Spiritualism in Norway Spiritualism in Norway

506 Mehren

Chapter 64 Spiritualism in Norway Spiritualism in Norway

Tonje Maria Mehren

The Formative Years

Spiritualism never became a broad popular movement in Norway. After an ini- tial peak in the late 1880s and the early 1890s, it was not until after the First World War that it received renewed interest. Organised spiritualism did not have favourable conditions in Norway, and the spiritualist societies were few. The spiritualistic doctrine was, however, supported by some influential indi- viduals in the period from the late 1880s up to the Second World War. Ghosts have been part of Norwegian folklore for centuries, and under many different names, such as dauding, gjenganger, and draug. Stories of ghosts who rise from the grave and are vengeful and evil abound in Norse literature from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and have continued their existence in Norwegian folklore. A typical Nordic ghost was utburden, the ghost of a new- born child who had been carried out into the woods and left to die. It was said that it cried and complained, because it had not been given a name, and in some cases it even clung to passers-by. A distinctly Norwegian ghost was sjø- draugen, the ghost of a person who had been lost at sea. Dressed as a fisherman, often headless, he sailed around alone in half a boat and was dangerous to sailors who met him; they would not come home safely. In addition to all the tales and stories connected to nature, there are also plenty of reported instances of Norwegian poltergeist experiences and of haunted houses, where people tell of mysterious knocking sounds and of objects being thrown around. Modern spiritualism gained a foothold in Norway in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Prior to that, however, the former Norwegian lieuten- ant and teacher, Adolph Theodor Boyesen (1823–1916), who in the early 1860s had studied in America, was an early proponent of the spirit communications and religious writings of the Swedish scientist and visionary, Emanuel Sweden borg, throughout Scandinavia. He translated a wide range of Swedenborg’s texts from Latin into all three Scandinavian languages. In Norwegian he pub- lished, inter alia, Om det nye Jerusalem og dets Himmelske Lære (On the New Jerusalem and its Heavenly Doctrine, 1864). After being educated at and ordained as a priest by the Swedenborgian New Church in England in 1871,

Boyesen left for Copenhagen, where he was a preacher for Swedenborgianism in the 1870s. In the late 1870s, he moved on to Sweden and played an important part in establishing assemblies for the Swedenborgian New Church. In the 1880s, it was especially French spiritualism that found its way to Norway. One of the early spokesmen for spiritualism in Norway was Hendrik Storjohann (1840–1915), a language teacher born in Bergen, on the Norwegian west coast. In 1880, he wrote to the American spiritualist journal Banner of Light: ‘Spiritualism is just commencing to give a sign of its existence here in Norway’. He reported about some promising Norwegian mediums, and empha- sised his own efforts: ‘I am doing all I can to make people acquainted with our great course’. Storjohann was a keen traveller, who had become acquainted with spiritualism in Uruguay’s capital, Montevideo, where he had been to séances with a French medium. Having purchased books in Paris and London, Storjohann opened a private library in Kristiania in 1884, where the general public could rent or buy books and journals about spiritualism and related top- ics, such as Theosophy and animal magnetism. Spiritualism had its breakthrough in Norway in the mid-1880s, thanks to one man, the lawyer Bernt Christian Sverdrup Torstenson (1846–1925). When the American medium Henry Slade visited the Norwegian capital, Kristiania, in September 1886, Torstenson took advantage of the public stir and founded the first and only Norwegian spiritualist journal the following month. It was a monthly publication called Morgendæmringen (Dawn). The Danish spiritualist Christian Brinch would later characterise the journal as the first noteworthy spiritualist journal in Scandinavia. Since no equivalent spiritualist forum was available in Denmark, for many years Brinch and other early Danish spiritual- ists contributed articles to the Norwegian journal. Torstenson’s conversion to spiritualism was originally inspired by Allan Kardec’s “spiritism”, and the columns of his journal bore witness to Kardec’s doctrines. Torstenson, who was especially interested in spiritualism as a phil- osophical doctrine, saw spiritualism as a renewal of Christianity. However, the journal’s columns were open to various voices and perspectives, and the keywords of the journal’s subtitle reflect its scope: ‘Psychology, somnambu- lism, animal magnetism (hypnotism), thought reading’. Ample space was given to fringe medicine, e.g., animal magnetism and the Natural Healing Method. Torstenson himself advocated antivivisectionism. He believed that, along with spiritualism, all these different movements would create a bet- ter world. Torstenson translated many of the classical works of spiritualism into Norwegian, both Kardec’s books and others. He also gave public lectures about spiritualistic doctrine, and defended spiritualism against attacks from