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STUART W. SMITHERS (1987)
SPIRITUALISM is a widespread and generally unorga-
nized movement that arose in the United States at the end
of the 1840s, was influential through the nineteenth century
in the United States and elsewhere, and persists at the begin-
ning of the twenty-first century. At its core is the belief that
the living can conduct conversations with spirits of the de-
ceased through a sensitive instrument (either a mechanical
or electronic device) or a human medium.
Spiritualism’s advent was occasioned by two events. The
first was the publication of Andrew Jackson Davis’s visionary
cosmology and universal history, The Principles of Nature,
Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind, in 1847.
The second was the production of audible rapping that was
interpreted as coded responses of spirits to questions posed
by two young sisters, Margaret and Kate Fox. Others soon
reproduced the sounds during “spirit circles” or séances
around the country. Spiritualists later annually commemo-
rated the rappings as having begun on March 25, 1848.
Practitioners said Spiritualism was precipitated when
spirits, including that of electrical experimenter Benjamin
Franklin, established a practical “spiritual telegraph” be-
tween this world and the spirit world. Those who were not
Spiritualists looked elsewhere for the sources of the move-
ment, crediting demons, mass delusion, human folly, fraud,
or simply to the influence of social and religious trends in
the larger culture.
SPIRITUALISM’S THEORY AND CULTURAL BACKGROUND.
The “harmonial philosophy” of Davis and his sympathizers
envisioned a harmonization of past, present, and future; of
matter and spirit; of reason and intuition; of men and
women; and of individuals and society. It provided an osten-
sibly rationalist stock onto which was grafted a variety of ex-
otic psychic phenomena, such as mesmeric trance and the
Fox sisters’ rappings. The result was “Modern Spiritualism,”
as it was called, which was optimistic about the destiny of
each individual after death and of human society in the long
run, and egalitarian insofar as it accepted the revelations of
women, children, and others who lacked education or cre-
dentials.
Spiritualism was part of the larger culture’s effort to rec-
oncile science and religion. In the United States and Europe
the intersection of matter and spirit had been explored in ex-
periments with mesmerism. Influential books included the
1845 translation of Justinus Kerner’s case study of a som-
nambulist, The Seeress of Prevorst, and the 1855 translation
of Louis Alphonse Cahagnet’s description of conversations
with entranced clairvoyants, The Celestial Telegraph. The
term Spiritualism came from mesmerism and referred to the
concept of an exalted expanse opened to clairvoyants travel-
ing without the body to realms where spirits could commu-
nicate secrets to them.The disappearance or surrender of one’s identity to an-
other was a theme of the seventeenth-century mystical writ-
ings of Madame Guyon and Francois Fénelon, who empha-
sized the individual’s surrender of the will to divine love.
These writings were popular among American antebellum
Protestant intellectuals. The Romantic movement fostered
a similar surrender of the self, or hypersensitivity to spiritual
or psychic “impressions.” Goethe had depicted such sensitiv-
ity in his novels The Sorrows of Young Werther (1744) and
Elective Affinities (1809), and it was exemplified in Bohe-
mian wanderlust, the desire to follow personal “monitions”
rather than conventional expectations. The abandonment of
the self to holy enthusiasm and impulse was also encouraged
in the religious revivals of the time. The Gothicism of the
period resulted in the enormous popularity of Catherine
Crowe’s 1848 collection of stories about uncanny phenome-
na, The Night-Side of Nature.The concern with reconciling science and religion, as
well as matter and spirit, coincided with a popular interest
in the newly translated writings of Swedish engineer and vi-
sionary Emanuel Swedenborg, who had conversations with
spirits about their lives in other worlds that intersected with
this one. Transcendentalists urged a spiritualization of the
natural world, and Perfectionists suggested that the earthly
could be reformed into, or revealed to be, the heavenly, sti-
mulating seekers to set up utopian communities founded on
the ideas of French socialist Charles Fourier. Also influential
in the birth of Spiritualism was an efflorescence of trance vi-
sions among Shakers during the late 1830s and 1840s, which
presaged many of the features of Spiritualism.Spiritualism promoted the notion of surrendering the
will to the inspiration of spirits, but it simultaneously elevat-
ed the importance of the individual’s perception and judg-
ment. It assented to testing the reality of the spirits, ranking
empirical experience over traditional authority. It made a
“scientific” appeal to evidence available to anyone. It also
adopted the individualism and anticlericalism of the Protes-
tant dissenting tradition, evident in the Pietistic origins of
the religious groups—such as the Universalists, the Unitari-
ans, and Quakers—among whose members Spiritualism
flourished. Spiritualism, by and large, was antiauthoritarian
and Spiritualists valued the liberty of individual conscience.
The movement was associated with progressive politics and
social theory, and was most popular in the northern United
States. Southerners often saw spiritualism as one strand of
a twisted skein of Yankee fanaticism that also included such
causes as utopian socialism, women’s rights, and the aboli-
tion of slavery.SPIRITUALISM 8715