Everyone's A Critic

As promised here is my second blog post of the week...


                               Spiritualism and Science: Reflections on the First Decade of Spirit Rappings 

                                                                 By: R. Laurence Moore

William Lloyd Garrison

I thought that this article would be more help with my research than it actually was. It seemed to be more ethereal and philosophical. Commenting on the relationship between science and spiritualism and spiritualism and religion. That being said some aspects of the article are worth mentioning and I will do so below.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

The article mentioned several abolitionist leaders that believed in spirit voices as strongly as they did the wickedness of slave holding. These leaders included William Lloyd Garrison, Joshua R. Giddings, Benjamin Wade, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Parker Pillsbury, even Harriet Beecher Stowe!

 Even though spiritualism had its supporters the critics had a lot to say as well.

George Templeton Strong, a prominent NYC lawyer was disturbed by the popularity of the movement. He found "the acceptance of spiritualist explanation by many educated and otherwise levelheaded people inexplicable." (pg. 475).

Historians at large, according to the article have "reduced spiritualism to a symptom of a restless, trouble society and has placed it in the same category as Mormonism, Shakerism, Millerism, and Grahansim." (pg. 476).

Unsettling social conditions such as a high degree of social mobility, a sudden influx of immigrants with different cultural experiences, and an accelerating rate of industrialization. The spiritualist movement allotted people a form of comfort in a time of mass change.  The Industrial Revolution can be credited with creating the public medium.

 "Spiritualism satisfied man's craving for mystification and grew as a reaction to the encroachements of scientific naturalism." (pg. 477).

Emanuel Swedenborg

                                                               Mesmerism

The article also speaks at length about Mesmerism and its life before the growth of spiritualism and even the Fox Sisters. With many variations mesmerism became for the first fifty years of the 19th Century a widely demonstrated procedure in Europe and America. Some mesmerized persons attributed their powers to the inspiration of guardian spirits.

In the United States in the 1840s the main man for mesmerism was Emanuel Swedenborg and his Church of New Jerusalem, which exposed Swedenborg as a prophet and accepted his detailed revelation of Heaven and Hell. 

Students of the Church of New Jerusalem also had significant impacts in the Mesmerism movement. Most promising would be Andrew Jackson Davis who as a man exhibited characteristics of a "good " medium being sickly and nervous during his younger years. It is said that Davis "when mesmerized, he could visualize the interior organs of ailing persons and diagnose their illness." (pg. 479).

Davis also spoke in Hebrew, Arabic and Sanskrit while under mesmerism, languages he did not know.




                                                                    Evolving into the 1850's

The Fox sisters did bear responsibility for the new directions of the spiritualist impulse in the decade of the 1950's. " The impressive rappings produced in their presence suggested that spirit messages could be subjected to an objective test verifiable by a group of impartial witnesses." (pg. 482). One did not have to trust the word of previous mesmerist, such as Davis, that spirits inspired their utterances. "Spirits now stood available to answer test questions put to them by an investigating audience." (pg. 482).

Who wouldn't want to see this!!!

In the 1850's mediumship became more democratic as it became a source of profit. Spirits in the 1850's discovered that they had to tailor their manifestations to the demand of public demonstrations. Rambunctious spirits has an advantage over gentle saints in that their tricks were more easily seen and heard.

The article also cites four principles that mediums of the 1850's used to make spirit communication credible 1) a rejection of supernaturalism 2) a firm belief in the inviolability of natural law 3) a reliance on external facts rather than on an inward state of mind and 4) a faith in the progressive development of knowledge (pg. 485).

A typical diagnosis for conversion is also given on page 485 of the article as an individual experiences a death of a loved one attends on seance. The visitor has questions that need to be answered so they keep going back, taking extensive notes and after analysis of these notes can not argue with the plain facts before them.

Lastly an intersting analogy is given in the article on page 486:

Spiritualist urged science to recognize an extension of mechanical laws into unseeable worlds, they went most mechanists one better.

Spiritualist journals typically used mechanical images. Why you might ask?  One used a lot is the telegraph. Spiritualists though "it illustrated the reduction of something once considered marvelous to a completely understandable occurrence and furnished an analogy of how spirit communication might take place." Spirits themselves demonstrated a mechanical aptitude by handing down inventions for riving shingles, milling and net weaving.

Telegraph = Spirit Communication?

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2711685