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Handbook of Spiritualism and Channeling Brill Handbooks on Contemporary Religion Handbook of Spiritualism and Channeling Brill Handbooks on Contemporary Religion Series Editors Carole M. Cusack (University of Sydney) James R. Lewis (University of Tromsø) Editorial Board Olav Hammer (University of Southern Denmark) Charlotte Hardman (University of Durham) Titus Hjelm (University College London) Adam Possamai (University of Western Sydney) Inken Prohl (University of Heidelberg) VOLUME 9 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/bhcr Handbook of Spiritualism and Channeling Edited by Cathy Gutierrez LEIDEN | BOSTON Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Handbook of spiritualism and channeling / edited by Cathy Gutierrez. pages cm. -- (Brill handbooks on contemporary religion, ISSN 1874-6691 ; volume 9) Includes index. ISBN 978-90-04-26377-2 (hardback : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-90-04-26408-3 (e-book) 1. Spiritualism. 2. Channeling (Spiritualism) I. Gutierrez, Cathy, 1967- editor. BF1261.2.H36 2015 133.9--dc23 2014045279 This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1874-6691 isbn 978-90-04-26377-2 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-26408-3 (e-book) Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Contents Introduction 1 Cathy Gutierrez Part 1 Locating Spiritualism 1 Mesmerism and the Psychological Dimension of Mediumship 9 Adam Crabtree 2 Spiritualism and the American Swedenborgian Current 32 Arthur Versluis 3 Dead Reckonings Spirits and Corpses at the Crossroads 48 Cathy Gutierrez 4 Spirit Possession 66 Mary Keller 5 Queering the Séance Bodies, Bondage, and Touching in Victorian Spiritualism 87 Marlene Tromp Part 2 In Conversation 6 Man is a Spirit Here and Now The Two Faces of Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Creation of the Magical Occult Theosophical Spiritualist New Thought Amalgam 119 John Patrick Deveney 7 Pinkie at Play Postcolonialism, Politics, and Performance in Nettie Colburn Maynard’s Was Abraham Lincoln a Spiritualist? 152 Elizabeth Lowry vi Contents 8 Criticising the Dead Spiritualism and the Oneida Community 171 Christa Shusko 9 The Nature of Reality Christian Science and Spiritualism 199 Jeremy Rapport Part 3 New Directions 10 Reincarnation The Path to Progress 221 Lynn L. Sharp 11 Crossing Over Allan Kardec and the Transnationalisation of Modern Spiritualism 248 John Warne Monroe 12 Spiritism in Brazil From Religious to Therapeutic Practice 275 Waleska de Araújo Aureliano and Vânia Zikán Cardoso 13 Between Two Worlds Transformations of Spiritualism in Contemporary Lily Dale 294 Darryl V. Caterine Part 4 Channeling 14 “The Medium is the Message in the Spacious Present” Channeling, Television, and the New Age 319 Hugh Urban 15 Channeling—The Cinderella of the New Age? A Course in Miracles, the Seth Texts, and Definition in New Age Spiritualities 340 Ruth Bradby Contents vii 16 Individual Power, Cultural Constraints Israeli Channeling in Global Context 362 Adam Klin-Oron 17 Channeling Extraterrestrials Theosophical Discourse in the Space Age 390 Christopher Partridge Part 5 The Next Move 18 Secret Lives of the Superpowers The Remote Viewing Literature and the Imaginal 421 Jeffrey Kripal 19 Psychics, Skeptics, and Popular Culture 444 Douglas E. Cowan 20 The Occultists and the Spaceman The Metamorphosis of Dorothy Martin 464 Michael Barkun 21 Historical Imagination and Channeled Theology Or, Learning the Law of Attraction 480 Catherine L. Albanese Index 503 Introduction Cathy Gutierrez Spirit possession ranks, along with myth-making and mysticism, as one of the truly global religious phenomena. Through time and across space, all cultures have manifested some form of spirit possession, whether ritualised and central to religious authority, like indigenous shamans or the Pythia of Greece, or understood as an intrusion of chaos into religious order, like the travails of Salem or even the current outbreak of interest in zombies. An external, super- natural force occupying a living, material body can be an omen or a curse, a prophecy or a sign of end times. The fate of the possessed—and the role of possession—is always in the hands of its interpreters, who bring culturally- crafted conditions and conceptions to the moment and determine whether the event is demonic, divine, or somewhere in between. The contributors to this volume have come together to examine two related models of interaction with spirits in the modern world. Spiritualism, the move- ment that is generally dated to 1848 with the Fox sisters, inaugurated wide- spread attempts to contact the dead through the use of mediums. Modeled on the new technology of telegraphy, mediums served as conduits between this world and the next, where trance lecturers expounded on politics and philoso- phy while home séances contacted the dead for the bereaved. In the course of these communications, the living learned the landscape of heaven and that it was the destination for all of humankind. Indebted to the Neo-Platonic ladder of progress and predicated on Emanuel Swedenborg’s visions of a lively and active heaven, Spiritualists understood death to be the next step on a journey of never-ending progress. Born in California in the 1970s, channeling relied on new technologies of television and talk shows to become an international New Age phenomenon. Much as with Spiritualist mediums, channelers initially came from the ranks of middle-class white women who would enter some alternative state and let spirits speak through them. Unlike those in Spiritualism, these spirits were not familiar ones, famous dead people or lost loved ones, but rather ancient wise men from mythical places like Atlantis or Lemuria. Speaking with the author- ity of tens of thousands of years of knowledge, these channeled spirits held forth on all matters of theology and history. As time went on, the beings chan- neled by the living expanded to include aliens, elemental spirits, and even nature itself. While the basic structures of Spiritualism and channeling share remarkable family resemblances with religious communication transhistorically and © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004264083_002 <UN> 2 Gutierrez cross-culturally, they also bear the markers of their specific cultural circum- stances: both relied on and embraced technology, both existed in a new world of international communication, and both shaped and reacted to the new dis- courses of psychology. They also share an ethos that is extra-denominational, a multicultural and progressive spirit that is inclusive of all humanity but still not entirely exempt from the pitfalls of stereotyping, racism, and colonialism. But as Spiritualism and channeling do not deal with the deity per se but rather with wise intermediaries, they also deny that spiritual knowledge or salvation is reserved for the few. Many scholars have noted that spirit possession allows the marginalised of a society a voice in important religious and political matters that would other- wise be denied. Bypassing the need for education or credentials and often in direct contradiction to priestly authority, women and children are often the vessels for spirit contact and the recipients of cultural currency for it. This observation holds true for Spiritualism, where the majority of mediums were women, many of them quite young. In addition to discoursing publicly on such serious matters as Abolition and women’s rights, mediums also had a higher degree of autonomy than many women in the nineteenth century. They usu- ally made a generally poor but at least independent living, travelled, and inter- acted with social classes that would often have been out of their normal reach. Channeling began among housewives. There were far fewer restrictions on women in the 1970s and 1980s than there had been on their Spiritualist sisters, and the possibilities for fame and fortune were also much higher: these women wrote bestsellers and appeared on television with some regularity. Those claiming direct contact with some sort of spiritual authority that bypasses the establishment are always in danger of censure. The nineteenth century saw a new form of condemnation, often with the power of the state behind it—nascent psychology and the medicalisation of consciousness. The infrastructure of Spiritualism was predicated on the work of Franz Anton Mesmer, a medical doctor who was seeking a single-cause cure for illness. In the course of conducting treatments with what Mesmer called ‘animal magnet- ism’, a student of his discovered that his patients would often fall into alternate states of consciousness. Erroneously and eponymously called ‘Mesmerism’, the ability to induce a trance state in another was the necessary backdrop to early Spiritualism, where the trance state was understood as the condition for allow- ing spirits to use the medium as a portal to this world. Ghosts are also good to think with, and the appearance of the dead speaks volumes about a culture’s fears, boundaries, and bigotries. Mediums, particu- larly those who produced material goods or people from heaven, were often tested, prodded, and bound to protect against trickery, with effects that <UN> Introduction 3 frequently fell outside of the established bounds of Victorian ladyhood. The presence of spirits from other cultures and races both inscribes their presence in heaven and reinscribes painful stereotypes.
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