tion between spirit and body (Did sexual prompting signal
an attraction of true spiritual “affinities”?).
THE FORMS AND PRACTICES OF SPIRITUALISM. Spiritualists
developed their own church services, with congregational
singing of hymns, lectures, and Sunday schools (“lyceums”)
for children. Spiritualists also encouraged the development
of mediums who could conduct séances or give lectures
under the influence of spirits.
The séance was meant to be a ritual communion of the
saints still in the flesh with those who had left it, but the sé-
ance was also meant to be a proof test of the reality of the
afterlife. The earliest Spiritualists formed spirit circles similar
to those that mesmerists already used to investigate “animal
magnetism,” where men and women touched hands around
a table, forming a “magnetic battery.” Mesmeric investiga-
tors had produced trance, clairvoyance, eruptions of tics or
automatisms, sometimes involving writing or speaking, and
the tilting of tables and levitating of people, furniture, and
musical instruments. Now sitters attributed these to discar-
nate spirits rather than to their own manipulations of energy.
Personal messages voiced or written by the medium
from the sitters’ deceased friends and family were always the
main products of a séance, with the sitters conducting their
conversation with the spirits through the medium. But the
medium might also give voice to the spirits of famous people
who corrected or supplemented the ideas for which they had
been known while living. Other phenomena produced at a
séance might include musical sounds, disembodied voices,
floating lights and phosphorescent hands, and the material-
ization of coins, flowers, letters, or birds. Mediums produced
spirit-inspired songs, poetry, paintings, scriptures and narra-
tives of travel to other times or worlds, revelations of hidden
treasures or lucrative business opportunities, chalk messages
on slate boards, spirit images on photographic plates, and
novel plans for inventions and for political or social reforms.
Mediums also reported the ability to read minds, to see the
future, and to escape from tied ropes or locked jail cells. At
séances in the 1870s and 1880s mediums might extrude
from their bodies a pale diaphanous substance eventually
called “ectoplasm,” or they might conduct “dark cabinet ma-
terializations” in which they were locked in a cabinet and
produced spectral forms who walked among the audience.
Mediums also diagnosed disease. Their reputed clair-
voyance allowed them to see into a person’s body to the
source of illness, and, sometimes with assistance of the spirits
of famous physicians, to prescribe treatment. This often in-
cluded the medium’s manipulation of the energy “aura” sur-
rounding the patient’s body through the laying on of hands.
Many mediums made their living through healing, rather
than through conducting séances or giving lectures.
Far more women than men were spirit mediums, and
male mediums often characterized their sensitivity as a femi-
nine power. Spiritualist lecturers, on the other hand, were
often men, although the exceptions—such as self-styled
“trance lecturers” Cora L. V. Scott Richmond, Emma Hard-
inge Britten, Hannah Frances Brown, Achsa White Sprague,
Lizzie Doten, Ada Hoyt Foye, and Amanda Britt Spence—
drew enthusiastic audiences, thrilled to see women on a plat-
form speaking fearlessly and authoritatively.
Spiritualists believed that one feminine aspect of Spiri-
tualism was its focus, not on the abstract intellect, but on
subjective feeling and on the body. They believed that spirits
had begun to affect the biological elevation of the human
race by exerting spiritual influence over the conception and
development of the human embryo. They also believed the
spirits could free women from undesired sex, which literally
degraded their offspring. Women had to be made equal to
men, and each woman had to be given sole authority over
when, and how often, and with whom she would have sex
and children. Some Spiritualists were the first public advo-
cates of women’s reproductive rights, and Spiritualists occu-
pied the most radical wing of the early women’s rights move-
ment.
Spiritualists made effective prophets, perhaps, but not
loyal group members. They attempted to organize, but with
only sporadic successes. Many were leery of setting up a hier-
archy that would judge individual practices or experiences.
On the other hand, they valued communion, association,
and small spirit circles as aids to amplify a medium’s sensitiv-
ity. In addition, groups fortified the camaraderie of believers,
inculcated children in the belief in spirit communion,
trained mediums, and sponsored lecturers. Local associations
licensed mediums, ministers, and lecturers to protect them
from ordinances against fortune telling and “jugglery.” They
also investigated charges of mediumistic fraud or immorality
to protect Spiritualism from abuse by con artists or from em-
barrassment by anti-Spiritualist opponents.
Spiritualists also formed state, regional, and national as-
sociations, with varying success, and they held conventions.
Propaganda for the movement was carried out by word of
mouth, by experiments with séances, by lectures from travel-
ing mediums, and by the publication of pamphlets and
books. Spiritualist newspapers connected far-flung and often
isolated believers into a community of faith. The most influ-
ential were Spiritual Telegraph, New-England Spiritualist,
Herald of Progress, Religio-Philosophical Journal, and Banner
of Light.
The first Spiritualist camp meeting was held in a field
outside Malden, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1866.
Camp meetings became very influential in the movement,
sometimes drawing as many as twenty thousand attendees to
such rural surroundings as Lake Pleasant, Massachusetts, or
Cassadaga, New York (the forerunner of the center for the
Spiritualist movement today at Lily Dale, New York, and the
namesake for another settlement in Florida).
SPIRITUALISM’S PROGRESS THROUGH THE NINETEENTH
CENTURY AND BEYOND. The popularity and influence of
Spiritualism rose and fell. Little solid evidence exists for judg-SPIRITUALISM 8717