4/28/2023 0 Comments A spiritualism timelime![]() These accounts vary in both plausibility and persuasiveness, yet all of them are interesting-partly because of what they tell us about the Victorian era, but also because of what they suggest about the resurgence of Spiritualism today.īecause Spiritualism so strongly rejected hierarchy and orthodoxy, it is difficult to say exactly when or how it started. These included scientific-seeming tomes purporting to offer evidence of the afterlife, as well as wildly popular memoirs such as “Evenings at Home in Spiritual Séance” and “Shadow Land or, Light from the Other Side.” Meanwhile, more than a hundred American Spiritualist periodicals were in regular circulation, advertising public lectures and private séances in nearly eight hundred cities and towns across the country.Ī recent spate of histories of the Spiritualist craze and biographies of some of its central characters have attempted to locate the movement’s origins in various cultural, political, and technological aspects of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. ![]() Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, and Queen Victoria all attended séances, and although plenty of people declined to attend so much as a single table-turning, the movement was hard to avoid in the span of four decades, according to one estimate, a new book about Spiritualism was published roughly once a week. So culturally prevalent was Spiritualism at the time that even skeptics and dabblers felt compelled to explore it. Early Spiritualism attracted some of the great scientists of the day, including the physicists Marie and Pierre Curie, the evolutionary biologist Alfred Russel Wallace, and the psychologist William James, all of whom believed that modern scientific methods, far from standing in opposition to the spiritual realm, could finally prove its existence. Some of the leaders back then were hucksters, and some of the believers were easy marks, but the movement cannot be dismissed merely as a collision of the cunning and the credulous. The surging numbers are reminiscent of the late nineteenth century, when somewhere between four million and eleven million people identified as Spiritualists in the United States alone. Such institutions hardly represent the full extent of Spiritualism’s popularity, since the movement does not emphasize doctrines, dogmas, or creeds, and plenty of people hold spiritualist beliefs within other faith traditions or stand entirely outside organized religion. And many people turn up not every year but every week: there are more than a hundred Spiritualist churches in the United States, more than three hundred in the United Kingdom, and hundreds of others in more than thirty countries around the world. Historic camps such as Lily Dale, in New York, and Cassadaga, in Florida, are booming, with tens of thousands of people visiting every year to attend séances, worship, healing services, and readings. Like clairvoyants in centuries past, those of today also fill auditoriums, lecture halls, and retreats. Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, television: whatever the medium, there’s a medium. ![]() Almost a third of Americans say they have communicated with someone who has died, and they collectively spend more than two billion dollars a year for psychic services on platforms old and new. It’s a good time to be dead-at least, if you want to keep in touch with the living. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
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