What it is
In March 1848, in a farmhouse at Hydesville in western New York, two young sisters named Kate and Margaret Fox began to receive answers, in raps, from something they said was the spirit of a murdered peddler. Within five years tables were turning in parlors from Boston to Berlin. Spiritualism, the belief that the dead survive and speak to the living through mediums, became one of the great popular religions of the nineteenth century, with its own lecturers, newspapers, hymnals, and Sunday schools. It gave a public voice to many women, who spoke in trance from platforms they could not otherwise have mounted, and its early ranks were full of abolitionists and reformers.
The movement had ancestors: Swedenborg's journeys among the angels, the trance states produced by the mesmerists, and a long learned argument over whether ghosts were souls, demons, or delusions. It also had investigators. From the 1850s chemists, physicists, and philosophers sat in the dark and took notes, and in 1882 a circle of scholars in England began the systematic study they called psychical research. Conjurors joined in, demonstrating how the effects could be produced by trickery. The result is a literature of testimony and counter-testimony that we keep together, as our collection policy requires.
Where to begin
Read Emma Hardinge Britten's Modern American Spiritualism for the movement's account of itself and Houdini's A Magician among the Spirits for the case against. Then read the opening chapters of Myers's Human Personality to see what the scholars in between were trying to do.
Before 1848: ghosts and spirit-seers
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Of Ghostes and Spirites Walking by Nyght Ludwig Lavater. German and Latin, 1569 and 1570. English translation 1572. L 7
A Protestant pastor argues that apparitions are real but are never the souls of the dead, who do not return. They are angels, devils, or tricks of the senses and of knaves. The standard Protestant position for a century, and the book Shakespeare's audiences had in mind when they argued over the ghost in Hamlet.
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Saducismus Triumphatus Joseph Glanvill. English. Published after his death, 1681. L 7
A clergyman of the new scientific circles, with his friend Henry More, collects well-attested cases of witchcraft and haunting, including the drummer of Tedworth, to prove that a world without spirits is a world without God.
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Miscellanies John Aubrey. English. 1696. B 3
Day-fatality, omens, dreams, apparitions, voices, knockings, and the second sight, gathered by the antiquary and gossip of seventeenth-century England. The only book Aubrey published in his lifetime.
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Dissertations sur les apparitions et sur les revenants et vampires Augustin Calmet. French. 1746, enlarged 1751. L 7
A learned Benedictine weighs the reports of apparitions, the returning dead, and the vampire epidemics of eastern Europe, and leaves the reader to decide. Voltaire mocked it. It was translated into several languages and read for a century.
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Theorie der Geister-Kunde (Theory of Pneumatology) Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling. German. 1808. D 5
A Pietist physician and novelist sets out what can be known of spirits, presentiments, and second sight, drawing on the mesmerists and on Swedenborg while trying to stay within Christian orthodoxy.
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Die Seherin von Prevorst (The Seeress of Prevorst) Justinus Kerner. German. 1829. English translation 1845. D 5
A physician and poet's account of a young woman, Friederike Hauffe, who in somnambulic trance saw spirits, described the inner spheres of the soul, and drew diagrams of them. The English version was made by Catherine Crowe.
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The Night Side of Nature Catherine Crowe. English. 1848. D 5
A best-selling collection of ghost stories, presentiments, doubles, and haunted houses, offered as evidence that science had not yet explained. It appeared in the same year as the Hydesville rappings.
Mesmerism and somnambulism
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Memoire sur la decouverte du magnetisme animal Franz Anton Mesmer. French. 1779. D 5
Twenty-seven propositions on a universal fluid that pervades all bodies, whose obstruction causes illness and whose restoration by the physician's passes brings a healing crisis. Mesmer's practice in Paris made him the most talked-of physician of the decade before the Revolution.
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Rapport des commissaires charges par le roi de l'examen du magnetisme animal French. Paris, 1784. D 5
A royal commission that included Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier tested the magnetizers with blindfolds and concluded that the effects were real but came from imagination, not from any fluid. One of the first controlled experiments of its kind, and a founding document of the psychology of suggestion.
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Memoires pour servir a l'histoire et a l'etablissement du magnetisme animal Armand-Marie-Jacques de Chastenet, Marquis de Puysegur. French. 1784. D 5
On his estate at Buzancy, Puysegur found that a magnetized young peasant, Victor Race, fell not into convulsions but into a calm sleep in which he spoke more clearly than when awake and diagnosed illness. Magnetic somnambulism, as it was called, led on the one hand to hypnotism and on the other to the trance medium.
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The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind Andrew Jackson Davis. English. New York, 1847. D 5
A barely schooled young man of Poughkeepsie, magnetized in trance, dictates a vast system of cosmology and social reform. Davis became the chief theologian of American Spiritualism and called his own system the Harmonial Philosophy.
The Spiritualist movement
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Modern American Spiritualism Emma Hardinge Britten. 1870. D 5
A twenty-year record of the movement by one of its most gifted trance lecturers, compiled from its newspapers and her own travels. Partisan, detailed, and indispensable. For her later turn toward occultism, see The Occult Revival.
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Le Livre des Esprits (The Spirits' Book) Allan Kardec (Hippolyte Leon Denizard Rivail). French. 1857. D 5
A schoolteacher's systematic record of answers given by spirits, through several mediums, to questions on God, the soul, reincarnation, and morality, more than a thousand of them in the revised edition of 1860. The founding text of Spiritism, which spread from France to Latin America and above all to Brazil, where it remains a living religion. Followed by The Mediums' Book of 1861.
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Experimental Investigation of the Spirit Manifestations Robert Hare. 1855. D 5
An eminent chemist builds apparatus to prove that mediums move tables by their own muscles, and ends by announcing that the spirits are real. His colleagues were not persuaded.
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Incidents in My Life Daniel Dunglas Home. 1863. D 5
The memoir of the most famous medium of the century, who sat for emperors and novelists, was said to have floated out of one window and in at another, and was never publicly caught in fraud. Robert Browning loathed him and wrote the poem "Mr. Sludge, the Medium" about him.
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Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism William Crookes. 1874. D 5
A leading physicist and chemist reports his tests of Home and of the young medium Florence Cook and her materialized spirit, Katie King. Historians still argue over what Crookes saw and why he believed it.
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The History of Spiritualism Arthur Conan Doyle. Two volumes, 1926. D 5
The creator of Sherlock Holmes spent his last years as the movement's most famous missionary. A believer's history, generous and uncritical.
The psychical researchers
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Phantasms of the Living Edmund Gurney, F. W. H. Myers, and Frank Podmore. Two volumes, 1886. D 5
Seven hundred cases of apparitions seen at the moment of a distant person's death or crisis, collected by questionnaire and checked by correspondence. The authors argued for telepathy rather than ghosts, and their method of gathering evidence set the pattern for the field.
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Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death F. W. H. Myers. Two volumes. Published after his death, 1903. D 5
A classical scholar's great synthesis of hypnotism, genius, dreams, automatic writing, and mediumship around the idea of a "subliminal self" larger than ordinary consciousness. William James admired it, and it is still the most ambitious book the field has produced.
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From India to the Planet Mars Theodore Flournoy. French, 1900. English translation 1900. D 5
A Geneva psychologist's study of a medium who recalled past lives as a Hindu princess and Marie Antoinette and spoke a Martian language. Flournoy traced it all, patiently and kindly, to forgotten memories and the creative unconscious. A model of investigation without contempt.
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On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena C. G. Jung. German. 1902. D 5
Jung's doctoral thesis, a study of the seances of a young cousin who spoke in trance with the voices of the dead. The first appearance of ideas he spent his life developing.
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Modern Spiritualism: A History and a Criticism Frank Podmore. Two volumes, 1902. D 5
By one of the authors of Phantasms of the Living, who had come to doubt nearly every physical phenomenon of the seance room. The best skeptical history written from inside psychical research.
For Nandor Fodor's Encyclopaedia of Psychic Science of 1933, the standard reference of the period, see Reference and Bibliography.
Critics and conjurors
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Modern Spiritualism John Nevil Maskelyne. 1876. D 5
A London stage magician who had reproduced the cabinet tricks of the touring Davenport brothers explains how the effects of the seance room are done.
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Mesmerism, Spiritualism, etc., Historically and Scientifically Considered William B. Carpenter. 1877. D 5
Two lectures by a physiologist who explained table-turning, the divining rod, and thought-reading by unconscious muscular action and expectation, and called the whole business an epidemic delusion. Michael Faraday had shown much the same with a simple apparatus in 1853.
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A Magician among the Spirits Harry Houdini. 1924. D 5
The escape artist attended hundreds of seances and found none he could not explain. His campaign against mediums, and a seance held for him by the Conan Doyles in 1922, ended his friendship with Doyle. Lively, angry, and not always fair, but most often right.
Things to watch for
- Everyone had a stake. Believers wrote to persuade, investigators to establish a science, and conjurors to defend their trade. Read each account for what its author wanted to be true.
- Fraud and sincerity. Many mediums were caught in trickery, some repeatedly. That does not tell you what any particular sitter experienced, and fraud and sincere belief were sometimes found in the same person.
- Who was in the room? A seance report describes what certain people saw in poor light. Note who was present, who controlled the conditions, and when the account was written.
- A religion, not only a parlor game. Spiritualism had churches, ministers, and a theology of progress after death. The talking board, patented as a parlor game in 1891, is a small part of the story.
- Ghosts before Spiritualism. Early modern writers on apparitions were arguing about Purgatory, demons, and the evidence for religion. Read them in that context, not as early paranormal investigators.
On the shelves
Spiritualism, mesmerism, and psychical research are shelved at the North Gate in class D 5. Learned writing on ghosts before 1800 stands with demonology at the South Gate in L 7, and ghost lore and local legend with folklore at the West Gate in B 3. The movement's own weekly papers and the journals of the psychical researchers are in the Waters. Related guides: The Occult Revival and Rosicrucians and Christian Theosophy, for Swedenborg.