Spiritualists accepted the naturalistic idea of geological
and biological change and development, and they extended
the idea to religion, which they believed also evolved and
progressed. Spiritualists supposed that individuals progressed
as well, continuing beyond this life into the afterlife, and
Spiritualism thus expanded the realm of natural law into the
supernatural. They did not view the Fox sisters’ rappings or
other Spiritualistic phenomena as miracles in the sense of a
suspension of natural law, but they saw such phenomena as
the ultimately rational—although not yet understood—
effects of the interaction between this world and the higher
world. The clairvoyant travels of spirit mediums also resem-
bled the travels of naturalist explorers of exotic cultures, such
as, for example, A. J. Davis’s travels while in “the superior
state” to the afterlife, which he envisioned as “The Summer-
land,” a socialist community of enlightened souls. The “sci-
entific” tendencies of Spiritualists led some of their early reli-
gious opponents to refer to them as “rationalists.”
Many personal accounts described conversion to Spiri-
tualism as a joyful liberation from a bleak Calvinist belief
that the soul was powerless to affect its final disposition, or
even liberation from an arid materialist belief that denied life
after death. Other accounts described the adoption of Spiri-
tualism as only a small step from the beliefs of liberal church-
es that already had a tenuous relationship with traditional
Christian doctrine. Many Spiritualists saw themselves as
“come-outers,” that is, as part of a group that had left Chris-
tianity, just as their spiritual forebears had left corrupted
churches. Many other Spiritualists, however, believed that
they were simply finding their way back to the true core of
Christianity and called themselves “Christian Spiritualists.”
Spiritualists were early advocates of “higher criticism” of the
Bible and they were convinced that apocrypha, such as Gnos-
tic texts, contained a true picture of Jesus’s life and teachings.
Spiritualists generally accepted the rococo speculations of
comparative religion as it was practiced by such savants as
Louis Jacolliot, who believed that the biblical story of Christ
was a fiction based on the Hindu myth of Kr:s:n:a.
Traditional churches vigorously opposed Spiritualism,
attributing it to the devil and equating it with previous forms
of necromancy. Traditional churches also opposed Spiritual-
ism because it made revelation deliberately open-ended and
subject only to individual judgment. Spiritualism moved re-
ligion from churches, which were public places subject to the
control of traditional (male) authority, to home parlors,
which were private places subject to domestic (female) senti-
ment, or, as opponents put it, dark places where people were
free of restraint. Opponents also took issue with Spiritualists’
equating the authority of the Bible with that of the messages
and wonders produced at séances and in other religions.
Most of the public and most scientists, with a few excep-
tions, treated Spiritualism as delusion, fraud, or mental dis-
order. Some scientists attributed séance messages to the me-
dium’s ability to read the thoughts of others in the spirit
circle, rather than to the medium’s ability to hear the whis-
perings of spirits. These scientists believed this explanation
was more naturalistic.
In nineteenth-century America, Spiritualism bore the
marks of the progressive wing of Protestantism. Local varie-
ties, however, sometimes drew from other sources, such as
the Spiritualism of New Orleans, which incorporated Ca-
tholicism’s traditions of intercessory saints and sacraments,
as well as voodoo. The Spiritualism practiced in some parts
of the United States incorporated Native American methods
of divination, trance induction, and spirit possession, and
white mediums often discovered that their spirit guides were
Indians. Modern Spiritualism was largely a phenomenon of
white Americans, however, with some notable exceptions,
such as Sojourner Truth and Pascal Beverly Randolph. Nev-
ertheless, Spiritualists believed that spirit contact was at the
heart of all religion, and they believed they found support
for this view in the Bible, in ancient accounts of the Sibylline
oracles and of prophets and druids, and in historical records
of witchcraft and haunting.
Some opponents of Spiritualism argued for replacing
the term Spiritualism with spiritism. As they saw it, Spiritual-
ism was a word with wide application but only appropriate
as a contrast to materialism. They insisted that spiritism was
the proper term for what was commonly called “Spiritual-
ism,” which, according to them, was merely a submission or
unhealthy attachment to spirits. Their argument had little
effect on popular usage, and gained no acceptance by Spiritu-
alists.
Spiritism, however, was used by French seer Hippolyte
Léon Denizard Rivail, writing under the pseudonym Allan
Kardec. Kardec’s publications in the late 1850s and 1860s
influenced many in the French-speaking world to accept the
reality of spirit contact. They also accepted the existence of
reincarnation, whereas American and English Spiritualists, at
least for the first decades of the movement, rejected it.
In general, European Spiritualism was more influenced
than was American Spiritualism by occult traditions, such as
Hermeticism, Rosicrucianism, irregular orders of Freema-
sonry, and ideas from the eastern lands that Europeans had
colonized. Nevertheless, American spirit mediums spread
their variety of Spiritualism to Europe by lecturing and hold-
ing séances there. Maria Trenholm Hayden, for example, vis-
ited England and made an early convert of socialist Robert
Owen. Daniel Dunglas Home traveled throughout Europe
and gave spectacular performances, some of which powerful-
ly affected the czarist court.
Doctrinal controversies arose within the movement:
Did spirits provide tangible assistance or mere comfort? In
trance, was the will erased or exalted? Was Spiritualism’s es-
sence a public platform of progressive reform, or the phe-
nomenal manifestations of the séance? Why were revelations
from trance mediums contradictory? Controversies also arose
on the specifics of the afterlife (Were animals reborn there?
Was retrogression possible after death?) and on the interac-8716 SPIRITUALISM