Chapter 129. Voices from Beyond: The Spiritualist Movement and the Mediumistic Century

The Millerites had looked for Christ in the sky over the “burned-over district” of upstate New York. Four years after the Great Disappointment, the same region produced a different promise. The dead, it was said, could be reached directly, at a kitchen table, through knocks. Modern Spiritualism dates its birth to 31 March 1848 at Hydesville. Within a decade it had congresses, thousands of mediums, trance lecturers and a press of its own, and it had close ties to abolitionism, women’s rights and utopian socialism. The reference shelf notes that Spiritualism “first appeared in the 1840s in the ‘Burned-over District’… where earlier religious movements such as Millerism and Mormonism had emerged,” though neither of these associated itself with it [Wikipedia: Spiritualism (movement)]. This chapter follows the movement from the Fox sisters to psychical research and the confessions. It sets out the believers’ and the sceptics’ cases side by side. It also treats Spiritualism as the ancestor of later channeling and of the Theosophical “Masters” discussed in Chapter 135.

Hydesville, 31 March 1848

Theresa Cheung’s encyclopedia gives the founding account. “Three New York sisters, Maggie, Kate and Leah Fox… are credited historically with the birth of Spiritualism… when they discovered they could communicate with spirits by rappings. On the night of 31 March 1848, Maggie, aged 15, and Kate, 12, who were living with their parents in Hydesville, first discovered that if they clapped their hands raps would answer back.” [Theresa Cheung, The Element Encyclopedia of the Psychic World, #53445, “Fox sisters”]. Cheung writes that when the press “went into a frenzy,” the elder sister Leah, “living in Rochester in poverty after her husband had deserted her, seized the opportunity to manage her younger sisters.” She arranged “fee-charging public demonstrations,” and the performances “grew to include object” movements and other effects [Cheung, #53445]. Cheung’s entry has a coda that has fed the dispute ever since: “In 1904 school children discovered a skeleton behind the cellar door in the Hydesville house… Spiritualists hailed it as proof that the sisters were genuine mediums but sceptics were convinced that the skeleton had been deliberately put there” [Cheung, #53445]. The sources disagree on the sisters’ ages. Cheung’s dates for the two girls (Kate 1841, Margaretta 1838) differ from the reference shelf (Margaretta 1833, Catherine 1837) [Wikipedia: Fox sisters].

The reference shelf adds the social setting. During the excitement the girls were sent to Rochester, where “Amy and Isaac Post, a radical Quaker couple and long-standing friends of the Fox family, invited the girls into their Rochester home.” The Posts were “immediately convinced of the genuineness of the phenomena” and spread the word among radical Quakers, “who became the early core of Spiritualists.” The article continues: “In this way, the association between Spiritualism and radical political causes developed, such as abolition, temperance, and equal rights for women” [Wikipedia: Fox sisters]. The sisters’ first paid public demonstration took place at Corinthian Hall, Rochester, on 14 November 1849. Their New York séances of 1850 drew Horace Greeley, James Fenimore Cooper, Sojourner Truth and William Lloyd Garrison [Wikipedia: Fox sisters].

A Mass Movement in Four Years

The anonymous Romanian-language exposé Magicienii (subtitled Les faiseurs de miracles) stresses how fast the movement spread. “Soon the whole of America is seized by an enormous passion: to communicate with the spirits. The Fox sisters quickly become famous, organise shows in the theatres of the largest cities and, in 1852, only four years after the first communications with the spirit of Rosna, the city of Cleveland hosts the first congress of spiritism. At that moment, in the United States there are more than ten thousand mediums” [Anonymous, Magicienii, #45579, ch. 19 “Raşid şi materializarea sacră”]. The book’s narrator writes as a Sorbonne-trained student of psychology and a conjurer. He follows the movement’s European offshoots and the investigations of the physical mediums. One example is the 1922 tests of “Eva C.” under “the strictest control” at the Sorbonne’s physiology laboratory, by Professors Georges Dumas, Louis Lapicque, Henri Piéron and Henri Laugier. Another is Arthur Conan Doyle’s lecture tours from 1917 onward, which continued despite repeated failures [Magicienii, #45579].

The reference shelf describes a movement that “flourished for a half century without canonical texts or formal organization, attaining cohesion through periodicals, tours by trance lecturers, camp meetings, and the missionary activities of accomplished mediums.” It traces the movement’s background to Swedenborg, who “has some claim to be the father of spiritualism,” and to Mesmer’s trance technique. Andrew Jackson Davis combined the two in his “harmonial philosophy,” and his trance-dictated The Principles of Nature (1847) “became the nearest thing to a canonical work” [Wikipedia: Spiritualism (movement)]. Kugelmann describes the same synthesis. Davis (1826–1910) “launched a career in Spiritualism after experiencing animal magnetism and communicating with Emanuel Swedenborg,” and the movement promoted “progressive social mores, including balancing male and female imagery for God and accepting the inner divinity of the person” [R. Kugelmann, Psychology and Catholicism, #32134, section 59 “Nineteenth-century Spiritualism and Mind Cure”].

Politics, Reform and Grief

Spiritualism’s political connections are well documented. Kugelmann cites Ann Braude’s study: “While not all feminists were Spiritualists, all Spiritualists advocated women’s rights.” He adds that many converts “came from religious denominations that already stressed individual freedom, such as the Quakers,” or from liberal Protestant bodies such as the Universalists [Kugelmann, #32134, ch. 10 “Crossings”]. The reference shelf names trance lecturers who held abolitionist and women’s-rights views, among them Achsa Sprague and Cora L. V. Scott, and the mixed-race abolitionist medium Paschal Beverly Randolph. It also records the activism of Spiritualists on behalf of Native Americans, whose “Indian spectres” at séances were read as “a symbol of the sins and subsequent guilt of the United States.” It notes that “after 1848, many socialists became ardent spiritualists,” including the utopian socialist Robert Owen, who was converted in 1854. Not every reformer joined: “among the skeptics was abolitionist Frederick Douglass” [Wikipedia: Spiritualism (movement)]. One figure links this chapter to the previous one. Moses Hull, the Adventist whom Ellen White warned that “God’s hand will arrest you” if he left the faith [Catalin Negru, A History of the Apocalypse, #62383], later became a Spiritualist lecturer, a Greenback-Labor organiser and a Socialist Party candidate for Congress [Wikipedia: Moses Hull].

Grief drove the movement as much as reform did. “Many families during the time of the American Civil War had seen their men go off and never return”. Mary Todd Lincoln held séances in the White House, which the President attended. The reference shelf calls the surges of Spiritualism after the Civil War and the First World War “a direct response to those massive battlefield casualties” [Wikipedia: Spiritualism (movement)]. Jerry Kantor places the period’s new institutions “amid this panoply of ‘isms,’ the cataclysmic grief and roiling madness of post–Civil War America” [Jerry M. Kantor, Sane Asylums, #64394].

Europe: Kardec’s Spiritism and the Road to Theosophy

In France the phenomenon became a doctrine. Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail (1804–1869), an educator trained under Pestalozzi and a practising mesmerist, met the medium Madame de Plainemaison in May 1855. There, by his own account, a spirit named “Zephyr” “gave him the mission of being the spokesman of the Dead.” Under the pen-name Allan Kardec he wrote the five books of the “Spiritist Codification” [Wikipedia: Allan Kardec]. Kugelmann describes French Spiritism as an attempt “to integrate Enlightenment ideals of reason and science into a traditional religious framework” [Kugelmann, #32134, section 59]. The reference shelf treats Kardecism as separate from Anglo-American Spiritualism (“Not to be confused with Kardecist spiritism”) [Wikipedia: Spiritualism (movement)]. Spiritualism has a direct line to later occultism. Cheung’s encyclopedia records that the Fox sisters “first brought public attention to channelling in 1848” [Cheung, #53445]. In the same tradition, Dion Fortune claimed in 1923–4 to have contacted “three great masters,” Socrates, Lord Erskine and a war-dead officer, who “dictated her magical writings” [Cheung, #53445]. This is the pattern of communication with discarnate teachers that Theosophy turned into the Mahatmas and Ascended Masters (Chapter 135).

The Case For: Inglis and the “Pagan” of Science

Brian Inglis presents the believers’ case openly as a partisan. He writes that “by taking the evidence for the supernatural seriously… a writer immediately identifies himself as a partisan.” He describes his book as a fight against two “seedy giants”: “Pope,” meaning superstition and religious dogma, and “Pagan,” meaning “the dogmas and evasions of materialist science, refusing to credit what it cannot quantify” [Brian Inglis, Natural and Supernatural, #66356, Introduction]. For Inglis the Fox rappings belong to a long series of earlier cases. At Samuel Wesley’s Epworth rectory, “Old Jeffery” would answer the children’s raps “by rapping back the same number of times”. Priestley blamed the servants, Coleridge hallucination and Southey the devil [Inglis, Natural and Supernatural, #66356]. In the Cock Lane case of 1759–62 he concedes that the raps “ceased if sceptics were present”. He argues all the same that “there are features… which make the fraud diagnosis implausible,” because the haunting began before the dispute between Parsons and his lodgers and was heard by people outside any conspiracy [Inglis, #66356]. His son’s foreword to the reissue places the book of 1978 as “a counterpunch against the emerging sceptical backlash” of CSICOP, whose members included Martin Gardner, Carl Sagan and James Randi. For Inglis, it says, “the evidence… for the paranormal was overwhelming and the onus was on sceptics to disprove it” [Neil L. Inglis, foreword, in Inglis, #66356].

The Case Against: Exposures and the 1888 Confession

The sceptics’ case built up from 1850. In 1851 investigators from the University at Buffalo concluded that the raps came from cracking joints and stopped when the girls’ feet rested on cushions. A relative, Mrs Norman Culver, signed a statement that she had helped produce the raps. A Boston committee of 1857 and the Seybert Commission of 1887 reached similar verdicts [Wikipedia: Fox sisters]. Magicienii describes the climax. “In 1888, the two Fox sisters put an end to the polemic by revealing the trick: on 24 September Kate declares to the New York Herald: ‘Spiritism is a fraud from…'”. A month later, at the New York Academy of Music, “Margaret finally makes the confession: ‘There is no manifestation of spirits.'” She demonstrated raps made with her big toe, and Kate told how as a child she had frightened her parents by dropping an apple on a string [Magicienii, #45579]. The reference shelf puts the audience at 2,000 and says doctors came on stage to verify that the sound came from her toe joints [Wikipedia: Fox sisters].

The believers’ reply also appears on the record. Conan Doyle argued that the raps continued at Hydesville on 31 March “in the girls’ absence,” on the testimony of the neighbour Duesler. On 20 November 1889 Margaret retracted her confession in the New York Press. She said it had been extracted for money “under the strong psychological influence” of Spiritualism’s enemies, and that the newspaper had not paid the promised sum. Sceptics in turn saw in “this constant reversal of testimony” proof that the sisters “were manipulators willing to say anything for monetary gain” [Wikipedia: Fox sisters]. As the reference shelf puts it, “despite their loss of credibility, the Spiritualism movement continued to grow” [Wikipedia: Fox sisters].

Church, Science and the Surrogate

Spiritualism faced resistance from two directions at once. Kugelmann describes the Catholic neoscholastic psychology of Cardinal Mercier’s school (1890s–1960s). It held the soul to be “an immaterial gift” and defended that view against reductionist experimental psychology on one side and Spiritism on the other. Charles Bruehl (1920) distinguished the Catholic teaching on survival from Spiritism’s “fantastic and grotesque embroideries” [Kugelmann, #32134, section 57 “Neoscholastic Psychology and Spiritualism”]. On the scientific side, the Society for Psychical Research (London, 1882) took up the phenomena. “By the end of the nineteenth century, the skeptics had the upper hand.” The American Society’s findings came to support mainly “the reality of the unconscious,” though “Spiritualism never died out; it continues to this day” [Kugelmann, #32134, ch. 10]. Kugelmann places Spiritualism and mind cure together in the American “unchurched spirituality” that runs on into the New Age (see Chapter 128).

The sociologist John Schumaker explains why such movements survive. “Mysticism is especially well suited to the conditions of modernity since this type of religious experience tends to be internal, free-floating, subjective, and relatively tolerant of rationalism and scientism. It responds well to the breakdown of traditional religious structures by releasing individuals to their inner freedoms.” He argues that religious decline is regularly followed by “invisible religion”. He cites research showing that “nonreligious paranormal beliefs and rituals (e.g., clairvoyance, witches, ghosts, ESP…) serve as functional equivalents to mainstream religion,” with greater paranormal belief among the less religious. In the United States today, he adds, “UFOlogy is the religion growing most rapidly” [J. Schumaker, The Age of Insanity, #33227, ch. 7 “Spiritual and Existential Health”].

Keshe’s Teaching on the Soul Beyond Physicality

Mehran Tavakoli Keshe’s workshops answer the Spiritualist question of survival without séances and without spirits who speak through raps. In his account the soul is a field-structure that the body trains for independent existence. In Knowledge Seekers Workshop 569 (19 December 2024) Keshe states that “in the old age we gradually prepare the body to mature the Soul for it to be to take its position in the Universe.” The transcript adds: “We don’t just get thrown out into the Universe as a Soul, or a collection of fields… We are trained how to feed ourselves through the Universal Energy. This is why we dream, it’s part of the training to connect and be ready to live without attachment to Physicality” [Mehran Tavakoli Keshe, Knowledge Seekers Workshop 569, #378281, “Soul Preparation and UFO Phenomena”]. He compares this to the womb, where the mother prepares the child’s digestion before birth. Keshe claims that new “emotions from the Universe” will be felt “in the Soul” though “the body [does] not show” them, and the same workshop’s index refers to experiencing “Beings” through field devices. The workshop also says the “KF [is] not [a] Cult; Don’t follow teacher – apply knowledge” [Keshe, #378281]. Spiritualism takes as proof a communication received through a medium. Keshe instead claims a developmental physics of the soul that the practitioner is to apply himself.

Key points

• Cheung and the reference shelf date Spiritualism to Maggie and Kate Fox’s raps at Hydesville on 31 March 1848. Their sister Leah managed them, and the Quaker abolitionists Amy and Isaac Post spread the movement [Cheung, #53445; Wikipedia: Fox sisters].
• According to Magicienii, by 1852 Cleveland hosted the first Spiritualist congress and the United States had more than ten thousand mediums [Magicienii, #45579].
• Spiritualism was closely tied to abolition, women’s rights and socialism (Braude, quoted by Kugelmann), and it surged after the Civil War and the First World War as a response to mass grief [Kugelmann, #32134; Wikipedia: Spiritualism (movement)].
• Inglis, writing openly as a partisan, places Hydesville in a line with Epworth and Cock Lane and accuses materialist science of “refusing to credit what it cannot quantify,” against CSICOP sceptics such as Randi and Sagan [Inglis, #66356].
• The 1888 toe-joint confession at the New York Academy of Music and its 1889 retraction leave a disputed record, but the movement continued to grow [Magicienii, #45579; Wikipedia: Fox sisters].
• Kardec’s Spiritism systematised spirit communication in France, and channelled “masters” connect Spiritualism to Theosophy [Wikipedia: Allan Kardec; Cheung, #53445].
• Catholic neoscholastics defended the immaterial soul against both laboratory psychology and Spiritism. Schumaker treats modern mysticism and paranormal belief as “functional equivalents” of declining religion [Kugelmann, #32134; Schumaker, #33227].
• Keshe (KSW 569) claims that ageing and dreaming prepare the soul to exist apart from the body, a doctrine of survival without mediums [Keshe, #378281].