Spiritualism

Factual Questions
1

I’m doing some research on recent religions, and I’ve been trying to get information about spiritualism (sometimes called spiritism), the system of belief about an afterlife and communication with the dead which appears to have sprung up in Britain and the USA in the mid 19th century. The websites I’ve found have all seemed partial or hostile, and of little factual value. Even http://www.religioustolerance.org/ doesn’t seem to include any information on it. I’ve a few questions I hope people can point me towards unbiased answers for.

Is spiritualism generally considered (by anthropologists, sociologists, experts in comparative religion, etc.) to be a religion, or a religious practice, or something else?

Do most spiritualists consider themselves members of religions other than spiritualism (e.g. “I believe in spiritualism but I’m a Christian”)?

When was it founded as a religion/belief? Where, and by whom?

How many practitioners are there in the world (or in USA, UK, etc)?

Are there any good anthropological or social history studies on spiritualism?

2

You might try Janet Oppenheim’s The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850-1914 (Cambridge, 1985), though, as the subtitle suggests, she particularly concentrates on the efforts to make spiritualism scientific in its period of semi-respectability amongst the middle classes. Several other studies of the subject in the same period are listed as part of this bibliography; the ones by Barrow and Owen are particularly often cited.

3

IIRC, Phillip Davis discusses it to some extent in his book Goddess Unmasked, esp. in relation to Wicca, goddess worship, etc.

4

Spiritualism, as a formal movement, is generally figured to have grown out of interest in the experiences of two young girls, Margaret and Catherine Fox. In 1847 people came to believe that the farm house in which the family lived near Hydesville, New York, was haunted, and that ghosts would respond to questions asked by the sisters by making rapping noises.

The young women later became two of the most prominent Spiritualist mediums. At one point they confessed, saying that they had mostly created the sounds in their house by “popping” their knee joints.

The idea that ghosts were prone to sending messages by knocking in code had already circulated for a time in Europe. It came to be an extremely widespread belief. One of Ivan Turgenev’s best stories is an alternatively funny and poignant piece about belief in ghosts is called Knock, Knock, Knock. It was first published in 1970.

While mainstream denominations were generally dismissive or hostile to Spiritualism, it appears that most Spiritualists, and the various churches they formed, were self-identified as Christian.

One of many things more conventional churches found objectionable was that there gradually grew up among many Spiritualists a shared belief that the next life involves a place or state of being called “The Summer Land”. This was a sort of bland happy hunting ground which lacked both the glory of salvation and the horror of damnation. Mostly it sounded kind of insipid; ghosts sometimes blathered about how so-and-so on the other side had a toothache or something similarly wordly and pedestrian.

A minister who identified himself as a “Christian Spiritualist” provided an interesting footnote to the Jack the Ripper investigation. He told authorities that he was riding a bus one day when he got an overwhelming feeling that a passenger seated nearby was Jack the Ripper. He tried following the man when he left the bus, but lost him in a crowd. Later he saw the same man in the street and followed him home to learn who he was.

The man was a successful doctor, and, when questioned by police, said he honestly did not know if he was Jack the Ripper or not. It developed that he had been having trouble of late with black-out spells, and could not account for his actions or whereabouts during these periods. Ultimately the police determined he was not a viable suspect. The suggestion that the Spiritualist had heard about the doctor’s problems and chose to capitalize on them for purposes of self-publicity immediately suggests itself.

The extent to which there are serious, sincere practitioners of Spiritualism as a religion and there are pure hucksters out to bilk the credulous can probably be argued endlessly. It is known that within the “trade” there is talk of “open” and “closed” mediums. An open medium networks with other charlatans to exchange information about people who are willing to pay for mediumistic services.

There was even said to have been a large reference book or directory of private information about such people which circulated among mediums. Possibly something of the kind is still in use. James Randi has written about this from time to time, as did the late William Lindsey Gresham, probably best known as the author of the novel Nightmare Alley. Randi has written about his experience of visiting a Spiritualist “camp” which convenes in Florida every year, and of seeing some not-very-clever fortune telling trickery there.

It has been a long time since I read it, but I recall that Ronald Pearsall’s 1973 book The Table Rappers gives a good overview of the range and variety of Spiritualist beliefs in the 19th Century.

5

Oops. Turgenev’s story was, of course, first published in
1870.

For first-hand information on current Spiritualist beliefs, you might simply try checking a telephone directory in a large city. In St. Louis, I know, there is at least one long-established Spiritualist church.

6

Some possible Google searches:
> the Fox sisters (noted above)
> the term “planchette” (as in Ouija board, but it appears to have been used more seriously in the 19th century)
> Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (who got heavily “into” spiritualism)
> “table-tipping”

A lot of what’s available will be dead-ends – exposés of frauds, and the like – but you should find a few links to actual Spiritualist beliefs.

7

This story is attributed to the 19th century spiritualist Robert Lees. From there it has passed into the folklore of Stephen Knight’s Masonic Ripper conspiracy (in which the doctor is Sir William Gull) and from there into Alan Moore’s riff on the subject, From Hell. However, as most of the articles on the site about his career linked to above argue, it appears that virtually all of the tale is merely some sort of journalistic invention.

Of course, from the social history perspective suggested by the OP, such newspaper stories are still of interest as evidence of how the public thought spiritualists ought to behave. As are the later versions interesting in the context of their times.

8

There is a small Spiritualist “camp” or “colony” known as Cassadaga in Volusia County, Florida. Click on http://www.cassadaga.org/. There is also a Cassadaga, New York – both were founded by Spiritualists in the 19th century.

9

Whether it’s a religion or what is actually a complicated sociological issue. (The pejorative implications of words like “cult” and “sect” make analysis difficult.) When I was in the sociology biz, I would have called spiritualism a client cult, based on Stark and Bainbridge’s theoretical work. In a client cult, the believers go to certain individuals who can provide spiritual (in a broad sense) services – seances, “readings,” etc. These believers don’t necessarily organize into ongoing groups, and may continue to affilitate themselves with a mainstream church in addition to their client cult beliefs.

You may want to start here in a really good website.

10

My thanks to Bonzer for the site about Robert Lees.

It has long struck me that the story of his involvement with the Jack the Ripper investigation sounds a lot like the story of Dutch psychic Peter Hurkos and the search for The Boston Strangler. Hurkos gave police information which led to the investigation of a mentally ill man who was considered a viable suspect for a time. He said he got his information via his psychic powers.

Much is made of this incident in the movie The Boston Strangler, in which Henry Fonda plays the head of the investigation and Tony Curtis portrayed the man ultimately arrested for the killings. What the movie does not mention was that Hurkos was caught impersonating a policeman in Boston; the suggestion is inevitable that Hurkos may have gotten a lead through means that had nothing to do with ESP, and then fabricated a story about having visions as a way of promoting his reputation as a psychic.

In the same way, it does not seem impossible that Lees could have heard gossip about a doctor who was acting strangely and then woven a story about how “it came to him” that he was Jack the Ripper.

11

refusal: this is not exactly answering your question, but my wife is a Spiritualist, so I can give you a brief run-down on what it involves nowadays. “Spiritist”, by the way, was a late 19th / early 20th century pejorative term, not used its practitioners.

I think it would count as a religion. The format is strongly influenced by low-church Christianity. No dressing-up, rituals or props: you go to a meeting house and sing hymns (the choice influenced by the general beliefs in mediumship, such as Hushed was the evening hymn). Then you get a ‘witnessing’ from a guest medium, who will give a stand-up address during which he/she will profess to contact spirits (skeptics would say run a cold-reading session) related to members of the congregation. For those interested, they also run special sessions for, say, individual reading and spiritual healing.

They believe, generally, in a genderless God and a very ecumenical afterlife. The actual slant varies: some believers would say they’re Christian and Spiritualist; others (like my wife) are on the edge of Wicca - its philosophy meshes quite well into the Wiccan “do as you will, an it harm no-one”. Overall, though, Spiritualism per se in the UK tends to be a fairly conservative working class belief, in contrast to the Yuppie ‘New Age’ equivalents involving channelling, crystals and such like.