, hallucination, psychopathology, psychological bias, or a combination of such factors. This latter form of reductionism was the official naturalist line, and the line of Huxley’s agnosticism
As a rule, the field moved away from the spiritualist hypothesis, and has generally centred on forms of animism during the period that concerns us the most
Asprem, stage magic and professionalization
hardly coincidental that the stage magicians involved themselves in this quarrel with spiritualism at the same time as their trade was going through a phase of professionalization, attempting to heighten the prestige of this traditionally “low-culture” practice
Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin (1805–1871), was involved with the debunking of modern mediums and “traditional” miracle workers – including a famous exposé of Sufi marabouts in Algeria.54 In Britain, the high profile stage magician John Neville Maskelyne (1839–1917) was well known for debunking mediums, publishing a book exposing the main conjuring tricks used in spiritualist performances in 1876.55 In the early 20th century, Harry Houdini (Erik Weisz, 1874–1926) famously made a career out of debunking spiritualists in America, with much publicity and to the irritation of certain spiritualist-friendly psychical researchers.56 His exposé of the Boston medium “Margery” (Mina Crandon, 1888–1941) in 1924 was particularly devastating, since the SPR had invested much prestige in this particular case
Asprem, enchantment
It is particularly in the meeting between the negative reductionist strategy and the other purportedly naturalised explanations of psychic phenomena that psychical research became a veritable battle over the boundaries of natural knowledge.
It was here, moreover, that the boundary between enchantment and disenchantment was truly drawn
Psychical research, in short, meant a refusal to do natural philosophy along the disenchanted lines of Kantian epistemology. The call for a naturalisation of the supernatural is in this sense also a naturalisation of the problem of disenchantment itself: the very borders that were thought to separate this world from higher worlds were themselves opened up for scientific investigation
boundaries of knowledge cannot be drawn a priori
Asprem, one inherent danger in SPR’s approach
while it seemed to Myers and the psychical researchers that no religious options in the modern world could overlook and ignore the authority of science, the fearless call for empiricism also led to an open confrontation with contrary evidence. Breaching the border between science and religion means that religious claims must be open for disconfirmation in the exact same way as any other claim not graced with the cloak of sanctity and thus left untouchable.
A close dialogue with the empirical sciences was necessary if anything of the sort was to be established in the first place, but this manoeuvre simultaneously left a flank wide open for well-prepared attacks. The very philosophical assumptions that were necessary for the project to get started contained within themselves the seeds of its future antagonisms.
Asprem, three generations of psychical research
he founding first generation (active ca. 1870 to 1900), the second generation (ca. 1900-1930), and the third generation (ca. 1930-1960s).
SPR generational shift (Asprem)
new generation tended to open up old avenues that their forebears had already closed, w good reason and after due consideration, as being unproductive and riddled with methodological dangers.
Thus, Spiritualist hypothesis made its return, and verified fraudsters such as Palladino found new support among an enthusiastic younger generation
the status of the field was changing from that of a late-Victorian gentlemanly intellectual pursuit, to a topic of broad popular appeal.
Chasm growing between ‘scientific’ wing and ‘spiritualist’ wing
Psychical research between 1900 and 1930 was characterised by conceptual, theoretical, and methodological fragmentation
second-generation psychical research can be characterised as a “preparadigmatic science”, and the researchers involved in it as a generation of would-be scientists in search of a paradigm. With “paradigm” I am thinking of the most specific of the many senses in which the term has been used since the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), namely, as a “shared example” from which scientists in a given discipline are able to perform “normal science” in accordance with specific standards of rationality that are encoded in a common “practice” rather than “laws”.
Lack of a unifying exemplum
Qualitative vs quantitative (Asprem)
qualitative approaches focus on the close study of single cases, evaluating the minutia of a séance, or the details of a given “anomaly”. By contrast, quantitative approaches are concerned with statistical relationships, probabilities, and the design of repeatable experiments. As we shall see later, quantitative and qualitative approaches to psychical phenomena were typically separated by different explanatory hypotheses as well: for example, the spiritualist and animist strategies that we discussed in the previous chapter were usually (although not exclusively) connected to qualitative research practices, while the “positive” reductionist ones proved more compatible with quantitative methods
The SPR in England and the United States, the IMI in France, and the Munich laboratory of Schrenck-Notzing in Germany were all situated in a theoretical field that oscillated between spiritualism and animism.
their methods remained qualitative: knowledge was to be built on a careful assessment of specifically chosen extraordinary events, conducted on a case-to-case basis.
Reappreciation of the spiritualist hypothesis within SPR (Asprem)
already noticeable among psychical researchers in the decades before the Great War. For example, Oliver Lodge had started considering it seriously already in his presidential address to the SPR in 1902, and was followed by William Barrett’s address two year later.25 In his 1908 Immortality of the Soul, which mostly addressed the compatibility of science and Christian notions of the soul, Lodge enlisted the seeming ability of some mediums to ‘respond to a psychical agency apparently related to the surviving portion of intelligences now discarnate’ as part of a case in favour of immortality.26 The year after, in 1909, he published a broader survey of psychical research with the suggestive title The Survival of Man. In the concluding section of this book Lodge, made it clear that he thought it ‘the best working hypothesis at the present time … to grant that lucid moments of intercourse with deceased persons may in the best cases supervene’
Changed psychology/ wider science - specialisation (Asprem)
Experimentalism was becoming more refined, and the requirements for producing valid knowledge in the human and social sciences were getting more difficult for the amateur to meet. Above all, this reflects the fact that the academic discipline of psychology had become well-established by the 1920s, and characterised by extensive and sophisticated methodological debates that amateurs could not be expected to keep up with.
It was, in other words, quite a different situation from the one in which psychical research had first been defined.
. Through the early decades of the 20th century it became increasingly clear that such a science had to play by the rules of quantity. To be taken seriously in a scientific context, studies of psychic phenomena had to go through experimental control, randomisation, statistics and probabilities. Anything personal, situated, and subjective had to be removed – that was the only way from unreliable “anecdotes” to reliable “data”. However, while science was a quantitative endeavour, psychic experiences appeared to be of a qualitative nature. As studies piled up, it became hard to avoid the conclusion that whatever else they might be, “psychic phenomena” were of an essentially subjective character
Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science
Gieryn,
the successful professionaliser must differentiate his or her field from
competitors and answer to possible critics
Asprem, SPR and boundary-work
the SPR was originally quite successful because it managed to keep firm boundaries against “unscientific” spiritualists, and build a very significant network of members and allies in fields ranging from the sciences to politics
fragmentation that followed in the second generation can thus be conceptualised as a collapse of the SPR’s boundary-work with the influx of spiritualism, and a partial collapse of its network, with the death of the influential founders
Parapsychology (Asprem)
In the early 1930s the young psychology department at Duke University, North Carolina, would be home of a new set of experimental trials, conducted mainly by Joseph Banks Rhine (1895–1980), a botanist who had turned his interest to psychical phenomena a few years earlier
my argument is that McDougall finally succeeded, both in erecting strong boundaries against competitors and other threats to the field’s legitimacy, and in networking the field to a number of highly relevant social, political, and scientific concerns.
Media coverage of the unusual research at Duke peaked around 1937/1938, when Rhine published his popularising account New Frontiers of the Mind. The book defended McDougall’s anti-mechanistic, vitalistic conception of the human mind based on new parapsychological evidence.
It was successfully marketed, appearing as a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection, and even given commercial radio attention by the Zenith Radio Corporation. For a whole year they broadcasted weekly ESP-“tests”, often featuring Rhine himself in the studio. Zener-cards were now commercially produced and sold – appearing with a J. B. Rhine copyright
Against the new geopolitical and ideological threats of the emerging Cold War, Rhine was opportunistic enough to brand parapsychology as a defence of voluntarism, and the “correct” political view of American liberalism.1
Parapsychology was now sold to laymen, government, and would-be private financiers as a cure for America’s “spiritual ailments” and as a battle station against the impending dangers of materialism and communism
Parapsychology was even conscripted for military purposes, with the Star Gate programme, begun in 1972, as the most significant example.103 This government-funded research programme into applications of parapsychology for military intelligence was only disbanded as late as 1995, after the CIA assumed control and judged the project to have been a complete waste of tax money
it was the mobilisation of anti-disenchantment discourses that in the end made it possible for parapsychology to emerge as a professional discipline. It was on the basis of this network of discourses that McDougall was headhunted by the president of Duke University. Furthermore, it was only after discovering Bergson’s vitalism that the Rhines discovered psychical research and followed McDougall’s pleas for a scientific and university-backed research programme. While it is often assumed that the modern academy has built its very identity on a “disenchanted” outlook, the professionalisation of parapsychology suggests that things may have been a little more complicated
Badash, popularity of science
Reasons for popular interest in science (example of radioactivity):
- useful applications
- glamour. ‘radium craze’. early 20th C, radium roulette became the rage in New York. Roulette wheel was washed with a radium solution, such that it glowed brightly in the darkness. “Amid ghastly silence” an unseen hand cast the ball on the turning wheel and sparks marked its course as it bounded from pocket to glimmering pocket
- real scientific significance
- scientists’ concern w impact radioactivity might have upon own specialties
Barton, professionalisation of science
categorization as professional/amateur was not particularly important to Victorian men of science
- the increasing number of jobs requiring scientific knowledge and skills
- the demands for greater recognition through more and better paid positions, more money for research, and more respect for expert knowledge
- the rise of specialized training and qualifications
- the decline of a leisured
class
‘man of science = most common label, followed by ‘cultivators of science’
Men of science were characterized by the quality of their reasoning, the reliability of their judgement, their patience, constant labour, and public-spiritedness
Men of science used the label ‘professional’ in two distinct ways in the mid-Victorian period: first, to refer to members of the traditional learned professions and, second, to refer to those who earned an income in a scientific occupation. In the latter sense ‘professionals’ were contrasted with ‘amateurs’ who pursued science as private persons in their ‘spare hours’, but both ‘professionals’ and ‘amateurs’ were part of the scientific community and there was no systematic association of amateurs with inferior work and lesser status.
I have found few clear references to science as a profession.
common perception, for professors, medical men, and government officials, of leisure time foregone in the pursuit of science needs
Thus, the mid-Victorian scientific community was much broader than the identifiable “professional Scientifics”. It included “mere amateurs” and “really scientific” amateurs, men of business and “professional men” who “devoted” their spare hours to botany or astronomy or, like Spottiswoode, to mathematics and physics
subtle but significant shift in the way achievements were evaluated. Under Rosse
and Wrottesley the medal citations emphasized the moral and intellectual character of the recipient.
When referring to the qualities of the person rather-than the work, the labels ‘cultivator’, ‘votary’, ‘scientific’ man, ‘worker’ and ‘philosopher’ were more evocative than ‘physicist’ or ‘palaeontologist’.
Twenty years later, when Hooker himself was President, the medal citations focused more often on the importance of the results achieved
attacks of Sedgwick on Chambers and Huxley on Lewes are, I now suggest, better interpreted as about hierarchy within the scientific community, rather than as about maintaining a boundary between professional experts and amateur dabblers
Science was a meritocracy, established not by examinations and degrees (‘Dr’ was more likely to mean a medical degree than a Ph.D.) but by the Fellowship and medals of the Royal Society and other, but lesser, metropolitan scientific societies
theoretical and institutional leaders were
concerned not with excluding the incompetent but with ensuring that everyone knew
their proper place in the enterprise.
even as specialist societies and journals burgeoned, men of science were presenting a unified front
My suggestions are, first, that science was becoming a profession in the occupational sense that more paid positions were becoming available, and that paid professionals were becoming an ever-more visible component of most of the disciplinary groups in the scientific community; secondly, that both amateurs and professionals were claiming greater recognition for science and men of science from government and the public suggests, not only the process of occupational aggrandisement emphasized by Morrell but, perhaps, a more meritocratic value system; thirdly, that in the sense that Victorian parents would have recognized it, neither science nor its specialist disciplines were yet professions, for there was no identifiable path of education and training that could be counted on to lead to an occupation
Braude, Spiritualism and women’s rights
Compatibility of women’s rights and Spiritualism. Not surprising that a reform movement aimed at altering roles and relations of men and women should find allies - sometimes unwelcome - within a religious movement committed to critiquing basic theological principles and religious structures
spirit mediums formed the first large group of American women to speak in public or exercise religious leadership. The book documents existence of 200 or so women whose careers as trance speakers during 1850s and 60s
All Spiritualists advocated woman’s rights. Women = equal to men w/in Spiritualist practice, polity and ideology
Antithetical to institutional religion because it asserted that truth came directly to the individual without mediation by minister. Spiritualists adopted much of their social program from individualistic rhetoric already articulated within the left wing of the movement for the abolition of slavery. Lifted women’s rights out of reform platform as preeminent.
Spiritualist network, including Progressive Friends, assembled large audiences for promoters of radical causes.
Allowed for dissemination of women’s rights ideas beyond the occasional convention devoted to them exclusively. Large convention in Providence, Rhode Island, found that all departments of human improvmeent and practical reform come legitimately within the scope of a broad Spiritualism
Woman’s rights agitators held own conventions during this period but women who led these meetings remained subgroup within abolition movement. Woman’s rights movement essentially ancillary to the abolition movement, so abolitionists set the agenda. During Civil War period, non-Spiritualist woman’s rights advocates abandoned agitation for women.
Spiritualists did not. Continued to pursue the broad woman’s rights agenda of the 1850s, pressing for dress reform, marriage reform, economic rights, all of which disappeared from the postwar suffrage movement.
Spiritualists believed oppression of African Americans and women stemmed from same cause - ownership of souls.
Spiritualism’s national speakers helped spread woman’s rights further than cld the few abolitionist agitators unaided. Illinois, suffrage movement’s official history reported but little agitation for woman’s rights before the Civil War. But an 1860 Spiritualist conference resolved that any abridgement of woman’s rights constituted an unwarrantable assumption of power unbecoming of an enlightened people. Illinois Spiritualist conventions were a hotbed of woman’s rights agitation throughout the early 1860s.
Neglect of Spiritualists in accounts of woman’s rights movement
Spiritualists applauded Mary Davis’s identification of marriage as the root of women’s oppression
Spiritualists asserted woman’s most sacred and important right = right to decide for herself how oft and under what circumstances she shall assume the responsibilities and be subjected to the cares… of maternity
While Spiritualists disagreed about whether marriage was morally salvageable, their agreement on the immortality of marriage as practiced in mid-century America led to the charge that they advocated free love
1850s, surprising array of Spiritualists accepted the label ‘free lover’ without rejecting marriage as an institution
Anne Cridge wanted self-sovereignty, but she also wanted a family and knew by experience that the latter goal might require some compromise of the first. Spiritualists who advocated free love in addition to marriage, rather than as alternative, recognised the potential victimisation of women in the context of sexual freedom
Term free love, no clear definition
Spiritualist free love proponents clearly did not intend to increase men’s sexual access to women or condone sex outside marriage
Spiritualists proposed to free women from cumbersome clothing that restrained limbs and organs, from med theories that encouraged them to view themselves as weak, and from barriers to their participation in the healing professions. Medical men insisting women’s organs made them more prone to disease
Women used skills obtained through Spiritualist movement. While Woodhull scandal rocked local Spiritualist organisations, Mary Davis and trance speaker Charlotte Wilbour were occupied by their roles as vice-president and president of the new organization of literary women, Sorosis. Woman suffrage benefitted more than any other movement from the self-confidence women gained in Spiritualism
Spiritualism fostered another group of female leaders who worked for women’s rights. Radical reformers who distanced themselves from the increasingly conservative suffrage movement
Braude, Spiritualism and gender
Importance of Amy and Isaac Post - Quaker abolitionists - in spreading the initial story of the Fox fam’s spirit rappings. Isaac introduced the technique of reciting the alphabet so the raps could spell words by sounding when the correct letter was reached
As in Rochester, Americans throughout the country found messages from spirits most plausible when delivered through the agency of adolescent girls. Mediums appeared most frequently among the younger female mems of families. Mediumship = closely identified with femininity. Spiritualists used the language of electricity, current in mesmerism and phrenology, to describe the relative positions of men and women in spirit communication. Women were ‘negative’ and men were ‘positive’. Circles should be composed of equal numbers of men and women
trend away from identification of women with the fallen Eve. New concept of ‘true womanhood’ conflicted at several points with orthodox theology. Contribd to the appearance of an image of God as loving parent, solicitous for the welfare of his children, which joined old Puritan image of God of wrath
Death occurred in woman’s sphere. Most ppl died at home in bed, attended by female relatives. Spiritualism provided a way to show love and interest in the dead without submitting to the restrictions on one’s activities that accompanied mourning
Spiritualists’ critique of marriage and Free Love itself were part of the 19th-C elevation of the roles of wife and mother and increased respect for the domestic sphere
Spiritualists and physicians both associated the physical characteristics leading to mediumship with the female body. Spiritualists, however, viewed these characteristics as fostering revelation, while doctors viewed them as pathology. Passivity, susceptibility, impressibleness (American Spiritualist).
Contradictions inherent within Victorian ideas about gender. 19th-C norms portrayed women as both paragons of virtue w moral power to and simultaneously as weak, will-less hysterics in need of protection both from the world and from the pathological tendencies of their own physiology. Spiritualists made virtues out of both stereotypes
Braude, Spiritualism and the home
Spiritualism also reflected Victorian view that the home was the true locus of religiosity. Introduction of the planchette facilitated the mediumship of untrained family mems within the home. Heart-shaped piece of wood mounted on three casters, the planchette was believed to respond to magnetic forces passing through the bodies of those who placed fingers on it, thus communicating messages from spirits. Cld be used either with copy of alphabet or with pencil inserted in hole on back. Not commercially Mass-produced in US until 1860s, but planchettes imported from France were avail in Spiritualist bookstores by late 1850s. Line between parlour game and religious inquiry blurred when fams who tried the spirits in fun discovered mediums in their midst. Professional mediums.
Braude, Spiritualism and organisation
Spiritualists staunchly opposed national organization
Mediums understood that formal association threatened their role because it recognized masculine leadership qualifications rather than the passive characteristics that linked mediumship and femininity - opponents included Lizzie Dolten. Trance speakers lost the debate and American Association of Spiritualists was voted into existence, 2864
Breakdown for and against organization divided normal speakers from trance speakers more fully than it divided men from women. Women who had the same leadership qualities as men joined men in advocating a system of organization that rwarded assertiveness over passivity
Female normal speakers included physicians Juliet Stillman, Alcinda Wilhelm.
Braude, Spiritualism and wider trends
Spiritualism represented an extreme position in the liberal trend of theology that swept the mainstream Protestant denominations in the United States far from their Calvinist or Reformed origins
Many Americans adopted Arminianism
As 19th C wore on, American culture increasingly viewed women as the moral guardians of their families
Similarities between Spiritualism and Transcendentalism
Sentimental values and an increasing emphasis on the nuclear family as the focus of emotional life encouraged a rebellion against death. Messages frequently focused on the spirit’s happiness after death and continued concern for surviving family mems
Spiritualists embraced the rural cemetery movement, in which the rejection of death was expressed in the transformation of the burial ground from a reminder of the inevitability of death and decay into a site designed for the contemplation of hapy memories and heavenly reunions
Braude, Spiritualism’s appeal to Protestant denominations
Universalists found in them confirmation for their rejection of eternal damnation
Quakers saw them as a concrete illustration of the doctrine of the inner light
Across Midwest and New York State, Quaker splinter groups investigated Spiritualism
Mediums emerged from the leading women in the Progressive Friends - e.g. Charlotte Beebe worked as medium in Massachusetts 1855
Quaker splinter groups used their new freedom to explore both radical religion and radical politics
Spiritualist network, including Progressive Friends, assembled large audiences for promoters of radical causes.
Braude, mediumship
Spiritualism’s greatest contribution to the crusade for woman’s rights probs lay in new role of spirit medium. Mediumship cast women in central public role
Mediumship did not model a simple abrogation of accepted feminine norms. Mediumship gave women a public leadership role that allowed them to remain compliant w the complex of values of the period that have come to be known as the cult of true womanhood - this asserted woman’s nature was characterizd by purity, piety, passivity and domesticity
Speakers observed a rigorous sexual division of labour, even though equal nums of men and women spoke from Spiritualist platform. Men called meetings to order, forcefully presiding. Women at the podium were unconscious. Trance mediums understood to be passive vehicles. New York City lecture by Emma Jay - ‘that a young lady not over 18 yrs of age shld speak for an hour and a quarter, in such an eloquent manner, w such logical and philosophical clearness’, proved to one observer the presence of a power not natural to the education or mentality of the speaker
Youth proved medium didn’t compose own speech
Also considered to reduce motivation for fraud
Unaccountability of mediums controlled by unseen intelligences
Trance mediums = import element in emergence of women and public speakers 1850s
Sight of a lone woman confidently expounding spiritual truths enchanted American listeners - New Yorkers enchanted by Cora Hatch
Flowing speech of trance mediums depended on a self-assurance unavailable to mid-century women who lacked spiritual inspiration
Braude, Spiritualists and health
Spiritualists insisted women naturally healthy. Asserted women better suited than men to act as healers. Medical mediums
Health reform. Proposed reformations of personal liefe that wld free the population from illness and suffering. Appealed to the Laws of Life as written in book of nature as guides to maintaining hlth and curing disease.
Spiritualists condemned the baleful influence of tobacco and alcohol
Braude, fading of Spiritualism’s reformist impulse
Paradoxes and tensions within Spiritualism began to undermine its significance for woman’s rights and reform during 1870s and 80s. As century advanced, distinctiveness of Spiritualism’s social program faded, owing in large part to its success, however limited, in several areas. Spread of liberal theology and loosening of some restrictions on appropriate activities for women reduced distance between Spiritualism and other visions of society. Increase in reform women speaking in public after the Civil War diminished the social significance of trance speaking. Woman’s appearance on the public platform no longer attracted interest in and of itself.
Within Spiritualism, variety of attacks on mediumship evinced a devaluing of the feminine qualities so prized in the movement’s early yrs. Sensational mediums replaced trance speakers as Spiritualism’s biggest attraction, and mediumship itself therefore ceased to challenge accepted gender roles. The new sensationalism attracted figures anxious to gain personal benefit from its newsworthiness - Victoria Woodhull, Helena Blavatsky.
Sensationalism and self-aggrandizement generated reaction against mediumship
Spirits no longer emboldened mediums to exceed the traditional female role. Mediums who emerged in the 1870s did not lecture, nor did they become active reformers. Typical of these new mediums = French-American Lucie Marie Curtis Blair, whose career began mid-1870s
Spiritualists spent the decade preoccupied with accusations of fraud and attempts to vindicate specific mediums . Almost every issue of Banner discussed these.
Mediums attacked each other. Mrs Carpenter exposed Annie Fay by demonstrating Fay’s feats without the assistance of spirits. Andrew Jackson Davis attacked the new manifestations.
Bundy, editor of Religio-Philosophical Journal, joined Davis’s attempt to return Spiritualism to its basic philosophy but refused to go along in condemning séances altogether
y and Woodhull undermined Spiritualism’s claim that woman’s nature suited her to be a teacher of religion. Although Woodhull achieved widespread fame and Blavatsky became founder of a religious movement that still exists today, both figures, as did Mary Eddy, emphd their own leadership rather than the empowerment of women in general. Under these conditions, Spiritualism ceased to be a locus of either spiritual or political power for women.
Braude, materializations
Culmination of the sensational trend in spirit manifestations came with the popularity of ‘materialisations’
When materialisation replaced trance speaking as the most noteworthy public manifestation of Spirtiualism, the meaning of mediumship changed. Emphd medium’s passivity in new and humiliating ways and downplayed her employment. Test conditions humiliating. While trance speakers oft travelled independently, most of the new mediums required male confederates/ managers In most cases, manifestations appeared only after the medium was securely bound and hidden in a cabinet, her effectiveness depending on invisibility and powerlessness.
Mediums for materialisation cld not hope to inspire same admiration trance speakers elicited from their audiences.
While materialization diluted the meaning of mediumship, it also opened Spiritualism to new and more spectacular forms of fraud and self-aggrandisement
The new manifestations lacked the potential to be vehicles for the social criticism delivered by trance speakers.
Spiritualism and public opinion, Braude
Spiritualist doctrines remained permanently outside the pale of acceptable public opinion. America’s identity as Christian nation became more firmly entrenched than ever as the 20th C opened
Spiritualism’s critique of Christianity as inherently oppressive was as controversial in 1900 as had been in 1848
Ann Douglas, feminization
the feminization of American culture reflected in Spiritualism perpetuated women’s restricted role and produced a morally impotent sentimental culture.
Braude’s response to Douglas
History of Spiritualism suggests that the identification of piety with femininity cld aid in the expansion of women’s options and contribute to the potency of a comprehensive moral idealism. More women stepped beyond conventional female roles because of Spiritualism than they would have without it
Brower, Spiritism as democratic
Communication with the spirit world was not an occult practice limited to those with access to secret knowledge. Spirit phenomena could be produced and observed by anyone willing to follow a few simple procedures.
Ellenberger, Discovery of the Unconscious
psychical research would play an important role in psychology’s theories of a decentered and fragmented subject
Brower, contribution of psychical research to science
Psychology would draw abundant evidence for subconscious activity, the subliminal self, and unconscious mental processes from the often staggering feats of mediums.
Brower, cooperation in psychical research
International cooperation reached its apogee in the decades following the First World War with a series of international congresses involving participants from dozens of European, Asian, and American countries
Brower, motivations for psychical research
Resented the silences institutionalized science seemed to impose on those anomalies that refused to fit its established paradigms
Wished to sustain heroic age of discovery in era increasingly characterized by the regimentation and specialisation of scientific work
Confronted by prospect of closing scientific frontier and corresponding loss of creative agency, psychical researchers highlighted indeterminacies revealed by mediumism and somnambulism
As a young science, the scientific psychology of Ribot and Pierre janet turned, sometimes boldly, sometimes more cautiously, to the facts of somnambulism and mediumism in its effort to substantiate the claim that the mind could be studied through objective means.
In contrast to prevailing discourse of ‘degeneration’, the revalidation of the spirit suggested by the facts of mediumism held great appeal both to those tied to the older spiritualist philosophy of the self and to many eager to find firm scientific footing for what had previously passed as religious beliefs
Great deal of interest shown. More than psychoanalysis, bc psychical research had advantage that it professed principle of determinacy by eschewing subjective phenomena
Brower, democracy in psychical research?
Psychical researchers sometimes found it rhetorically useful to draw upon legitimizing principles of democracy by making ref to fact the phenomena they studied had been witnessed by tens of thousands of amateur observers
Brower, Science in France
Late 19th-C Fr, expansion of sci knowl promoted as central component of ideology of Third Republic.
Scientific spirit of education in Fr primary and 2ndry schools = essential part of the republic’s efforts to combat traditional claims to authority that undermined secular ideals of republicanism
Brower, problems in psychical research
inability to untangle objective causes from subjective motivations
Psychoanalysis became about analysing doubt, why/ how came about.
No such sophisticated analysis of doubt in psychical research
Brower Spiritualism and science
While in its empiricism the practice explicitly mimicked scientific forms of knowledge, in its populism it questioned an older form of scientific authority rooted in elite ideals of social respectability. It also countered a newly emerging ideal of science based on the insulated and exclusive space of the experimental laboratory.
Brower, French authorities and Spiritism
Second Emp left spiritists to it, as they were apolitical (some cynics thought spiritism encouraged bc distraction from atrocities)
Brower, support for Spiritism
In industrial cities like Lyon, spiritist organizations tended to manifest themselves as workers’ mutual aid societies
Brower, significance of SPR
Set standard for all psychical research in 19th C
List of mems/ corresponding mems across Europe e.g. Hippolyte Taine, Bernheim, Richet, Janet, Flournoy, Lombroso, William James (served as one of the soc’s 1st vice presidents). Freud, Carl Jung, Flournoy, eventually contribd to soc’s Proceedings
Richet and Bergson each served term as president
Brower, impact of FWW on Spiritualism
Spiritism, which in the 19th C had focused on personal losses assoc w the intimacies of the bourgeois fam, now took on collective meanings in proportions unknown to other periods
Spiritism = perfectly suited to the effort to transform great suffering and loss into an occasion for national redemption by permitting the souls of the dead to remain in communion with the soul of the living France
Fr President, Paul Deschanel - framed procession down Champs-Élysées as moment of national communion between living and deadTheme of immortal dead and their communication w living
Invoking Deschanel’s speech, La Revue Spirite asserted priority of the spiritist movement in work of restoring unity to the nation
Brower, decline of psychical research in France
Mediums capable of producing phenomena were so rare that the experiments were not widely reproducible.
Phenomena became increasingly tangible and increasingly visible at the same time that they became less accessible to the general public.
Mediumism in this form no longer open to the widespread public scrutiny it had enjoyed in the past.
Public knowledge was increasingly reliant on the accounts of elite researchers.
Question of good faith that psychical researchers had so oft raised about their mediums now became afeature of the relationship between the elite practice of science and the general public
Dependent on press accounts that shaped their understanding of mediumism, general public also inclined to apply standards of truth completely alien to the methods of experimental science
Was in the gaps produced by the opposition of journalistic, historical and juridical methods of investigation, on the one hand, and experimental methods on the other, that the traditional doubts surrounding mediumistic phenomena intensified
Ectoplasm came to play increasingly important role in experiments of psychical research.
Interwar period, difficulties plaguing efforts of psychical researchers to contrib to sci knowl were compounded by unprecedented popular interest in the field.
Increased scrutiny from skeptical public that was, from perspective of committed psychical researcher, inexpert and ill informed.
Intuitive arguments made regarding similarities between Eva’s ideoplastic faces and portraits form Le Miroir indicated the errors inherent in the ppular conception that the reality of mediumistic phenomena cld be tested by commonplace methods of observation
In contrast to table rapping, mediums w ability to produce materializations were extremely rare, and technical expertise claimed by those who studied them well beyond reach of the merely curious.
Drawing widely from the methodologies of natural history, clinical psychology and physiology the field of psychical research had develd in the last decades of the 19th C in a methodological no-man’s-land
Richet, Schernck-Notzing - claimed solidarity w such scientists by arguing their science was closer to that of the naturalist who observes phenomena that the observer has no power to bring about or influence.
Nordmann agreed that psychical research presented methodology typical of many accepted sciences.
While claiming methodological similarity to field sciences, psychical researchers continued efforts to emulate the experimental sciences.
This aspiration continually thwarted by field’s reliance on human subjects and poss the phenomena were produced in interests of deception - central preocc of the field
Researchers agreed an overly severe set of controls was just as likely to disrupt a genuine phenomenon as expose a false one
Experimenters were apt to rely on criterion difficult to translate into terms acceptable to science. ‘Good faith’
Nordmann - this = Achilles heel of whole enterprise. Problem was that faith had a role to play at all.
For a public unlikely ever to witness materialization, knowledge came exclusively from written accounts. Invoked set of methodologies diff from those psychical researchers employed in their labs.
Heuzé crit lack of detail (e.g. dates) in Flammarion’s Autour de la mort
Heuzé called his method ‘historical’. Pointed out inconsistencies. Comparing/ corroborating
H challenged ability of researchers to make phenomena of mediumism transparent
Difficulty of recording all details, especially when conditions were frequently changed
Brower, shifts in psychological study of mediums
By turn of century, psychological study of mediums had given way to program that aimed to estab the objective reality of mediumistic phenomenon. This focus corresponded to a shift in attitudes about hysteria, hypnosis and automatism, which came to be seen not as authentic representations of mental processes but as effects of suggestion and stimulation.
This shift began around 1901 w Babinski’s challenge to Charcot’s theories and was formalized in 1909 w his article, Démembrement de l’hystérie traditionnelle.
Psychical research responded to diminished faith in hysteria and hypnosis by seeking to substantiate its claims in the objective phenomena of materialization.
Study of mediumism proceeded w little serious consideration of the subjective phenomena - automatic writing, disaggregation of the personality - that had initially drawn psychologists to the study of mediums in earlier decades.
Emph on objectivity had widespread appeal for proponents and critics alike
For Dupré, hysteria and mediumism constituted a contradiction to reality; they were not, as Freud wld argue, the means of negotiating a reality in which contradiction was inherent
Brower, psychical research and science
Psychical research emerged as relevant to French thought just as older, socially limited forms of subjective knowledge were giving way to a new, democratic enthusiasm for the objective methods of experimental science
Psychical research would embody many of the antagonisms lingering from this transition from a philosophy of the mind to a science of the mind, seeking, for example, to objectify the mind in an examination of physical and physiological phenomena while insisting on the essential qualities of will, intention and good faith.
By acting as the representative of these displaced antagonisms within the field of psychology, psychical research wld help to safeguard, through its contradictory methods and assumptions, indeterminacy even as the field of scientific psychology achieved an institutional base and a corresponding social utility.
As sci psychology gave rise to methods of rendering the mind knowable and making this knowl publicly accessible and useful, psychical research wld continue to mark a point of resistance w/in the sciences to the v universality claimed on its behalf. Psychical research in this role wld fade from this position only as the indeterminacy it represented came to be refigured in other terms. In the movement of French thought that wld culminate in the Lacanian ‘return to Freud’, indeterminacy was no longer to be seen as anathema to universal knowledge but as a necessary feature of the knowing and desiring subject.
Cadwallader, shift in Victorian mourning practices
streets filled with 1.5 mil spectators 1852 for funeral procession of Duke of Wellington
Materialism and a desire for spectacle centered on technology within the context of religious ceremony: these two conspicu- ous features of Wellington’s funeral mark a shift in cultural attitudes toward mourning in the Victorian period
the popularity of the spirit photograph in the second half of the nineteenth century points to a culture which saw its materialism spilling over into reli- gious doctrine, and whose interest in technology was transforming into a type of religious faith
Cadwallader, power of the spirit photograph
In a soci- ety where mourning was highly visible in dress, but where grief was all but taboo, the spirit photograph provided a space to gain conceptual control over one’s feelings
directly refuted the collec- tive soul doctrine. As the spirit photograph clearly shows, spirits have discrete bodies after death, and furthermore, they retain (at least to the eyes of eager-to-believe relatives) the same physical appearance. This seems to suggest that the self is retained in the afterlife, and that the dissolution into the collective soul that so many feared does not occur
material heaven” was one endorsed and promoted by Spiritualists par- ticularly
In England, the fervor for the version of heaven portrayed in spirit photography isattributa-ble to an equal fervor for - and oftentimes frustration with the failures of - social reform. Class inequality, workhouse and fac- tory conditions, overcrowding in the cities, all of Dickens’s poor starving orphans - everything that made Victorians lament the “condition of England” would find redress in a material heaven.
Cadwallader, Civil War
In the United States, part of the popularity of Spiritualism and spirit photography was due to the impact of the Civil War. So many loved ones met early and tragic deaths that it was a comfort to think of them getting a second chance to live out the lives they were meant to have.
Cadwallader, Doyle, Holmes, appeal of Spiritualism
I would argue that Doyle’s spiritu- alistic beliefs and the Sherlock Holmes sto- ries use the same ideological framework: one that sees all knowledge as obtainable through observation, and believes that all things are reducible to physical signs
What makes Sherlock Holmes so appealing is precisely the appeal of the Spiritu- alist Movement.
Spiritualism is premised on the notion that the divine and the afterlife can be broken down and systematically understood through physical signs
Cadwallader, faith in tech
Buguet’s clients illustrate how strong the faith in technology was at the time.
They believed that the camera, like a logical, dispassionate Sherlock Holmes, was not susceptible to corruption
The popularity of spirit photography is thus a mark of a shift toward faith in science and technology and away from faith in tradi- tional Christian doctrine.
in the spirit photograph, the interest in technological marvel that Vic- torians evinced at the Duke’s funeral was transformed into the equivalent of religious faith.
spirit photograph is a marker of a shift in faith, of a belief in man’s ability to reveal the nature and workings of the Divine, and in technology’s ability to enhance man’s powers of perception
Hacking, telepathy and SPR
The word telepathy is coeval with the society, having been coined by one of its founding members, F. W. H. Myers, in 1882.
For the first several years the SPR was preoccupied with telepathy. It remained a prime concern for decades.
Richet did something that, though obvious, no one had quite thought of doing before.
proposed a long sequence of trials in which an “agent” drew a playing card at random and concentrated upon it for a short time, after which a “reagent” guessed the suit of the card. Some 2,927 guesses were made by various reagents in sequences of various length. In each sequence the expected number of successes was compared with the actual number, and a rather primitive statistical inference was drawn. In the total se- quence of guesses there were 789 successes, whereas 732 is the expected number
there is some probability for the hypothesis of mental suggestion-low, but not negligible. The result was not very thrilling for the SPR, but the method was
Hacking, psychical research and randomised experimental design
Fisher, the acknowledged founder of randomized experimental design , Fisher was well aware of psychical research, even if, on the testimony of the daughter who is his biographer, he thought it baloney
Fisher was intimately aware of the practices and the past of psy- chical research.
Porter, Enlightenment
Enlightenment crusade - to banish reports of supernatural phenomena from intellectual discourse
Hamilton, Spiritualists and the SPR
Spiritualists, in terms of numbers, were in the majority on the original SPR council
3 areas of conflict:
- Proper investigation and interp of physical phenomena
- Source of automatic wriitng, speaking and drawing
- Timing, focusing and ordering of the Society’s investigations
Cambridge group felt Spiritualists jumped to quickly to assumption of spirit action
Spiritualists saw the key condition for a successful séance as one of sympathetic respect; for Myers and his colleagues, it was control and unimpeded, sustained observation
Spiritualists frustrated w focus on telepathy. Cambridge group argued this = prior stage to investigation of life after death.
Many Spiritualists believed SPR leaders not unbiased, but dismissed evd that did not fit w their social and academic preconceptions
Stainton Moses resigned from SPR in 1886 but other influential Spiritualists e.g. Massey and Wallace remained.
No mass exodus.
A number welcomed the SPR exposure of fraud, and the greater status the involvement of more academic and socially established leadership had given to this whole area of investigation
Roger, Conan Doyle
Crusade probably attracted more worldwide attention and controversy than any other development in the history of Spiritualism.
Crockford, origins of Spiritualism, France
Spiritualist magnetism emerged before 1848
New way of looking at the emergence of Spiritualism from mesmerism in France, which led to Kardec’s Spiritism
By 1840s, medical magnetizers w somnambulistic patients were claiming to contact spirits.
Spiritualist magnetizers - included Garnay, Delaage
Published articles devoted to Spiritualist magnetism in Journal du magnétisme (1st published 1845
editor of Journal du Magnétisme = Baron Dupotet
Frequent reprints of articles concerning American Spiritualism and discussion of them.
Dupotet in one editorial claimed evd from US was further proof of what he already believed
By 1860s, Kardec’s Spiritism had absorbed the interest of those concerned w spirit communication
Spiritualist magnetizers’ popularity declined as Kardec’s grew
Change in role of medium. Medium not directed by magnetizer - mediums put themselves into trance
Kardec’s requirement to have th spirit via medium impartially but vigorously questioned meant that the questioner occupied same social role and dominant position as magnetiser
Spiritualist magnetism = plural and diverse discourse w many competing views. Spiritism had unity of doctrine and structural organization that Spiritualist magnetism lacked
Spiritualist magnetism = as import as American Spiritualism in devel of Kardec’s Spiritism, yet had received comparatively little acadmic attention
Spiritism survived bc Kardec produced a codified and coherent religious system
Williams-Hogan, origins of Spiritualism
Grew from fascination w magnetism, knowledge of Swedenborg and his religious writings, and sense of disease brought on by tumultous changes accompanying a rapidly expanding and devleoping new nation
peak 1857. Estimates for num of adherents as high as 11 mil.
Church of the New Jerusalem (Swedenborgian) well established by time Spiritualism took hold in US.
Spiritualism had already been divisive force w/in the Church.
1844, the New Era movement was started among mems of the New Church’s New York Society by Silas Jones
Jones held private gatherings where communicated w spirits
Williams-Hogan, Spiritualism as democratic?
Spiritualists believe in long run process wld be democratized and all Spiritualists wld devel the gift of mediumship.
Could be said that Spiritualists were democrats in theory but specialists in practice
To extent, medium’s circle ran against anti-clerical thrust of movment. Acceptable to them bc seemed they were naturally selected, by spirits, not selected by human-made institutions
Butler, damage to Spiritualism
Public condemnation from scientists, med journals, psychical socs
Tarnished Spiritualism’s reputation
Results of SPR’s investigations damaged Spiritualism
Winter, cultural aftermath of WW1 and Spiritualism
overwhelmingly conservative. Finds Spiritualism to be a ‘salient example’ of a postwar ‘avalanche of the unmodern’
the enduring appeal of Spiritualism was related directly to the universality of bereavement
Cannadine, Spiritualism
Spiritualist movement = private denial of death
French, Spiritualism and mourning
Spiritualism not jst conservative. Also ran counter to traditiona nd was deeply affected by experience of war
Lodge 1916 - death but no extinction
1919, Conan Doyle - we miss their physical presence
Lodges also pursued other means of consolation - Mary kept Raymond’s letters with intention of making them into a book
Spiritualism complemented rather than supplanted other ways of mourning the war dead
Spiritualism borrowed from secular ways of memorialization e.g. photography
Deane’s photographs taken during armistice day.
Deane’s photographs suggest Spiritualism and Armistice Day wer enot opposing responses to war bereavement.
From 1919 onward, Spiritualists held their own Armistice Day ceremonies, organized by the Spiritualists’ National Union
1926 moved from Queen’s Hall to Albert Hall - 8000 ppl attended
Klass, Silverman, Nickman - Continuing bonds
Mourning as negotiating a meaningful relationship with the deceased. In this continuing bonds framework, Spiritualism can be readily understood as an aspect rathe rthan avoidance of mourning and memorialization
Universality of bereavement also worked against Spiritualism
French, Decline of Spiritualism in Britain post-WW2
Spirits brought many assurances that the Great War wld never be repeated.
Utopian progressivism and metaphysical apologetics leashed Spiritualists to a new and immutable principle: the horror and chaos of the Great War was tolerable bc it was the birth-agony of an enlightened age. Great war = unique.
This was dangerously falsifiable principle
Natale, Spiritualism and entertainment
Attending a Spiritualist séance cld be considered an activity as entertaining as a magic show
‘star’ (film studies)
Stardom theory
Spiritualism not immune to the dynamics of precinematic stardom. Most popular mediums were true celebrities, capable of arousing curiosity of Spiritualists and non-Spiritualists alike
Celebrity mediums contribd to cohesion of Spiritualist communities by spreading the fame of the movement and furnishing a common ground of recognized personalities
Frequently was the appeal exercised on the pop press by famous mediums e.g. Palladino that allowed Spiritualism to ‘break the news’, acquiring public attention beyond boundaries of believers
Palladino famous for humble origins and simple manners
Poverty making mediumship story of social and economic redemption
Downfalls attracting attention - falling stars
Through repeated admissions of trickery, troubled sentimental lives and pathological addiction to alcohol, Fox sisters recurrently attracted attent of the Spiritualist press
Exceptionality as key element of stardom. Mediums described thus
Home performed so many extraordinary features.. He became one of the most famous men of his time
Home started using levitation 1851
Natale, Mediumship as profession
Mediumship = considered a profession. Economical activity for own sake
Fox sisters publicly demonstrated their mediumship in Rochester’s Corinthian Hall Nov 14, 1949, charging 75 cents for admission
Mediumship = a skill that cld be improved by regular training
Monroe, wave of religious innovation
first emerged with Mesmerism in the late eighteenth century and developed into a widespread cultural phenomenon after 1850
sought to resolve crisis of factuality in religious life
For an explanatory system of this kind to function properly, it needs to have an “aura of factuality,” to strike believers as “uniquely realistic.”
In addition to articulating a particular vision of symbolic order, a given religious system must make that order seem authoritative.
adhered in many crucial ways to the grammar of the Catholicism with which the vast majority of them had grown up. Ideas of Christian morality, the importance of charity and the soteriological value of repentance, the necessity of doctrinal uniformity, and the fundamental role of centralized authority in the legitimation of religious teachings all remained crucial, in varying degrees, to their spiritual projects.
distinctively French brand of nineteenth-century religious innovation
Monroe, modernity
During the period from 1848 to 1914, journalists and other commentators tirelessly proclaimed the radical difference and novelty of the era they inhabited
The modern age, according to late-nineteenth-century conventional wisdom, was characterized above all by an ever-growing knowledge and mastery of the forces of nature.
Like Weber, many others assumed that this new reality entailed a particular way of seeing the world, one based on “scientific” objectivity and empirical rigor
clear moral overtones: not only was it the path to truth, it was also the path to virtue
In the French context, this critique of subjectivity—and by extension of religion—also assumed a political dimension, which stemmed from the Catholic Church’s support of antidemocratic conservatism. Beginning in the 1850s, and increasingly after the 1870s, French advocates of democracy and reform used Comte’s vision of history to affirm their own sense of political destiny.
Stephen Prothero, innovation
Likened religious innovation to the “creolization” of a language.20 In creole languages, the grammatical structure remains relatively stable, while the vocabulary, imported from a wide array of other languages, changes dramatically. Similarly, in religious systems, a “grammar” of deep structures can be separated from a “vocabulary” of specific practices, doctrines, and institutional arrangements.
Monroe, opposition to the tables tournantes
Catholic priests and writers simultaneously justified and assuaged post-1848 conservative anxieties by presenting the Devil as a frighteningly tangible presence in the séance room.
Académie des sciences - explaining the tables tournantes became a way of linking science with the authoritarian, technocratic ethos of the Second Empire. Debunking the new phenomena allowed members of the Academy (académiciens) to elaborate an image of the scientist as objective guardian of rationality and, by extension, as protector of the social stability that 1848 had threatened.
spring of 1853, the Académie des sciences quickly agreed on a hypothesis to account for the tables tournantes—that their rotation was the product of imperceptibly tiny muscular tremors produced by séance participants
By adding a psychological dimension to their analysis, the second wave of académiciens and their allies transformed the terms of the debate about the tables tournantes. The conflict was no longer one between intolerance and openness to innovation; instead, it became a struggle between virtuous objectivity and destructive subjectivity, in the form of an all-too-human amour du merveilleux (love of the marvelous).
Monroe, support for the tables tournantes
for socialists and republicans demoralized by the collapse of the Second Republic, these new phenomena were a source of hope and metaphysical consolation. In their séances, the entities that spoke through the tables explained the left’s political failures while reaffirming its transcendent aspirations.
Monroe, differing views of objectivity
One group asserted that a truly objective attitude entailed absolute open-mindedness. To deem even the most implausible-seeming phenomenon impossible without first subjecting it to thorough experimental study, in this view, was a violation of proper experimental method.
The other group, which followed Arago’s lead, held that current scientific knowledge was sound enough to furnish certain irrefutable principles. These accepted principles, in turn, could be used to make an objective distinction between the possible and the impossible in evaluations of particular phenomena
By advancing this view of the scientist as prophylactic explainer, Littré linked his argument to those of Chevreul and Babinet. For these writers, the proponents of scientific open-mindedness were fundamentally misguided. When confronted with such a large number of dramatically implausible accounts, a truly rational analyst turned first to the study of those who claimed to have observed the phenomena, not to the phenomena themselves
The image of the scientist presented by Babinet, Chevreul, and Littré embodied a new moral vision, rooted not in faith but in an ascetic commitment to objectivity. The role of the trained scientist, these writers argued, was to act as a bulwark against sentiment
Monroe, French crisis of faith
Many of those who regarded the tables as a source of revelation came from the political left. For many advocates of democracy and social reform, the rapid, violent collapse of the Second Republic provoked a crisis of faith.
This was especially true among exponents of the theories of Romantic Socialists such as Henri de Saint-Simon, Etienne Cabet, and Charles Fourier
At the same time, however, their arguments tended to make visionary leftism seem increasingly marginal. Political theories developed by human beings had a long and august history; political theories tapped out by animated tables, on the other hand, struck many observers as being of dubious provenance.
Monroe, Spiritualism and mesmerism
séance held in the summer of 1859, a distinguished committee of French Mesmerists attempted to reach a definitive conclusion about the reality of spirit phenomena.
At home of Honorine Huet
spiritualist manifestations seemed to corroborate theories about the mind’s power to act outside the body
On the other hand, the spiritualist tendency to ascribe these phenomena to the intervention of otherworldly beings exacerbated a fundamental difference of opinion that had become increasingly pronounced in Mesmerist circles during the 1840s.
Spiritualist Mesmerists embraced these astonishing manifestations as signs of a new era in human history—one in which mankind would finally resolve the crisis of factuality that scientific progress had created in religious life. Therapeutic Mesmerists, for their part, argued that their discipline would never be accepted by the scientific community if its practitioners surrendered so readily to metaphysical aspirations that, in their view, were nothing but superstitious fanaticism
Therapeutic Mesmerism lapsed into obscurity after 1859
Spiritualist Mesmerism, on the other hand, served as the foundation for Spiritism
Two leading exponents of Spiritualism Mesmerism = Delaage, man of letters (Catholic), and Cahagnet (free thinker, inspired by Swedenborg)
In the end, however, the addition of mysterious raps or spontaneously rotating tables did little to address the fundamental epistemological conundrum that spiritualist Mesmerists had always faced: the lack of a reliable means of proving that the spirits encountered in a séance were autonomous beings and not simply products of the imagination
1858, the rift between spiritualist and therapeutic Mesmerists finally grew too deep for the existing institutional structures to contain. In January, Piérart left the Journal du magnétisme and started a periodical of his own, the Revue spiritualiste, exclusively devoted to the study of the new phenomena.
séances with Huet provide a revealing example of how much the American spiritualist example had changed the practice of Mesmerism in the years since the séance vogue of 1853. While the most obvious change was the introduction of new phenomena such as table-moving and spirit raps, spiritualism also introduced an even more pervasive shift in social dynamics. Home’s tour revealed this transformation clearly: The old relationship between magnétiseur and somnambule had given way to a new arrangement, which allowed the entranced subject a considerably greater degree of independence.
Monroe, mesmerist-somnambule relationship in Spiritualist Mesmerism
elationship between magnétiseur and somnambule was still founded on inequality: The somnambule Delaage described at greatest length, Alexis Didier, was the shy product of a humble family of artisans; Cahagnet’s most remarkable subject, Adèle Maginot, was a woman of undetermined occupation from what one commentator called “the illiterate class.”
The transcendence these somnambulists achieved in their states of lucidity, however, far outstripped anything Puységur would have imagined.
Didier, sitting in Paris, could describe the furnishings in London apartments he had never visited
Monroe, Daniel Dunglas Home in France
1856-7 French tour seemed to mark the first step in the spread of this second, metaphysical American Revolution
A torrent of publicity in the press
journalists who discussed Home’s séances overwhelmingly cast them in a positive light: rather than mocking these events, they burnished their mystique, transforming the American medium into a Romantic hero and saying little that might call the authenticity of his gifts into question
While in Paris, he frequented numerous aristocratic salons and held several séances for the Emperor and Empress at the Tuileries Palace.
As press accounts of the marvels Home produced became increasingly common, journalists grew far more willing to take their aristocratic sources at their word
journalists proclaimed the reality of his gifts
remarkably widespread journalistic credulity—not an altogether unexpected development given the enthusiasm many writers had shown in the initial stages of the tables tournantes vogue—was probably a response to social and literary imperatives, not metaphysical ones. Young, dark, and slim, Home cut a picturesque and mysterious figure. The séances in which he produced his uncanny phenomena were always exclusive, private gatherings. By telling stories intended to make these events seem as remarkable as possible, aristocrats, femmes du monde, and men about town augmented their social cachet
