Diving In: First Article Synopsis

           From the title of this post I can only assume that my readers will have some idea of the overreaching arguments of the first article that I chose to read for my research. In Enchanted Spaces: The Seance, Affect and Geographies of Religion Holloway opens up stating that the article calls for "geographies of religion and belief to attend to the sensuous, vitalistic, and effectual forces through which spaces of the religious, spiritual, and the sacred are performed." (pg. 182). This article searches to fit seances and spiritualism in general into the commonly accepted religious beliefs.

            The article starts out with a background of the spiritualist movement and the effects of seances. I found out that spiritualism was popular between 1848-1855 but had its true golden age in the 1870s. Spiritualism was an interest of all the classes of society for citizens common bond that spiritualism would allow them an avenue to communicate with the spirit of loves ones.

            Spiritualism transformed cultural norms in three ways, according to the article.  Firstly, spiritualism and the church formed a some what ambivalent relationship. In some ways people believed that spiritualists helped to confirm the word of the Bible. Spiritualism was a half way point between the separate God of "hellfire" doctrine and the bare materialism of secularism/atheism.

             Secondly, The space of seances interacted with discourses and practices of science. According to Holloway spiritualism could be verified by scientific experimentation and controls. This process was conducted through test seances and controlled investigations of mediums by the Society for Psychical Research.

           Thirdly, the seance paradoxically put women in their "place" as docile passive creatures while simultaneously allowing them to speak out and have a say that they wouldn't have otherwise. Seances helped to add to the separate gender spheres of thinking. Holloway makes note that some believed that women made such good mediums because their passive nature allowed them to be possessed by spirits, sometimes even willingly. Men were not good candidates to be mediums because of their strong, impassive nature.

         The dark, dim lit seance room allowed people to break with acceptable cultural relations between men and women. Seances were performed in close quarters. This close proximity allowed a deferral of polite society's codification of respectable bodily practices. From reading this article I was struck with the idea that perhaps those ghostly hands gripping mediums were just attendees getting a little handsy?

        A second large part of Enchanted Spaces: The Seance, Affect and Geographies of Religion talks about the performance and affect of the seance. Holloway tells readers how seances started with a prayer or singing of a hymn, a perfect connection to the previously made statement that spiritualism was a half way point between strict religion and secularism. Central elements to seances were the linking of hands and stillness of participants. This inter-connectivity allowed the participants to feel, witness and recoil at the levitation of the seance table or other events. It was also customary for the medium to be tied to a chair in the rooms so as to help prevent fraudulence. The seance room created a space " of corporeal interaction between living bodies and the spirit bodies of the dead." (pg. 184). Through automatic writing mediums represented a form of possessed and passive embodiment.

      All in all I found that this article provided some information to my research question:  "What role did seances and mediums play in early American Spiritualism? This article helped me to see the societal implications of spiritualsim, the role women played in the movement and how the atmosphere of the seance helped to create an environment that could have been caused by actual communication with the dead or simply could have been caused by the physical characteristics of the setting. 

I have attached a link to this article if anyone would like to give it a read:

 http://www.jstor.org/stable/3694153