It isn't hard to date (arbitrarily) the "birth" (what a metaphor) of Modern Spiritualism. You can pick the Fox Sisters chatting with Mr. Splitfoot if you like, or Cahagnet's somnabules, maybe. You could -- and I think I might -- pick Joseph Smith's revelations. Or the Shakers, perhaps. In any case, there are definitely markers that can be argued for, as a starting place or point for the movement.
The end is another matter.
Plenty of people these days are self-identified practicing Spiritualists -- of widely differing practices, perhaps -- and in that sense the movement isn't dead: it lives.
But it seems to me that the innovative period of the movement is over: no new practices, requiring the attention of a skeptical science, are being developed. Self-identified membership is probably on the decline. So when did innovation cease?
(Way before Geller. His physical force mediumship was belated, like watching someone re-enact nineteenth-century minstrelry: both sad and somehow incorrect...)
I may have stumbled on to the answer earlier this week, in the form of the Urantia phenomenon.
It's early days yet, but having just finished Larry Mullins' (alternatively over-precise and wildly broad-brush) A History of the Urantia Papers, and having (I admit it) grinned my way through the first hundred pages of The Urantia Book, it appears that the epistemological dilemma that was Modern Spiritualism reached its end-point, or perhaps end-game, in the Urantia phenomenon. A thousand pages of elaborately engineered cosmogony, the pure non-referential play of language, and a new testament of Jesus, all delivered, in huge pre-manufactured chunks, by a mechanism that is not described and apparently not describable, except insofar as the witnesses to those deliveries can be very specific about how those deliveries did not occur (and that list would be, at a stylized level, every mechanism Modern Spiritualism innovated for just such deliveries).
In -- what does one call it? -- the Urantia movement, the central questions of epistemic warrant (the basis of the source's claim to knowledge, the auditor's basis for judging the material's source, and accuracy) are as far as I can tell evaded entirely. It is not possible to evaluate the discourse itself, except by means of faith, reducing free will (of which much is made) to a stark binary opposition: accept or reject. The beautiful and destructive pluralism of Modern Spiritualism, finally, reduced to a question of compliance.
(And not surprisingly, instantaneous splitting amongst the Followers: the revelation-to-split cycle time of the Urantia movement is the shortest in the historical record, I believe.)
It's really where the epistemological problems of spiritualism have to end: with a completely opaque relevation, delivered "all at once", by a source that abandons the sink once the message is delivered.
The theory of language on which the Book of Urantia is premised is a pre-structural model, as one would expect, given where and amongst whom it appeared. And the Book makes reality a problem of language (as indeed it is). The revelation would be more obviously correct, we're told, were it not for the fact that the language in which the revelation was cast -- American English -- was crude and inexplicative, as compared to the native language of the revelation's source, which we're told consists of billions of concept-signs that make the complexities of the universal reality much more clear and comprehensible. The rickety-ness of English also explains (and boy am I jealous of this bit of cleverness) why the Book of Urantia's extraplanetary authors made unacknowledged use of hundreds of other people's purely human and time-bound texts. The available texts formed a sort of alternative "concept-sign" pool from which felicitous explanations could be drawn (that is so bold, isn't it?) for bringing the light to the benighted.
(And make no mistake -- there is an undertone of the colonial in the text. Forget the white man's burden; the disembodied planetary spirits have a colonial burden to bear that would make Cecil Rhodes weak-kneed and weepy.)
Anyway, linguistics folks will recognize the (quaint, isn't it?) nineteenth-century model of language-as-consciously-used-tool: we use it, and it never uses us, itself, or anything else. And translation -- that's a mapping exercise, and (as everybody knew back then), the more tokens in the language, the more precise the language is at describing a reality that exists, outside the speech act referencing it. Ergo, mapping from a (we presume perfectly formed) intergalactic language (more than one billion concept-symbols! Concept pictures! Idea patterns!) into a local language must needs be an exercise in crude oversimplification, distortion and inexactitude. Problem grokking? Blame your language.
But don't take my word for any of this. Here are some relevant snippets and the entire revelation is online.
(Oh, for the student of organizational design, who could explain to us how the amazingly corporate organization of the universe in the Urantia book does, or does not, relate to large-scale organizational theory of the early 20th century....)
However accurate the science of the Urantia book may be (and a lot of believers have spent a lot of time demonstrating how accurate that is, though I'm still stuck on reference-able locales existing outside space-time....), the model of language we encounter in the Urantia Book has been pretty much eclipsed in toto by modern linguistics. It is very difficult to argue, any more, that language merely clothes the thought that exists (in what form, pray tell?) fully realized prior to its embodiment in signs.
And one doesn't need to have consumed too much Derrida Cola to understand this -- the complex and often dysfunctional relationship between the sign, the signified and the referent is pretty much there, in de Saussure, whose work predated the beginnings of the Urantia revelation, but isn't likely to be have been on the reading list of anyone living in Chicago circa 1920.
All of this to say something obvious, but I think important. However innovative the epistemological machinery of the Urantia Book -- and full marks for it! -- the Book falls into the same hole that swallowed some of those who came before it: no one can possibly, at any given time, know everything there is to know about every discipline that bears on the space in which one wants to conjure -- and yet one must conjure with that dangerously time-bound knowledge.
Joseph Smith depended on the Egyptian hieroglyphics remaining untranslated; Emma depended on the luminiferous ether remaining a scientific mainstay; the authors of the Urantia Book depended on a now-debunked model of language itself, and at nearly the very moment when thick-headed language-impaired benighted savages elsewhere on the planet were busy discovering that language didn't work that way. Not at all.
Now it may be that the entirety of modern linguistic theory is a cosmic dead-end, and the revelators of the Urantia Book could tell us that, were it not for the fact that they aren't talking to us any more. Meanwhile, if there are any budding deconstructionists (speaking of moribund faiths) out there looking for a fertile, fertile ground for the exploration of the pure play of a language blissfully free of referents, and in most cases signifieds, the Urantia Book is for you. Jouissance, this way....
I think I just convinced myself: Modern Spiritualism is book-ended by the Book of Mormon and the Urantia Book. Two acts of translation of a divine text into a human one. Two new narratives of the son of a tripartite deity borrowed from the dominant ideology. The first depended on the continuing illegibility of a particular language (see that in The Pearl of Great Price, just after page 30 in this edition), and the last depended on a model of language itself that, apparently unbeknownst to the Universal overlords, was coming undone at that very moment.
Both undone, in the end, by language -- which is the ultimate occult instrument, following as it does the beastly dictum that do-what-it-wilt shall be, if not the whole of its law, at least a forever-ineradicable part of that law.
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