The influence of Victorian Spiritualism and Psychical Research in the literature and culture of the long 19th century

Edith Somerville was born on May 2nd 1858 on the island of Corfu, but returned to her family home at Drishane, County Cork, when she was a year old. She studied art in London, Dusseldorf, and Paris, after 1884, and exhibited paintings in Dublin, London and New York. Yet, despite these artistic capabilities and her political activities in campaigning for women’s suffrage as President of the Munster Women’s Franchise League, she is best known as a writer and part of a successful literary partnership with her cousin, Violet Martin, under the joint pen-names of ‘Somerville and Ross’.  As well as being author of the 'Irish R.M.' novels, Edith Somerville also held a life-long interest in the paranormal and was socially well-placed to observe and personally well-equipped to describe the place which the supernatural held in the hearts and minds of the Anglo-Irish social circles to which she belonged.

In Supernatural Entertainments, Simone Natale vividly depicts spiritualism’s rise as a religious and cultural phenomenon and explores its strong connection to the growth of the media entertainment industry in the nineteenth century. He frames the spiritualist movement as part of a new commodity culture that changed how public entertainments were produced and consumed.

Starting with the story of the Fox sisters, considered the first spiritualist mediums in history, Natale follows the trajectory of spiritualism in Great Britain and the United States from its foundation in 1848 to the beginning of the twentieth century. He demonstrates that spiritualist mediums and leaders adopted many of the promotional strategies and spectacular techniques that were being developed for the broader entertainment industry. Spiritualist mediums were indistinguishable from other professional performers, as they had managers and agents, advertised in the press, and used spectacularism to draw audiences.

Addressing the overlap between spiritualism’s explosion and nineteenth-century show business, Natale provides an archaeology of how the supernatural became a powerful force in the media and popular culture of today.

Reviews:

“Approaching Victorian supernaturalism as popular spectacle, Natale makes a compelling argument that nineteenth-century spiritualism made a significant contribution to what would become the dominant religion of the twentieth century: the entertainment industry. Rather than seeing the spiritualists and their energetic followers as gullible or deluded, Natale explores the more fascinating possibility that medium, circle, and audience helped redefine the possibilities of domestic leisure and public performance.”
—Jeffrey Sconce, Northwestern University

“We all know that the supernatural is entertaining. Just turn on your television set or go to the movies. But this entertaining? Supernatural Entertainments is one of the most original books I have read in a long time. Simone Natale’s embrace of the history of technology, celebrity studies, material culture, popular culture, photography, and film studies to plumb the immediate historical background of the modern supernatural also makes it astonishingly capacious and interdisciplinary. Get ready for a ride. Or a show.”
—Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal

"This is an ambitious, overdue book ... Natale depicts a more light-hearted version of Spiritualism than the politically and epistemically fraught social history that other authors have established. Such arguments are detailed, compelling, and themselves enchanting instances of media history."
—Susan Zieger, in Media History

Over the last century and a half, the successes of science in explaining our normally sensed world have led to further attempts to expand science into the realm of the para normal and explain the para-normally sensed world of psychic phenomena. These attempts have helped to establish a greater and growing variety of psychical experiences as well as offer a real challenge to our traditional concepts of religious experience. Within this context, science first came into contact with the paranormal with modern spiritualism, then to parapsychology and finally to paraphysics and a new interest in consciousness and spirituality. At each stage of this evolutionary process, changes in the scientific attitude toward the paranormal coincide with changes in the evolution of attitudes in normal science as well as changes in religious attitude.

Science investigates phenomena in nature that are either experienced or observed by people. However, one special class of phenomena is generally considered unscientific, i.e. unworthy of scientific investigation, by the majority of scientists. Science generally ignores any phenomenon associated with the possibility of an afterlife, which amounts to a scientific bias against this possibility. This shortcoming of science is actually a historical artifact that our present science inherited from the earlier break between science and religion and the separation of human thought into the two realms of MIND and MATTER. The bias is so
strong that science, as it now defines itself, will never accept the reality of the afterlife and associated phenomena no matter how strong or persuasive the evidence is to the contrary. But new research does point directly to a conclusion that the afterlife is real or at least that consciousness in some form survives death; so science must change in order accept this new reality and progress.

Marie Corelli was a powerful voice in the push-back against the Victorian crisis of faith after Darwin. She was a best selling novelist read by everyone from Queen Victoria to scullery maids, and at one time, out sold Dickens. Her anti-materialism message reached a wide audience through her novels. She critiqued everyone from Huxley to Blavatsky, and created her own brand of Christian-spiritualism with a science fiction spin. She was fascinated by the new science and at the same time, fundamentally threatened by it. Her novels do not hold up well as literature, but as cultural statements, they are important.

Richard Maurice Bucke’s concept of a Cosmic Consciousness was a forerunner of science s modern emphasis on studies in consciousness, but it was also an heir to an earlier clash between science, especially physics, and modern spiritualism. His thesis that the human race is evolving a new and higher state of consciousness is far more relevant within the context of modern thought than it was during his own day and the science of paraphysics, especially with the development of the single field theory, is close to confirming his prediction regarding consciousness.

In recent years, the study of spiritualism and occultism has been proposed as a key to understand the political, social and cultural issues of nineteenth-century America. While the position of spiritualism's supporters has been the subject of most accounts, however, sources that critically questioned the spiritualist claims have been usually left aside. In this article, I will rely on this extremely rich body of sources, in order to understand how the debate about spiritualism played an essential role in the shaping of sceptical perspectives in nineteenth-century America. Focusing in particular on anti-spiritualist performances played on the stage by professional magicians and on psychological writings that questioned the phenomena of the spiritualist seances, I will argue that in both contexts the ‘spirit medium’ came to be understood as a performer, and the sitters as spectators. As a critical reading of texts such as film theory pioneer Hugo Münsterberg's 1891 ‘Psychology and Mysticism’ may suggest, the exposure of spiritualist trickery shaped a discourse on perception and sensorial delusion that anticipated in many ways later debates on cinematic spectatorship.

It is generally believed in the scientific community that no changes in the physical concept space occurred during the period of time just before the onset of the Second Scientific Revolution except for Mach’s successful logical argument against the possibility of Newton’s absolute space. This belief is untrue. The concept of space in general and absolute space in particular was undergoing a complete rehabilitation during the era. The proliferation of new wave of aether theories that were initiated by Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory were merely a side issue to the question of absolute space. This scenario fits well the foregone conclusions that Newtonian science had reached its zenith but had begun to stagnate. The stagnation was marked by wild speculations regarding the aether that were being thrown around the scientific community prior to the coming revolution. Therefore, when experiments to detect the aether failed and explanations of the emission spectra of atoms and molecules could not be explained within the Newtonian paradigm, the next logical step was the scientific revolution. At least this is the general story of late nineteenth century physics that is perpetuated by the early winners of the Second Scientific Revolution. This story is necessary to demonstrate the corruptness of the Newtonian paradigm with regard to the new physics and show how the new physics of the twentieth century is superior to the Newtonian paradigm. So this story is grossly incomplete on many issues if not outright untrue.

This is a summary of my PhD dissertation, which examines the relationship between the emergence of spiritualism and the rise of modern show business from the middle nineteenth century to the introduction of cinema.
Please download the full version of my Ph.D. dissertation at the following link: http://dspace-unito.cilea.it/handle/2318/834
(University of Torino)

""On December 28, 1895, German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen disclosed his discovery of X rays to the public. Just a few months later, Guglielmo Marconi successfully demonstrated his wireless system at Salisbury Plain, England. This article traces the relations between the early histories of wireless and X ray technology. It does so by highlighting the role played by psychic research to open the connections between different technologies and knowledges. The disclosure of occult connections between them contributes to locate the cultural reception of wireless around 1900 in a wider cosmology of rays and invisible forces.

French Version
Le 28 Decembre 1895, le physicien allemand Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen révélait au monde sa découverte des rayons X. Quelques mois plus tard, Guglielmo Marconi faisait une démonstration de son système de télégraphie sans-fil en Angleterre, à Salisbury Plain. En examinant la parapsychologie comme un champ propice à la mise en relation entre les technologies et les connaissances les plus hétéroclites, cet article reconstruit les liens entre la télégraphie sans-fil et les rayons X. L'étude de ces liens occultes permet de situer la reception culturelle de la transmission sans-fils autour de 1900 dans une cosmologie des rayons et forces invisibles.""

The history of science has often been viewed from the perspective of separating the logical and reasonable explanations of our world from supernatural, occult and superstitious views of nature. In a very real sense, part of the progress attributed to the rise of science has come as the result of an endeavor to winnow superstition out of the human worldview as well as culturally and philosophically limit all the other qualities, events and phenomena associated with the supernatural and occult. Within this context, there have been lesser skirmishes as well as greater periods of open warfare between science and religion, especially in those cases where various religious practices still propagate superstition and the supernatural. However, there is growing evidence that some aspects of the scientific and religious worldviews are converging and that trend is highly evident within the realm of valid scientific studies of the paranormal.

It is fairly common to refer to our use of the paranormal aspects of consciousness as a sixth sense, but the idea of a sixth sense comes much closer to the truth of our physical situation in the universe-at-large than we might imagine. The universe in which we exist is commonly thought to be a four-dimensional space-time continuum. All five of our normal senses evolved within this common four-dimensional environment. Each individual consciousness interacts with the four-dimensional world via our five normal senses. However, our universe is actually five-dimensional so it would be safe to assume that human evolution has also taken the fifth dimension of the space-time continuum into account and given humans a sixth sense. According to all indications in modern science, this assumption would prove true. Our sixth sense actually represents the manner by which we gather information about the universe in which we exist via the fifth dimension, just as our normal five senses allow us to gather information about our physical environment within the four normal dimensions of space-time. Even when our four-dimensional material bodies die, we still continue to exist, communicate and gather information via this five-dimensional connection with the rest of the universe, and sometimes show ourselves and communicate with the living.

"Previous authors (Braude 2001, Dixon 2001) have highlighted the intersection between radical politics and new modes of spiritual thought in their respective analyses of Spiritualism and women’s rights in nineteenth-century America, and Theosophy and feminism in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England. Whereas a similar dynamic existed in Ireland, the role that paranormal preoccupations played in the Irish literary and political revival is of particular interest. Concepts such as the Victorian crisis of faith (Oppenheim 1985), alternatively constructed as the crisis of evidence (Lamont 2004), may provide a framework within which the history of paranormal phenomena and its investigators can be viewed; however, outside of the Anglo-Saxon culture these concepts may be less useful. The esoteric pursuits of the Celtic revivalists may be viewed as part of parallel preoccupations all over fin de siècle Europe, but what is especially compelling in the Irish case is the way in which early modernist fascinations meshed at so many points with vernacular tradition (Witoszek and Sheeran 1998). While it has been argued (Pearsall 1972) that, in terms of its impact on everyday life in Victorian England, Spiritualism produced nothing but a range of largely unread and unreadable books, no literature of any merit, and no art or architecture, save the type ‘destined for a quick fall into the archives’ (Cottom 1991: 7), in Ireland the situation was quite different: otherworldly concerns intruded into everyday life in a way that had distinct and lasting social, cultural and political consequences. This chapter examines how the paranormal experiences and experiments of writers and artists in nineteenth-century Ireland influenced the culture and politics of the Celtic revival and the foundation of the Irish Republic as a new twentieth-century nation state.

http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472406125"

http://tiny.cc/paranormalcuturez

An analysis of historical trends in science indicates that the study of the paranormal is not only valid from the scientific perspective, but has been an integral and important part of science since the birth of science. This conclusion is based upon a consideration of the Cartesian Paradox of mind and matter, which sets the boundaries between the scientific and non-scientific parts of our perceived world. Study and belief in the paranormal is not now and has never been either a popular fad or a trendy fashion. In fact, recent trends in science clearly demonstrate that a new revolution in science is approaching and that the paranormal will be explained as science changes in the near future.

Public lecture delivered at the Tolson Museum, Huddersfield on October 9th 2014. The talk explored the relationship between Conan Doyle's qualified endorsement of the Cottingley Fairies photographs and the formation of public attitudes regarding religion and technology in the immediate aftermath of WW1.