Haunted Visions: Spiritualism and American Art

By Charles Colbert

Spiritualism emerged in western New York in 1848 and soon achieved a wide following due to its claim that the living could commune with the dead. In Haunted Visions: Spiritualism and American Art, Charles Colbert focuses on the ways Spiritualism imbued the making and viewing of art with religious meaning and, in doing so, draws fascinating connections between art and faith in the Victorian age.

Examining the work of such well-known American artists as James Abbott McNeill Whistler, William Sydney Mount, and Robert Henri, Colbert demonstrates that Spiritualism played a critical role in the evolution of modern attitudes toward creativity. He argues that Spiritualism made a singular contribution to the sanctification of art that occurred in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The faith maintained that spiritual energies could reside in objects, and thus works of art could be appreciated not only for what they illustrated but also as vessels of the psychic vibrations their creators impressed into them. Such beliefs sanctified both the making and collecting of art in an era when Darwinism and Positivism were increasingly disenchanting the world and the efforts to represent it. In this context, Spiritualism endowed the artist's profession with the prestige of a religious calling; in doing so, it sought not to replace religion with art, but to make art a site where religion happened.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: May 10, 2011
• ISBN: 9780812204995

Book preview

Haunted Visions

_________

Spiritualism and American Art

Charles Colbert

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2011 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

2  4  6  8  1  0  9  7  5  3  1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Colbert, Charles, 1946–

  Haunted visions : spiritualism and American art / Charles Colbert. — 1st ed.

      p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8122-4325-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  1. Art, American—19th century. 2. Spiritualism—United States—History. 3. Spiritualism in art. I. Title.

N6510.C65    2011

701'.08—dc22                                                                                            2011001800

Contents

_________

List of Illustrations

Introduction: The History and Teachings of Spiritualism

Chapter 1. Who Speaks for the Dead?

Chapter 2. Reenchanting America

Chapter 3. Revelations by Daylight

Chapter 4. Ghostly Gloamings

Chapter 5. Land of Promise

Chapter 6. Romantic Conjurations

Chapter 7. The Critic as Psychic

Chapter 8. Lessons in Clairvoyance

Postscript

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Illustrations

___________

1. Psychic State, from Davis, Magic Staff

2. Paul, Evangelist Campmeeting

3. Fowler's Phrenological Head

4. Carter, Col. Matt Clary and Attendant Spirits

5. Tombstone of Mary Barber

6. Milleson, Apotheosis

7. Tombstone of Hannah Chapman

8. Tombstone of Stella Heywood

9. Mrs. Blair, Bouquet of Flowers

10. Barber (attr.), From Holy Mother Wisdom to Elder Ebenezer

11. Anderson, Spirit Carrie Miller

12. Dexter, Bust of Theodore Lyman

13. Powers, Mary Sargent Duncan

14. Powers, Proserpine

15. Powers, Elizabeth Gibson Powers

16. Powers, Martha Endicott Peabody Rogers

17. Powers, Cornelius Vanderbilt

18. Hosmer, Puck

19. Hosmer, Will o' the Wisp

20. Bowman Mausoleum

21. Giovanni Turini, John Bowman

22. Interior of Bowman Mausoleum

23. Bowman House

24. Apport, Old Roman lamp

25. Story, Libyan Sibyl

26. Powers, Fisher Boy

27. Powers, America

28. Powers, California

29. Mental—Spirituelle

30. Quidor, Money Diggers

31. Hosmer, Oenone

32. Mount, Spirit Drawing

33. William Mount, Portable Studio, Diary

34. William Mount, Long Island Farmhouses

35. Shepard Mount, Old Double Door

36. Lane, The Western Shore with Norman's Woe

37. The Sun of the Universe

38. Norman's Woe

39. Church, The Wreck

40. Whistler, Symphony in White, No. 2

41. Whistler, Arrangement in Black: Lady Archibald Campbell

42. Whistler, Arrangement in Black: Senor Pablo de Sarasate

43. Whistler, Arrangement in Black and Gold: Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac

44. Whistler, Nocturne in Blue and Silver

45. Tintoretto, Origin of the Milky Way

46. Inness, Valley of the Olives

47. Residence of O. S. Fowler

48. Inness, Lake Nemi

49. Inness, Ampezzo Pass, Titian's Home

50. Photograph of Portrait of Ella Leamon-Leach

51. Inness, Sundown

52. Inness, Home at Montclair

53. Johnny Appleseed

54. Fuller, Fedelma

55. Fuller, Winifred Dysart

56. Ryder, Joan of Arc

57. Ryder, Jonah

58. Ryder, Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens

59. Heidelberg Electric Belt

60. Ryder, Toilers of the Sea

61. Ryder, Moonlit Cove

62. Whistler, Caprice in Purple and Gold

63. Sarcophagus or large urn with cover

64. Fra Angelico, Coronation of the Virgin

65. Corot, Balmy Afternoon

66. Jarves, James Jackson Jarves

67. Henri, Laughing Child

68. Henri, Spanish Gypsy Mother and Child

69. Morse, Gallery of the Louvre

70. Rimmer, Interior/Before the Picture

Introduction

__________

The History and Teachings of Spiritualism

The flourishing of Spiritualism in the second half of the nineteenth century coincided with a growing willingness on the part of many Americans to hold the fine arts in high esteem. The simultaneity was not entirely fortuitous. Puritan austerity and republican simplicity seemed increasingly passé to the consumer culture that emerged in the Victorian era. But old mores had to be replaced with new ones that endorsed the pleasures commodities now offered. Painting and sculpture were especially problematic in this context because they seemed purely decorative; what greater purpose could they possibly serve? Spiritualism resolved the quandary by identifying them as the loci of psychic energies. Those intent on particularizing the enthrallment art exercised over its newfound devotees found an explanation in these magnetic powers. The sanctification implied was a ready resource for proponents of Modernism who sought to extol art as the last refuge of authentic experience in a society beguiled by commercialism. Faith and aesthetic theory commingled and proved an important motive in the advent of Modernism in this country.

Modernism's identity continues to spark debate. It was long associated with the logic that prompted Max Weber to proclaim the disenchantment of the world. According to this outlook, the triumph of the scientific method obliges the rational individual to recognize that in the social and physical environment there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This principle was given its aesthetic formulation in Clement Greenberg's famous dictum about Modernism being an exercise in self-criticism, but in recent years scholars have begun to question whether the nice precision of such schemas comes at the cost of accuracy. This book takes its cue from Alex Owen's remarks about the intellectual climate in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century. We must recognize, she contends, that a significant constituency of modern-minded women and men were engaged in a dialogue with spirituality that involved the recuperation of modes of thought that rationalism dismissed as irrational. She goes on to propose that conventional definitions of post-Enlightenment modernity that assume the unambiguous meaning of secularization need to be reexamined. Similar considerations apply to American culture where, then as now, faith has generally been a more pervasive arbiter of lifestyles than across the Atlantic. This inclination led many thoughtful individuals to adopt what George Cotkin calls reluctant modernism, an attitude that embraced technological innovation and current efforts to govern by means of professional bureaucracies while also seeking to preserve religious values.¹

An understanding of Spiritualism's place in this context requires a familiarity with its principles and history. The synopsis of these that follows concludes with a brief review of the chapters and the reasoning behind their sequence.

Spiritualism

On its birth in 1848, Spiritualism was promptly cast into an arena of sectarian strife. Fierce competition raged among the diverse religions in America for the loyalty of citizens who were free to choose the denomination that most suited their inclinations. For decades, the mainline Protestant churches had had to contend with the Evangelical and millennial movements spawned by the Second Great Awakening. The formalism of the former vied with the emotionalism of the latter, but not everyone was satisfied with these alternatives. There were those who hoped to rise above the fray by appealing to an impartial referee: science. Spiritualism attracted such individuals because it vowed to test its claims by empirical means. The idea took, and soon trance speaking and séances spread throughout the nation as growing numbers sought to establish direct, and supposedly verifiable, contact with the dead.

Other factors contributed to Spiritualism's popularity. It coalesced with the cult of domesticity by conducting its services in the dining room or parlor. With Romanticism and the feminization of culture came a heightened appreciation of the ties of affection; Spiritualism promised to maintain these beyond the grave. In a country where traditions were weak and mobility great, its practice of communing with the dead offered a sense of continuity and community, especially to those who had left their ancestral homes to answer the call of the frontier. Underlying all these enticements, however, was Spiritualism's promise of personal survival after death. In making this claim, it enshrined bourgeois ideals of individuality at a time when the middle class had impressed its stamp indelibly on American culture.

Much of the sway mainline churches held over congregants derived from their governance of the rituals that ushered the dead into a world beyond recall. This control would be greatly compromised, however, if that realm was not as inaccessible as upholders of the established creeds maintained. The challenge posed by Spiritualism was part of a larger debate about authority abroad in Jacksonian America. Just as ordinary citizens were demanding a greater voice in the corridors of power, so there were those determined to have a say in matters pertaining to the afterlife.

The Rochester Rappings

Young Kate Fox precipitated the events that led to the advent of Spiritualism when, late in March 1848, she resolved to discover the source of the mysterious noises that had resounded for several weeks through her home in western New York. Addressing the entity presumed responsible for the disturbance as Mr. Splitfoot, she commanded it to do as I do. The eleven-year-old then clapped her hands, and to the astonishment of her parents, John and Margaret, and her elder sister, Margaret, thumps equal in number to the claps responded immediately. When repeated experiments brought the same results, the neighbors in their hamlet of Hydesville were called in to witness the strange goings-on. A code was quickly improvised, and those assembled learned that the unseen visitor was one Charles B. Rosna, a peddler who had been murdered in the house some five years earlier by a previous tenant.²

The disturbances in the Fox household were hardly unprecedented; disgruntled spirits had been banging on walls to acquaint the living with their grievances for centuries. The novel factor in this case was a penny press ravenous for sensational news. Soon millions were reading about the strange happenings in Hydesville, but determining the number who actually became votaries is problematic due to the want of precise criteria that defined membership. Many in the traditional Protestant denominations wove the doctrine into their received beliefs; some adopted it temporarily in times of grief; others ventured out on their own while maintaining their faith in Christ; and still others abandoned Christianity entirely. Some estimates have put the number of believers as high as eleven million, though this seems excessive. One reliable contemporary, Robert Dale Owen, mentions three million, while Nancy Rubin Stuart recently cut that figure by two-thirds. Perhaps we are best served by Ann Braude's characterization of Spiritualism as a ubiquitous feature of antebellum society; its influence, especially in the artistic community, extended well beyond those who unequivocally identified themselves as devotees.³

Thanks to such modern marvels as the telegraph and steam powered printing press, word of the Fox wonders quickly reached the remotest corners of the nation, but the entire incident might have been passed off as an oddity had there not been a public prepared to deem it worth consideration. The Second Great Awakening was the seedbed of this development. In western New York this was especially true because the rapid settlement that followed the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 left much of the population beyond the reach of the traditional churches. Residents were obliged to find salvation wherever they could. In the early 1840s, for example, they flocked to William Miller, a minister whose predictions of an imminent apocalypse galvanized many to abandon their worldly possessions and ascend the mountaintops. Others were drawn to the revivals organized regularly by itinerant preachers, and the enthusiasm characteristic of the region led to its reputation as the burned-over district.⁴

Kate and Margaret Fox stirred this hornets' nest anew when they agreed in November 1849 to demonstrate their powers to call up the dead on stage in Rochester. The sensation of what became known as the Rochester rappings spawned rumors of witchcraft and led to the family's expulsion from the Methodist church for having consorted with the devil. Suspicions of a different kind arose after a group of physicians in Buffalo examined the girls and concluded the raps were produced by subtle movements of the toe and knee joints.⁵ While this report animated skeptics, Spiritualists pointed out that the sounds originated at a distance from the children and divulged information about persons, living and dead, whom the sisters did not know.

Charles B. Rosna had taken it upon himself to alert the Foxes of the wrong committed in their house, but the spirits were not always so eager to initiate contact with mortals. A dependable means of communicating with the dead had to be devised before a faith premised on this practice could succeed. Mesmerism, which had become a fad in the United States in the late 1830s, answered this need. In the eighteenth century, Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815) proposed that an ether, which either resembled, or was identical with, such imponderable fluids as light, electricity, and magnetism, pervaded both interstellar space and the human body. Disease arose whenever this fluid was unbalanced in an individual, and it was the practitioner's task to restore health by infusions of the energy, or animal magnetism, he possessed in excess. Subsequent investigators encountered behavior unanticipated by Mesmer. Subjects who went into a profound trance, known as the superior condition, often conversed with the dead as their souls swam in currents of a cosmic ether (Figure 1). Americans were fascinated with the tales these travelers told, and by the 1850s, Robert Fuller notes, the Mesmeric trance had entered into the common stock of ideas from which many took their religious bearings on life. Its theories and methods promised to restore individuals, even unchurched ones, to harmony with the cosmic scheme.⁶

Spiritualism adopted the theories and practices of Mesmerism, an act that constituted an implicit criticism of the violent movements and clamorous outbursts associated with revivalism. The Methodists took the lead in these matters, devising a shout tradition to emulate the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and thus sanctify the ground on which believers gathered. Jeremiah Paul's illustration of one such gathering includes a number of incredulous spectators on either side who reflect the aversion outsiders often felt toward these practices (Figure 2). Such viewers complained that the emotional displays represented a willful capitulation of the rational faculties to a dangerous enthusiasm. Spiritualists inherited from philosophical Mesmerism (in contrast to the sensational performances often enacted on the popular stage) a preference for quietude; hence they joined the ranks of those who stigmatized the Evangelicals as enthusiasts. Much of the new religion's appeal rested on its advocacy of a moderate mysticism; like the Methodists, it sanctioned an experiential relationship with the supernatural, but in doing so sought to avoid the excesses of ecstasy.⁷

Figure 1. Psychic State, from Andrew Jackson Davis, The Magic Staff: An Autobiography (Boston: Colby and Rich, 1857), 5.

Andrew Jackson Davis and the Doctrine of Spiritualism

Such theological niceties were not the invention of the Fox sisters, who remained largely indifferent to the implications of the movement they inaugurated. The theoretical framework that propelled Spiritualism beyond the sensations of the Rochester rappings came from Andrew Jackson Davis. Widely celebrated as the Poughkeepsie seer for the alacrity with which he fell into the superior condition, Davis set down in a series of volumes, dictated while in this state, the principles that generally guided believers.

Davis began publishing his pronouncements in 1847; they were, then, already in circulation when the events in Hydesville commenced. Much of his inspiration came from conversations with the spirits of Galen (130?–200?) and Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). The Greek physician's communications underline the importance Davis and most Spiritualists attached to health as a condition crucial to personal equanimity in this world and the next. Swedenborg, the Protestant mystic, was in many respects the progenitor of Spiritualism and had much to impart to his American disciple.⁸

It was Swedenborg who provided the essentials for a faith premised on communications with the deceased. His contentions that heaven resembles earth (with houses, streets, parks, and the like) and is populated exclusively by the souls of deceased mortals proved especially influential. Davis integrated these ideas with Mesmeric notions about magnetic fluids as a means of achieving regular access to the dead. From science came the conviction that gradual progress, such as exemplified in the uniformitarianism of Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830–33) governed the nature of existence. It follows, Davis concluded, that death entails neither radical transfiguration nor bodily resurrection at a Last Judgment. Personal proclivities and appearances are transferred from one realm to the next, where they improve continuously. Everyone is destined for heaven, or what he calls the Summerland, a world much like our own but free of its travails. Sin is merely an absence of virtue: it is not inherited from Eve. The doctrines of total depravity, predestination, and vicarious atonement are replaced by arguments proclaiming humanity's innate innocence and unlimited potential. Eventually, everyone will communicate with the dead, but the spirits are still evolving, Davis warns, and should not necessarily be considered infallible.

Figure 2. Jeremiah Paul, Evangelist Campmeeting. n.d., Billy Graham Center Museum, Wheaton, Illinois.

So compelling is the evidence relating to the integrative function of the imponderable fluids, Davis announces, that the supposed dichotomous relationship between mind and body no longer holds. Instead, the two exist on a continuum, one that encourages the believer to adopt an attitude of moderation towards matters metaphysical rather than view them in terms of antitheses and conflict. Physical well-being affects one's mental constitution, and the latter never entirely transcends its corporeality, even on entering the Summerland. After all, only a spirit possessed of some physicality could rap on walls and move furniture. In order to amplify these tenets, Davis turns to phrenology, the popular cerebral physiology of the day.

The invention of Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828) and Johan Gaspar Spurzheim (1766–1832), phrenology began to filter steadily into America at the end of the Napoleonic wars and became a pervasive part of the culture during the Jacksonian era (Figure 3). It was founded on the premise that the brain could be studied much like any other bodily organ. In pursuing this insight, Gall hoped to dispel the fog of metaphysical and philosophical speculation surrounding the study of the mind. He would do so by replacing inductive reasoning with empirical methods. Evidence was gathered by measuring the heads of different personality types to determine the correlation between character and cranial form. The diversities that appeared, Gall contended, were due to the various faculties, or organs, of the brain. Each was devoted to a specific mode of cogitation and, like a muscle, exercise caused each to expand and modify the configuration of its osseous shelter. When the diverse bumps were compared, an objective reading of an individual's psychological orientation resulted. This theory, now discredited, permitted Victorians to reify their values by projecting them not only on the shape of the skull, but also, by virtue of the brain's influence on the organic constitution (according to the mind/body principles discussed above), on the entire figure.

As a discipline dedicated to the exposition of a transcendental anatomy, phrenology's influence on the visual arts went deeper, and is more specifiable, than any Transcendentalism devised in Concord. It appealed to Spiritualists because it affirmed their contentions about the integration of spirit and matter by illustrating the dependence of the mind, or soul, on the physical and temperamental peculiarities of the individual. And since these survived in an attenuated form in the afterlife, so did the phrenological organization; without such continuities, one would be unrecognizable to those left behind. Spiritualists were further encouraged by phrenology's advocacy of a progressive view of human nature, one also unencumbered by belief in original sin and kindred doctrines. As Spiritualism evolved, it was seen to epitomize much of this thought, and in calling for a reassessment of its importance Page Smith notes that it served as a kind of organizing ‘center’. Without it, he contends, diverse reform movements such as phrenology would not have acquired the feeling of a common purpose that seems to be an essential ingredient in what we might call sustainable reform. In Davis's case, phrenology allowed him to locate the soul's exertions with great precision. When a particular faculty was in use, the energy it emitted could be detected by clairvoyance. While observing a woman in mourning, for instance, he perceived a soft ethereal light playing just above her head, [which signaled] action in the organs of hope and veneration.⁹ These sentiments, however refined, were anchored in the physical structure of the brain, and while traditional metaphysics saw only antipathy between mind and body, Davis found harmony.

Figure 3. Fowler's Phrenological Head, frontispiece from O. S. Fowler, The Practical Phrenologist (Boston: O.S. Fowler, 1869).

Spiritualism Evolves

Spiritualism's determination to make the world anew allied it with a wide range of antebellum crusades intent on perfecting humanity. In addition to phrenology, it embraced abolition, temperance, vegetarianism, and dress reform.¹⁰ Feminism proved to be an especially close partner. The Fox rappings were still echoing through Hydesville when delegates to the first women's rights convention gathered some twenty miles away at Seneca Falls. Like the members of this assembly, Spiritualists pressed for equality in marriage and property rights. They were also instrumental in encouraging women—mediums—to address public assemblies. It is not coincidental, for example, that the first woman to run for the presidency, Victoria Woodhull, was a Spiritualist. And when a trance speaker such as Cora Hatch called on the spirits to provide a topic for one of her lectures, they often obliged by airing their grievances about the oppression of women. She provided the model for Henry James's Verena Tarrant in The Bostonians, and its characterization of a meeting Verena attends as a rendezvous of witches and wizards, mediums and spirit-rappers, and roaring radicals encapsulates much of contemporary sentiment on these matters.¹¹

Inspirational speakers of Hatch's ilk were avidly followed in the 1850s, but the séance emerged as the preferred method of contacting the dead at this time. To create an inviting environment, the sitters at such sessions had to observe certain conditions. Although allowances could be made, eight was the preferred number of attendees; their arrangement around a table was dictated, whenever possible, by the alternation of positive and negative temperaments (usually male and female) in order to enhance the circulation of psychic currents. Women constituted the majority of mediums, and phrenologists identified the best as possessing a nervous-bilious temperament. Shades were closed and lights dimmed. Good ventilation enhanced the electrical content of the air. Songs might be sung at first, but usually a state of anticipatory silence was maintained. The participants indulged in neither the petitionary prayers given by members of the mainline sects nor the bodily gyrations of camp meetings; instead, they cultivated a meditative attitude which, as we shall see, could be readily transferred to the contemplation of art.¹²

As the movement gained momentum, efforts were made to organize believers. As early as 1851, a conference of the faithful assembled in New York, and within two years regular Sunday services were inaugurated. Although some historians have claimed that interest waned toward the end of the decade, all agree that it surged during the Civil War as families yearned to contact those fallen on the battlefield. Perhaps it was the urgency of events that prompted followers to convene their first national gathering in 1864. This took place in Chicago and was followed by similar meetings in Philadelphia in 1865 and Rochester in 1868. Although groups claiming to represent nationwide constituencies arose, they struggled against the deep-seated distrust of organized religion Spiritualism inherited from the antinomian strains in American culture.¹³ The history of Spiritualism is less about the building of institutions and the tensions such developments breed than about the personal initiatives taken by a wide array of individuals scattered over several continents.

Although raps of the kind Charles Rosna employed to contact the Foxes remained a staple at séances, the years following the Rochester rappings witnessed a prodigious growth of techniques intended to invoke the dead. Not content to spend laborious hours tapping out codes, some spirits began to move furniture, ring bells, play instruments, and speak through the medium or use her hand to write messages. Soon the more determined among them commenced materializing portions of their bodies, and floating heads and hands started flitting around the sitters. In 1860, the first full-form materialization arrived at the behest of Leah Fox Fish Underhill, the older sister of Kate and Margaret Fox. Such manifestations became increasingly popular in the 1870s with the introduction of cabinet séances, a practice that entailed the sequestration of the medium in a curtained corner where she coaxed a phantom to appear. The entities who emerged from behind the drapery were usually female (skeptics thought them remarkably like the medium) and frequently given to wearing long, white gowns.

Speculation about these manifestations led to a consensus that they were produced either by psychic emanations from the medium or from the spirit's power to condense the universal ether sufficiently to permit visibility. Both explanations call attention to an assumption central to the understanding of Spiritualism and its influence on art. Traditional angels and devils, one early historian of the movement notes, existed outside the human order. They entered the material realm by rending the fabric of time and space. In contrast to these sudden, miraculous appearances, Spiritualist manifestations emerged gradually out of the environment, a process that usually required a propitious alignment of the temperamental traits of the sitters with the psychic forces operating in the universal ether. Because the latter caused such phenomena, they occurred within the natural order. Ether created the continuum between spirit and matter mentioned above, it constituted a pervasive potential, a spiritually fecundating constant which only required a fertile mind to engender the desired results. Nature, not a remote, inscrutable deity, was responsible for the events that earned Spiritualism its renown.¹⁴ God rarely enters Spiritualist discourses; when he does, the discussion is generally about first causes or sustaining energies, and the notion he intervenes to enforce a covenant with his chosen people finds no support. When searching for purpose in the universe, believers lowered their sights by directing all inquiries to the spirits.

Mention of ether raises the issue of the time-determined vocabulary of Spiritualism. As we will see, ether is one of a number of terms fraught with implications in the nineteenth century that have largely dissipated over the years. It is often necessary to review aspects of the phraseology artists and critics sympathetic to the movement employed in order to follow their reasoning. In discussing gender conventions prevalent during the Gilded Age, Griselda Pollock offers a precept equally applicable to the study of its religious beliefs: If we acknowledge the difference of history, that even ways of thinking and using common words may vary from our present usage, we need to read the past, to examine its inscriptions as if we were deciphering the monuments from a lost civilization whose alphabet we can hardly yet decode.¹⁵ No Baedeker exists for those who embark on this undertaking, and one is best served by remaining as alert as possible to the pitfalls involved in the parsing of certain words and phrases.

If spirits could materialize, couldn't the camera capture them? Thoughts to this effect must have occurred to William Mumler when he began to experiment with spirit photography in 1861. The events that followed his decision to translate this idea into a commercial venture, first in Boston and then in New York, where he moved in 1868 and was tried for fraud and larceny in 1869, stand as one of the most celebrated, or notorious, episodes in the history of Spiritualism, and of late have received considerable scholarly scrutiny. Here we need only touch on the few particulars relevant to this study.

Mumler's example served as an inspiration for photographers across America and Europe who discovered their psychic powers enabled them to achieve similar results. In Mrs. Carter's portrait of Matt Clary, for instance, the subject looks forward, seemingly unaware of the disembodied heads floating around him (Figure. 4). These heads belong to spirits who are drawn to the sitter because he thinks of them fondly. Distances in the celestial sphere are measured by affections, not miles. The potential presence of spirits is constant; they respond to even the slightest sympathetic ripple in the ether. Mumler asked his clients to concentrate on the individual they most wished to see, assuming the magnetic attraction of such remembrances would contribute to a successful photograph. Those so invoked, however, only appeared during the developing process, hence Clary's unawareness of the beings circling him.¹⁶

Figure 4. Mrs. L. Carter, Col. Matt Clary and Attendant Spirits, Gallery of Spirit Art, and Illustrated Quarterly 1 (1883): opposite 88.

Spiritualists considered these images as irrefutable testimony of an afterlife and therefore a rebuke to materialists. The perils of atheism troubled believers from the beginning, but during the 1870s this threat seemed all the more menacing with the advance of Darwinism and the new prominence of what Alan Gauld calls the cock-sure school of Empiricists. For members of the generation that came of age in this decade, Gauld continues, it must indeed have been no trivial affliction to find that the faith which had from childhood guided one's actions and sheltered one from the cold fear of death was in danger of crumbling utterly away. Instead of being the handmaiden of theology, science now seemed intent on usurping all authority in matters of ultimate meaning.¹⁷ In response to the pervasive pessimism these developments engendered, a number of distinguished intellectuals in England established the Society for Psychical Research in 1882. Their course was followed three years later by a similarly-minded group of Americans.

Neither society was a Spiritualist association in the strict sense: they charged themselves with determining the truth about such phenomena as apparitions, telepathy, automatism, haunted houses, and trances, and were prepared to go wherever the evidence led. Devoted Spiritualists often rejected their findings, claiming they were overly scrupulous in assessing data, but their imprimatur gave international prominence to a new crop of mediums, including Eusapia Palladino (although controversy surrounded her manifestations) and Leonora Piper. Indeed, one historian has labeled the years between 1880 and 1920 as The Era of Great Mediums.¹⁸

As noted above, Spiritualists did not view the Civil War as a hiatus; if anything, they redoubled their efforts in response to the fatalities caused by the hostilities. These activities continued unabated in the decades following the conflict. Within twenty years of its advent, then, Spiritualism had become an established, if somewhat diffuse, feature in the religious landscape of America. Utopian communities of the kind created in the antebellum era continued to be founded, and these often included summer camps that welcomed skeptics and believers alike to test the resident mediums. The most renowned of these, Lily Dale, opened in 1879 and continues to this day to be a major tourist attraction in western New York. These were the halcyon days of Spiritualism, but with prominence came scandal and controversy.

A report issued in 1887 by the Seybert Commission, a committee of professors at the University of Pennsylvania tasked with evaluating Spiritualism, created a stir when it dismissed most of the principles the faith professed. Again, believers complained the evidentiary standards set by the investigators made the results a foregone conclusion. While the findings were a source of distress, greater consternation arose a year later when Margaret and Kate Fox admitted they had produced the raps that won them acclaim by snapping their joints. This declaration confirmed the views of the Buffalo physicians and caused great rejoicing among the faith's detractors. In the following year, 1889, the sisters recanted, attributing their lapse to monetary incentives offered by unscrupulous individuals. It is unlikely Spiritualists considered these events quite as consequential as did their adversaries; the girls had turned to alcohol as a means of coping with celebrity and were rather marginal figures by this time. These events were still fresh in everyone's memory when the National Spiritualist Association of Churches was organized in 1893, but it flourished despite the negative publicity surrounding the sisters and emerged in the twentieth century as one of the most influential organizations within the movement.

Spiritualists did not speak with one voice, hence it is difficult to generalize about their outlook at the end of the century; nevertheless, many remained decidedly optimistic, contending theirs was the faith that would supersede all others in the near future. A new era seemed imminent, one in which the spirits would be more palpably present.¹⁹ This scenario was actively promoted by Thomas Gold Appleton (1812–84), an artist and philanthropist whose charities included generous support for the fledgling Boston Museum of Fine Arts. His long interest in psychic phenomena led him to conclude, according to his biographer, that the spirit-world is ever close to the world of matter; and that, with the advance of time, the slight barrier between them may be broken down.²⁰ Whether or not the reader is inclined to agree, there is no avoiding the fact Spiritualism is still with us. It is a prominent component of what Eugene Taylor calls the shadow culture, a collection of New Age beliefs