Chasing Down Emma

Straws, Making a Straw Man

2012-01-26T10:31:00.000-08:00

William, the Cipher.

Last week's discovery that William was involved in some legacy-related dispute with his "family" circa 1870-71 has, alas, been completely ineffective as a way of opening up his life to inspection. As I can find no coverage of Emma's public lectures in London during the period, I can find no coverage of those lectures being disturbed, as Emma claims they were, by William's family.

And while my reconstruction of Emma's forebears seems to be holding up, I'm increasingly uncertain about my identification of William's family; it's that damned "Daniel and Jane" on the 1870 marriage certificate, eating a hole in my confidence.

I'm reminded of the mantra of the protagonist in Pi -- when in doubt, restate your assumptions.

But the problem with William isn't a decryption problem -- he's not a cipher, for which we need a key. It's more fundamental than that. With William, we don't have enough ciphertext to even think about decryption. We don't even have enough trace material to be sure there is a key -- he could be, like some of the Zodiac ciphers may be -- uncrackable because there is, actually, no plaintext, no key that can yield sense. William, I have to keep reminding myself, may not even be William.

Here's what I think I know about William's early life, and its poverty-stricken.

Born in London in 1826 -- plenty of evidence for that. Census reports, baptismal records, statements he made during his own life.
In the 1841 census, living with father Daniel (laborer, b. 1791 or so), Daniel's wife Elizabeth (not Jane, mainden name probably Mimpress, born 1791 or so), Sarah Britten (b. 1831), Mary Ann Britten (b. 1831), and (double-take) Sarah Britten (b. 1839), all in St. Leonards, Shoreditch (a mile or so from Emma's birthplace)
Absent from Daniel's household in the 1851 census (Daniel is at that time a journeyman carver and gilder, the family is living in Goldsmiths Terrace, and Mary Ann has had a daughter, Mary Ann).
Arrives in the US on Sept 28, 1858, on the City of Washington, cabin class, denoted "gentleman"
almost immediately thereafter, provides aid and assistance to Cora Hatch in a Connecticut hotel (according to Hatch's promoters, who seem to be anti-Emma)
(If William's mother was Jane Britten, she died in the first calendar quarter of 1844, and her death was registered in Camberwell)

Bugger all. And I'm mindful that other people have identified a different William Britten as Emma's husband, which doesn't reconcile to the marriage record -- but there's no real reason to assume that the marriage record (the origin of 'documentation' on Emma's faux widowhood) is accurate with respect to William.

It's this...undecidability that makes me grasp at straws like this one:

A question of probabilities, and the probability that this is our William is low. Vanishingly small, really.

Yet I have to account, in his life, for an apparent 17-year gap in the public records between the 1841 UK census, and his arrival in the US in 1858, and then another twelve-year gap until 1870, when Emma marries him and makes his life a matter of public record thereafter.

And the public records databases are just not cooperating. Every day, tens of thousands of pages of historical information are pouring into these sources, and nothing pertaining to William under any variation of his name we know he used during his later life. I can track Mrs. Foye, week by week for a decade, and I can't get a single glimpse of William for decades. That is in itself significant, but I don't know what absence means. We never do, as Lacan reminds us.

Ebenezer, John, Ebenezer: Light On Emma's Patrimony

2012-01-23T18:10:00.000-08:00

Thanks to a Minehead resident, booster and historian (thanks so much, Daphne, for your digging), I am in possession of the last will and testament of Ebenezer Floyd's grandfather, Ebenezer. It makes the link I was hoping it would make: to Ebenezer the elder's son, John (who received one guinea in the distribution of Ebenezer the elder's estate), whom I had tagged as the likely father of Ebenezer-father-of-Emma.

It also helps cement the notion that the John Floyd living close to the Ebenezer Floyd family in Bristol in the 1830s was Ebenezer's brother John, named for their father -- as Ebenezer was for his grandfather.

John Floyd the elder -- our Ebenezer's father -- parlayed the guinea from his father into a thriving merchant business (complete with 'ship-owning' which I suspect means owning-cargo rather than owning-vessell) and the appellation "gentleman" by the time Ebenezer was in his teens. Ebenezer's grandfather rode down the Minehead marine economy, his father was a self-made petit bourgeois, and Ebenezer a derascinated (for sure) labor radical (I think) -- I don't know how much neater things could get, in terms of synecdoche -- Emma's patrimony was, truly, the pattern of 100 years of history in miniature.

A Place of Pilgrimage: Emma's Newton, Massachusetts Residence

2012-01-23T17:39:00.001-08:00

A bright light on a dark little corner, wherein is found an item of great significance.

As many readers will know, I am being led to a somewhat dim view of Ann Sophia, Emma's mother, by a variety of factors: circumstantial evidence, interpretation that would not stand a strong light.

And there are -- I don't know -- a thousand nagging details about Emma's life that I cannot reconcile, that lead me to be always hopeful that there will be new discoveries, if I just wait a bit longer. Today is one of those days.

One of the things that has nagged at me is a snippet -- which I can't locate, but which I did post on the blog (update: it was E.V. Wilson, and you can read it here) -- in which Emma receives a visitor in the mid-1870s, and gives him an earful about two topics: her marriage in an Episcopal church (which the BofL shed some light on a few days ago), and the difficulty of earning her living. She remarks, this visitor tells us, that her husband WIlliam has to work the land (what land, where, she does not say) in order for them to make ends meet, and she's not ashamed of that fact.

I had marked this down as positioning, because in the first half of the 1870s, the Brittens were living in the Boston area -- at 155 West Brookline Street, I assumed, because that is where their galvanic medical practice was located.

When you assume, you make an.....

Turns out that, when Emma and WIlliam brought Ann Sophia back to the US in late 1871 or early 1872 (still can't find those passenger records), they -- Emma and Ann that is -- bought property (undeveloped property, by the sound of it) in Newton, Massachusetts, some time after May of 1871 and, further, that Emma and William had a house built on that property, at 455 Winchester Street. When, in 2008, the city of Newton was documenting their historic properties, they documented what they called "the Floyd House," in some detail (see Section 7, pages 5 and 6), mentioning our Emma, Ann (F not S -- orthography or Anne's fibbing), and William by name but without understanding who they were talking of, and noting that the house is still standing, in substantially the form in which it was, originally, when built by Emma and William.

(Emma's is the house on the left -- this from Google Streetview)

Yes, it appears to be true: one of Emma's houses remains standing to this day, in the form in which she lived in it.That's more than we can say for any of her London residences, or her Manchester residences (although "Rose Cross" in Delanco, NJ may be in its original form -- I have not checked).

A tiny detail, but an immense find, particularly for those of us who have had the desire to visit those places Emma lived, and find them as she found them.

View Larger Map

The office of The Western Star in Bromfield Street (A), WIlliam and Emma's galvanic medical practice on Brookline Street (B) and their home in Newton (C).

More to look into -- like the profit they made on the house, or the fact that Anne was apparently involved in the sale of the property in 1875, when she was clearly in England with Margaret and Gilbert Wilkinson (so how'd they effect the transfer? and where are the records? And are there signatures or other notations on them?). I may owe Anne an apology; it looks like Emma and William leveraged her net worth...

Guy Fawkes and Agents of Reason

2012-01-19T06:35:00.000-08:00

In case I haven't said it before (a dozen times), I'll say it again: the reason-belief dichotomy is a false one. Like it or not, Derrida, Foucault and others were right: there is no "outside language," no "outside ideology," no "outside belief" where one could stand and perceive, free from the influences of one's own belief system. The social construction of reality is, at root, an ideological contest among parasciences, vying for -- among other things -- a limited number of positions in the ideological ecosystem, where the positions are already laid out, and labeled. Some parascience gets to dominate, some get privileged niches, and some are "debunked," or "discarded" as we like to say (about the occult, and other things) -- meaning "consigned to the predefined niche marked 'worthless humbug'". This contending-and-sorting process says nothing about the truth of any of the parasciences contending and being sorted (by whom or what, one asks?); it speaks only to the collective ability of the agents of any parascience to prevail in more-or-less open rhetorical combat. Said another way (by someone far smarter than me), "I am more interested in tracing how certain memes and beliefs arose and spread, than I am in proving whether they are true or not." (a) It's all memetic and (b) meme-tracking is as close as we can get to "outside ideology".

Several people wrote me gentle notes in the past week, based on a misunderstanding of my use of the term "agent of reason." What I mean by that term (and I should have said it, but who reads Althusser these days?) is "agent of the ideological state apparatus," or more specifically "agent of science". Althusser listed the ISAs he thought were important in his essay "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" (nice...not), and those included: religion, education, family, politics, unions, the media and entertainment (in its broadest sense). He did not include science, because when all was said and done he needed access to that place-outside, and in the Soviet Communist scheme of things, that was the role of science (along with historiography I would argue). That was the view, from the French Communist so-damaged-I-killed-my-wife segment of philosophy in the 1970s, anyway.

Today, we know better: science is the cold, ka-thumping heart of the ideological state apparatus, and the dominant belief system (see here, here, here and here for a few obvious examples), interpellating us and structuring our interactions with ourselves, others and the world.

Like the carbon dating cartoon I linked to above, science has -- since the late 1700s -- been remarkably successful at occupying and defending the position in the ideological ecosystem marked "truth". Occupy that position in the ideological landscape, and every other contender is left with -- at best -- a niched position in the large space on the ideological board marked 'land of error.' The tactics of the agents of science were, and are, manifold, and include -- as Emma and others whined in the 1870s and 1880s -- co-opting any competitive material that seemed worth co-opting (suggestion, from mesmerism), maintaining a multi-tiered model of truth (in which psychology, for example, strives but always fails to rise to the level of physics -- talk about recapitulating economics), and shifting the terms of the debate from one that was outcome-oriented ("and then you go to heaven") to one that was methodological; if the outcome is unknown, then the guarantor of truth must be devotion to a particular method of arriving at an unknown outcome.

Not to mention the long and flourishing tradition of ridicule, invidious discrimination and invective as part of the scientific method: see Huxley, and then see Dawkins.

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.

The greatest trick science ever pulled was convincing the world that the ideological wars were over, that the twins "reason and science" so prominently ensconced on Herr Dawkins' foundation's pediment were not the latest gods, but the death of gods. To create a divide between the truth of science-and-reason (which requires no belief, only -- as Charles Fort so accurately observed -- acceptance), and the error of belief.

Reflect for a moment on Dawkins' foundation's mission statement:

The mission of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science is to support scientific education, critical thinking and evidence-based understanding of the natural world in the quest to overcome religious fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and suffering.

Heavens. That was Modern Spiritualism's mission statement -- at least as publicly promoted by EHB -- in 1860.

Yes. Just so. And how the worm turns. Huxley's mission statement was, at some level: "nature red in tooth and claw," and the marketplace, too. And it was just that hands-off-ish "can't mess with the machinery" attitude (really, stemming from Bentham, who believed that as well, but believed one could ameliorate the mangling effects of the machinery) that created a space in which Modern Spiritualism could form out of a generally reformist substrate and contend -- completely unsuccessfully -- with science for the dominant position in the ideological ecosystem.

All of this nonsense is a propos of something I read this morning, at the end of a long chain of Webwalking, in an unlikely place:

Guy Fawkes was no anarchist. The purpose of the Gunpowder Plot was to bring the Roman Catholic church back into control of the English monarchy. That would have been a step backwards into rigid and brutally authoritarian control of every element of English society. Guy Fawkes is more akin to today’s false religionists of fundamentalism who today work to make the United States into a mock-christian theocracy. Fawkes was a simple terrorist, bent on creating as much chaos as possible without rational purpose or valued outcome

A penny for the old Guy.

I happen to agree with most of this ideologist's assertions ("a step backwards," "false religionists of fundamentalism," "mock-christian theocracy") but I don't see them as facts: I see them as ideology, my ideology. I identify, even applaud, but I'm fooling myself if I think any of those assertions rise to the status of fact. Actually, if I make that leap (a leap of faith), I actually disadvantage myself, in the struggle against mock christian theocracy in America, because the adversary is unimpaired by the rhetoric.

That's one of the problems of preaching only to the converted.

And I disagree, in the extreme, with the writer's conclusion about Fawkes. He or she is tangled up in his or her (it's not clear which) rhetoric. If Fawkes was like them, and they suck, then Fawkes must also suck..

Not my period, and I don't have time to find the material that would demonstrate (because you know it's out there) that Fawkes had a plan, a rationale, a chain of polymerase-like reasoning that, however gappy and dysfunctional, led him to -- as he saw it -- the inescapable, compelling conclusion that blowing up Parliament would produce the desired outcome. Fawkes was an agent of belief, but no doubt saw himself as an agent of reason -- as we all are, and as we all do.

As did the Cato Street conspirators, and John Bellingham. However gappy and dysfunctional, they reasoned their way to violence. Saying "they were all crazy" tells us nothing useful, about anything. It's a gesture that closes off investigation of how it worked. It is the gesture of the agent of science, the agent of reason.

John Bellingham, Spenser Perceval, John Thomas Perceval, the Port Glasgow Miracles (which don't seem to warrant a Wikipedia entry), Modern Spiritualism.

"In the year 1830 I was unfortunately deprived of the use of reason."

A short walk from a "deranged" assassin and a dead Prime Minister to a belief in spirit communion, and its belief, belief, belief all the way along.

How does belief -- in science, in the survival of personality after death, in the viability and value of historiography -- work?

April 29, 1871: Emma, William and the Marriage

2012-01-18T07:30:00.000-08:00

I love EHB as a letter-writer. Her power -- and her tendency to over-reach and over-spin -- come out so beautifully in her letters.

"the civil contract was no subject of respect or necessity for me"... "voluntary exile"... "openly assailed by my husband's family in my Sunday meetings"...Something interesting underneath all this.

She further defends and clarifies her position in the July 29, 1871 issue of the BofL, saying in part: "I insist upon it, that in the present youthful and unpopular aspect of Spiritualism, we can none of us, who are Spiritualists, commit a single act against which society chooses to protest, which the said society will not visit upon every hapless individual who belongs to Spiritualism, and as the public speakers are the most easily assailed, so have they the heaviest brunt of this warfare to endure."

Yet Another Biographical Summary: BofL, December 18, 1869

2012-01-18T06:17:00.000-08:00

Yet another (auto)biographical summary of EHB, placed in the BofL for December 18, 1869 by Charles Edwards Lester, attendant on the publication of MAS. This one has some interesting bits in it:

"My life had been, at first, a terrible tragedy. Its sad and painful details cannot come before the world; hence the foundation stones being hid from sight, the real effects will be ever incomprehensible." [That's my life with Emma, in a nutshell]
"After writing for the English press for a while, I went to America; I was twenty years old....I was born on the 2nd of May, 1833." [There's the ten-year subtraction, plain and in print]
"Married at fifteen to a gentleman far above myself in rank." [Wow. Married in 1838, or 1848, depending on whether we're following the real chonology, or Emma's -10 chronology. Either in Bristol, or in London. Shameless, but I am going to have to look again.]
"For some years I was a member of 'The Adelphi Company,' London. Here, in order to eke out a very slender salary, I became organist and choir leader at a fashionable chapel, wrote for several magazines, and [wrote] some of the plats and farces in which I myself appeared. I composed music under the name of Ernest Reinhold, wrote sermons for preachers, and speeches for members of Parliament. I obtained several prizes for my Glees, amongst which two are still celebrated, the one written for the Anchor Society in Bristol, called 'They rest not here'; the other written for the London Glee Club, called 'The days of Robin Hood.' [My word -- rejoinders to this set of claims would take pages, but there's tantalizing material here.]
The best known of my writings is a series called 'Tales of the Stage by Aunt Ann,' 'The Prompter,' and 'The Popular Preacher.' The best known of my dramatic works is 'The Tragedy Queen,' a two-act drama, 'Mr. Gander's Breakfast Party'; 'The Witches' Frolic,' [all of which are] farces. I wrote chiefly for The Musical World and The Court Gazette, and then mostly essays on scientific subjects. [Well, now we know where Lewis Spence got his information from.]

Indeed, "Tales of the Stage" by "Aunt Anne", appeared in The Musical World in 1853, at least. Possibly by EHB -- the mother is dead, the narrator is an orphan, a setup used by EHB more than once.

The Tragedy Queen and Mr. Gander's Breakfast Party were both produced, in NY, by the Broadway Theatre, during Emma's time in that company -- the former in September (with Emma in the starring role) and the latter in October of 1855.

Rep'ing Emma: Charles Edwards Lester (1815-1890)

2012-01-18T05:44:00.000-08:00

Some e-mail chatter this morning amongst a few of us (thanks, Leslie!) on EHB details led me to test an assertion I made: that Emma largely disappears from the BofL (indeed from the public record entirely) in the period 1867-69. In testing it -- yes, it's true -- I discovered a single letter from EHB to the editor of the Banner of Light, in the issue for September 11, 1869. The letter announces a brief return, by EHB, to the US, but is mostly about puffing the soon-to-be-issued Modern American Spiritualism. I don't know how I missed this letter, or how previous researchers did, but the letter reveals one startling fact: Emma had an agent, an author's representative, in the US, who spent a good part of 1868 and 1869 trying to find a mainstream US publisher for MAS (which was finally published by the BofL's New York wholesaler, the American News Company, which had already published EHB in pamphlet form once or twice).

That agent: Charles Edwards Lester (1815-1890): abolitionist, "author, editor, translator, diplomat, art connoisseur and critic" (as one writer has it) and somehow related to Elizabeth Cady Stanton. You can see a wide range of Lester's publications in Google Books. Now, I can see -- which I did not before -- Emma's note of thanks to Lester at the close of MAS. Interesting point: Lester is, more or less, a canonical figure. The connection with Emma -- what might it be? As Lester spent significant time in England in the early 1840s, we could be looking at a very old association. A good topic for a snowy weekend day's spelunking....

Lester writes in to the BofL, in the November 27 issue, to explain the details of the publication of MAS.

SOPA and PIPA: Bad Ideas Whose Time Has Come and Gone

2012-01-18T05:38:00.001-08:00

If you're not paying attention to the latest in a slew of stupid-minded legislation from the US Federal government -- SOPA and PIPA -- you should be. It isn't just that this legislation is designed to thwart something that -- like breathing, or graffiti -- cannot be stopped by any known means (online piracy), or that the legislation's sponsors are self-described technological know-nothings in the pockets of lobbyists from a particular city in Southern California known for the exploitative business models it uses; it's that sites like these may well be masked, or taken down, based on someone's (possibly spurious) complaint that "fair use" is actually "piracy" (matey!). Write to your legislators today, via Wikipedia and tell them to keep SOPA and PIPA from becoming law.

Completed Analytic Recon: Spiritualist Incunabula

2012-01-17T15:23:00.000-08:00

I'm hoping some preservationist or library scientist will tell me what this nutty annotation -- found lodged in a rear molar of Google Books' insatiable maw -- means:

I am hoping "HD" means "hard disk", but am very afraid it stands for something like "hollow depository" or "hold-for-discard".

Now, I found this curious annotation in a "book" as Google understands that term. It wasn't a book, except in the sense of being bound in half-leather and boards. It was a set of pamphlets, on a topic -- Modern Spiritualism.... fancy that -- of interest to the original owner of the pamphlets, who invested in having them bound uniform with his or her other books (I suspect). One of the pamphlets (damn Google Books to hell) was Capron and Barron's Explanation and History of the Mysterious Communion with Spirits (1848, 1850), which I paid quite a lot of money to obtain in order to digitize it. That pamphlet was the meat of the "book"; the two slices of bread were far more fascinating.

They were:

"Doctor Diotrephes'""The Knockings" Exposed, Comprising a Spiritual Examination of Modern Pneumatology and Thaumaturgic Manifestations. Together with a Spiritual Critique on the Claims of Psychological-Mesmerism and Clairvoyance (New York: 1850)
an anonymous pamphlet (attributed to George H. Derby, but probably by Austin Flint), entitled Rochester Knockings! Discovery and Explanation of the Source of the Phenomena Generally Known as the Rochester Knockings (Buffalo and New York: 1851).

The first of the two pamphlets is available from reprint houses (if you know you're looking for it) but the second appears to have been lost to researchers after Sidgwick in 1887, and I can find no mention of either of them in modern scholarship on Spiritualism.

Have I completed the analytical recon, do you think?

Undocumented Aliens: 'Lost' Early Modern Spiritualists

2012-01-17T14:02:00.000-08:00

All part of the ongoing effort to tear down the sheet iron wall at the border of acceptable history (Mister Whoever, tear down this wall!) and let the memes be free.

I have been in the habit of stopping, each time I see a new entity (person, place or organization) that repeats itself in the early periodical literature of Spiritualism (pre-1860), long enough to see whether the entity is covered: whether someone's mentioned, summarized, described, potted, framed up or otherwise annotated the entity in question. Often, there is nothing immediately apparent, but there's that other wall -- the pay-wall around academic journals -- that keeps the unwashed from seeing the best part of 50 years of publisher-controlled scholarship, so who knows...

The earlier back one goes in the periodical literature, the more frequently undocumented alients appear, intermingled with canonical citizens and institutions that require no such glossing.

I think it might be better, for all concerned, if I just kept a running list, here. Maybe my lack of breadth will become apparent.

W(illiam?) M. Fernald -- Buescher footnotes him, but otherwise nada for this lapsed Universalist...
Fannie Green, conspicuous in the pages of The Spirit Messenger and The Univercoelum
Dr. Anna M. L. Potts, who looks absolutely fascinating in her own clothes and as "A Dweller in the Temple" (I think)
Col. Washington A. Danskin, of Baltimore.

The Occult Sciences, circa 1855

2012-01-17T13:05:00.000-08:00

Tracking down the identity of the early Spiritualist author, "A Dweller in the Temple" (I believe it's Anna M. L. Potts), and I came across this volume of the Encyclopedia Metropolitana, from 1855:

The section on "Modern Spirit Manifestations" (authored by one E.R., who is almost certaintly E. C. Rogers) is instructive as an early (less than a decade on) attempt to situate Spiritualism within a larger occult tradition.

Also of note: there is a single reference to Rosicrucianism (on p. 16), a reasonable section on astrology (which seems to fly a bit in the face of the position that astrology was moribund as an area of historical or academic interest mid-century), and exactly zero references to Masonry or Freemasonry (which I suspect the editors considered a living, non-occult discourse at this time. India and some of our favorite mythographers get a few mentions. A troll through the index, as a tour of the space of the occult, is really instructive, I think.

Micro: What One Page of the BofL Can Tell Us (Part 3)

2012-01-15T10:14:00.000-08:00

Now the fun stuff. Not statistically significant. For anyone who wants to crunch for themselves, the data set referenced is available in Numbers and Excel formats.

There are 170 speakers -- first- or second-circle Spiritualists -- willing to lecture (for money, in almost all cases) in the issue of the BofL I am looking at. Of those 170 speakers, I class 27 of them as first-circle, based on whether or not they feature regularly in the BofL, and/or publish works on Spiritualism, and/or participate in the founding of other movements. My 27 first-circle Spiritualists are: Mrs. H. M. F. Brown, Emma Bullene, Adin Ballou, Warren Chase, Laura Cuppy, Lizzie Doten, Andrew Jackson Davis, E. C. Dunn, S. J. Finney, Laura De Force Gordon, Mrs. D. A. Gallion, Emma Hardinge, Mrs. F. O. Hyzer, Moses Hull, Anna Kimball, J. S. Loveland, Leo Miller, J. M. Peebles, L. Judd Pardee, Anna M. L. Potts, P. B. Randolph, H. B. Storer, J. H. W. Toohey, Hudson Tuttle, A. B Whiting, E. V. Wilson, Lois Waisbrooker, and Henry C. Wright. Someone more familiar with the movement than I am may well class some of my second circle as first circle; I did the classification on the basis of my knowledge only.

By gender: 11 first-circle Spiritualists are female, and 16 male. For the second circle (N=143), 62 are female and 81 men. (Note to academics: "most" are NOT women.)

By state: first-circle cadre bases itself in 14 states: IL (3), NY (5), MA (7), CA (1), NJ (1), MI (2), CO (1), IA (1), MD (1), WI (1), OH (2), PA (1), KY (1), MN (1). Second circle cadre bases itself in at least 17 states (there were four UNKNOWNS): MA (33 -- due to the fact that the BofL is in Boston), WI (8), MS (1), NY (19), MI (15), VT (7), IA (4), NH (4), IL (13), CT (6), NJ (4), OH (8), IN (2), ME (5), PA (4), CA (2), KS (1),

There are other things worth noting here (1867, mind you) including 2 female licensed (I checked) MDs on the list (one first, one second circle), some sites in the upper Midwest with 3 or 4 mediums/speakers based there, and generally a density in the Midwest that is surprising, since the Midwestern Spiritualist community had its own organ, the RPJ, by this time.

A final thought: it's tedious to consider, but.... I have 20 years of the BofL in preparation for IAPSOP; that's 1040 issues, each of which has a page like this, representing a more or less week-by-week snapshot (time-delayed in many cases by 1-3 weeks for post and BofL production cycles). At, say, 100 lecturers per week, that is 104,000 data points about place, gender, class, topic and other key aspects of the actual operation of the actual Spiritualist network in the US. It took me two hours to do 1 issue: 2080 person-hours worth of work. With that 20-year-period, week by week, in a database, we would actually be in a position to make generalizations about MS based on real data, and I suspect "most of them were women" would, along with a lot of other unsubstantiated generalizations, fall by the wayside.

Micro: What One Page of the BofL Can Tell Us (Part 2)

2012-01-15T08:02:00.000-08:00

Local societies: where third-circle Spiritualists managed a space in which fourth-circle Spiritualists could hear from second- and first-circle Spiritualists.

Here, for that same page of the BofL, are the functioning, soliciting Massachusetts societies.

View Larger Map

Now, add in the "northeast" societies outside Massachusetts:

View Larger Map

And now the non-regional societies:

View Larger Map

What we're looking at is, in effect, the commercial network circa 1867: railroad, and primary surface roads. The non-local societies are provided so that BofL readers have some notion of where they might go to find like minds when they're out of town.

Micro: What One Page Of The BofL Can Tell Us (Part 1)

2012-01-14T10:28:00.000-08:00

A lot of traffic, relatively speaking, about my intemperate screed contra modern academic treatments of Modern Spiritualism. Some finger-wagging, but a lot of support (thanks, all, for that).

The angels are in the details. It's not a waste of time to study how one's predecessors wasted theirs. The economics and the free play of the memes are what's really interesting.

Under those headings, here's one (deliberately selected) page from The Banner of Light for early January of 1867 (post-war-trauma, pre-collapse-of-the-movement, according to contemporary academic models).

What can it tell us about the demographics of the movement-as-marketplace, about the first-circle and second-circle Spiritualists?

Well, here's an interesting thing, cribbed from the lower right-hand corner of the page: a map of the distribution network for the BofL as of January of 1867.

(Larger version).

The three-tiered distribution model -- wholesale, retail and subscription agency -- is an indirect measurement of volume: wholesalers moved the BofL in volume through their own local distribution networks (of retailers), retailers sold over the counter, and subscription agents brought in onesy-twosy subscriptions, for a fee, that were fulfilled direct from the BofL offices by post.

For me, notable conclusions: no distribution in the US South whatsoever (yet we know folks were reading it there, as they're writing in, periodically) and none in those hotbeds of "Western Spiritualism," Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan (where we have reason to believe interest and readership were high-ish.)

Bela Marsh: A Downpayment on 14 Bromfield Street

2012-01-14T06:04:00.000-08:00

(Two sewage engineers in a week: first May Benzenberg Mayer's father, and now Bela Marsh's grandson, Francis. What are the odds. George H. Benzenberg was a nationally known "municipal engineer" and the city engineer of Milwaukee; Francis Beal Marsh, the son of Bela's son, Thomas, designed the Baltimore sewer system).

Bela Marsh. I am drawn to him because The Western Star was, I believe, organized with his involvement or equipment in one way or another (its offices were at 25 Bromfield Street), though I can't prove it, and Marsh was dead before TWS saw the light of day. His name appears everywhere in the early records of Modern Spiritualism, but it's only a name, and an address: Cornhill, and then 14 Bromfield Street, both in Boston.

Giles Stebbins wrote, somewhere or other:

Before me lies the Autobiography of Henry C. Wright, a volume of four hundred pages, published in Boston, in 1849, by Bela Marsh -- whose little Cornhill bookstore, in the same room for years with the anti-slavery office, was the place where all sorts of books on unpopular, yet excellent reforms and reformers, could be had, and where Bela Marsh himself, one of the best of men, could always be seen.

(Henry C. Wright was, among other things, the author of The Unwelcome Child, or the Crime of an Undesigned and Undesired Maternity (1858), which Marsh also published, and which secondary sources tell us contained more than round hints on methods of abortion -- though I can't find them in the text.)

Bela Marsh was born, to Lot Marsh (1757-1843) and Lydia French (1761-1843), on or about 20 February 1797, in Massachusetts. He married Mary Beal or Beals (1808?-1878) on 23 February 1827 in Boston (Rev. H. Ballou, Universalist, conducting the ceremony), and they had one child, Thomas (1849--?), who married a Jane Lowry, with whom he had two children: Charlotte and Francis Beal Marsh, the Baltimore sewer system designer.

Bela was, by trade, a book-binder, and his early professional associations were not surprisingly with others in the book trade: printers, in particularly. He and one Nahum Capen dissolved their partnership Marsh & Capen at the end of 1829, and formed a new one two weeks later, adding one Gardner P. Lyon to the partnership, and announcing their intent to enter the book trade directly, having bought the inventory of one Jacob B. Moore, Esq., of Concord. That enterprise was long-lived: a fourth partner, Thomas S. H. Webb, was added, some time in the mid-1830s, but by the early 1840s, the firm was in difficulties: liens were imposed on them, in New York State and in New Hampshire, for unpaid obligations, and the firm (and Bela) disappear from the public records entirely from 1842 to 1844. It's then, in January of 1844, that Bela announces -- in the Boston Liberator, Garrison's paper -- that he's set up shop on his own.

From early 1844 until the end of 1852, Bela -- as a merchant and a citizen -- leads what may be the exemplary progressive life. His featured stock includes: water-cure and hydropathy, "the physiological and phrenological works of Fowler, Graham and others," "the works of Owen, Brisbane, Godwin, Boyle and other," the by-laws of Brook Farm, "a new edition of the History of Women," (by one Lydia M. Child, whom EHB will mine for Art Magic), and other similar materials. He is also becoming a publisher, initially of pamphlets, and organizing or participating in societies: sanitary societies, a society to fund and build a "Female Medical Institute, and in conjunction with it a Maternity Hospital," and many, many, many abolition and fugitive slave meetings, groups and programs.

Aside from his publication of something I really must see -- An Exposition of the Secret Order of the Sons of Temperance, with Facts in Relation to Secret Societies (in 1848), there is nothing in Bela Marsh's life in the public records to indicate a sliver of occultism.

Then, in late 1851, this curious notice appears in the Boston Evening Transcript:

(At least one copy of this early piece of ephemera survives.)

From that point forward, Marsh is as deeply involved in the early growth of Modern Spiritualism as he is in other progressive communities. The Shekinah and New Era are both published out of his shop; he becomes, in 1852, a director of the Boston Spiritual Convention, and the Massachusetts Spiritual Convention, and he begins featuring Spiritualist literature in his advertisements, alongside Freethought and abolitionist material.

(Spear's Messages from the Superior State, another important piece of ephemera, is available from IAPSOP.)

In 1854, Marsh moves from the Cornhill to 9 Franklin Street, and remains there until 1857 or so, when he moves again to 14 Bromfield Street. Meanwhile, Marsh publishes much literature of interest to Spiritualist and occult researchers today, including E. W. Capron and LeRoy Sunderland material, while continuing to promote -- often with more muscle than he applies to Spiritualism -- different material, in particular alternative heathcare, hygiene and dietary regimes. in the late 1850s, he becomes embroiled in the Gibson Smith "Roman catacombs" testament of Jesus Christ hoax (which you can examine for yourself here -- note the Editor's preface by John Bovee Dods) as the publisher of the materials (in conjunction with our friend S. T. Munson of Great Jones Street, NYC), and in 1860 he is a prime mover behind a (failed?) attempt to establish a national Anti-Slavery Party in the US. The public record is quiet about his doings in the 1860s, but he is publishing plenty of progressive and Spiritualist material, as a Google Books search will evidence. He dies in January of 1869, and his death is only sparsely noticed in the Boston papers.

I'm happy to share my notes and clippings with anyone who's got a hankering to look more closely at the life of Bela Marsh -- a significant amplifying node in the social network of Modern Spiritualism -- but the sense I get, following him through the public records, is of a man committed to reform in nearly every dimension that reform was organized during his life, and deeply committed at that. Allowing, at one time, at least five Spiritualist journals to operate out of his offices, he was clearly making market -- as any bookseller and publisher of the time would have done -- but he was also voting with his pocketbook: water cure, female physicians, prison reform, alternative diets, birth control, abolition, and spirit communication. In his catalog, and I think in his mind, these were of a piece, parts of the reformation of a corrupt world.

Contra Eruption and Decline

2012-01-13T05:27:00.000-08:00

Entered into evidence against the claim that Modern Spiritualism was moribund by the turn of the twentieth century.

(Run it yourself)

And then have a look at this one.

Loss, Trauma or Power?

2012-01-13T04:54:00.000-08:00

Reading Ben Wilson's Decency and Disorder, about the transitional period between the French Revolution and the ascendency of Victoria, and it's a great antidote to the theories of Modern Spiritualism that are premised on loss, trauma, etc. Not because Wilson discusses that topic explicitly -- he has not, but I'm not done yet. Because he demonstrates, with the material lives of material people, how rich that period was in intellectual innovations (defined as "things that worked" and not as "things that were correct"), and how those innovations stemmed, in one way or another, from changes in the social order, the operations of science and faith on material culture and everyday life, the corrosive effects of literacy, urbanization, etc.

Hypothesis: the material subjugation of people and things by technologies of one sort or another, the penetration of the arcana of the material world (however incorrect or inexact), in this period, both created a sense that the world was an intricate mesh of hidden, complex and inscrutable mechanisms (one thinks of Tennyson's mistaken belief that trains ran in grooves, rather than on rails, or the notion, as I have learned, that popular medicine drew connections between tea-drinking, "nerves," and onanism) and, simultaneously, evacuated the ordinary world of its wonder. One could inquire about the mechanisms of the black-box universe, but it was, at base, a black box. Nothing wonderful. If one finds a watch, one assumes...

If there was a loss, culturally, that sustained religious innovation, mesmerism, phrenology, vegetarianism, Chartism, the Age-of-Cant mythographers, the proto-anthropologists, and Spiritualism, it was the loss of quotidian wonder, and its replacement by black-box complexity. Those discourses -- including Spiritualism -- embraced the black-box-complexity premise: the argument was over the shape of the box, and the mechanisms within it (where is the organ of memory? is the social order like a body? how does disease propagate?). Some of those disciplines strove to create a space for the return of wonder, to be sure, while others said good riddance: it was an opiate, anyway. What seems to be the uniting instinct, the thing that connects all the parasciences I can think of, is: the right to inquire, to test, investigate, form, hold and defend opinions. Inquiry was de-professionalized; or, perhaps better, distributed. Fed with vast amounts of usually bork'd information, anyone possessed of the requisite skills -- literacy, numeracy and a dissatisfaction with a wonder-less black-box universe -- could scratch their itch, and (perhaps more importantly) use the new emerging global infrastructure to find and join with others, with similar itches. The birth pangs of global monocultural pluralism. The end of the monologic institution.

Seen this way -- and admittedly this has all the rigor of a spitball -- the ideological dynamic is not surcease-of-sorrow, but the contest -- between, as well as within, among -- discourses for access to a shaping, guiding power.

And it goes some way to explaining why parasciences, after the French Revolution, always suffered from splitting and marginalization.

Picking on Molly McGarry

2012-01-12T16:32:00.000-08:00

It really isn't fair. She's at the tail end of a read that includes Barbara Weisberg's Talking to the Dead and a lot of the animus here really should be directed as Weisberg -- but, for pity's sake, do we need more text churned out on the Foxes?

McGarry writes, in service of her assertion that Modern Spiritualism was an effect of the Victorian cult of the dead (unevidenced) and the mass trauma of the Civil War, as follows:

The Shekinah

The Banner of Light

Banner of Light

Though I am sure her defenders will deny it, the implication is that we will find in the pages of the BofL more evidence of the "comfort, consolation and sometimes assistance" and the "cult of the dead" hoo-hah in "The Message Department" section of the BofL.

So I decided to look at every message in that section for January of 1863, for evidence of "comfort, consolation and sometimes assistance", the cult of the dead, war trauma, etc. And rather than just give you sweeping conclusions, I'll let you count, along with me. Here are summaries of each communication in that section of the BofL for the five issues in January of 1863:



January 3, 1863
 - question "what is to be done with traitors (to the Union)?" answered
 - question "what is conscience?" answered
 - question "please explain the sacrament of the Lord's supper" answered
 - question about a passage attributed to Christ in the New Testament answered
 - FH Rogers, deceased second officer aboard the SS Golconda returns in an attempt to clear his murderer of responsibility for his death
 - Francis Elizabeth Gordon returns to testify to the peace she has experienced in the spirit world after a "wild and disordered state of life on earth"
 - Hattie A. Burroughs returns to communicate with her mother
 - question on the stability of the US constitution answered
 - question about the nature of "familiar spirits" as defined in the Bible answered
 - question about why spirits who have promised after-death communiques have not produced same answered
 - Col. Thomas Jones, Confederate, killed at "the battle of Roanoke" and who wishes to free some of his slaves, asks his son Thomas to receive communication from him in the form of automatic writing.

January 10, 1863 (issue that reproduces the Emancipation Proclamation)

 - Hulda Drew wishes to communicate with her sons that she is happy and was with them when they were told of her death.
 - George Briggs, a ten year old boy, wishes to communicate his father's death (in a PoW camp) to his mother, who is unidentified
 - Mary Eldredge wishes to communicate to her children that she has heard their requests, but (in effect) declines to comply with their wishes
 - question what shall I do to be saved? answered
 - Edward Kendall returns to "give to my friends and my acquaintances a test of spirit power"
 - Lavinia S. Mitchell, a medium, returns to identify for her friends a secret compartment in her 'work box' containing a document in her handwriting specifying the time and manner of her death (in effect, a test)
 - Michael Sweeney writes to complain that he died in the Union Army and that his wife, Mary Anne Sweeney, has received no compensation from the government
 - An unnamed son returns to communicate a long discourse on the nature of life, death and the cosmos to his unnamed father
 

January 17, 1863

 - question "Must there not have been a material world before there could have been a spiritual world?" answered
 - Captain Samuel J. Locke, dead at 71 (not a war casualty), returns to announce that he is intent on discharging his mission to "return to earth and enlighten poor and ignorant humanity" and that "I may be obliged to take away (my friends) Bible, but if I do I'll pledge myself to give them a better one"
 - Horace Mason, a 14 year old who ran away, joined the Union Army, and was killed in action, returns to communicate with his mother and father, that latter of whom he was at odds with, and whom he forgives.
 - 
 - Lieutenant Benjamin Gaines, killed at the Battle of Shiloh, returns to speak with his son, to communicate with certain friends who mistakenly believe he was compelled to join the Confederate Army (he volunteered),  and to describe the details of his wound and death (as a test)
 - Jane Van Buren, dead at Kinderkermack NJ in 1838, returns to ask her kin to start a private circle so that she may communicate with them
 - Isaac Summer, 22, killed in the war, returns to tell his wife Caroline that he is "here today, and a little unhappy, just a trifle so" and that he will meet her in a place in New York that she already knows of

January 24, 1863

 - question "Are the spirits in favor of war?" answered
 - question "Have you at any time seen Jesus Christ?" answered
 - Felix K. Zollicoffer (Confederate general who has appeared in the circle before) returns to comment on the current political situation and to propose immediate rapprochement between the North and South
 - Florence Reed, an 11 year old girl from Baltimore, dead a week, to assure her mother and father that there is a spirit world, because they were not believers
 - Philip Guinon, apparently a soldier, returns to thank his unnamed friends for looking after his unnamed wife.
 - question of the spirits' position on the Constitution's usefulness answered
 - General Villelegue, Confederate of Camden, SC, returns to admonish Abraham Lincoln and deliver a short homily about duty to unnamed friends
 - Loammi Baldwin, "celebrated" engineer, death 24 years, returns to seek communication with a Robert Lee, the son of a deceased friend
 - John Dixon, an eight year old boy whose father was killed at the battle of South Mountain, returns to deliver a message to his mother -- his father is dead, and not drinking in the spirit life -- through the BofL, to one of its readers, Jane Edgerton, who will in turn carry the message to his mother
 - Edward Semmes, son of the captain of the ship Alabama, returns to communicate a message -- listen to the voices, essentially -- to his father.

January 31, 1863

 - Stephen A. Douglas returns to discuss the possibility of foreign intervention in the war
 - Benjamin Creggen, killed at Bull Run, returns to communicate with his mother in "Bellows Falls" and to say that he, an atheist, is doing well in spirit life
 - Clara Pillow, daughter of a Confederate General Pillow, and dead 17 years, returns to tell her father that the Yankees are his brothers
 - David Daniels, a six year old who died in Danvers, Massachusetts, solicits a medium to control, in order to communicate with his friends
 - an unnamed control gives a long discourse on the philosophy of memory, the location of the organ of memory, and to answer a few memory-related questions
 - Jane Alden returns to provide a proof promised to her friends while in life.
 - Milo S. Davis, the nephew of Jefferson Davis, returns to speak to an uncle of his (a brother of Jefferson Davis?) living in Boston under an assumed name and to indicate that had he to do it again he would not be a Confederate
 - Benjamin Powers, returns to ask his sister's husband to seek out a medium "in the West" (Ohio), and to give various tests to the circle

(It's perhaps worth mentioning that by column-inch, the BofL devotes more space to fiction this month than it does to messages of all types, and as many column-inches to alternative medical practice advertisements.)

There are so many things worth noting in this small sample of messages, but "comfort and consolation" messages are, in my opinion, in the minority. When the fully-disambiguated (name, and details of life and death) return, they often do so to promote Spiritualism -- to encourage often unnamed "friends" or "kin" to consult mediums. Or to lecture and correct opinions. Or to right wrongs committed while living. Or to explicitly give "proofs" in the context of the Spiritualist "test." This sample, I think, is noteworthy for the number of Confederates who appear in a public circle (it's important to keep that fact in mind -- there is zero evidence that communications received via Mrs. Conant were pandering to people in the audience in need of "comfort and consolation") in the flaming heart of Abolitionism, to testify (surprise surprise) to their doubts about the war, the Confederate cause, etc. Also interesting to note the number of famous spirits -- Zollicoffer, Stephen Douglas, the son of the captain of the Alabama (much in the news, and the circle's communications, this month), the nephew of Jefferson Davis (oh, you know I am going to dig into that one) and the niece of Confederate General Gideon Pillow.

Bottom line -- this small sample does not bear out McGarry's implicit assertion, and I'd argue that a larger sample would fail to do so as well. Really, I doubt she read much of The Shekinah or the BofL before making the assertions she made.

If you'd like to test McGarry's assertions against The Shekinah, you can do that here. Look for the standing section called "The Comforter" (fancy that!) and in particular for the statement by SBB that the comfort supplied is to the ill and the dying, in many cases -- that is, that there is a spirit world, and that personality survives. If you'd like to test her assertions against the BofL, you can read the first several years of it online at IAPSOP.

Modern Historians on Modern Spiritualism

2012-01-12T11:35:00.000-08:00

I’m putting off real work, and have been reading a lot of modern -- that is, contemporary -- historians’ work on Modern Spiritualism and related topics, of late. Perhaps it’s a sign of the curmudgeonly spirit that usually accompanies specialization, but I find modern history-writers’ treatment of Modern Spiritualism infuriating: particularly the writings of American academics. Excepting Albanese, Buescher and Gutierrez from the mix, I’ll go out on a limb and say that the problems I am about to list can be found in pretty much every book written about Modern Spiritualism for the last decade (at least).

Grossly-incorrect details, indicating a superficial familiarity with the material, due to an acquaintance with the material that is largely second-hand: that is, through the work of other academics. . This indicates, I think, a lack of care, or more precisely the sense that American academics, particularly younger academics, have that Modern Spiritualism is relatively speaking a clean stage for the ritualistic dramas associated with getting ahead, grinding theoretical axes, and getting tenure. In other words, the details don’t matter, because (a) no one knows them anyway and (b) Modern Spiritualism is a always a pretext for something else: acts of professional affiliation and devotion, theory-construction, vaguely post-modern linguistic cleverness, political revisionism, etc.
The homogeneity fallacy. Readers are usually invited to accept a model of Modern Spiritualism that is homogeneous. MS is a progressive, anti-institutional (some academics even claim antinomian), decentralized discipline allied with progressive movements in other areas: sexual politics (free love), health, diet and medicine (vegetarianism, homeopathy and the anti-vivisection movement, progressive politics (abolitionism, etc.). It is certainly true that (a) many Spiritualists (of what type, though?) resembled that profile, that (b) fully as many did not, and (c) the more academics talk about only the ‘progressive’ Spiritualist (as opposed to the Christian Spiritualist or indeed the reactionary Spiritualist, who was also represented in the mix), the more it will appear to future academics using only secondary sources that the movement was homogenous. The movement is not homogenous today, and was not homogenous in the 1840s, and has not been homogeneous at any point in between. I will offer into evidence, as an example of the lengths modern historians will go to to avoid confronting their own presumption of homogeneity, Victoria Woodhull. Those modern historians who are willing to acknowledge the central role that Spiritualism played in Woodhull’s life and work (and in the lives and work of other founders of modern feminism) are unwilling to acknowledge that Woodhull spent the last decades of her life as an ardent polemicist for eugenics. They are unwilling to explain that transition, or to examine Woodhull’s work as a eugenics propagandist at the same level of detail that they examine her life as a leading proponent of free love or women’s political equality. This is a knotty problem worth untangling, by any estimate, particularly when we note that the drift into eugenics was a not uncommon drift for first-circle Spiritualists (or first-circle occultists for that matter), and when we note that (however we see it today) eugenics was a ‘progressive’ discipline in the sense that word had at the turn of the 20th century, even though we view it, post-Hitler, as the worst sort of crypto-fascism. There’s a second aspect to this homogeneity fallacy -- the notion that a Spiritualist is a Spiritualist is a Spiritualist -- but I’ll deal with that one separately, in a bit. My sense of the movement is that it is highly segmented, and multi-dimensionally so. For example, the spirit controls of Stainton Moses come from a different universe than the controls of Mrs. Piper, despite the similarity of some monikers, and those of Moses - though perhaps not those of Mrs. Piper - would have cut dead in the streets of Summerland the controls of Miss Young. Similarly, the spiritualism of Boston and the spiritualism of New York were distinctive and in important ways (free love-ism, for example), and both were viewed as not rigorous by the spiritualism of Chicago and somewhat uninformed and blinkered by the spiritualism of San Francisco. There are two dimensions: class and place. There are several others. There is, no matter how you look at it, no homogeneity. Below the level of label, of top-level theoretical object and a small credal contract (which Emma encapsulated nicely at several junctures), there is no such integrated, homogeneous thing as "Modern Spiritualism" per se.
The nationalist fallacy. Modern academic treatments of Modern Spiritualism discuss a theoretical object called “American Spiritualism” as thought it has any real, historical foundation, which it does not. Among the dimensions that segment "Modern Spiritualism," national boundaries are at best tertiary in importance. The movement was primarily Anglo-American (that is, the Commonwealth + the United States), with (as Emma and others sought to demonstrate) significant traction in Western Europe (France and Germany in particular), and was internationalist from its outset. Innovation -- in seance techniques and apparatus, in propaganda techniques, in dissemination methods, in any of the mechanisms of a discipline or belief system that matter -- was not confined to the United States, or any other country, and these were spread, replicated and versioned quickly (in matters of weeks) across national boundaries. On the whole, the trajectory of the movement and its interpenetration and symbiosis with a nominally-oppositional “mainstream culture” took shape in substantially the same way whether we’re looking at British Spiritualist in the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s, or Australian Spiritualism in the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s. The national dimension of the movement -- the ways in which Australian Spiritualism, say, differed from American Spiritualism -- are nuances; the movement was, from the late 1850s, international.
The recapitulation fallacy. An unfortunate feature of academic history. What I say is so because it was said before me, by academics to whom I wish to claim affiliation. If we say it often enough, to one another, in our academic cabinet, it must be true. Modern academic treatments of Modern Spiritualism distort the objects of study by recapitulating signal themes, in particular the notions that MS was either (a) a manifestation of the Victorian cult of death or (b) a reaction to the horror of mass death in the US Civil War, the Crimea and elsewhere. It would be tough to trace these free-floating themes (because they do not stand up to scrutiny, at the detailed level, very well) back to their origins, but my hypothesis is that they all take root in Weber and Weberian analyses that need -- because of Weber’s model -- disruption, dislocation, and loss in order for the model to make sense. As I’ll suggest in a bit, many third and fourth circle Spiritualists may have been drawn to the movement because of a personal loss, but second-circle and first-circle Spiritualists came to MS, in the main, for reasons that had nothing to do with the themes recapitulated by academics, and everything to do with a profound dissatisfaction with the available idols of the tribe.
The eruption-and-decline fallacy. This one's a bit of a shocker. In part because academics appear to accept the distorted canonical versions of Modern Spiritualism as promoted by Spiritualism itself (then and now), MS is presented as a flash-in-the-pan, erupting full-blown with the Fox Sisters, and collapsing in a sticky heap in the late nineteenth century. This fallacy does produce a nice bell-shaped curve (for the movement’s trajectory, the number of “Spiritualists,” etc.) -- it is a pretty theoretical object to be sure. But it is a fallacy that does not serve Spiritualism the modern movement, and is otherwise just an ahistorical academic playtoy. The movements that were MS developed, quite slowly (over perhaps 20 years) from mesmerism, phrenology, folk occult practices, alternative medical disciplines and *incorrect and incomplete orthodox science* -- not to mention a pre-existing whirlwind of religious innovation that dates back to the 1770s, and a mythographic tradition coincident with the colonization of India and the British hegemony over parts of the Far East. It’s appropriate to date the “beginning” of Modern Spiritualism to (most conservatively) the work of Andrew Jackson Davis in the US, and more realistically to the Anglo-American cultural hubbub we tend to refer to as the Age of Cant (say, 1770-1830). And Modern Spiritualism has in no sense ended. In fact, it has persisted, and, if we take a notional 4% of the general population (say, 1 million souls) as a number that probably pegs the peak of self-identified third circle US Spiritualists in 1870, Modern Spiritualism has persisted at more or less the same level of demographic penetration, up to the present day. And none of this gets at the fundamental fact that the "Modern Spiritualism" EHB documented in Nineteenth Century Miracles and the one Conan Doyle documented, fifty or so years later, are fundamental different, and Doyle's was, in most important ways, more culturally significant. There is no tangible, evidence-based bottoms-up view of Modern Spiritualism that supports the eruption-and-decline model academics favor. That is the wishful thinking of reason, and that’s all it is. "We’re so much smarter now."
Problems of cause-and-effect, and a penchant for the ahistorical. A common example of this is the tendency of modern historians to see alternative medical practices (medical clairvoyance, or intuitive medicine as we now call it), changes in dietary and dress regimes, and other “allied causes” as the effects of Modern Spiritualism, rather than some of the discourses and communities from which Spiritualists (particularly the first- and second-circle Spiritualists) migrated. The wily mesmerist preceded, trained, nurtured and in many cases pimped the spirit medium. EHB and HPB -- to pick two obvious examples -- were steeped in one or more of these disciplines before they self-identified as Spiritualists; Elizabeth French made her living as a medical clairvoyant before AND after she was prosecuted successfully as a fraudulent medium; Gilbert Vale “tested” Spiritualism from his secure vantage point in the freethought movement; Benjamin Coleman embraced Spiritualism after two decades as a political advocate of the rights of ordinary folks against the depradations of capital and the State. Chartists became Spiritualists; Spiritualism did not, in itself, promote socialism and freethought except insofar as infinite perfectability, an ethics of personal responsibility here and hereafter, and a religious experience centered on intimacy and a medium -- rather than a crowd and a priest -- promoted socialism, freethought, anti-vivisectionism, and vegetarianism.
The chop-shop effect. In my view, modern academic historians do violence to the lives of the dead. It’s difficult, after reading academic treatments of Modern Spiritualism, to look into the giant bag of real historical figures and find a single person whose personal life trajectory fits the academic model one’s just ingested. No one’s life-facts fits the academic model, even slightly. The academic’s clothes cover no emperor, no pauper, no one at all. If one steps back, and looks only at how academic historians conjure with historical figures in their work, it becomes apparent very quickly that we’re dealing with chop-shop history: the real lives of real people are parted out, into thematic bins, like car parts in a stolen car parts operation. Purloined lives, disassembled and sold off. Judge Edmonds -- a name frequently conjured with -- has no life, or his life has no integrity. He is an exemplar for certain assertions (people came to Spiritualism after personal tragedy), and those parts of his life (as a person, as a Spiritualist) that don’t have a bin (for example, the mediumship of his wife and daughter, his role in the founding of the Society for the DIffusion of Spiritualist Knowledge, his defense of Cora Hatch against her husband Benjamin, his resolutely Christian orientation toward Spiritualism and its truths, and his lack of rigor in accepting witnessed and reported phenomenon, not to mention the history of his legal opinions...just as some for-instances) get silently dumped on the floor of the academic chop shop. Seen bottoms-up, through the details of the lives of real Spiritualists of the nineteenth century, there are virtually no academic treatments of Spiritualism that align well with the facts of those detailed, intensely-lived existences.
The cartoon seance problem. For academics, all seances -- all Spiritualist practice and apparatus -- are bound up with interpersonal communications with the dead. This is a view of the seance that is sustainable only (a) if one has not actually read any significant number of seance records and/or (b) if one has no interest in what Spiritualist practice actually was and always (c) when one makes no distinction between first-, second- and third-circle Spiritualists. Let’s take four first-tier first-generation mediums as test cases -- J. V. Mansfield, Henry Slade, Daniel Dunglas Home and the Davenports -- as examples. What percentage of the performances (public and private) of these four actors would any reasonably well-read person say were “interpersonal communications with the dead”? I would hazard the guess: less than 30%. Even if we restrict the analysis to the purely private circles each of the four was involved with, throughout the course of his life, less than half of the performances would involve interpersonal communication with named deceased persons beyond the controls involved. The seance, for Spiritualists, was laboratory, therapeutic couch, and theatre, and was always a zone of demonstration first, and communication second. Based on a (naive and fragile) model of “scientific proof” that emphasized personal experience and made sensory perception (not to mention cause and effect) unproblematic, the seance was not, primarily, about permitting the bereaved to communicate with their lost loved ones. Katy King was proof, but not of the afterlife existence of one's Aunt Emily. J. V. Mansfield wanted a sealed envelope, or a lock of your hair, but usually the transaction did not involve the afterlife existence of one's Aunt Emily. And although Mina Crandon was controlled by the spirit of her dead brother Walter, the material of the Margery seances was definitely not interpersonal: it was an exploration of the limits of the medium (Mina, and the seance) first and foremost, and it was proof of the survival of personality: something academic historians do not recognize, because they apparently have not read much at all in the primary literature. When I tested for Aunt Emily, I did so not because I was mourning her or because I had some necrophilial preoccupation with death, but because I expected to be able to recognize the nuances of her personality. (I'll just note in passing that the obsession with proof of the survival of personality, which can be documented, contradicts directly academic yarn-spinning about "cults of death" and private obsessions with specific dead people. It was my personality, and its survival, that were frequently at issue, in the "test."
The separate-and-inequal fallacy. I have harped on this before. There seems to be little or no acknowledgement of the plain fact that Modern Spiritualism existed, from inception, and does to this day, within the boundaries of that theoretical object called “mainstream culture”, rather than as a separate community in more or less uneasy relations with “mainstream culture.”
The disingenuous narrator problem. If you read closely in modern academic treatments of Modern Spiritualism, you will nearly always find the moment where the writer unmasks himself or herself as the agent-of-reason, and ridicules some aspect of Spiritualism as a belief system. The tone may be “how nutty!” or “how quaint!” or “of course we know better now….” but the moment we discover a fundamental lack of sympathy almost always occurs. This has been the hallmark of “mainstream” and “academic” histories of Spiritualism (and the occult) for the past 150 years. The author cannot be trusted to show us the memes at play, because eventually the author will conclude (a) that the memes are fraudulent, dangerous, trivial, or unhealthy, (b) that the play of those memes is uninstructive, marginal, or distracting or (c) both. (I am reminded of a comment quoted in one of Christopher MacIntosh's books, in which someone suggested that it is never a waste of time to study how one's precedessors wasted theirs. Many academic historians do not even exhibit this level of sympathy with Modern Spiritualism.

The list is not exhaustive.

Finally, boiling over on an airplane while being dragged through overgeneralization, fallacy and cliche by Molly McGarry (Ghosts of Futures Past) -- wherein I learned that Theosophy originated in Britain, among other things -- I’m provoked to make what ought to be an obvious point to anyone who has (as McGarry claims to) read EHB’s Modern American Spiritualism: a Spiritualist is not a Spiritualist is not a Spiritualist. At a gross level, during the first generation of Modern Spiritualist (1840-1900, say, with 1870 as the lovely convenient and entirely faux midpoint for the erupt-and-dissipate peak to center itself on), there were four circles of Spiritualists in the international community:

first-circle Spiritualists who occupied positions as public intellectuals advocating one flavor or other of Modern Spiritualism. Examples would include: William Stainton Moses, EHB, Benjamin Coleman, Crookes, Cora Hatch, Alfred Russel Wallace, Marie Countess of Caithness (but NOT Victoria Woodhull, to differentiate). You know you're looking at a first-circle Spiritualist when they served as synechdochal material for attacks on Spiritualist in the mainstream media, or as the organizing point for a splinter faction that forms around them, or when they explicitly differentiated their 'brand' of spiritualism from others brands.
second-circle Spiritualists who derived some or all of their personal income from either the promotion or the practice of Spiritualism. Examples would include: Jj Morse, Colby, Rich, Samuel Brittan, Thomas Shorter, Elizabeth French, and Victoria Woodhull (and Tennessee Claflin). There were 10 or 20 second circle Spiritualists in 1870, in my estimation, for every first circle Spiritualist, and the first and second circles were connected to one another in vibrant and complex international social networks that become immediately apparent to anyone spending quality time with the primary material.
third-circle Spiritualists, ordinary believers who testified publicly to their belief in Spiritualism, but who did not promote Spiritualism beyond the scope of a private circle or a local society, and who made their living by conventional means not immediately associated with the movement. There were 20 to 40 third-circle Spiritualists for every second-circle Spiritualist, in 1870. The hallmark of a third-circle Spiritualist: they paid the social cost for their beliefs. They evangelized; they bore witness publicly. These were and are the backbone of the international movement. You can find them running or participating in literally thousands of local societies and public circles in 1870.
fourth-circle Spiritualists: ordinary believers who incorporated elements of the Modern Spiritualist belief system -- or the entire belief system -- into their personal worldview, but who did not organize locally, join locally, or bear witness in any public sense to those beliefs. Syncretists, fair-weather believers, and their ilk. There were 10 to 100 fourth-circle Spiritualists for every third circle Spiritualist in 1870, just as there are, today (if we credit surveys and polls) millions of Americans who believe in the possibility of direct communication with angels (Christian and otherwise, superintending and personal).

There's so much more to say about this topic, but I think I may be the only person who gives a shit.

2 Prospect Terrace, Bath

2012-01-07T07:52:00.000-08:00

An apparently minor note, from Notes and Queries of June 1892.

Fryar was a market-maker in things occult, and connected to nearly everyone who mattered in the social network that was the Victorian occult revival, working hard to maintain his relationships regardless of the controversies of the moment.

And he was a supplier of tradecraft materials of various sorts as well.

Fryar is much on my mind these days, as he may well be a primary source for the material underlying Art Magic -- he claimed to have loaned Emma manuscript materials that were lost -- along with other of Emma's papers -- in the Boston Fire of 1872.

All Hail David Drummond

2012-01-02T06:17:00.000-08:00

In Cecil Court, in London, near the National Gallery and Trafalgar Square, David Drummond, self-advertised ephemeralist, has a small shop devoted to "books, playbills and bygones of the performing arts." I had looked in his window longingly a few times, but it seemed completely nutty to think that he's have anything from the Adelphi in the 1840s and 1850s. Over the Xmas holidays, I finally asked him if he had any material from the Adelphi from 1845-1855 that mentioned a "Miss Hardinge" or "Miss Emma Hardinge." He sent me off for a half-hour to have a coffee while he looked through his stock, and when I came back, he had found five marvelous Adelphi playbills with specific mention of EHB.

Here, for example, she's playing a minor role in a (then new) Charles Selby farce, The Irish Dragoon.

(See larger version)

And here she's doing double duty of a night, in both The Dance of the Shirt and The Dancing Barber.

(See larger version)

But here's the real gem, I think. Advertising the re-opening of the Adelphi after extensive renovation (during which time the company performed at the Haymarket), this playbill has Emma in what was a common role for her, in The Dancing Barber, but significantly promises a new play based on Dombey and Son.

(See larger version)

My apologies for the poor reproduction -- the playbills are larger than the largest platen scanner I have, and extremely fragile (they're going under glass as soon as possible). While they are not more or better evidence, per se, of Emma's time in the London theatre, the playbills do evidence many of her claims -- to have known Tom Taylor, Mark Lemon and Charles Dickens, for example -- and they're miraculous survivals of that time, bringing home the reality that it's all about ephemera, with non-canonical figures.

All hail David Drummond.

New Light on No. 9 Stanhope Street

2012-01-02T06:00:00.000-08:00

In a post in 2009, I suggested that Emma may have had John Roddam Spencer Stanhope and his painting "Eve Tempted" in mind when she was writing her last novella, The Mystery of No. 9 Stanhope Street.

Having had a chance, during the holiday break, to visit Manchester and spend a morning in the absolutely marvelous art museum there, I think we can elevate that surmise to the status of a fact.

The earlier of two versions of Stanhope's "Eve Tempted" is in the permanent collection at Manchester, and has been since the 1880s, making it a virtual certainty that Emma saw the painting there, amidst Manchester's world-class collection of Pre-Raphaelite works.

The second version is included in my post of March 2009, but the version Emma saw was somewhat more racy.

That's not the only interestingly suggestive canonical connection in Emma's life that emerged from my brief trip to Manchester (which is a charming city and worth a few days of any tourist's time -- stay in the Malmaison near the train station, and you're well-situated to walk most of the city). Ford Madox Brown, the proto-PRB member and mentor to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, spent several years there, painting a series of wonderful murals in the Manchester town hall (which you can see, gratis, just by asking). Turns out -- having felt the need to read a bio of Brown as a result of seeing his work -- that Brown's funeral oration was delivered by his long-time friend, and Emma's adversary, Moncure D. Conway.

Reading James Webb

2011-11-25T06:10:00.001-08:00

I am a big fan of James Webb's The Flight from Reason (aka The Occult Underground) and The Occult Establishment. That isn't, as far as I can tell, the majority opinion -- perhaps the iffy status of Webb's work has something to do with the circumstances of Webb's death. Reading Webb is tricky -- he will roll two facts, two surmises and and an odd-ball speculation into a sushi roll, slice it and plate it, and stand back, saying always: Q. E. D. He has to be triangulated, carefully, which sometimes means it takes a half-hour to get through a single page of his text. Like any good conspiracy theorist, he excels at repetition as a means of establishing a surmise as a fact. And throughout his texts -- which in fairness would be considered 'balanced' by most readers -- his disapproval of his subject runs like an underground stream. Noises under the rock.

For Webb (as the title indicates), the Occult Revival is a flight from reason. The reason-able center remains unmoved (and unmove-able), and the flight is hither-and-yon, but outward, toward the margins, into the arms of irrationalism. It's Keystone Kops-ish: figures are constantly running into one another as the herd of figures that people his narrative move, ever outward. It's a shame no one turned him on to social network analysis, and more of a shame that no one's thought to go back through his texts and do the SNA work, for he's surely got, in them, the backbone Mercator projection of occultism between 1870 and the Second World War.

This passage, from The Occult Establishment, got stuck in my teeth yesterday:

[I have defined the occult as] "rejected knowledge" and its adepts [as] "irrationalist." This is historically justified in that it can be shown that the occult consists of an amalgam of theories which have failed to find acceptance with the establishments of their day; and the Establishment of the late 19th and early 20th century was still precariously rationalist. If a rationalist or materialist viewpoint equips a man for anything, it is the struggle for survival; thus we are presented with the spectacle of casualties from the battle for existence taking refuge in a "spiritual" interpretation of life.

Richard Dawkins, take note -- your rhetorical position was homesteaded before your arrival.

Like Webb, I believe the occult is a parascience -- a collection of parasciences, really. But I don't see the occult as belated parascience: it is really not the case, when one looks closely, that the occult adopted, say, mesmerism, after it had been weighed and found wanting by some set of representatives of the dominant scientific order, and rejected. That idea is, in almost every case, ahistorical, because what one finds, in the detailed sediments, is evidence of a strange kind of race: the orthodox, and the occult, contesting for a body of ideas (again, say, mesmerism) , with the Establishment (in Webb's model) rejecting (as with phrenology, or the Central Sun theory of astronomy) or absorbing (as with mesmerism, or galvanic medicine) the body of ideas (picking the feathers off the carcass in the process, for sure), while the Occult continues onward, defending that which has been labeled or demonstrated to be false for some time -- a decade, a generation -- before submerging the "rejected knowledge" into its tradition, where it remains dormant, to surface again, later (think: therapeutic color theory, or the recent signs of the revival of materialization in the work of mediums).

(The daily double: find a parascience that has not succeeded in establishing a single one of its tenets in any contemporary belief system. The answer is: none. The most remarkable thing about parascience is: like a virus, it always succeeds in replicating itself, if inexactly.)

For sure, it is true that the occult will scribble in whatever white space science leaves -- but, again, that is not belatedness. It's pioneering, actually.

But what Webb really asks here -- is it the case that the occult calls to those mal-adapted for survival in whatever passes, at any point in history, for "the modern world"? -- does require an answer from anyone working in the discipline.

We do have to get away from the value judgment implicit in the question: mal-adaptedness is not, after all, a sin against some kind of natural order. It is, in fact, the natural order: everyone, more or less mal-adapted. And we have to get away from the fetish of reason: if the instant-polling world of the present has demonstrated anything, it is that nearly everyone who's bothered to describe their belief system in any detail has demonstrated that there's a healthy admixture of the un-reasonable in there, rubbing elbows and hips with the reasonable.

And then there's the head-counting: the idea that reason is the property of the belief system attracting the largest number of adherents. That won't do, either, unless "reason" is entirely a social construct -- in which case why bother to use it at all, except to make the reasonable feel better about their irrational neighbors?

Ah, there it is -- talk for long enough, and it'll pop out.

I love reading Webb, but I can't help feeling that, in describing the flight from reason, he is actually busily erecting a set of somewhat shaky defenses around reason, to protect it from the marauding occultists, who he sees gathering around smoky fires at the edge of the forest, at dawn. Far from being in flight outward, into obscurity, it feels to me like the adversary, as far as Webb is concerned, is dead-set on taking the citadel, and has the means to do so.

11-11-11

2011-11-11T05:24:00.000-08:00

The pattern is of course not inherent in the date, which might just as well be written 11-11-2011, 2011-11-11, or what have you. In fact, it's not a real pattern at all -- too much ambiguity as to month and date, and a reliance on the conventions of a culture, as to how dates are presented.

Nevertheless, some children of Emma's have announced their intention to conduct occult rituals at the Pyramids. The occult is alive and well, and indifferent to the instability of the Arab Spring and its aftermath.

New Issue of Psypioneer

2011-11-06T08:08:00.000-08:00

is out, and well worth the read. Get it from the Psypioneer site. In particular, Paul's coverage of Spiritualism in Glasgow is a much-needed corrective to the London-centric view of nineteenth-century Spiritualism.

Emma Contra Christianity: 1861

2011-10-26T06:30:00.000-07:00

I continue to kick myself for not having focused more, in the edition of Art Magic, on the text as a summation of Emma's thought: a summing-up text, as much as a text-of-departure.

In late 1861, Emma is reading The Spiritual Magazine, which I feel certain is being sent to her by Benjamin Coleman himself, and commenting on it, in the pages of The Banner of Light, in a series of articles entitled "Prejudice and Spiritualism in England." In her third article, in the December 28, 1861 issue of the BofL, Emma takes on -- head on -- Christian Spiritualism, and attempts to expose it as internally inconsistent. Her motivation here -- a partial echo of her concerns in the Six Lectures of 1860 -- is at least three-fold: to continue the attack on Christian sectarianism as a weak platform from which to battle materialism (a new Church is needed, she says elsewhere in the series), to resist the absorption of Spiritualist revelations into a hierarchy in which Jesus is "the Lord and Ruler of Spirits," and -- most importantly I think -- to try (as she did throughout her life) to put a bullet in the head of what, for Emma, was the most pernicious doctrine of Christianity: the doctrine of vicarious atonement.

Of all the itches I will never be able to scratch, the most persistent one is: talking with E. J. Dingwall. I'm reading Dingwall's work on Mina Crandon at the moment, trying to get some kind of handle on Dingwall's way of thinking. I like his language, the turns of thought, and I regret his absence. Like EJD, I have the scent of Emma's trauma in my nostrils, and I can't stop smelling it. Dingwall located that trauma in a rape, during the Orphic Circle period of Emma's life, and -- in his introduction to his 1970 edition of Modern American Spiritualism -- he exposed his suspicion, and linked it to Emma's adoption of the name "Hardinge." That erroneous linkage obscures the palpable fact of the rent in Emma's psychic life: the terrible thing, it's called in my notes, that is always imbricated, and never described. Every shred of material that comes to light -- the Perdita story is the most recent example -- gets sifted, if you have Dingwall's Complaint (which I do, in a big way) for allusions to the terrible event. And I cannot see the Home for Outcast Women project as anything other than a reaction to that terrible event, or more precisely its aftermath, for Emma.

(Look, he's wandering...)

I'm not, really. Emma's disgust with the doctrine of vicarious atonement is a thick crimson thread woven through the center of her thought from the late 1850s onward. It isn't going too far -- and may not be going far enough -- to say she's obsessed with it, and she hates it. Whatever happened to her, not only did the perpetrator escape justice, but he -- it must have been a he -- wrapped himself in the warm mantle of vicarious forgiveness as he exited the scene of the crime.

The doctrine of personal responsibility here-and-hereafter (that central feature of Emma's moral framework) was not just modern, and morally valuable -- it was, for her, a psychic necessity. It must be so, as she was fond of saying. Eventually, here or hereafter, justice for the damaged, retribution for the damagers.

War and Utopia

2011-10-26T05:42:00.000-07:00

Reading The Banner of Light for 1861 is a depressing experience, given our current global crises and domestic idiocies. The war permeates the Spiritualist community's thinking, appearing in trance lectures (Cora Hatch's control provides a particularly interesting justification for a War for an Idea), the discourse of congresses and committees, and even the advertisements.

But A. B. Child -- someone I am really coming to appreciate -- refuses to be drawn down into the slough of distress, raising against that reality a bulwark -- or fragments thereof, anyway -- of utopian planning. From the Septmber 14, 1861 issue.

In the face of war and economic distress and political crapulence, let us combine our interests.

Perdita: An Autobiography

2011-10-26T05:32:00.001-07:00

I shipped off this morning, to the person working on Emma's fiction, what has to be the find (for me) of 2011:

No spoilers, but -- sensitive as I am to the defining relationship of Emma's life -- the mother in this novella is killed off early, unleashing the devil in her daughter. And the mother is (have to think about this for a good long while) a Freethinker.

Is Trance Science After All?

2011-10-25T16:31:00.000-07:00

I don't do this very often, usually because the science is somewhat sketchy. But a new study indicates that hypnotic states may be closer to what the people I study argued they were -- distinct mental states -- and far more real, in the objective, measurable sense, than much of science -- then and now -- will allow.

Ada Hoyt Coan Foye (1835?-1904?)

2011-10-22T12:24:00.000-07:00

Given name Adelaide. Only child of David Hoyt, cooper, and his wife Jane, who is, at one point in her life, a stockbroker of means. Born and raised in Boston. In 1852, begins practicing as a for-fee physical (table) and writing test medium in Boston, and that same year marries William B. Coan, a clerk. By 1856, she and William B. have moved to 115 1/2 Grand Street, in New York, where she is advertising her services, and mixing with New York Spiritualists including the actor Augustus Fenno, who takes Emma to see Ada. Also in 1856, she is subjected to public tests by both the Stuvesany Institute and the Philosophical Society of the New York Mechanics Institute, and is traveling around Massachusetts, giving public tests. Her major test involved third parties' writing of the names of deceased persons on slips of paper, which were folded, balled up or put in ballot boxes; Ada would then give communications from some of the named individuals. She also sang, on occasion. In 1857, she travels extensively in the midwest, and adopts a public, strident, anti-free love position at a Spiritualist convention in Ohio, but in 1859, Coan divorces her, claiming she was involved in adulterous relations. In 1858, she is exposed by one M.V. Bly (who needs looking into), and in April of 1859 appears on stage with Bly, is exposed again, and publicly claims that 90% of spiritualist manifestations are fraudulent -- she recants this position later in the year. In August of 1859, she and Coan divorce, and she begins to advertise as "Ada L. Hoyt, the Great Public Personal Test Medium." A. B. Child and John Wetherbee, associates of EHB, test her extensively in March of 1860, but results are mixed. In mid-1860, she apparently begins a drift west (she is in Chicago, possibly with E. V. Wilson, in mid-1860) and arrives in San Francisco in 1865, mingling with the Golden Era crowd EHB was associated with earlier in the decade, giving seances for Mark Twain (among others) and becoming prominent in San Francisco Spiritualism. By March of 1866, she is known as Ada Hoyt Foye (or Foze, as some papers have it) -- she has married (as far as can be determined) William H. Foye, and they will have three children: William, Franklin and Adeline. Her parents are living with her family by 1870. In the early 1870s, Ada is a major figure in SFO spiritualism, and in the west coast women's suffrage movement. In 1877, she testifies for spiritualism's claims at the civil trial of Clarence Mathews, who has violated an Oakland ordinance forbidding fortune-telling. By 1881, her second husband has disappeared, and she goes to Australia alone, for October and November, to speak and give public tests. She then disappears from the public record entirely until the mid-1880s, when she apparently restarts her public career, spending increasing amounts of time on a national circuit including Portland, Denver, Chicago, Cleveland, Boston, Waterford NY, NYC, Salt Lake City, San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco. By 1890, she is apparently basing herself in Denver, Colorado, where she leads a spiritual congregation (referring to herself as a pastor), and gives private tests every afternoon, for a $1 fee. She remains Denver-based until at least June of 1903, when the weekly advertisements in the Rocky Mountain News abruptly cease, and, aside from a trip (alone) to Australia and New Zealand from December of 1900 until May of 1901, ceases most travel after 1900. The death of her son Franklin is noticed in the San Francisco papers in January of 1904, and in that obituary Ada is discussed as though she were still alive. But all other newspaper mentions of her have ceased by this time.

Charles A. Foye, William Foye: Ada Hoyt's Second Husband?

2011-10-22T10:24:00.000-07:00

The Waterloo (Iowa) Courier for December 18, 1891 reports that:

Yesterday morning's Cious City Journal notices the commencement of a suite for divorce by Mrs. Ada Foye against her husband Chas. A. Foye. The defendant is the father of Joseph A. Foye, formerly of this city. She asks $2000 alimony, $100 attorney fees and $50 per month during the pendency of the suite. The parties were married in Sioux City, February 1891.

This must surely be a different Ada Foye, as our Ada has been using the name Foye since the mid 1860s (the newspapers originally reported her marriage, effectually, as to one Foze), and the 1870 Federal census finds her with her husband William Foye (and her parents Daniel and Jane Hoyt, as well as her 1-year-old son William) living just where they should be at that time; in San Francisco.

Curious.

William B. Coan: Ada Hoyt's First Husband

2011-10-22T08:59:00.000-07:00

William B. Coan. He and Ada were married from 1852 until he obtained a divorce from her, in 1859 in New York, on the grounds of adultery. As near as I can determine, William B. Coan remarried and lived a quite life with his second life Nellie. But he retained a bitterness for his time with Ada.

Mrs. Coan and M. V. Bly

2011-10-22T08:45:00.000-07:00

Here, from the April 18, 1859 issue of The Boston Courier, is the other half of the Hoyte Coan Foye exposure scandal I noted a couple of days ago. In this context, Coan's note in The Banner of Light makes perfect sense.

I'll just say it, because I think it: Dr. M. V. Bly may be Melville Fay. I can find him in the record for the period 1858-1861, on both sides of the Atlantic, but for no time prior or after. I'd like Bly's backstory, if anyone knows it.

Monstrous Doctrines: July 1857

2011-10-22T08:15:00.000-07:00

Spelunking for Hoyt Coan Foye this morning, and found this, which is worth recovering. From the Wooster Republican for July 23, 1857 (but also found in substantially the same form in half-a-dozen other daily and weekly papers across the country, at this time). Our Ada (at the time, Mrs. Coan) is on the side of the angels.

Like this commentator, I am curious to know who Mrs. Lewis is.

Ada Coan Foye

2011-10-21T10:10:00.000-07:00

I am easily distracted.

Running around in my mental addict... err, attic... are names with which I cannot associate much of anything. They're people and places that intersect with Emma's life, but now mostly below the water level of history, and difficult to recover. One of those names: Mrs. Coan. Another: Mrs. Foye. Two mediums influential in Emma's development as a Spiritualist. No... one medium. Ada L. Coan Foye.

These faceless, placeless, content-free names are always somewhere in the processing cloud when I'm converting periodicals, and last night I came across this meaty bit on Mrs. Coan Foye.

Apparently there's a free love divorce scandal hiding in there (and perhaps a recantation scandal as well), so it's off to the newspaper databases this weekend, to dig it out if I can.

Ada Coan Foye worked for a long, long time in the trenches of the movement -- well into the 1890s -- and traveled many of the same circuits as Emma. She too had the institutionalization instinct. And there are random traces of her life that hint at complexity, and possibly tragedy.

A reader (thanks, Pat) reminds me she is actually a trifecta: Miss Ada Hoyt, Mrs. Coan, and Mrs. Foye -- with Hoyt periods intermixed.

Banner of Light Update

2011-10-21T07:33:00.000-07:00

The Banner of Light through the end of December of 1859 is now digitized, indexed and available for download at IAPSOP. 1859 is an interesting year of the newspaper, filled more with secular lecturers (Chapin, Beecher, Emerson) than Spiritualist lecturers, but it does have A. B. Child on "obsession by dark spirits" and "spiritual affinity" (the conceptual doorway through which free love creeps in), P. B. Randolph's "Dealings with the Dead" and coverage of Randolph lectures, a number of interesting contretemps amongst Spiritualists, about a dozen Cora Hatch lectures, a smattering of Lizzie Doten, and a truly bizarre series of articles on the nature of the element carbon (consensus is that it is not an element, but a compound, and the controversy is: a compound of what?). Oh, and scattered throughout the year are various appearances of James J. Mapes and his adventures in agriculture. If memory serves, it is about this time -- perhaps a while earlier -- that Mapes is training one Henry Steel Olcott.

November 1859: Infidel In Memphis

2011-10-20T21:02:00.000-07:00

Well, yeah, stick close to large cities, if you want to make money. Large cities in the North, that is.

In late November of 1859, Emma lectures in Memphis, on her way to the deep South (where she'll be ring-fenced by an act of the Alabama legislature, I believe), and gets a face-ful from a pseudonymous letter-writer to the Memphis Morning Enquirer:

As a constant reader and an old subscriber of your paper, I was no little surprised to read [the notice of EHB's lecture] in your paper of this date. I know that no request was ever made...to this northern fanatic, to delivery any such lecture...and I sincerely hope, for the honor of our city, that no such lecture will be attended by our community. If we cannot support [the charitable institution on behalf of which EHB was lecturing] without importing infidel lecturers from the North, then let it slide. It is bad enough to hear infidelity preached by men, but how humiliating to hear it from the lips of woman...Let this woman go home and attend to the duties assigned to her by the laws of God and man; and let us have no more such importations to corrupt the morals of our youth. The next importation, I suppose, will be from the Society of Free-Lovers.

Emma gave back way better than she got (you go, girl); The Banner of Light for December 17, 1859 printed the entire exchange.

October 22, 1859: EHB on the Compensation of Mediums

2011-10-20T20:20:00.000-07:00

It's mesmerism-and-money night here in the Archive.

From The Banner of Light for October 22, 1859 (wherein the transcendentally curious will find a transcription of a public address by one H. D. Thoreau), and written from Lyons, Michigan (another bit of the hinterlands), Emma's first public statement -- as far as I am aware -- on the most vexed institutional topic of Modern Spiritualism: the compensation of mediums.

She closes strongly:

over bountiful

I like the rhetoric of it, but I suspect that what was thrust upon her was, all too often, just enough to get to the next town, the next committee, the next lecture.

September 1857: Brand, and Risk

2011-10-20T19:49:00.000-07:00

Completely over the top, I think you'll agree.

The piece does tend to reinforce two things: the strength of Emma's personal brand at the time, and the righteousness of her claims that being Spiritualism's "brilliant luminary of the higher spheres" and the "harbinger of a new era" came with real risks: speaking in the hinterlands (as opposed to Boston, Philadelphia or New York), Emma was putting herself in harm's way. And of course she wasn't making money doing this -- if that had been her primary concern, she would have stayed close to the major metropolitan areas, and packed the larger halls. That's what Cora Hatch is doing, just at this time: cycling between Boston and New York with impressive regularity.

View Larger Map

New Brighton was definitely the hinterlands in 1859.

Thirty-Seven Cents

2011-10-20T19:29:00.000-07:00

From the August 22, 1859 issue of The Banner of Light:

Beecher, Chapin and Emerson all out-score Hatch and Hardinge on column inches in the BofL for 1859, but we also get a crisp understanding of the value of those two women's personal brands at this time.

At the time, the BofL's distribution network looked like this -- something that, regardless of volume-through-the-channel, is very interesting.

Another Piece of Work

2011-10-20T19:00:00.001-07:00

It's "wily old mesmerists" night....first Hatch, now Sunderland. Good thing I am in a scrofulous humor. From the June 25 1859 issue of The Banner of Light:

One really has to wonder how much of the business model of Spiritualism was, in fact, the business model of mesmerism, redux.

A Piece of Work

2011-10-20T18:28:00.000-07:00

Benjamin Franklin Hatch, in the April 23, 1859 issue of The Banner of Light:

The world is governed by emotion, not law; and the man who litigates with a wife is sure to lose, though he win; therefore, I shall pay no further attention to any suit which Mrs. Hatch may institute, and would gladly aid her in obtaining a full divorce, were it in my power. Here we part, at least until she sees her injustice and wrong. I have loved her as man seldom loves woman; and if, in the future, she shall ever need a friend which she may not find elsewhere, she can rely on my forbearance. | Very truly, | B. F. Hatch, M.D.

Yeah, I know -- I am into Hatch like I'm into color doctors; catnip, all the way. What a piece of work this man was.

April 1859 -- Emma and Elizabeth, Cohabiting

2011-10-20T18:02:00.000-07:00

The Banner of Light for April 9, 1859 includes a notice from Emma: "Miss Emma Hardinge | begs to apprise her friends that she has changed her residence to No. 8 Fourth Avenue, New York, where all future communications should be addressed to her. That's Elizabeth J. French's boarding house.

Now we can dig into the meat of Warren Chase's claim that Emma and An Sophia were living in the 1850s in a free love colony on Long Island -- it has to pre-date April 1859, as Emma and Ann Sophia are still at the Fourth Avenue address in 1861....

Babbitt's Lamp Shade

2011-10-20T07:20:00.001-07:00

A propos of my post on adverts a bit ago, a reader (thanks, Pat) draws my attention to Edwin Dwight Babbitt, MD, DM LLD, color doctor, Secretary of the College of Fine Forces (previously known as the New York College of Magnetics), inventor of Babbitt's Lamp Shade, and author of The Principles of Light and Color: Including Among Other Things the Harmonic Laws of the Universe, the Etherio-Atomic Philosophy of Force, Chromo Chemistry, Chromo Therapeutics, and the General Philosophy of the Fine Forces, Together with Numerous Discoveries and Practical Applications (1878). I'm not kidding; you can have a look at it, here.

Now, I have a thing for color doctors, as Emma did -- there's a whole history of
"chromo therapeutics" (I am trademarking it this afternoon, if I can) to be written, that extends to the present day, and is fully equipped with an occult history featuring all the requisite components: origin in India and/or Egypt, conspiracies to suppress by traditional medical practitioners and religious institutions, etc. It's a rich vein. It's tied into the Theosophical Society through Seth Pancoast, a color doctor of the first water, and it's....well, everywhere, really. As a meme, tracing its pathways tells us more about nineteenth and twentieth-century culture's actual structure and function than reading all the figures in the canon. Cultures are best understood, I think, not by how they replicate their science, but by how they replicate their parascience.

But that's not really what's intriguing to me here. E. D. Babbitt was a Cincinnati Spiritualist of standing. I feel certain I am going to be able to find direct connections between Babbitt and Emma, when I go spelunking in the databases this weekend.

And, what's got me smiling from ear to ear this morning is this: apparently, Edwin Dwight Babbitt's son was Irving Babbitt, a man I loved to badmouth in graduate school, who changed the meaning, and the face, of the study of humanities, and who, arguably, was the spirit obstetrician at the birth of Neoconservatism.

(I love the way that previous link associates Babbitt and Peter Viereck; his father was, as some of you may know, George Sylvester Viereck, German propaganda master, and a man who'd have had a lot to talk about, marketing and sales-wise, with E. D. Babbitt).

Time to re-read Democracy and Leadership, through a new lens. Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm....right-wing. History is the lengthened shadow of...our fathers.

Carlisle? Emerson....

Mumler on Mumler: January-March 1875

2011-10-19T20:14:00.000-07:00

I can't do this sort of thing, or I'd never get out of the giant nerd-swamp that is The Banner of Light, but this one I can't resist...extracting.

For someone who, compared to Stainton Moses, Mrs. Piper or even (I'll say it) J. M. Peebles, is a footnote in the history of a movement, William Mumler is an academic's darling.

If you need a refresher on Mumler -- but who would? -- the Wikipedia entry on him is sparse but well-illustrated. But, if you want Mumler-on-Mumler, the Banner of Light published a seven-part (count 'em!) essay, "The Personal Experiences of William H. Mumler in Spirit Photography | Written By Himself", between January and March of 1875. Get yours here. Fantastic read.

Keep in mind: this is half a decade after his trial for fraud.

Periodical Geek-fest

2011-10-19T19:38:00.000-07:00

A big batch of Banner of Light materials is back from the processor (thanks, Spectrum Information Services for another stellar recovery from bad film), and I am geeking out. By splicing together incomplete film runs from several sources, IAPSOP is now within striking distance of a complete run of the Banner, online, from inception until the end of 1876.

There's a standing feature in the early years of The Banner of Light, called "The Busy World," that sadly becomes irregular and then vanishes.

To get a sense of the busy-ness of the world of Modern Spiritualism, circa January of 1873, there's nothing quite like the back adverts page of The Banner. Students of the economics of Spiritualism will note that this is a great example of what modern marketeers call "marketplace noise." Crowded, loud, clamouring -- hard to get one's message across for the shouts and boasts of one's neighbors. And all this noise at a time when, arguably, the market called Spiritualism is as large as it is ever going to be. Consumer growth static, consumer confidence beginning to ebb, and more and more suppliers entering the market with products and services for sale. Fast-forward to 1875, and some of those suppliers are deciding to pioneer a new market: the occult.

(Click here for a full-size version)

November, 1867: Astrophysics in Glasgow

2011-10-17T07:20:00.000-07:00

From a colleague (thanks, Erica), this lovely gem from the Liverpool Mercury for November 13, 1867, shedding some light on a particularly private time in Emma's life. Emma was in the US from (possibly) August of 1866 (having failed to start a secular lecture career in the UK) until May or June of 1867, but there is scant information on her movements and activities anywhere in the public record from the summer of 1867 (when Modern American Spiritualist begins to be discussed as "forthcoming" in the US press) until the spring of 1870, when (after the publication of MAS), she takes to the lecture circuit once more.

Madame Sancerotte: Spiritualism and The Law

2011-10-12T08:41:00.000-07:00

This piece, from The Zoist for January of 1848 has -- along with some conversations with colleagues (thanks, Cathy and Pat) has got me digging around in the nexus between Spiritualism, law and crime.

Emma had but one dance with The Law, as far as I have been able to determine -- when she and William decided to sue the board of directors of The Two Worlds after they were removed from that board in the aftermath of William's stock manipulation. She threatened to go to The Law on a number of occasions, usually to protect herself from some real or imagined slander or libel. And she pronounced on The Law -- notably, on a number of notorious murders -- throughout her career.

But on the whole she steered clear of legal entanglements, with great success, in part because she chose -- carefully and deliberately, I have argued elsewhere -- not to engage in mediumistic practices that were prosecutable under the prevailing laws of commercial fraud.

Emma was working in a trade -- and it was a trade -- that was not, fully, within the purview of The Law. Yes, there were various statutes in various regimes prohibiting conjuring and fortune-telling and other mancies. But that isn't what I mean. Madame Sancerotte is, in the example above, haled before the bench for commercial fraud: she made an incorrect prediction (among several correct ones) and took money for it. The implied-warrantee-of-mechantability doctrine was compromised. There is, in the piece The Zoist excerpts, no hint that the public prosecutor had a political agenda contra clairvoyance, as Lankester did when he entrapped and prosecuted Slade, or as HM Government did when it prosecuted Helen Duncan (for, some of her apologists claim, precognition of the invasion of Normandy and other facts blacked-out by HM Government).

To fall into the hands of The Law was never a good thing, for a Spiritualist. But I am thinking now about the complexity of the problem, from the perspective of the agents of The Law. How indeed does one prosecute something one does not countenance, except as fraud against the agreed-upon social order of things? And why -- to pick an extreme example, for effect -- were the scientific proponents of the luminiferous ether not similarly prosecuted in, say, the fashion that the Italians are prosecuting their earthquake experts at the moment?

To look at Anglo-American Law, where Modern Spiritualism is concerned, is to look at a party to the conflict over the truths of Spiritualism, and not to look at a disinterested arbiter of social knowledge. And I find it interesting, but at present inexplicable, that the Spiritualist movement did not seek validation from the Law as it did from Science.

Note to self: need to look into Spiritualist libel and slander cases.

The Wayback Machine

2011-10-11T14:50:00.000-07:00

Plenty of people have bemoaned the prolonged absence of John Buescher from the trade. Me, among them.

For people who wish they'd grabbed stuff from SpiritHistory.com when it was alive, there's good news. The WayBack Machine, at the Internet Archive, has multiple working snapshots (51 of them between 2001 and 2010) of the site. Having dug around in one of those snapshots, the listing of 19th century Spiritualists seems to be intact.

Downpayment: The Zoist, Volumes 1 through 5

2011-10-11T12:19:00.000-07:00

Volumes 1 through 5 (1843-1848) of The Zoist, the flagship periodical for mesmerism and allied parasciences for the 1840s and 1850s, is available now from IAPSOP.

Mesmerism continues to intrigue and tantalize me, as I come to grips with how thoroughly Emma's Spiritualism is rooted in her "science," in magnetism and clairvoyance. But processing The Zoist has helped me to see that Emma's milieu, in the 1840s, was significantly a mesmerist milieu, and that she was by no means the only first-generation Spiritualist who found, in Modern Spiritualism, the logical extension of mesmerism and clairvoyance, as well as a reason for those parasciences to be. Varley the Elder, Luxmoore, Stanhope, Townshend, Martineau, Hockley -- they're all there, in the mesmerist soup, discovering the open boundary between their particular hobby horses and mesmerism (and they came from such different places), and discovering, too, the open boundary on the other side of mesmerism: the only that opens onto Victorian high culture and the people and places where power collects (reading the subscription lists was such fun).

It's a three-step from astrology in Bristol to the private seance in St. John's Wood, and the path leads through mesmerism.

I found this bit from Elliotson in issue 14 (July 1846) and it made it to the wall where I tape the really important things I don't get yet:

mesmerism produces no phenomenon that does not occur in nervous affections without mesmerism...

That may not seem important to any one but me (that's often the case), but I see in that open-handedness the explanation for mesmerism's broad appeal to the marginal and dispossessed parascientist.

Note: IAPSOP has a complete run of The Zoist, except for Volume 10, so if you happen to have one, let IAPSOP know.

Henry Melville Fay, Thomas Starr King, Mrs. Conant and the Obsession Theory

2011-10-10T05:42:00.000-07:00

After reading some fascinating early fraudulent-medium material involving Charles Partridge, Payton Spence, and R. T. Hallock (among others), in The Banner of Light in the spring of 1861, I have taken a little detour into the life of Henry Melville Fay, who more than any other medium I've run across, represents the always-open boundary between mediumship and showmanship, between Spiritualism and stage-magic.

Melville Fay is remembered, if at all, for three things: (1) repeated exposures, from the early 1860s onward (on both sides of the Atlantic), with brazen responses from Fay like the one in the example above; (2) his full-light stage exposures of the Davenport Brothers' "tricks," and (if contemporary newspaper advertisements are to be credited) his deliberate suggestions that he (rather than William Fay) was a colleague of the Davenports; (3) his training of his wife, Ann Heathman, who becomes Anna Eva Fay, one of the most interested mediums/magicians of the late 1800s, a notable Theosophist, and a particular interest of Houdini and William Crookes. (The child of the union of Melville Fay and Ann Heathman, John Fay, marries, goes on the stage with his wife as the Marvelous Fays, and gets into a bit of a nasty public battle with his mother.)

Things have a way of knitting themselves together in my little traipses. In between finding all sorts of fun stuff in the public records on Melville Fay, I stumbled on this interesting transcript of a spirit communication from Thomas Starr King (of whom Emma wrote), through the mediumship of Mrs. Conant, the house medium for The Banner of Light.

A. I certainly do. Nay, more than that, I know that he is. I know also that he is given to trickery, and will bear a very large amount of criticism.

Q. Then you think that spirits would assist him in his trickery?

A. I certainly do.

Q. Then spirits do, at times, assist in deception?

A. Why should they not? There are spirits disembodied who are upon the same plane with himself, and from them you should expect similar mental conditions. They would do what he would do. They stand no higher, no lower. They are ready to assist hiui in all that is possible. Mediumship, or spirit manifestations, are by no means dependent upon any high moral law. They belong to Nature; and Nature sometimes gives very crude manifestations, while again she gives us very lovely ones.

Q. Were not the Davenport Brothers good mediums at first?

A. And so they are now.

Q. Do you think it is a benefit to Spiritualism to allow Fay to go on?

A, It certainly does not harm Spiritualism. It cannot.

Q. Does it not in the estimation of the people?

A. No; not even in the estimation of its opponents. Spiritualism, as a natural science, cannot be harmed by the trickery of one, two, or a thousand individuals. All these persons who practise trickery under the name of Spiritualism, do but excite the populace to investigate, to know what is true and what is false. That which they would use against Spiritualism the great God throws into the scale and uses for it.

The material above is from Allen Putnam's Flashes of Light from the Spirit-Land (1872), which you can grab from Google Books, if you've a mind. Fascinating stuff.

The more I look, the more un-novel becomes the claims of HPB and Olcott that fraudulent mediumship could be explained by obsession (by elementals). It's pretty clear that obsession as an explanation for fraudulent mediumship was widely proposed, and accepted, well before HPB arrived in the US. This leads me to believe -- with some red-faced-ness -- that the thing that got folks so het up was not the idea of obsession, but rather the idea of elementary spirits.

April 1861: The Transmigration of Souls

2011-10-09T14:51:00.001-07:00

This fortuitous page from the April 20, 1861 issue of The Banner of Light will interest people for different reasons. It provides a nice, compact comparative view of Cora Hatch and Emma as competitors on the lecture circuit, and -- for those of us interested in the sources of Art Magic -- it is what reads like a nearly-exact transcript of Emma's trance lecture on the transmigration of souls, which weaves together metempsychosis, the theory of correspondences, and teleological progress-to-perfection (what she calls here the development theory) in much the way that Art Magic does, while also making plain that Emma's controls were thorough-going magnetists with an investment in the luminiferous ether:

From out the human form there passes a subtle fluid, of which we another time will speak. It is that by which the psychologist is enabled to determine character; for this subtle influence, adhering to all objects with which the body has come into contact, proclaims that the body and soul go forth together. If all things, then, reveal your sphere, what is the result to them? If these bodily emanations, thus charged with character, are found in every place where you have been, does not that character affect the earth, the atmosphere, the forms by which you are surrounded?

April 6, 1861: Emma's Fiction

2011-10-09T14:28:00.000-07:00

For the fun of it.

As I've said before, if you don't count quoted third-party material, Emma wrote more fiction than non-fiction during the course of her life. Her fiction's being collected and edited by another Britten scholar, and it will be a treat to read all of her stories and novellas, straight through.

Meanwhile, if you have a hankering, The Wildfire Club is in the Archive.

A. B. Child: Dentist, Promoter, Hashish Dealer

2011-10-09T12:36:00.000-07:00

I confess: in the silence of my own contemplation, I've always dismissed the idea that the people I study got high. I am sure they took opium extracts, in patent medicines and per se -- everyone did. But drugs-as-an-aid-to-clairvoyance: it's just too-1960s for me.

Not so fast, grasshopper. Here's A. B. Child, advocating hashish as he advocated Emma, in the January 22, 1859 issue of The Banner of Light.

Of course, A. B. Child wasn't really a dealer in hashish, as far as we know. But I think it's time for a foray into the hashish trade, and the hashish literature, of the 1850s... (strains of the Grateful Dead, as interpreted by J F. Souza, in the background)

Downpayment: The Spiritual Magazine, 1860-1864

2011-10-09T06:58:00.000-07:00

The first five years of The Spiritual Magazine, from 1860 to 1864 inclusive, are parted out, indexed, and online at IAPSOP.

Cleaning Up After Google

2011-10-08T15:13:00.000-07:00

Some folks have asked questions, a propos of my last post on The Banner of Light going up on IAPSOP, and I thought I should answer them, particularly as I am about to post the first five years of The Spiritual Magazine there as well.

The first question is a doozy: Isn't this what Google Books is doing?

Where to even begin? The short answer is: No. Google Books is all about text (not books, and certainly not periodicals, of which more later) in repository libraries. Google Books has no notion of discipline, balance, taxonomy, coverage -- nothing. While it's the single most important tool in modern scholarship, IMHO, it's also a disaster -- particularly if we assume Uncle Google is taking care of things for us.

The travails with The Spiritual Magazine should serve to illustrate my point. Google Books has hoovered up, in the course of its work, a nearly complete run of The Spiritual Magazine for 1861 through 1877. In many cases, it has more than one copy of a given year's run, and some of those are opaque to Google Books' own catalog (it records a volume as containing 1860, when it contains both 1860 and 1861. The volume is acquired, either purely mechanically or with human intervention (lots of pictures of gloved hands to be had), and the volume is stored in Googleland. In the case of almost every volume, the volume is complete (all issues are there, and all pages of all issues are present) but damaged. The automatic or manual page acquisition went badly awry, and, since Google has no quality control (certainly no human quality control), an issue -- or in some cases half-a-year -- are not actually readable. Pages are literally cut, medially, in half.

This mangling requires manual inspection, and of course one would be in the file anyway, separating issues into separate files for ease of processing, use, storage and transfer. When I found a copy of The Spiritual Magazine for 1860 that was badly mangled by the acquisition process, I knew I had two (count 'em) other copies of that year, and surely between three acquired copies I would be able create a complete, unmangled run. No such luck. Even with three sources to work from, and a day to do nothing but page image-by-page image comparisons, I still couldn't find enough properly-centered page images to create an undamaged run of any year of the magazine, for 1860, 1861 or 1862.

Does Google care? Hell, no. The company might wrap itself in the cultural preservation flag, but this is, for them, all about textual acquisition, and they acquire so much text this way that even if 20% of their volumes are defective at the page-image level, Google is happy. Only people who care, and who collect and examine the texts Google ingests, are going to preserve the actual content for future generations.

And then there are the subtle points. Consider for example the beautiful full-color reproduction of one of Elizabeth French's spirit drawings, which served as an illustration for Benjamin Coleman's "Spiritualism In America," which was first published serially in The Spiritual Magazine. I had three copies of that volume of the magazine: in one volume, there were no illustrations; in one, the illustrations were in black-and-white, and mangled, and in one, the full-color drawing survived as such (via a technical error; the page was not recognized properly, and was preserved as a full-color image, instead of being flattened to black-and-white). The image in question is full of text, but not text that Google recognizes -- it really is dumb luck we got anything, let alone a reasonable facsimile of the original.

And what about computationally-driven scholarship? Sure, you can search Google Books, but the only notion of "corpus" that Google Books has is: time. You can collect texts published between X and Y into a corpus for searching (assuming Google Books' metadata is accurate, which it absolutely ain't) but that's as far as Google goes, and is likely ever to go, in the direction of understanding that the heart of computational bibliographical analysis is the creation of a corpus to search. Beyond the obvious convenience and safety of have parted-out issues of major Spiritualist and occult periodicals outside Google Books, having indexed single issues permits scholars and researchers to do what Google won't do for them: download, create collections, index and search those collections separately. In the Windows world, there are a ton of search tools to do that; Mac users should go get themselves a copy of CTM Development's Foxtrot search engine, because Spotlight, like Google Books, sucks, and Foxtrot is brilliant, as long as your PDFs are already indexed).

I like to fantasize that Google's going to take a tiny fraction of the billions of dollars in cash they spend on bad technology, hire a team of curators, and turn Google Books into what they like to claim it is: a library. But that won't happen, in part because no one has any respect for library science any more (we do ontologies now :-)) and in part because, once you get to 30 million texts or so, the idea of cleaning up after yourself is just too daunting. "Fix it later" is a common practice in software development, but it doesn't work so well in curatorial discplines, where your errors are multiplied by the number of objects under curation. No doubt, at some point Google will make some tools that allow us to fix the mess in Google Books, and proclaim it another democratic experiment in crowd-sourcing. Then we'll get Google Books-by-Wikipedia: plumbers classifying chemistry texts, chemistry professors classifying fly-fishing texts, Christians classifying Spiritualist texts as demonology, etc.

The Banner of Light: Volumes 1 through 4

2011-10-08T10:18:00.000-07:00

are now online and available, at IAPSOP.

December 8, 1858: Entirely Divested of Anything Like Embarrassment

2011-10-08T08:48:00.000-07:00

A propos of the last post, this coverage of Emma, declining an audience-selected topic, at the start of a lecture in Cincinnati -- a city with which she will have a long and important association.

Error, Fraud and Truth: Working Out Spiritualism's Epistemology

2011-10-08T07:43:00.000-07:00

Having just finished reading The Banner of Light for 1858, I'm being tempted to deviate from the normal reportage-from-the-trenches.

It's really worth reading this whole year of The Banner in a single sitting, if you can. It isn't as hard as it sounds -- half of each issue is fiction that (in my opinion) is unreadable, anyway.

1858 is the first year, in The Banner, that a substantial portion of each issue is devoted to the question: how do we know what is true in spirit communications?

There are cases of "fraud" being aired in The Banner -- J. V. Mansfield, for example, is taken to task for producing content-free spirit letters that "could do in any situation" as one irate reader writes, and several other mediums are both attacked, and defended, for their "reliability." Most painfully, the table-tipping medium of Worchester, Paine, is caught using mechanical equipment to move his table, and explains his deception as a snare to catch fraudulent witnesses, mostly other mediums. "I have deceived for the good of the cause - for the sake of battling deception. I think the means justifies the end. What sort of a medium is that person who, while I am producing raps and movements by the aid of machinery, will assert that he sees, standing by, the spirit of the party moving or rapping?"

Margaretta Fox joins a Christian church, which leads readers and writers to question whether Catholicism or Methodism is consistent with Spiritualism, and whether the turn to orthodoxy is a sign of waning belief in spirit communion.

B. F. Hatch promotes Adin Ballou's theory of obsession by evil spirits, as I mentioned in an earlier post.

La Roy Sunderland and A. B. Child have a controversy about the origin of the power behind spirit healing: Sunderland, predictably, advocating for mesmeric energy, and Child for disembodied spirits.

Thomas Lake Harris' cult is watched from afar, with growing unease. The idea of power, and the cult of personality, is rearing its head, and the forces of charisma and enthusiasm are viewed, by more than a few Spiritualists, with dismay -- it's well and good to believe, but must we act out in that fashion?

The same with free-love: readers and writers struggle to understand how such a "pernicious" idea could have sprung from the Spiritualist tree.

And P. B. Randolph's apostasy -- with his one-third fraud, one-third delusion and one-third insanity diagnosis of Modern Spiritualism -- gets its fair share of column-inches. He's invited to the Melodeon, to explain himself. He says: "I am not a Benedict Arnold, for I have renounced error, and am now endeavoring to maintain the truth....Spiritualism is an evil, in whose track I see discord and ruin; and as I feel I have a soul to save, I resist it, condemn it and repudiate it. Though pleasing outwardly, perhaps, and attractive, foul and venomous cobras lurk inside." Wow.

At the close of 1858, The Banner reports (in the December 11 issue) that the New York Conference of Spiritualists -- roughly, the same high-caste luminaries involved in the founding of the SDSK -- have taken the issue of "the causes of fallacy in spirit communication" under consideration, and have come to the conclusion that fallacy in spirit communications is attributable to three causes: (1) "premeditated fraud", (2) "hallucination" and (3) "interpolation" (this typology courtesy of Dr. John Gray). The New York Conference further concluded that most hallucinations were due to mesmerism (well worth noting -- there's a riff in here), illness (the effects of mediumship on health already a hot topic) and drugs (oh, my!). Interpolation, in the minds of the Conference leadership, was what we would call today distortion -- the otherwise-accurate spirit communication was corrupted, garbled or mangled by "the mind of the medium," something the Conference leaders felt was unavoidable.

At the same time, The Banner is reporting on the early career of the Davenport Brothers (the "Davenport boys" at this point), and their physical manifestations -- which include transporting marked items 50 miles or more -- are pre-cabinet, and astounding. The same with Dan Hume (who will become Daniel Dunglas Home). We are, in the sweep of things, just on the cusp of an explosion of innovation in increasingly confrontational physical manifestations.

It's hard not to see that innovation as an effect of these concerns.

And already we can see a division emerging, in Spiritualism's self-critique -- and academics should take note, as that self-critique is real, pervasive and more honest that the self-critique of orthodox science at the time -- between fraud, and error: a distinction we all employ every day.

What interests me, at this point, is that Dr. Gray's quite-workable theory of "interpolation" is, I think, going to get lost, almost immediately, perhaps because Spiritualism never develops a satisfactory model for the interplay between the mind of the medium, and the mind (if there is one) of the spirit control. The idea of error -- unintentional corruption or distortion of an otherwise accurate message during transmission, the heart of modern communication theory since Claude Shannon -- gets lost, ceases to be available as an explanation.

In the December 18 issue, one "H. T." living in Muses' Dell, Virginia (awesome name!), writes, a propos of Hatch's defense of Ballou's obsession theory, a passionate piece on "pure and impure" mediumship that has to be emblematic of the state of confusion and concern among ordinary believers at this time. His punchline: "until modern Spiritualism can furnish at least as good a code of morals as Jesus has given us, we will do well to hold on to the latter."

If I were doing another kind of work, I'd follow this thread. Someone should.

December, 1858: Montreal, Hecklers, and a Camp Follower

2011-10-08T07:02:00.000-07:00

From The Banner of Light for December 4, 1858, coverage of Emma in Montreal (an episode which features in the Autobiography as well -- the version there aligns so nicely with this version that I suspect this piece was used in the writing of that chapter of the Autobiography).

The writer, A. B. C., is A. B. Child, the Boston dentist and Spiritualist who was the most ardent and reliable promoter of Emma's mediumship at this time. I have been interested in Emma's relationship with Child since reading his "History of Mediums" piece on her. Where Child's other "History of Mediums" pieces sometimes do not rise above the level of bare-bones biography, his piece on Emma is clearly informed by Emma herself, directly, and possibly in the form of notes, as there are places in the piece where the text comes close to slipping into first-person narration.

The coverage above is even more tantalizing, as it suggests that Child was with Emma, in Montreal -- something not mentioned in the Autobiography, where Emma travels to Montreal alone.

Also of note: this episode, in the Autobiography, is sensational: Emma corrects a rabbi's translation of Old Testament Hebrew, suggesting (from my reading of it) that she could understand Hebrew in trance. That episode is not present in this account.

The Delanco Nexus, Once Again

2011-10-07T15:01:00.000-07:00

The house: Rose Cross. The inhabitant: Ann Sophia Floyd, before and during the time Emma was in California in 1863 and 1864. Location: Delanco, NJ. The rationale: completely unknown.

But Emma had a colleague, living in Delanco in 1858, it turns out. Her name was Agnes Carra.

October 1858: Eating of the Body of Ceres

2011-10-07T14:54:00.001-07:00

I sense a revision to the annotated edition of Art Magic coming on. How embarrassing to discover this, at this point, in The Banner of Light for October 23, 1858:

She's thoroughly indoctrinated, already, at this (early) date. I smell Gilbert Vale.

Obsession by Elementaries: Not HPB's Invention

2011-10-07T14:29:00.001-07:00

I've noticed recently that more than a few people are wont to give HPB credit for inventing the idea that fraudulent spirit communications were, in fact, the result of mediums' obsession (possessed, as we say now) by elementary spirits or elementaries.

It just ain't so.

Near as I can determine from reading the periodical literature and book-grazing, pride of place for the specific theory goes to Adin Ballou, in 1857 -- well before the Spiritualist crises of 1870-1880, and HPB's controversial explanation of fraudulent mediums.

And then, as now, the theory was highly convenient for all sorts of people, for all sorts of reasons. You can have a look, for example, at the September 25 issue of The Banner of Light, for example, where -- on page 7 -- Ballou's theory is warmly and explicitly endorsed by one B. F. Hatch, MD, who is just then at the beginning of his long and public battle over his separation from his wife, Cora Hatch. Alienation of affection by elementaries. Novel.

March 1897: Born To Preach

2011-10-07T08:08:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Paul Gaunt, of Psypioneer, we have what may be one of the last large-forum lecture EHB gave, in late February or early March of 1897, as recorded in The Two Worlds for March 5 of 1897.

My two earlier posts on Emma's May 1858 lectures at the Melodeon show us the "original" Emma -- thoroughly enmeshed in the Christian Spiritualist matrix, though already (the lectures demonstrate) wrestling with the attacks on Biblical historicity and Christianity's claims-of-uniqueness, the corrosive effects of which are going to lead her away, first into a non-Xian Spiritualism that was uncomfortable for her, and from there into her flirtation with occultism and freethought.

Here, thanks to Paul, we find Emma at the end of her public life, frail from 60 years of public performance -- 40 of which were in the service of Spiritualism -- and thinking of her own final judgment, her own transition.

I don't think Emma ever resolved her argument with God, or returned to her position of the late 1850s, in which the life of Jesus of Nazareth was treated as a matter of transcendent truth if not historical fact. That she died an orthodox Spiritualist is, based on this transcript, absolutely undeniable.

To the end, she abided by her time-honored rule, and declined to name her spirit control.

Late May, 1858: In The Fields of Uncontrolled Light

2011-10-07T06:00:00.000-07:00

The Wednesday lecture that preceded my earlier posting was entitled "The Last Judgement," and The Banner of Light for June 5, 1858 summarized it as follows:

Miss Emma Hardinge lectured at the Melonaon [sic] Wednesday evening last. At an early hour the hall was filled, and many were compelled to remain standing. Her subject, as before announced, was "The Last Judgment." She commenced by reading from the third chapter of Joel, the eleventh and following verses, in which judgment is referred to, and the day of the Lord in the Valley of Decision.

She continued -- In the world, all religious creeds and doctrines look forward to the Last Judgment, when, by deluge and fire, the world -- spiritual and material -- will arrive at its finality.

The upspringing minds of progress break loose from this acceptance and call it blasphemous to charge a God of love with the vengeance and cruelty attributed to him by this system. They cannot see God as a negative power -- a God of dust -- without reproduction. These forms must be broken up by a knowledge of cause and effect. To the smallest atom, as to the largest thing in nature, belong cause and effect. In man these laws exist, and a knowledge of them will break the fetters of earth, and let the spirit wander in the fields of uncontrolled light.

The coarse particles of the granite, the finer particle of the diamond, reach in time their culminating point, and break and die -- they reach their summit, arrive at an end -- their day of judgment comes, for they die, and their identity becomes involved in another life. Then these laws exist and act in a higher degree in vegetable life, -- the mature tree, the perfect flower, the ripened fruit, are broken by death; thus upon them judgment is passed. Man comes forth governed by the same laws -- his use in the individual form ceases, and he dies; this is his doom, is his judgment, and his identity is involved in a higher life. So in the progress and change of ideas with which man's intellect is fraught. These laws have applied to nations in all ages, to all things -- to the fisherman's hut, the woodmans cabin; and from thence, through all the degrees of refinement, to the mighty city of civilization. All these pass on to their culminating point; they die, and judgment is passed.

Tracing up the history of the world, form the birth of Adam, we find that all is governed by this law. We find, in the first revelation of man, the [sic] Adam is born -- type of the strength of man. He is born of the animal kingdom, and has neither wisdom nor conception. His mission is to till and cultivate the land, and make earth fruitful. When his work is done, his judgment is passed. The Adam dies, and the Eve is born. This is intellect, and seems to be the highest condition of the God. Then knowledge of good and evil is born.

The next condition is a mixture of this good and evil, where Cain and Abel are born. The judgment comes to Cain, and he is sent forth to people the earth. Here we find the carvers of wood, stone and marble are born. Age after age succeeds, till we arrive at the time of Enoch. Here is religion born -- the idea of a God who walks and talks with man. But this age, too, must die, and in turn passes away. It listens to the doom of judgment, and Enoch is no more. Age succeeds, and the compendium of all exists in the person of Noah. The deluge, represented as taking place, is the transition of man from gross materiality to a spiritual life. Moses follows, in the course of ages. Here is law, springing up from the ashes of Noah and of all who had passed away. Then we read the light and progress the world has made, in the history of David and Solomon.

We come to Christ. A child is born with the gospel of love, and it is from this stand-point we shall be able to know, to see the light, the beauty, the power that truly belongs to earth. A thousand Christs shall yet spring forth in spirit power.

All developments of the past have had their day, their place, their growth, their maturity, their judgment. This is the highest development of earth -- the gospel of love -- and onward and upward shall it now spread. Age after age of power has passed; the age of law is now having its judgment; the age of learning is culminating, and shall soon have its judgment; and thus age after age passes away. Under the unfolding of the new power of love, kingdoms shall rock, and find their doom; dynasties shall crumble, for their judgment day is come.

Men put off their old forms, laws, creeds and government. The old man dies, and the new man is born in Christ in a higher and better life into the gospel of love.

What does last mean? Is there any last of anything? is there a finality to anything? What we call the last of everything is but the birth of a new blessing. The earth reproduces after every failure; not a thought is ever lost from change; the use is ended, but the individual reigns forever.

What is judgment? Where may we find it? Trace progress through the past and in every step you will find a judgment. Judgment on the earth has already taken place; new light at every judgment has burst forth; and a brighter light than the earth has known is breaking forth today in the new-born infant love. Spirits from the world unseen -- fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers -- are whispering the new gospel -- the gospel of love. In the infancy of this new world of love we recognized the fulfillment of the promise of a new heaven and a new earth. Judgment is passing; sensuality, materiality, science and human invention culminating for change; the old world is dying; the night of darkness shall fall on the nations; but the infant star of love will shine. The soul shall be born, perhaps in sorrow from the gross encasement [?] that now holds it.

Death comes. What is it? It is the emancipation of this earthly body from the toiling spirit. How beautiful it is. This is judgment -- change only -- it is an onward move of the soul to a higher life. And as the soul moves onward in its eternal destiny, it ever passes new judgments, and emerges into new beauties. There is no last to the soul. The law of judgment is in every thing. The tribunal of judgment is inevitable; but judgment is not a law of terror; it is beautiful. Fear not this act of your Father. children of earth, for by this process of judgment He draws you nearer -- nearer to Himself. On, on then, to the "Valley of Decision." Ask yourself what of the night? What comes of the morning light? All hail! to the great judgment day, unfolding radiant crowns of light and glory, waiting for souls. Man through successive series of judgments aspires -- rises to new and more beautiful life, forever.

At the close of her discourse several questions were asked and answeredd, though we have not room to publish them in the present rush of matter to which we are subjected. They will, however, be published, together with this, and Mrs. H's [sic] other discourses, in pamphlet form, by Bela Marsh, in the course of a week.

Late May, 1858: Is Not Progress The Spoken Word of God?

2011-10-06T14:25:00.000-07:00

Keep that date in mind: late May, 1858. Emma is lecturing at the Melodeon, in Boston. At best, Emma's been a trance medium for a year (if we credit her story about her coming-out as a trance speaker dating from June of 1857, through the good offices of General Edward Fitch Bullard and his invalid wife, Margaret).

From The Banner of Light for June 5, 1858:

Miss Hardinge [Ed: note spelling!] made the "Word of God" the topic of her discourse on Sunday afternoon, and took for her text the following passage of Scripture -- "In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God."

She continued -- Perhaps no passage of Scripture contains within itself a dictum so authoritative, concerning the nature and divinity of Jesus of Nazareth, as the few words we have quoted. There follows this a few other verses of similar nature; but we look in vain in the Hebrew Scriptures for a record that God was over [sic: ever] transformed into human flesh. But the position we are called to consider, is not the life and death of Jesus, but whether the word was an impersonation, or a principle -- and if the former, when it was made flesh and dwelt with man. We should not think this question worthy of attention for an hour, was there not something involved beyond.

We are taught that the Scriptures are from God, who was, by a great and incomparable metempsychosis, both Father and son -- alike finite and infinite. What is it you are called to believe is the word of God? In the Old Testament we find the spirit of the Word, and in the New Testament the Life of the Word. We must not dwell in the past because we find beautiful things there; our spirits claim the substance of to-day.

If we admit that the word existed before teh creation of the world, why was it ever divided? Matthew, it is claimed, wrote many gospels, but not till thirty years after the death of his master, and then from memory -- so his record cannot be divested of all all [sic] errors by any probability. But if this was written by the Holy Ghost, can that element of the Godhead be guilty of plagiarism? The first chapter of the book of Matthew give [sic] account of the cruelty of Herod, and his command that the first-born son shall be put to death, though no secular history mentions the matter at all. Though we have no evidence that any such legal proclamation was ever published, a parallel case is found in the mythology of Hindostan. The prediction of his birth, the fiat from the throne, the flight of his parents from the land -- all these incidents in the recorded life of Christ, are to be found in the old legend. If Matthew was inspired to write the history of Christ, he was singularly felicitous in turning to account the mythic legends of old India. Mark and Luke were likewise guilty of plagiarism, thought not to such an extent as Matthew. We can trace John with less certainty than we can the other writers.

Years, many years after the death of Christ, he was called from the seclusion of the Isle of Patmos, so old and decripit [sic] and worn with age that when he was conducted to the church, he said nothing but "Little children, love one another;" and when asked what he meant by the continual repetition of that injunction, he said that it was the beginning of all law. Forty or fifty years after the crucifiction, numerous schisms and sects grew up -- all opposed to each other, and constantly in discord and strife. One of the philosophic teachers of these days -- the head of a strong and growing sect -- taught the doctrine that all incarnations were simple illusions. To defeat this pernicious doctrine, the Bishops of Asia called upon John to write an epistle. John was the only apostle alive, and he was weakened in faculties, and in the foolishness of second-childhood. Many years passed before this document was published, and the church to which it was addressed was not founded until thirty years after his death!

No many ever accomplished anything to excite the wonder of his cotemporaries, but the ignorance and superstition of the people sought to deify him. So it was with Jesus.

We shall now allude to the working of this word before the advent of Jesus. At one time it speaks in the singular number, and at other times in the plural. Again, how obvious is the inconsistency attributed to God in holding human life so valuable that He sets a mark upon Cain, in order that no man shall slay him -- and afterwards to send forth Abraham to slay his son, in order that he might regale himself with the smoke of the sacrifice! if such an order should come to the parent to-day as came to Abraham, how would it be received?

It is now admitted that in no case can two wrongs make a right -- and so horrid a crime as murder is, no retaliation will wipe the crime away. Even the life of the murderer is sacred. But the man who gathered sticks on Saturday, committed no murder, yet the spoken word of God commanded him to be put to death. In the word of God we find the history of Lot, the recital of whose obscenity would make refined ears tingle with shame. We cannot dwell upon it, and pass it by. We find God's spoken words coming from the mouth of a dumb beast, in response to the conduct of Balaam. The beast of burden becomes the agent of the spoken word of God! Balaam is called, by the word of God, to speak curses on all nations who shall stand in the way of the people of Israel. They must die, that the invaders may ride rough shod over their bodies, to occupy their land and use their property. We find in the spoken word of God, a law against stealing, yet we find the Israelites ordered, when they fled from Egypt, to borrow from their neighbors their jewelry and garments, and run away with them. But this is the spoken word of God, so we myst not put it under the ban of plundor [sic]. Then the book of Kinds and Chronicles are filled with disgusting details of men preying on each other. One devote and pious man, delighted in hacking in pieces, before the altar, the body of a king; and God regretted that the Amakekites had been spared, repented that He had made Saul king, and poor Samuel weeps at his hard-heartedness. Never was there a medium of such power and strength as Elijah. How did he serve his God? King Ahaziah sent to the best God he knew of -- an idol, and that, perhaps, a better God than the cruel-hearted Jehovah of the Jews -- and asked if he should live. On their way his men met Elijah, the Tishbite, who because the king had sent to consult an idol, rather than the God of Israel -- told them the king must die. Ahaziah then sends a captain and fifty men to consult this new oracle, Elijah, but Elijah says, "If I be a man of God, let the earth open, and let fire from heaven consume these men." -- and the men and their leaders were destroyed. Another captain and host were sent, and a similar fate befell them; and not till a third fity had been sent, and then, at the instigation of an angel would Elijah visit Ahaziah, and then only to inform him that he must die.

Vould we believe the God of to-dau would cause forty-three little children to be torn in pieces by wild beasts, simply for mocking an old man?

In the character of David, a devout man, after God's own heart -- we find the aldulterer and murderer - and we find him on his dying ned directing the building of a temple to his God, and in the same breath telling his son how to bring the hoary head of his enemy to the grave.

The spoken word of God records the wisdom of Solomon -- extols him as the wisest man that ever lived; but did his wisdom tell him to hand down to the future such a history of a life? -- in his old age to forsake his God to worship idols and stones, at the behest of a hundred wantons, and to commit deeds to shameful to name?

The spoken word of God was conveyed in images. Isaiah was commanded to run without clothing for three years, in order to fit himself for a prophet. Trace these directions in the spoken word of God for the observance of the sacrifices -- the cutting up of different portions of the body -- and what can be more disgusting to refined natures?

The spoken word, acting through Jesus, proclaimed, indeed, a higher gospel. It was enough that man should love his God with all his power, and his neighbor as himself. All the records of the Bible pass into insignificance, beside the inspiration from God we have here.

Can it be that God was the cause of all that was cruel and malicious in the history of the world? Did the God we worship command Moses to stone the man for picking sticks on the Sabbath, and send the bears down to destroy the little children who called Enoch a bald-head?

To reconcile, as we must, these incongruities of the spoken word of God, we admit that every medium, of every age, had to view God through his own faculties. The great mind of Milton, Shakespeare, or SHelley, could no more expend a knowledge of the Infinite, than the little child could know all of science, playing with its cup and ball.

What evidence have we that word of God lives? Look at man. Thousands of years ago, a man -- a leaf-gatherer, gazed upon a morsel of wood, and spent a life-time gazing at it. Others said he wasted his time. But while he was gazing, a thought was born. He died, and all was lost, save that thought. Another leaf-gatherer followed, and built upon that thought. And through long generations lead gatherer succeeded leaf gatherer, and thought is built upon thought. Finally the idea is born, that man can write upon leaves. The world was growing old, and its traditional history was spending itself, and decaying. Other ages follow. Wood, iron, stone, all had to be used -- all these were necessary before a single thought could be recorded. But the papyrus grows -- and you can see how the first leaf gatherer's thought has grown. At length, ine day, the mighty printing press was born -- then the thought of the past was given wings to fly onward toward eternity. And now, not a thought is born but owes its parentage to the leaf gatherer of centuries ago.

Spirits progress as man progresses, but God is over all. We would seek to reach Him, but He is ever onward. Go into the workshops -- man is no more a tool -- the elements are made to do the work of thousands of poor laborers of the past. Is not this the spoken word of God? Shall that word ever cease? If a word so noble exists in man, can the word of God be less? The rock-margined ocean and the hoar-headed mountain have stood, and will stand, forever; but they are always changing. The prairies shall shift places with the ocean, and man will yet build cities at the bottom of the sea. Is not progress the spoken word of God? Can we separate it from His word? We must not limit the spoken word of our Father. A spirit is our God. Would we know more of this spirit? What do we need more? Will he ever leave us? No; He cannot.

Our Father who art in Heaven! -- where is that heaven? In the heart -- in the good, pure heart, where the Spirit of Goodness ever dwells.Hallowed be thy name! -- God's name is hallowed by every tongue which pronounces it in confiding trust. Thy Kingdom come! -- How long has that prayer gushed from the heart of man! Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven! What is that will? Man has always sought to find it. But when we know Him, we shall know his Will. Give us this day our daily bread! -- Well may we ask our bread of God. Christ taught us to ask for bread from day to day, and this is a sufficient command against hoarding up our substance from day to day and year to year. God, who has numbered the hairs of your head, and who watches the sparrow's fall, will provide for you. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us! How long has man groaned under this prayer, and yet forgot the conditions under which he is to obtain pardon, in wiping out the memory of his transgressions by forgiving all who have ever done him wrong. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Does our Father ever lead us into temptation? No. This prayer asks that we mat be shielded from sin and sorrow. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen! If God's kingdom exists forever, it can never pass away from us -- never!

(At the close of this address -- which occupied nearly an hour and a half in delivery -- the medium called for questions from the audience. Dr. Gardner stated that he held some in his hand, but would reserve them to make room for verbal ones from the audience, on account of the lateness of the hour. The medium then called for the reading of the second question on the sheet which he hold [sic], being of course unacquainted with its purport. The question was read:)

Question. -- Margaret Fuller expresses her belief that every person is possessed of a demon who controlls [sic] them to do wrong. She says she has felt this influence for months at a time. Is this theory true?

Answer. -- It has been believed that every person, at its birth, becomes possessed of a good and evil genius. Good, as having gone beyond, and evil, as not having so much experience. These were called, by the ancients, demons. To suffer temptation, or to resisty it, the good or evil triumphs. WHen a spirit finds itself in affinity with a mortal, it delights to invest itself in his frail form. In the days of the apostles, instances of this kind are numerous, as the records of the casting out of devils; and to-day, in the mountainous country of Hungary and Bohemia, causes of this kind are very frequent. These people are possessed of an undeveloped spirit, who delights in the repetition of the events of his earth life; but by the exertion of a strong will, this power will be dethroned.

Q. -- You stated in your lecture, Wednesday evening, that the age of learning was drawing to a close. Is it right, then, and expedient, that we should send our children to school?

A. -- Learning and Science will never die, but simply cease to be the ruling power of the age -- make way for a higher development.

[Miss Hardinge's] evening lecture was on the subject -- "Night and Day." It was what may be pronounced a prose-poem. It was a production of rare beauty and eloquence, such as is seldom equalled. Any abstract which we could give would be simply mutilation, in breaking a string of pearls to treasure up one or two. This lecture will be published in the forthcoming pamphlet, with her other discourses.

The pamphlet in question was published, apparently, by Bela Marsh.

Lynn Thorndike's History of Magic

2011-10-06T13:59:00.000-07:00

A milestone in the history of the discipline for sure...

Electronic editions are loose in the digital wild, but if any one has a hankering to look at the real McCoy, sitting on their shelves, I know of someone who's willing to part with their set for under $1000 -- which is a serious deal.

Just drop me a note.

Digital Survivability

2011-10-04T07:32:00.000-07:00

A colleague (thanks, Paul) forwards me a note today, indicating that some archival records (correspondence, diaries, other one-of-a-kind things) we have been wanting to get our hands on are unavailable for an indefinite period of time because the university that holds all the records sustained significant damage during the recent East Coast earthquake.

Assuming for the sake of discussion that the undeniably unusual geophysical and meteorological events of the past couple of years, all over the planet, are related to a systemic change in our climate (never mind the cause), it seems to me that the premium on digitizing one-of-a-kind records, and releasing them into the replicating wilds of the Internet, is a first priority for repository institutions now.

One of the beautiful things about digital objects, copied hundreds of times across a global network of cheap compute-and-storage is that those objects survive pretty much everything, including the collapse, or the inundation, of entire nation-states.

In my particular domain, I think of the proximity of Adyar to the Bay of Bengal.

View Larger Map

No matter what your perspective on the TS, you'd have to agree that it's a crime that so much absolutely unique primary material is, every day, in immediate danger of destruction.

Data and History

2011-09-30T13:56:00.000-07:00

Some comments about my nGram posts lead me to make an observation -- the future of history is going to be, a lot, about large-scale data capture, analysis and visualization, even at the textual level -- and to offer a stunning example of how powerful such techniques are, for eludicating the complex and opening the guts of the past to more people, with better understanding and comprehension.

Real soon now, it will be difficult to make the kinds of freefloating thematic observations historians (particularly pomo ones) like to make, because it will be too easy for ordinary people to consult the data, in order to verify those assertions.

Updated EHB Biographical Summary

2011-09-30T09:57:00.000-07:00

I have updated the presentation I gave on Emma's life at the Church of Light's convention this year, and it's available.

I fear it will do little to combat "Captain Floyd Hardinge" and associated corruption, or to balance the hagiographies' emphases on suspect events, but it is -- whatever its faults -- based on data, not myth.

The Long Cycle of a Conspiracy Theory

2011-09-28T11:25:00.000-07:00

Contemporary esotericism is informed, or polluted, depending on one's viewpoint, by conspiracy models.

In this fascinating snippet from Google NGrams, you can see the Templars, Freemasonry and the Kaballah converging and becoming tracking curves, in contemporary English discourse.

The "Birth" of Modern Spiritualism

2011-09-28T10:01:00.000-07:00

"Birth," when it appears in an historian's account of anything, is a metaphor. Ideas have no birth, and no death -- they percolate in history's network.

The potted history of Modern Spiritualism includes such a birth, either with Andrew Jackson Davis or with the Fox family, and that has been the backbone of the trade since Emma's Modern American Spiritualism at least.

It's distorting, and (per my earlier post), this Ngram identifies a fact of the historical record that Joscelyn Godwin and others have identified, and that deserves far more attention than it has received to date. The terms are "mesmerism," "clairvoyance," and "seance"," graphed between 1830 and 1900.

And the Victorian occult renaissance....how much is told of that by the addition of a single token -- "Freemasonry" -- to the graph above...

The N-grams of Spiritualism

2011-09-28T08:31:00.000-07:00

A colleague (thanks, Erica) pointed out the Google Books Ngram project to me, and I have been messing around with it. You can get a view of the background to the project, but in a nutshell, the Ngram project is computational bibliography at its simplest, and its best. If you have -- as we do with Modern Spiritualism and the occult -- dense technical nomenclature (terms of art, as it were), you can plot, with the Ngram viewer, these terms, over time, to map the frequency of the terms' occurrence in the body of texts that is Google Books: a body of texts, mind you, that is now large enough (at somewhere around 20M books) to represent a statistically meaningful sample of "everything that was written" during a particular historical period.

The data, I would argue, calls into questions a lot of our working hypotheses about the shape of the curves of Modern Spiritualism and the modern occult: how much, when, who believed what, etc.

Generally, to do a meaningful analysis using this marvelous tool, we would need to have a working vocabulary -- a set of terms that constituted the core technical nomenclature of the discipline "Modern Spiritualism" or the discipline "Victorian occult revival," and we could then graph those terms using the Ngram database, and see -- in the rise and fall of the curve -- the cultural "relevance" of the terms (modulo, of course, the fact that we are dealing with a deliberately marginalized set of discourses), and -- in the relative frequencies -- the "importance" of the term of art in the discourse.

I am assembling a set of terms that, to my way of thinking, mark a discourse as belonging to Modern Spiritualism, but to give you a taste of the interest here, consider the graph below, which maps the occurrences of the terms "elementary spirits" and "elemental spirits" -- two vexed terms in the working vocabulary of the modern occult, between 1800 and 2000.

Or, if a more subtle pattern is more to your liking, consider the relative frequency of three terms of great interest to the Victorian occult renaissance: astral travel, astral light and etheric body. The resulting graph is, in some fundamental sense, the graph of the rise (twice) of the New Age movement.

And, finally, because in computational linguistics and bibliography, a token is a token is a token, consider this interesting graph of the relative "mentions" of Blavatsky, Olcott, EHB, Stainton Moses, Henry Slade the slate-writing medium, Mrs. Piper (the white crow, some say, of the parapsychological) and Edgar Cayce.

Stainton Moses -- what's going on there, I wonder?

Take out the outliers -- Stainton Moses and Edgar Cayce -- and a very different pattern emerges.

And finally, just to remind us all of what marginality looks like, statistically, here's Helena Blavatsky graphed against Charles Dickens. Helena is the blue line, riding the X axis. This is a graph of our forgetting (Charles) and our never-remembering (Helena).

The actual shape of that blue line is, however, very different in isolation: a rise to relevance (and a reflection of the post-WWII publishing boom and more recently the rise of self-publishing and the reprint houses -- the Google Books base data set is dirty, IMHO)

Fair warning -- you will lose days to this thing, if you let yourself fall into the rabbit hole...

Like, considering the implications of this set of tracking curves -- Theosophy versus The Luminiferous Ether...

Pizarro, or the Death of Rolla

2011-09-23T14:27:00.001-07:00

Detail-minded readers may recall that, as far as we know, Emma acted in only two productions for the Broadway Theatre, in NY, from September of 1855 to June of 1856.

After reading far too many advertisements for the Broadway Theatre, it turns out that Emma was introduced to NY audiences within her metier -- burletta and comedy -- but was given an opportunity, in October of 1855, to play the female lead, Cora, in what I am sure was a chopped-down version of Kotzebue's five-act tragedy, Pizarro, or the Death of Rolla.

Such mentions of the performance as they are -- and they are scant -- suggest the production was a disaster.

When, in early June of 1856, the NY Herald's theatre writer covers the doings in the theatres, he notes that "Miss Emma Harding has played with a good deal of success the second range of characters, and created a designer on the part of the public to see more of her..." implying, I think, that she has -- as she says in her autobiography -- been off the stage for some significant amount of time. Perhaps Kotzebue's play and her transition to leading lady was her undoing as an actress.

Emma and Edward Fitch Bullard

2011-09-23T12:33:00.001-07:00

Readers of Emma's auobiography will recall this passage.

The "now inevitable fate" Emma is speaking of is her career as a trance lecturer. That she had already, at the time of this event, appeared in public under the auspices of the Society for the Diffusion of Spiritual Knowledge as a trance lecturer is elided in the Autobiography, for reaons I have mentioned elsewhere.

She is living with Elizabeth French at this time -- indeed, she and French start a Spiritualist church together, a bit later along the timeline -- and French does indeed practice as a medical clairvoyant.

The advertisement she refers to we have now recovered, and so we know that bit is accurate.

What's troubling me today is: Edward Fitch Bullard. He's (a) the only General Bullard we have in the public records for the time, (b) living just about where Emma says he lives (in Waterford, just upriver from Tory), and (c) a Spiritualist luminary, intimately connected with the founding of the SDSK. It is virtually impossible that we're misidentifying Emma's "General Bullard" here.

But the timeline is all out of whack. Unless we adopt the posture -- which some Spiritualists do today -- that the Autobiography is unreliable in toto as to time and sequencing because it was finished after Emma's death, we have to make some sense of this episode.

If this episode took place after May of 1857 -- when the SDSK collapsed, depriving Emma of the means of earning her living, and forcing her to advertise her services as a musical governess -- the implication is, at minimum, that Emma did not know Bullard was involved with the SDSK, and did not meet him or hear of him a propos of the SDSK. I suppose that's reasonable, since she says on several occasions that aside from Horace H. Day no member of the SDSK's organizational hierarchy -- vast as it was -- was involved in the day-to-day operations of the organization.

The sticky bit, at the moment, is: Margaret Bullard. I believe her maiden name was Vandecar, and that she died shortly after this episode in Emma's life -- there's a break in the age progress of his children that suggests the younger children are the product of his second marriage, and that the second marriage took place circa 1868.

But at the moment, I cannot find any record of a Margaret Vandecar married to an E. F. Bullard, nor can I find any evidence of her mediumship.

The Men of the SDSK

2011-09-21T12:01:00.000-07:00

(Governor) Nathaniel P. Tallmadge (Wisconsin) -- President of the SDSK, Trustee, Founder
(Chief Justice) Joseph Williams (Iowa) -- Vice-President of the SDSK
(Judge) Willie P. Fowler (Kentucky) -- Vice-President of the SDSK
(Judge) Charles H. Larrabee (Wisconsin) -- Vice-President of the SDSK
Horace H. Day (New York) -- Vice-President of the SDSK, Trustee
(Honorable) Warren Chase (Wisconsin) -- Vice-President of the SDSK
(Dr.) David Corey (Illinois) -- Vice-President of the SDSK
(General) Edward F. Bullard (New York) -- Vice-President of the SDSK, Trustee, Founder (…
(Honorable) Richard D. Davis (New York) -- Vice-President of the SDSK

(Dr.) George T. Dexter (New York) -- Vice-President of the SDSK, Trustee, Founder

(…)

(Major General) George W. Raines (?) -- Vice-President of the SDSK
E. W. Bailey (Pennsylvania) -- Vice-President of the SDSK
Phineas E. Gay (Massachusetts) -- Vice-President of the SDSK
Joshua F. Laning (Pennsylvania) -- Trustee
Owen G. Warren (New York) -- Trustee, Secretary (…)
Charles C. Woodman (New York) -- Trustee, Secretary
Nathaniel E. Wood (New York) -- Trustee, Founder
Steven M. Allen (Massachusetts) -- Trustee -- Business partner of Horace Day in the Niagara venture
(Judge) John W. Edmonds -- Trustee, Founder
George H. Jones (New York) -- Trustee
Gilbert Sweet (New York) -- Trustee (wife was a notable medium, according to EHB)
(Dr.) Selah G Perkins (Vermont) -- Secretary (…)
Harrison Bliss (Massachusetts) -- Advisor (…)
Lyman L. Curtiss (New York) -- Advisor (…)
Benjamin Urner (Ohio) -- Advisor
Addison Smith (Ohio) -- Advisor
A. Miltenberger (Missouri) -- Advisor
P. E. Bland (Missouri) -- Advisor (…)
(Dr.) George Haskell (Illinois) -- Advisor
John Howarth (Massachusetts) -- Advisor
Amos Rogers (New York) -- Advisor
(Professor) John W. Fowler (New York) -- Advisor (…)
Cranstoun Laurie (DC) -- Advisor (…)
John J. Viele (NY) -- Advisor
Elisha Waters (NY) -- Advisor
(Dr.) J Tanner (Maryland) -- Advisor

Politicians, inventors, lawyers, Supreme Court justices, armaments manufacturers, merchants, Freemasons, phrenologists and magnetists -- excellent representative men for a new religious movement. Or for the orchestration of politics.

There are direct connections to Alexander Wilder and the Theosophical Society in here, as well, if I read the record properly.

UK Version of Art Magic Now Available for Kindle

2011-09-21T11:22:00.000-07:00

The UK version of the annotated edition of Art Magic is now available.

Without, I confess, a lick of effort on my part -- it just happened. By contrast, it cost Emma at least two trips from the UK to the States to see Modern American Spiritualism into print. Marvelous what electronic distribution systems can do.

Horace H. Day: The Schemes

2011-09-21T07:12:00.000-07:00

He was the Rubber King, but that isn't how he started, or how he ended.

He started out, apparently, in the apparel business, closely associated with his uncle Samuel Day, who was in the shoe trade. His interest in rubber appears to be the interest of a teenage inventor, and he kept at his rubber experiments through the 1830s, while selling hats and coats and shoes (imported and manufactured by Day, rubber-ized and non-rubberized), until he sold up his stock in 1838 and went into the rubber business full time, focused on rubberized fabrics.

Judging by newspaper advertisements, it took Day from 1839 until 1843 to perfect his rubberized fabrics and make products from them, at which point he blankets the United States with advertisements for his product: a novel (and monumental) feat at that time. By that time, he's already manipulating politicians, writing (for example) a public letter to his Whig Congressman, Randolph, to remind him of his promises to protect New Jersey industries from the influx of cheap foreign goods, and giving him a rubberized raincoast of Day's own manufacture. He's also purchased the license to some Goodyear patents (as far as I can tell) vested in the Roxbury India Rubber Company of Massachusetts (this happens in 1846), and has begun offering distributors and merchants exclusive territories in the US for Day goods. The man is sharp as a tack.

The rubber empire grows and expands, and becomes increasingly about patent rights, patent extensions and patent litigations, throughout the 1840s and 1850s. Day clearly understands the value of pressure groups -- he starts and heads an "Inventor's Congress" of a shape I can't quite define yet, which is clearly focused on extending patent protection periods, something Day needs for his patents, some of which are completely bogus, as they are based on industrial espionage perpetrated against Goodyear by paid agents of Day. And, when Day's employees leave and set themselves up in business, based on what they've learned at Day's rubber works, he's suing them, too.

The patent litigation -- which is a rat's nest, and will require time and a separate post, though in Day v. Cary, the Circuit Court reports do a decent job of laying things out -- is pretty much over and done with by the early 1860s, and Day is out of the rubber business.

In 1860 he purchases a bankrupt power generation project at Niagara and reorganizes and recapitalizes it, but as he's been on the board of the predecessor company, I can't help feel there's some kind of chicanery involved in this deal. The scheme is simple: generate power at the Falls and supply local manufacturing concerns -- which will move in and set up shop on Day-owned property, and use a Day-owned port below the falls to move goods to market. Reportedly, Day invested nearly $800,000 1860 dollars (call that about $18M 2011 dollars) in the scheme, and he demanded lease payments so steep that no manufacturing operations moved into the scheme.

Not to be thwarted, Day looked at his asset base, and decided apparently to convert the race (32 feet wide and 8-10 feet deep with a drop of nearly 200 feet over a mile or so) for the power generation station into a canal, to portage ships around the falls. To keep his scheme safe from competition, he purchased Channing's patents for ship portage via railway: either far-sighted or competitively paranoid, depending on your perspective.

The canal scheme came to naught -- although Day did develop and patent an improved canal lock system in the process -- and Day turned his attention in 1869 to another use of the Niagara assets: the development of a compressed-air power distribution system, whereby turbines at the Niagara properties would compress air and deliver the compressed air (at phenomenal PSI, apparently) via heated steel pipes to Buffalo, and Manhattan, among other places, where the compressed air would be used in place of steam and other motive sources to power machinery. Again, Day purchased patents on compressed air technologies -- this time, from one Dr. Royce of Newburgh, NY, who took Day's money to the bank, married and lived a rich and happy life. And Day generated yet more patents out of this particular scheme -- including one for using a combination of water and compressed air to build elevators for railroad cars.

But the compressed air scheme also failed to get commercial traction, and the Niagara Hydraulic Power Company went bankrupt, finally being bought out of receivership and righted in 1877.

Day returned to NYC when the Niagara company bankrupted, and his final two schemes were appropriately odd: he first knocked-off the products of a rubberized bandage company (in 1874), and was sued for his patent violations (in 1875; this would be the final stint in the "rubber industry" than some modern scholars note), and he then turned his attention to the manufacturing of a superior tree bark slurry for the tanning industry, at which he was engaged when he died in 1878. Several of his patents were extended by his widow, Sarah Gould Day, after his death.

Horace Day: The Marriages

2011-09-21T06:30:00.000-07:00

None of the potted biographies, or the obituaries, of Day got his marriages right -- consequently, no modern scholars have, either. Thanks to Marjorie Osterhaut at Storybook Genealogy, who spent a lot of time in the primary records, we know that Horace H. Day was married three times:

From April of 1838 to September of 1844, Day was married to Sarah Wyckoff or Wycoff, with whom he had two children: Nicholas Wyckoff Day and Helen Day. Horace left Sarah in October of 1843, almost immediately after Helen was born, because he was involved with...
Catherine Alice Day, his second cousin, whom he married in September of 1844. This liaison was the basis for the divorce, which is apparently covered in the pamphlet I noted in an earlier post. Day and Katherine - who went by Kate -- were married until 1859, and had two or three children: certainly, Horace Waldron Day and Edward Maynard Day, before Horace divorced Kate to marry...
Sarah Gould, in 1859.

Now, the New York Times obituary on Day suggests pretty plainly that Day was converted to Spiritualism by his second (and last, as far as that obit was concerned) wife, and that led to his establishment of and funding for the SDSK.

But Sarah Gould, the third wife, from 1859 until his death, is the identifiable Spiritualist, of the decidedly Christian and ethereal variety. Gould was raised a Quaker, and was primarily a poet who wrote under spirit control, according to George Shepard Burleigh's introduction to her Asphodels in 1859: "Trance-Improvisations, produced at the instant of uttering, and uttered in a state of essential unconsciousness to outward objects." The notes to the poems in this collection are definitely worth reading, and indicate clearly that, in the later 1850s at least, Sarah Gould Day was a member of -- but not the medium for -- a private NY circle which had as its spirit control "a philosopher and scholar." And apparently Sarah Whitman -- Christian Spiritualist grand dame and one-time fiancee of Edgar Allan Poe -- was a member of this circle. Gould's poems -- in Asphodels at least -- serve as a kind of record for this circle.

I'll paste a poem from another 1859 collection, called "The Difference," in here, as it seems relevant.

Men speak of grief as if they were acquainted 
 herewith, or it were possible for them, 
Though chastened by afflictions, e'er to paint, 
Or to conceive the woes, that as a flame, 
Consume the heart of woman. They do not
Offer their heart's whole wealth upon Love's shrine;
Altar and incense are too oft forgot,
In striving with the world, delving the mine 
For gold, or the poor purchase of a Name.
She in her heart's devotion ever kneels, 
Her offering burns in one undying flame;
Hiding her pain but his she knows and feels, 
She lives, loves, hopes, and dies for him alone;
Woe, that such love and faith by man are overthrown!

So we are left, for the moment, with a dilemma: was Catherine Alice Day also a Spiritualist (as the NYT suggests) who motivated her cousin and husband to form and fund the SDSK? Or was Day's marriage to a Spiritualist commenced in 1859 -- long after the demise of the SDSK -- leaving us with no obvious motive for Day's expenditure of his time and roughly $25,000 1850 dollars per year on the SDSK?

Horace H. Day: Sorting The Debris

2011-09-21T06:10:00.000-07:00

The deeper I dig, the more interesting this gets.

As is usually the case, modern scholarship on Day does not jive with the contemporary press and public records on Day. Biographical summaries of him published close to the time of his death are a bit closer to the tenor and tone of contemporary records. Here, purely for comparative purposes, are two of those, which do not seem to be drawn from quite the same base of material.

DAY, Horace H., manufacturer, born in 1813; died in Manchester, New Hampshire, 23 August 1878. He was a licensee under Charles Goodyear's rubber patents, which were granted in 1842, and identified with the India rubber trade from its inception. He was the exclusive licensee under the patents for the manufacture of shirred goods, which were subsequently found to be objectionable. Charles Goodyear, owner of the patents, brought suits against Mr. Day for infringement of the woven goods right, of the patent. Mr. Day instituted cross suits, and extensive litigation was the result. The most celebrated of all the suits was tried at Trenton, New Jersey, Daniel Webster appearing as counsel for Mr. Goodyear, and Rufus Choate for Mr. Day. Mr. Webster left, his seat in the U. S. Senate to try the case. He received $15,000 as a retainer, and his argument at the trial was regarded as one of his best. He won the case, and Mr. Day surrendered his license, transferred his factory and machinery to William Judson, a representative of Mr. Goodyear, and agreed to retire from the business for the sum of $350,000, and counsel fees amounting to $21,000 additional, all of which amounts were paid to him in 1862. Previous to this time Mr. Day had conceived the idea of utilizing the waterpower of Niagara falls. As early as 1856 he had discussed the subject in pamphlets and newspapers, and had organized a company, with himself as vice president, treasurer, and leading director. A canal was constructed at great cost, the estate of Walter Bryant alone expending $200,000. The canal began about half a mile above the falls, and terminated one fourth of a mile below them. It was 100 feet wide, with a depth of ten feet along its whole length. When Mr. Day bought the property the canal was not finished, and the Bryant estate had been exhausted in the enterprise. Mr. Day completed the canal, bought Grass Island for a harbor, and expended $700,000. But the work was sold out to satisfy mortgages in 1877. Mr. Day's next venture was the establishment of a mammoth rubber enterprise in New Jersey, but he received $40,000 to withdraw from it. His later speculations were unfortunate, his large fortune was gone, and he became comparatively poor.

DAY, HORACE H. (July 10, 1813-Aug. 23, 1878), manufacturer of rubber fabrics, was born at Great Barrington, Mass. He was a son of William and Mary (Pixley) Day, in the seventh generation of the family in America. As a lad he went to live with an uncle, Samuel H. Day, at New Brunswick, N. J. When only fourteen or fifteen years old he experimented in processes for manufacturing India rubber, but it is not known that he achieved any practical results until 1839, in which year, with the financial aid of friends and neighbors of his uncle, he opened a small factory at New Brunswick for the production of rubber fabrics. At that time all rubber manufacturers were seeking a process that would enable the fabric to retain its texture when subjected to heat. Charles Goodyear and Nathaniel Hayward had introduced sulphur in the treatment of molten rubber, at first without complete success. Goodyear, by accident, hit on the practical process of vulcanization, but it was not until 1844 that he could secure a patent. In the meantime Day, through several of his employees, had obtained patents on different kinds of rubber manufacture. The personal interests of Day and Goodyear soon clashed. Each claimed violation of his rights and brought suit in the United States Circuit Court. In the manufacture of shirred goods Day's process and machinery were generally preferred and adopted by other manufacturers, several of whom combined to resist his monopoly. After jury disagreements in the first cases, Goodyear pressed new suits against Day and his agents and customers in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, and New York. There is no question that Day's processes in making shirred goods were being used by the men who were combining to fight him, under Goodyear's banner, but how far there was actual infringement of patents is still a matter of doubt. At any rate there was enough merit in his claims to cause Goodyear to sign an agreement with Day in 1846 by the terms of which the latter was to discontinue the manufacture of all but shirred goods, while the former was to put an end to violations of the Day patents. Almost immediately there were complaints of the breaking of this contract by the "Shoe Associates," a group of manufacturers allied with the Goodyear interests. Day charged that these men were still using his processes for shirred goods. In 1848, he repudiated his agreement with Goodyear and began making all kinds of rubber fabrics. About the same time he bought the rights, for the United States, under an English patent for making car springs. His New Brunswick factory yielded a profit of $50,000 a year, but this was practically all spent in litigation which came to a climax in March 1852 in equity suits brought in the Federal Circuit Court at Trenton, N. J., by Goodyear to obtain a permanent injunction against Day. In point of money interests involved the case was one of the most important ever brought, up to that time, in an American court. Daniel Webster was retained by Goodyear and Rufus Choate by Day. Thus two of the ablest lawyers in the country were pitted against each other. The arguments on both sides were highly praised by members of the bar, but only that of Webster has been preserved. He upheld Goodyear's claims as a pioneer in the vulcanizing process, and his reasoning convinced the court The injunction was issued, and Day was never able to reinstate his business. In 1860 he took over the completion of the power canal at Niagara Falls, but several years passed before any use was made of this canal by factories, and he seems never to have been repaid for his investment. In 1870 he planned the utilization of the power in the form of compressed air, promising to deliver 6,000 horse-power at Buffalo, twenty miles distant. His experiments in that direction were approved by competent engineering authority, but the project failed to command sufficient capital and was not carried through. On Apr. 25, 1838, Day married Sarah Wykoff from whom he was divorced six years later (Divorce Case: Mrs. Sarah Day and Horace H. Day, 1844) ; and on Sept. 14, 1844, he married Catherine Alice Day, his cousin. He died at Manchester, N. H.

One or both of these morsels have served a lot of modern scholars as the basis for their Day tales. Unsurprisingly, neither says anything about the SDSK.

The Persistence of the Occult

2011-09-20T10:35:00.001-07:00

The occult persists because it submerges itself into the dominant culture in ways that protect occult knowledge. Percolation networks.

In this video -- featuring Barbara Ehrenreich and paid for by the RSA -- the basic ideas behind mesmerism are repeated (and , as far as Enhrenreich is concerned, debunked.

What she does not explain well -- because it would require her to make admissions she's unwilling to make -- is: the persistence of these (in her view, whacky) ideas.

Horace H. Day (1813-1878): The Sinews of War -- Spiritualist as Political Manipulation

2011-09-20T07:49:00.000-07:00

Even readers who routinely swim in the currents of Modern Spiritualism may not recognize this man's name. Horace H. Day was the financial backer of the Society for the Diffusion of Spiritual Knowledge (SDSK), the -- as far as we know -- first attempt at the institutionalization of Spiritualism in the US. The SDSK, and its house organ, The Christian Spiritualist, operated from a building at 533 Broadway in Manhattan from June of 1854 until May of 1857. The SDSK's organizers, officers and board members were a body of luminaries -- into whose lives I intend to look over the next few weeks. The SDSK -- or, more properly, Horace Day, who was as far as records allow us to determine the only active officer of the organization -- employed four of the founding mediums of Modern Spiritualism -- Cora Hatch, Kate Fox, Leah (Fox, Fish) Brown and Emma Harding(e).

The NY correspondent of the Cleveland Plain Dealer described the SDSK (and Spiritualism in NY) this way, just after the SDSK's founding:

seldom attends the public meetings

(If that sounds like a puff piece, that's because it almost certainly is one.)

But Emma, in Modern American Spiritualism makes even more startling claims for Day's SDSK: that it, in effect, used Spiritual techniques to control the outcome of the 1856 US presidential election and Buchanan's subsequent policies.

(In passing: this is the time -- 1856-7 -- when Emma would claim, later, to have met with Louis de B_____ in NYC. I am going to walk right past that angle, for the moment...)

I am not well read enough in the primary literature of Modern Spiritualism to know if this is the only specific example of attempted-political-control-via-spiritual-communion, but it is one unequivocal example nonetheless.

And I think the driving force behind this attempted control was: Horace H. Day.

In fact, without giving all my reasons for believing this, I'll just go on record as saying it looks to me like the entirety of the SDSK was an attempt by Horace H. Day to exercise control over US national politics, in a variety of ways, for one simple reason: his vast fortune depended on it.

And Horace H. Day was wealthy -- wealthy in a Gilded Age way, before its time. His next-door neighbors (for instance) were the Jaffray family (the Jaffray of Piper Jaffray). And Day was known, all over the US, as the Indian Rubber Man, because the basis of his vast fortune was the production of goods based on rubber: shoes, fabrics, railroad car shock absorbers, you name it.

The space available could not contain the chicanery and merchantilist behavior Day employed to build his fortune, but it included (a) industrial espionage, (b) bogus patent filings, (c) the creation and planting of scurrilous newspaper stories, maligning adversaries, (d) nearly two decades worth of lawsuits (and hundreds more threats of lawsuits) to protect valid and bogus patents related to India rubber, (e) the near-destruction, financially, of Charles Goodyear (who figures as the hero in the battle known in the court system as Goodyear v. Day), and -- most interestingly for me -- (f) the manipulation of the Federal government on a truly twenty-first century scale, including the filing of charges against patent commissioners and the lobbying and (according to his adversaries) the suborning and bribing of elected Federal officials.

When I discovered my Horace H. Day was Horace H. Day the Rubber King of New York (Goodyear was the Rubber King of Boston, and neither had their plants in those cities), I was already a bit surprised at the list of names associated with the founding of the SDSK, which you can examine in the New York Herald's coverage of its founding: lawyers, politicians and influential members of the merchantile class who were in some cases only a step or two from the White House, politically-speaking.

But when I discovered that Day's major lawsuits -- all involved with protecting his rubber patents or invalidating the patents or licenses of competitors -- ran pretty much continuously from 1850 until the late 1860s....well, paranoia and the current wholly-corrupted state of American politics got the better of me.

I don't know where this is going, just yet, but it's topical -- Emma was left destitute when the SDSK folded -- and it's damned intriguing.

Oh, and there's this angle on the SDSK: it turns out that Horace Day divorced his wife Sarah in 1851-2, and immediately remarried a young woman who was (surprise) a Spiritualist, and a medium. I don't know her name yet -- the census records imply she, too, was a Sarah -- but the contemporary secular press reports are very clear that, publicly at least, Day claimed the establishment of the SDSK was due to his conversion to Spiritualism under the guidance of his second wife.

Day warranted a significant NYT obituary when he died, and it's worth a read, because his life corkscrewed into the ground in the 1860s and 1870s. He didn't lose his taste for litigation, though, or his belief in Spiritualism, as far as I can tell.

Industrial historians know him as the Rubber King, but miss the Spiritualism; Spiritualist historians miss pretty much everything about him; he is just a name in the background in the let-us-now-praise-famous-women-and-men histories of the movement.

But there's a big story in here, if we can dig it out...

Emma, in Decline: March 1899

2011-09-19T14:02:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of Paul Gaunt (thanks, Paul), this poignant note from The Two Worlds of March 25, 1899.

Emma had attended the 50th anniversary celebration the prior year, and contemporary newspaper accounts have her ensconced, for the duration of the ceremonies, in a chair, bundled up and immobile.

Traveling Souls

2011-09-19T06:56:00.000-07:00

Reading a doctoral dissertation by a smart guy who's not a Spiritualist historian per se. Wondering about why it is that people don't make more of the first Theosophical Society's emphasis on elemental spirits and astral travel, when (a) the first topic threatened to undermine spirit communion entirely and (b) the second topic was on everyone's mind at the time the first TS was founded.

Readers will know that Emma was an early and vocal proponent of the reality of various forms of soul traveling -- from the mid-1860s onward. She even claimed to have been stalked by a Boston occultist astrally -- a novel claim, as far as I know.

Not surprising, then, that her anecdotes and evidence would figure prominently in William Henry Harrison's chapter on traveling souls in his Spirits Before Our Eyes (1879).

Google Books has hoovered up Spirits Before Our Eyes, and those with a social networking bent should check out his dedication: to Lisette Makdougall (sic) Gregory.

LMG (William Gregory's wife) is a significant node in the English Spiritualist network (on a par with Benjamin Coleman and the Countess of Caithness, in my view), and virtually nothing has been written about her, or her work on the odd book A Clergyman on Spiritualism. Because she is mentioned everywhere (I guess), she seems to be discussed nowhere.

2012: Big Year for Good Conferences

2011-09-19T06:16:00.000-07:00

The Theosophical Society's Hypatia Lodge, in Greece, is organizing what looks to be a killer conference for mid-next year.

And the Association for the Study of Esotericism's fourth annual conference, just prior to the Hypatia Lodge conference, looks like it may turn out to be an important gathering place/time....

Early 1876: Emma on Astral Travel

2011-09-17T07:40:00.000-07:00

From the American Spiritual Magazine of March 1876, publishing an excerpt from an earlier piece by Emma in The Spiritual Scientist:

Mr. Harrison Greene, of Brotherton, Yorkshire, England—a gentleman of distinguished social position, and one who as a visitor to the United States will be remembered by many Americans as a worthy and truth-loving person—belonged to a circle in the neighborhood of his own estate established chiefly for the purpose of investigating the phenomena of the "double." The records of this circle, although far too voluminous for quotation in this paper, furnish a most profound and interesting chapter in occult philosophy. On several occasions Mr. Harrison Greene, himself a good seer, and a young lady of remarkably fine clairvoyant powers, Miss Chapman, one of the principal mediums of the circle, saw the author of these papers in spirit, and heard from the lips of the phantom Emma Hardinge an announcement of her intention to return to England some weeks before the mortal Emma Hardinge had even decided upon such an arrangement. The appearance and dresses of this phantom were so clearly seen and described by Miss Chapman, that though she had never seen her except thus spiritually, no portrait could have been more accurate, no module's description more correct. A marked change in the style of coiffure too was observed, and just at that time, when a few days before embarkation, Mrs. Hardinge had her hair cut short, the phantom presented itself in Yorkshire for the first time, with a closely cut head of short, thick curls.

At a seance of several well-known French Spiritualists in New Orleans the author's wraith made an appearance, gave certain characteriitic communications, entertained the circle with her weird performances for over half an hour. This phantom was habited in a dress not even then in existence, but one, the materials of which were in the author's possession, but only made up and wore about a fortnight after its apparition had been seen, and the exact record of its pattern, trimmings, etc., entered among the minutes of the evening's proceedings. Mrs. Hardinge received the letter of her New Orleans correspondents, all strangers to her, detailing her appearance amongst them, and describing the dress she had worn, on the very morning when it came fresh from the dressmaker, and was put on for the first time for a New Year's reception at the house of her friend, Mrs. Eliza Neal, at Cincinnati. Miss Laura Edmonds, Mrs. Sweet, Mrs. Kellog, Miss Seabring, and several of the best New York mediums who were cotemporaries of the author when she commenced her spiritual experiences, some seventeen years since, endeavored to tranquilizo her mind, when she found that she was constantly annoyed by being made the unconscious medium of communications from the spirits of still living persons, by the assurances that their experience was of a similar character. "For my part," said Mrs. Sweet, one of the best and most truthful of the early mediums, "I am always uncertain whether the spirit I am communicating for is in the form or out of it, until some test facts reveal the true state of the case." If these remarkable phenomena complicate our researches into the realm of the spiritual, they prove most clearly, on the other hand, that all the powers and possibilities which belong to the soul enfranchised from its mortal tenement, also belong to it here; that it is our ignorance of that soul's capacity and quality which hinders its expression, limits its executive functions, and narrows it down to the circumscribed attributes of- its material body. Whatever we may be or can do hereafter, we may anticipate and measurably be and do here; we need only an earnest, thorough and rational system of investigation, carefully conducted experiment, and a lofty aspiration after spiritual things, to make us beings of a higher mold, nobler powers, and mightier achievement than we have ever dreamed of in our wildest flights of prophecy. Spurning all mean, selfish or petty aims in Spiritualism, sternly ignoring all performances which savor of charlatanism, and casting out from our midst all that can deform by trickery, imposture or impurity, all that tends to lower or degrade this noble religious science, we may, and We Must If We Will, "take the kingdom of heaven by violence," eat anew of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and become as the gods; the fabled Paradise forfeited by sin and ignorance will thus be regained by innocence and knowledge.

It bears reflecting upon, those last lines: Spurning all mean, selfish or petty aims in Spiritualism, sternly ignoring all performances which savor of charlatanism, and casting out from our midst all that can deform by trickery, imposture or impurity, all that tends to lower or degrade this noble religious science, we may, and We Must If We Will, "take the kingdom of heaven by violence," eat anew of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and become as the gods; the fabled Paradise forfeited by sin and ignorance will thus be regained by innocence and knowledge.

Just at this moment, Emma is finishing Art Magic and starting Ghost Land, and those lines are a statement of her intent, in publishing those texts.

The Greene family is an old Yorkshire family, and the estate mentioned may well be that family's ancestral holding, Liversedge, but interestingly enough -- while there are quite a few in the US -- I can find no "Harrison Greene" that fits this minimal description, in Yorkshire, in the 1851, 1861 or 1871 UK records.

Prisca Theologia Be Damned

2011-09-15T16:16:00.000-07:00

There's an interesting piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education about mining scholarly works for citations, and building triplestore models of citations to uncover affiliations. Another form of social network analysis that's sure to yield a more objective view of "schools" or "disciplines" in the Foucaultian sense of that term than the constructs we manipulate today. I posted about it on Google+, for the edification of my colleagues in the data warehousing business, and remarked that I believed there was a more interesting kind of analysis to be done on scholarly material: the analysis of repetition within secondary material. Scholar A says X-is-the-case, and for a hundred years thereafter, that assertion is treated as fact by other scholars, until the authority of Scholar A can be removed, and we can safely begin a paragraph with the declarative statement: "As everyone knows, X-is-the-case." Often, in this discipline at least, when one goes back to look at Scholar A's authority for the original assertion, one finds: misreading, or fabrication (see my notes to Art Magic for several interesting examples.

(This is, in case you were puzzled, what Dawkins means when he talks about memes: self-replicating, propagating tropes or ideas.)

Once the assertion has arrived at the no-authority-required level, it can often be elevated yet further: to the status of a portmanteau concept, encapsulated in a short phrase, that permits the assignment of an entire body of ideas to a conceptual category that makes the particular thing one is looking at much-of-a-sameness with hundreds or thousands of other, similar, things.

In this field, one of those is: prisca theologia, the "perennial philosophy" as Huxley translated the term. Without exception, every academic who read drafts of Art Magic wrote, at some point: "really, this is just another example of the prisca theologia and you ought to point that out."

Prisca theologia be damned.

The prisca theologia is a ploy to avoid looking hard at the details of occult movements, and that's all it is.

Oh, my, did I say that out loud?

"Nineteenth Century Martyrs": Another Recovered EHB Address

2011-09-15T15:59:00.000-07:00

From The Ladies' Own Magazine of Indianapolis, Indiana for August of 1870, a recovered precis of an otherwise-lost EHB address "Nineteenth Century Martyrs". This address was, according to the anonymous transcriber, delivered by Emma in the summer of 1870 in Chicago, when she was lecturing to promote Modern American Spiritualism.

Read the history of the world's writers, poets, sculptors, painters and explorers. All the productions of their brain were brought forth thro' thp hard and relentless discipline of poverty. It was the hand of necessity that chiseled that beautiful form from the block of marble. It was the hand of necessity that moved the painter's brush, until the beautiful ideal of the brain glowed forth from the canvass. It was the hand of necessity that moved the poet's pen to writelyrics that has thrilled the world with rythmic lore. It is stern necessity that has given to the world some of the brightest gems of literature. It was stern necessity that sent forth the exploring mind in quest of new worlds, and continents, and new systems of worlds in the starry realms. It was necessity that sent forth these names to immortality, and gave us their achievements to deck the world with beauty. In all great works the relentless hand of want and necessity is distinctly shown forth. 'Tis this hand that has strewn the onward road of progress with gems of beauty, love and truth. The discipline of poverty and want nerves the intellect of genius to immortal work.

God help the poor! How hard it is to be hungry in a world of plenty! To be houseless, and homeless, and friendless; to be alone in the night-time, with no friendly eye but the beamingstars; with no sunshine of hope to light the future. When night comes, "Would to God it were morning!" When morning comes, "Would to God it were night I" There are thousands of such in every city,—thousands who daily curse God and die. They are not thinkers, but mere plodders on life's rough road. We who are thinkers have reason to bless God and live.

Look at the poor laborer.—the father, mother and little toddling childhood, all toiling, laboring, sweating great drops of blood, as it were, for the mere privilege of living. Could we read the history of this earth from the beginning, we would learn that every inch of ground has been watered with tears of blood, drawn from the eyes of her weary, toiling martyrs.

Now turn your eyes within. Ask yourselves if the hand of affliction has not been your best instructor ; if your sorrows and the sorrows of others that you have witnessed, have not been your best teachers? Has not your best feelings, your deepest thoughts been called, into action by witnessing the deep suffering, and blighting affliction, and troubles of the poor? When you are happy, and hope and plenty light your life's way, do you remember that there is want, sorrow and affliction in the world—in your very daily walks? Do you remember the poor, or care for them, when by your own bright firesides, shielded from the wintry blast, and surrounded by love and plenty? Do you sorrow with them? Has not your own sorrows, your own suffering, your own mental agony been to you a blessed instructor, and your kindliest benefactor,—calling forth your deepest nature, your highest emotions, your kindliest sympathies, even though that sorrow, that agony is caused by the visitation of Death's angel? What life is free from the martyrdom of suffering? Not your life,—not our lives! We can sympathize with these mourning people because our lives have been steeped in the same bitter cup! We too have wept the bitter tears of Gethsemane, in ajjony of prayer. Such has been life from its first morn.

It's clear from the tone that this is a trance lecture, I think.

Genius is ever rocked in the cradle of poverty. Would that it were true.

There is a way of looking at Emma's life, focusing on her attention to scarcity and suffering, that is positively heart-breaking. The job of the spirits was to fill what was empty, soothe the sufferer.

December 1875: Spiritualism, Looking Silly

2011-09-15T15:47:00.000-07:00

A surprisingly large number of the unsurprisingly small number of people who've read my introduction to the new edition of Art Magic have wanted to take issue with me about my notion that Spiritualism was in crisis in 1873-5, and that EHB and HPB and HSO turned to the occult to save Spiritualism from itself.

Though I stumbled on it too late for inclusion in the available revision of Art Magic, this snippet from The Literary World of December 3, 1875 will definitely by in the next revision of the text.

That's what Spiritualism looked like, to the secular observer, in December of 1875. That's Spiritualism -- particularly in the person of Cora Hatch Tappan -- being made pointed fun of, and no mistake.

Her wild innovations made her an easy target, for sure, but it was the fact that she and other mediums did not -- in their drive to provide....what to call it.... novelty and insight for their Spiritualist audiences -- see to what extent their innovations provided fodder for amused and critical commentary on the part of secular culture that, in part at least, drove Emma -- always aware of the proprieties, and from whence the money for the movement actually came -- absolutely batshit, I am sure.

The Home for Outcast Women: The New York State Version, April 1862

2011-09-15T11:21:00.000-07:00

Emma promoted her Industrial Home for Outcast Women in Portland (Maine), Boston, Philadelphia and New York. In Boston, she raised thousands of dollars for the program, found a property for the Home, but -- according to her irate letters to Boston newspapers -- was unable to purchase the property when the owner and neighbors discovered her intended purpose. In New York State, she took a different tack, seeking state legislature funding for the program, and, in her submission to the subcommittee appointed to review her plan, we get a concrete view of her aims and objectives, as well as her talent for promotion -- regardless of subject matter.

I have already pointed out the startling similarities between this program and Charles Dickens' Urantia House project. What's interesting about this material, to me, is that Emma rules herself out as the matron for the Institution (unless one wants to argue that she adopted the faux "Mrs." in order to become a widow), and that her submerged model of the problem space featuring (a) women who, left to themselves, are unlikely to resist the temptation to sin, and (b) salvation through economic independence.

Salvation through economic independence -- certainly one of Emma's central concerns, in her own life.

TS Founders: John Storer Cobb

2011-09-15T07:59:00.000-07:00

At the instigation of Paul Johnson, who's noted that other than HPB and Olcott, we don't talk about or know much about the founders of the Theosophical Society, I've started looking into a few of them.

Tudor Horton is mildly interesting: it's difficult to speculate on why an engraver and small-run publisher would have become such a mover-and-shaker in the organization, particularly when there is virtually nothing in the historical record on him, or his brother/business partner John S. Horton.

John Storer Cobb, by contrast, left a well-documented trail: born in Kent in 1838, he marries in London in 1863, in the presence of his father -- a well-to-do merchant and politician -- and fathers two children before bringing his family to the US in 1869. Almost immediately -- as far as the public records will allow us to determine -- he warehouses his kids in a boarding school in Fairfield, Connecticut (at ages 5 and 6, respectively), becomes a member of various associations (by this time, some researchers claim, he has already studied at Oxford, London University, Heidelberg and Paris, and he certainly was a Germanophile, translating Goethe and others late in his life), and enrolls in the law school at Columbia, from which he graduates, an LLB (LLD) in 1875.

His marriage falls apart some time thereafter, and he abandons his wife and children, moving eventually to Boston in the 1880s, where he becomes involved with the cremation movement, Bellamy-ite Christian Socialism, and the eugenics movement, before -- on the death of his first wife -- marrying Mary S. Fuller (of the Boston Fuller family), and becoming a local elected official, serving in various offices pretty much up until his death in 1904. Local obituaries make no mention whatsoever of his role in the Theosophical Society (or his role in the Institute for Heredity, or his role in Bellamy's movement), focusing on his political career, and his important work in the cremation movement.

But what intrigues me most about Cobb -- and promises to shed the most light on his life and ways of thinking -- is this (if we can recover the actual court records) from the New York Times of May 7, 1882:

It makes one wonder: why has an organization that so carefully tends the images of two founders -- HPB and Olcott -- done nothing to keep basic information on the other 20-odd founders of the society from becoming buried?

Dead End: The Britten Memorial Trust

2011-09-15T07:31:00.000-07:00

Just as I received it...

What matters history in the face of the demands of one's records retention policy?

The Watkins Review Spiritual 100 List

2011-08-23T12:56:00.000-07:00

must be the best way of understanding the state of Spiritualism and the occult, at present. The commentary on the list certainly shows that modern-day adherents are no more able to focus on the issues at hand than are, for example, the followers of Fox News.

Congratulations to Joscelyn Godwin, for making the list .

I wonder what a similar list, for 1875, and confined to the Anglo-American cultural sphere, might look like...

Elisha Charles Dunn (1841-1914)

2011-08-22T08:05:00.000-07:00

When James M. Peebles took his Spiritualist propaganda junket around the world in 1872, he took with him his own private medium, E. C. Dunn, who's mentioned in Peebles' account of that trip, Around the World (1874). Dunn was controlled by, among other spirits, Aaron Knight (or Nite, as his surname is sometimes rendered), a high-toned intellectual spirit with whom Peebles spars intellectually, and who delivers himself -- according to the transcriptions of the seances in Around the Word -- of information on cosmology, physiology (particularly of mediums) and theology that bear more than a passing resemblance to material in Art Magic.

Peebles is an enigmatic and somewhat sinister figure, in my view. He appears to be everywhere, collaborating with everyone, working across nearly every dividing line in the movement -- a sign either of a diplomatic mind of the first order, or a rank opportunist. He espoused a line on Jesus that stripped him of his divinity (in my reading), and yet pal'd around with Christian Spiritualists without reservation. He was accused, inside and outside Spiritualism, of having a detestable secret vice no one thought fit to specify. Yet he carried a diplomatic passport (figuratively, anyway), and knew everyone worth knowing in the movement it seems.

But it isn't Peebles I am interested in at the moment -- it's his private medium, Elisha Charles Dunn (1841-1914), who seems to be the single shining example of a Spiritualist medium who died, in his bed, filthy rich and -- as far as the historical record indicates -- happy as a clam.

Peebles left several accounts of how he met Dunn, all of which are basically the same.

And Dunn provided his own account of his relationship with Peebles for Peebles' second biographer, Edward Whipple

Having spent far more time than I ought to have spent, digging into Elisha Charles Dunn's life, I thought I'd record the summary here, for anyone interested in digging into the pile for the truly fascinating story that awaits there.

Dunn was born, in New York state, in 1841, the child of a deeply-rooted US family of English and Irish origin (Dunn's daughter was able to join the Daughters of the American Revolution, on the strength of the family's pedigree). Early in his childhood, Dunn's family moved to Ohio, and then to Michigan, where, in 1857 or 1858, he apparently met Peebles in a situation similar to the one Peebles describes (as Dunn credits Peebles with taking him under his wing when Dunn was 17, and "seeing to his education.")

By the early 1860s, Dunn is married (to Caroline Etts, in a ceremony in Calhoun County, Michigan) and is a practicing clairvoyant physician. He's captured twice in the draft registrations for the Civil War: once in Battle Creek, Michigan (where he lists his occupation as "clairvoyant") and once in Rockford, Illinois (where he claims residence in Battle Creek, and lists his occupation as physician).

Rockford becomes Dunn's home and base of operations by the mid-1860s (largely, I imagine, because it was Peebles' base of operations at the time), and it's thanks to that town's abundance of newspapers for the period under investigation that we have such a clear view of Dunn's life.

In mid-1867, with his wife and young daughter Aeola in Rockford, Illinois, Dunn is working a circuit from Michigan to Ohio, including Illinois and Iowa, and is fully up-to-date as a medium: he's doing partial materialization cabinet seances much like those of the Davenports. In May of 1867, he is caught outside the cabinet by one of the seance attendees, and the exposure is spread across midwest US papers. After that exposure, Dunn makes two changes to his life: he begins to participate more fully in local Rockford doings, and he shifts his work to lecturing, increasingly on medical and scientific topics. And his son, James Martin Dunn (named of course for Peebles) is born.

In 1872, the Rockford papers report that Dunn is off on a trip around the world, but they make no mention of Peebles. This is somewhat surprising, as Dunn's obituaries will report that Dunn was named "secretary of legation" under Peebles when Peebles was appointed "ambassador to Turkey" -- but that may all be posthumous garble. While on the tour with Peebles, Dunn reports back regularly to Rockford papers (as well as sending back batches of newspapers from his various stop-overs), and nowhere in those reports is there even a hint of Spiritualism, or Dunn's mediumship: the accounts read like those of any gentleman traveler, writing home to the folk.

But when Dunn returns from the trip with Peebles, he's well-to-do: he deposits, according to local newspaper accounts, more than $10,000 in gold (Peebles reports that he and Dunn visited the Australian gold field towns in 1873) in the local Rockford bank, and is in possession -- and immediately showing -- what he claims is the most important collection of precious stones in private hands: all gathered on his trip. Those stones, combined with porcelain and other artifacts, form the basis of the Rockford Museum, which he kicks off with a few local worthies in the mid 1870s, and the $10,000 goes into real estate: his home, designed by a "famous" New York architect whose name I have yet to uncover, as well as rental properties.

Apparently, Dunn also continues to practice as a physician, and to lecture (now, on the places he visited with Peebles) but the basis of his fortune is real estate in the Rockford area, and an extensive network of commercial and interpersonal contacts: he is a leader in the Independent Order of Good Templars (in which organization Peebles was also a force), the Oddfellows, and notably the Knights of Pythias, early on in their history as a fraternal order. He becomes a temperance advocate in the later 1870s, converts to Christianity of the Methodist Episcopal variety, and becomes involved with the Greenback movement, to the extent that he runs on the Greenback/Temperance ticket for Illinois state senate in 1880 (and loses).

By the mid-1880s, he is a pillar of the Rockford community, in every way, but his wife's death in 1892 seems to have somehow both accelerated his notoriety and taken him back a step or two on the moral high road. He acquires several motor cars; he adorns his dog's ears with diamond studs and builds the pooch a perch on the hood of the motor car; be comes involved with various sensations, including a "mind reader" who claims he can be buried alive for weeks on end without ill effect; and he's drummed out of the Methodist Episcopal church in Rockford for being a "iicenser" -- someone in favor of the sale of liquor under state license.

And, he becomes, in 1898 (or earlier -- hard to tell at this point) a alderman: a real Illinois politician, for the fourth ward in Rockford.

And it is in that capacity that Dunn -- along with nearly every other member of the Rockford city council -- takes, in 1905, a set of bribes from a utility concern to throw a city contract in that utility's direction. In 1908, Dunn and other council members are indicted and tried for the bribery -- boodling, the papers called it -- and they plead guilty, pay fines, and return to their lives as politicians. Classic Illinois politics, then and now, apparently.

At about the same time, Dunn -- now a deputy grand commander in the Kinghts of Pythias -- weathers a scandal of similar magnitude within the K of P ranks. His opponents circulate a pamphlet at the K of P national conference, where Dunn is standing for a national office, detailing Dunn's life as an unlicensed Spiritualist medical practitioner (that is, a quack), and allege Dunn bilked hundreds of people of their money. Dunn mounts the podium at the national K of P convention, waving a diploma (apparently, from John Bunyan Campbell's Vitapathic medical college in Cincinnati), and successfully defends his "honor," although he loses the election.

Living with his daughter and her husband, Dunn continues to be a very public Rockford mover-and-shaker right up until his death in March of 1914, which is widely reported -- in part because Dunn died stinking rich.

After his death, Dunn continued to defy the ordinary-case fate of Spiritualists -- complete effacement -- by being resurrected, every 20 years or so in the Chicago-area papers, as a colorful flamboyant founding father figure -- right up until the mid-1990s. Of course, there's no mention in the majority of those resurrection pieces to Dunn's career as a clairvoyant physician and medium. But lots of coverage of the diamond-studded dog.

There is one exception. In the early 1920s, during a renaissance of interest in Spiritualism across the US, J. M. Peebles died, just short of 100 years of age. And the Rockford papers covered the event, for the local angle.

Dunn is an exemplar of a type of Spiritualist: the Con Artist, who saw in Spiritualism a way to make money by fleecing the suckers, and who stuck with it only so long as other, more lucrative avenues were not available to him. What this says about Peebles, whose Spiritualist world-view is deeply and widely informed by the pronouncements of Aaron Knight/Nite, is a topic for another post, by someone else. Dunn's value for the history of Spiritualism is, quite simply, that he demonstrates, in miniature, how some number of ex-Spiritualists (I think, of course, of Elizabeth French here) were able to rehabilitate themselves in the 1880s and after, and leave behind a period of their lives they saw, after the first hey-day of Spiritualism, as a liability.

July 5, 1876 -- Organizing Christian Spiritualism

2011-08-21T09:04:00.000-07:00

As yet another indicator of how perilous the times felt, in the mid-1870s, to a lot of Spiritualists, this interesting note, full of notable names, that deserves some further investigation.

(I came across this bit looking into the life of Dr. E. C. Dunn, medium and traveling companion of J. M. Peebles. By this time -- 1876 -- Dunn and Peebles are no longer living together, though they did so, according to Dunn, for 15 years.)

The Elements of Astronomy and Gilbert Vale

2011-08-20T09:48:00.000-07:00

A bit of bibliographical archeology...

As mentioned in previous posts, I am interested in the freethinker and journalist Gilbert Vale, and the role he may have played in bringing along our Emma's understanding of the critique of Christianity.

One of the works I mentioned in previous posts -- one which serves as a source for Faiths, Facts and Frauds and which seems to have passed entirely from the bibliographical record -- was a work on astronomy -- a pamphlet -- entitled On Astronomy and the Worship of the Ancients, which looks to be a condensation of Dupuis, Volney and our usual cast of anti-Xian characters.

($300 bounty for anyone who finds a copy of said work.)

Trouble is, at least according to the reprint houses and those who flog their wares, there's another Vale book on astronomy: The Elements of Astronomy. You can find reference to said work on Amazon, Abebooks, Alibris.... and, indeed, in Google Books itself. Most of the hits for "Gilbert Vale" in Google are hits on information about this text.

Trouble is, this book is not by Gilbert Vale -- no possible way.

The Elements of Astronomy, properly titled The Elements of Astronomy: Designed as an Introduction to the Study is a pamphlet of some 80 pages, "Prepared and Published for Mrs. John Tharp Lawrence's School", by Baker & Scribner, the pious Christian publishing firm from which the powerhouse Scribner's emerged.

I am not the first person to note this problem; a Vale scholar has already complained to Google Books, with predictable, machine-generated results. (As a hoover, Google Books is great, but it's useless in every other dimension The remedy the Google employee suggests to the Vale scholar, literally, does not lead anywhere that would allow you to correct bibliographical errors in Google Books. But you can buy stuff!)

So, what does the Library of Congress think about The Elements of Astronomy? There's our culprit -- in the old LOC catalog, Vale is listed as the author of The Elements of Astronomy, and that's no doubt where all our money-grubbing reprint houses are getting their bad data.

So, for the Google-ish record, Gilbert Vale is not the author of The Elements of Astronomy and it's a disservice to his memory to continue making this assertion. His agenda definitely did not include assisting in the refinement of young Christian marriage-fodder.

For those of you who are curious, Mrs. John Tharp Lawrence's School was a finishing school for young ladies in Manhattan.

(Check out all those Reverends... and a Hamilton Fish as well....)

I haven't yet figured out who Mrs. John Tharp Lawrence was before she married John Tharp Lawrence, but he was the son of a de-classed plantation-running family in the West Indies, whose fortunes declined with the abolition of slavery, and who moved to NY sometime in the 1820s or 1830s.

Just Plain Frightening

2011-08-15T11:29:00.000-07:00

Now, it may be that I've become infected with the ant-Xianity of Faiths, Facts and Frauds, but I find this absolutely terrifying. Just what sort of deity would find this sort of exploitation honorable or appropriate?

Onisarph: True Occult Knowledge

2011-08-13T21:14:00.001-07:00

In Faiths, Facts and Frauds EHB (borrowing from someone who's borrowing from Manetho) describes one Onisarph, a priest of Heliopolis at the time of Amenhotep.

This'll be an easy annotation, I think -- I'll just knock it out while I am waiting for Lion to try to install itself properly for the nineteenth time (no bad block logging -- good idea! who needs it?).

Onisarph is, it turns out, a Googlewhack -- the only hits you'll get looking for that term are on Faiths, Facts and Frauds itself.

The figure is Osareph, a bit of a walk away from Onisarph.

Having munged a name or two in my time, I'm going with this hypothesis -- but a part of me (itchy, scratchy) thinks: maybe it's something more, something along the lines of Rabbi Benoni of Art Magic, a wholly fictional character.

Source-Hunting: How EHB Met Godfrey Higgins

2011-08-11T19:56:00.000-07:00

Godfrey Higgins, the author of Analcalypsis, is lurking behind the scenes in Art Magic, but he comes out -- takes over, really -- in Faiths, Facts and Frauds of Religious History, which Emma writes in 1879, while in Australia.

In FFF she reads through Higgins, appropriating his quotations from others as her own quotations, and quotes from Higgins liberally, and in precisely the same assemble-to-order fashion that TAOAM employs in Art Magic.

Trouble was, I could find her material in Higgins, but her page numbers (indeed, there are page numbers cited in FFF) were entirely wrong, at least with reference to Higgins 1836 two-volume edition of Analcalypsis.

But she wasn't using that edition.

She was using this one:

Her page references in FFF line up perfectly to Burns' edition of Higgins.

This puts quite a different complexion on things. My working hypothesis had been, until tonight, that Emma was exposed to the work of Higgins, Dupuis, Volney and others of that period early in her life: prior to the first of the 1860 lectures. Now, I am not so sure.

Adoring the Artifact: Faiths, Facts and Frauds, the 1906 Edition

2011-08-11T14:08:00.001-07:00

Believe it or not, there was only a single text of Emma's that was published, in an authorized form, after her death in 1899.

And of all the texts in her corpus, it was an edition of The Faiths, Facts and Frauds of Religious History, her badly-constructed Freethought screed, originally written for Australian audiences in 1879, and republished in 1889 (in many "editions", that is to say, printings) while Emma was the editor of The Two Worlds.

The 1906 edition of FFF (and it qualifies for the tag 'edition,' as it was printed from newly-set type) is extremely scarce, and I have only just gotten my hands on a copy.

And what a treat the artifact is.

First, for comparative purposes, the second edition (Manchester: John Heywood, 1889):

Nice stamped boards. Clean, well-printed.

Now, the 1906 third edition (Manchester: The Two Worlds Publishing Co., Ltd., 1906):

That isn't some librarian's carefully-repaired binding you're looking at: that's a two-staple overtaped paperback, with the price foregrounded and the author's name relegated to the least significant area of the layout: by design. That's railway-stall binding.

And the back cover:

J. J. Morse, a protege of Emma's, is now at the helm at The Two Worlds, and as an experienced bookseller, he knows better than to waste advertising space. The priority list -- "Health and Food Reform" in second position -- is interesting, but maybe less surprising if i tell you that the Manchester Spiritualist elite routinely met, from the late 1880s onward, at Manchester's Vegetarian Restaurant (there was only the one). But what a list -- 150 years of occult disciplines, really, available in one bookseller's catalog.

And the inside front cover:

The Two Worlds has retracted its scope a bit since Emma's time (and since Wallis' time, for that matter, as the left-wing socialism seems to be gone as well), but the reason for the republication of FFF is buried in that description: "....showing that Spiritualism alone can explain the Spiritual works of the past." That's a recasting of FFF but not a particularly violent one.

The title page is no surprise:

Continuing Emma's (and Margaret's) desire to erase both Art Magic and Ghost Land from her body of work, no mention is made of either.

But here's what I hoped I'd find:

It's highly unlikely that there was demand for this text, and far more likely that this was a way for Morse (who was a good soul) to put some money in Margaret Floyd Wilkinson's pocket -- from the looks of things, in the historical record, the years after Emma's death were, for Margaret, lean and cold ones. But the statement is as plain an indication as we'll ever get that Emma's sister and only surviving relative was in control of her copyrighted works as late as 1906, and was exercising her rights thereto. That in turn suggests to me that the working hypothesis -- that Emma's papers were in Margaret's hands after Emma's death, and were deemed to be of value -- is probably correct.

Textually, the 1906 edition is uninteresting: it's a reset from the 1889 edition (with its whacky praise-Gerald-Massey preface), and corrects a few of the 1889 strays while introducing a few new ones -- but contains no new material.

But, as an artifact, it's magnificent, nonetheless.

How sad it will be, for historians, when such artifacts are no longer produced.