- Macquarie University ResearchOnline

THE SPIRITUALISTS
Gnosis and ideology
Paul Gillen, B.A. (Sydney)
School of Behavioural Sciences
Macquarie University
Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Hoveaber 1981
CONTESTS
Chapter 1. Mortfield Church
1
Chapter 2. Spiritualist history
10
Chapter 3. Spiritualist beliefs
24
Chapter 4. Circles
53
Chapter 5. Mortfield politics
66
Chapter 6. The backgrounds of Mortfield Spiritualists
Chapter 7. The Spiritualist ■ove*ent
96
Chapter 8. Discourse, code and text
123
Chapter 9. The codes of Spiritualis*
Chapter 10. The delphic voice
Chapter 11. The bardic voice
133
183
192
Chapter 12. Gnosis, ideology and ritual
References
211
201
iii
SYNOPSIS
Spiritualism originated in the U.S.A. in the mid nineteenth
century. Its Australian heyday in the late 1870’s has been
followed by a lingering decline. Ostensibly centred on the
idea that the personality survives physical death and can
be contacted by mediums, in fact this aspect is less elaborated
than beliefs in paranormal "phenomena" such as healing „by
touch, astral travel and various kinds of clairvoyance and
divination. The main Spiritualist ritual, while having the
outward form of a Christian church service, centres on a
demonstration of mediumship. Spiritualists also participate
in seances. Their organisations are fragile, and in spite
of prevailing norms of tolerance and egalitarianism, mediums
are competitive and often quarrelsome. Spiritualists tend
to be " seekers" from religious backgrounds, but there is
little evidence that social or economic "deprivation1’is a
very significant factor in attraction to the movement.
Spiritualism is directed to the attainment of "ultimate
knowledge" - gnosis. It is "occult", in that it searches
for signs of gnosis in anomalous events, and pluralistic in
allowing that there may be many paths to gnosis. I interpret
Spiritualism as a marginalised ideology, constituted by a
group of codes which are closely related to the codes of
dominant ideologies. Six Spiritualist codes are discussed
in some detail. They are concerned with (a) information
exchanges, especially those between mediums and Spirit;
(b) the nature and location of the person; (c) love of Spirit,
other humans and self; (d) progress to higher states of
iv
being; (e) the scientific validation of Spiritualist claims;
and (f) the elaboration of experience as a realm of metaphorical
correspondences. These codes display the contradictoriness
and incompleteness characteristic of ideology. Their "bardic*
enunciation by "messages from Spirit" and other Spiritualist
texts is analysed, and it is also shown how these texts work
as "delphic" entertainments. I argue that fundamentally
%
Spiritualism is caught between an ideological distortion
of reality, and a gnosis that cannot be realised.
The study is based upon participant observation of a group
of Spiritualists in Sydney, and a range of written sources.
DECLARATION
This work has not been submitted for a higher degree
to any university or institution other than Macquarie
University.
Paul Gillen
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I pay sad homage to my doctoral supervisor, the late
Professor Chandra Jayawardena, for his wide scholarship
and the sympathetic and critical interest he took in
my project. For advice and encouragement, I especially
thank Marie Curnick, Ann Curthoys, John Docker, Kate
Gillen, Margaret Jolly, Katrina Prokhovnik, Noel Sanders,
%
Pamela Gregory, who did most of the typing, and Shirley Deane.
It is to the Spiritualists of Mortfield Church that I
am most grateful, not only for their kind acceptance of*
me, but also for the complicated challenge their movement
presented to my preconceptions.
This study is dedicated to Joyce Mazengarb.
Thou waitest for the spark from Heaven: and we
Vague half-believers of our casual creeds,
Who never deeply felt, nor clearly willed,
Whose insight never has borne fruit in deeds,
Whose weak resolves never have been fulfilled;
For whom each year we see
Ereeds new beginnings, disappointments new;
Who hesitate and falter life away,
And lose to-morrow the ground won to-day Ah, do not we, Wanderer, await it too?
- Matthew Arnold, The Scholar Gypsy
CHAPTER 1
MORTFIEir CHURCH
Every week advertisments like the following appear in
Sydney newspapers:
Huntdown Spiritual Church welcomes Med. William
Veldt. James Rd. 2 p.m. Healing
Karawa Psychic Research Sanctuary, Scouts Hall,
Thompson St. Sun. 2.30 p.m. Mary Jay and Elaine
Harvey.
Mortfield Spiritualist Church, at 26 Bristol Road.
Flower service Sunday 2.30 Mrs Miller, 7 p.m. Andy
Johnson. Tuesday 7.15 Development class. Wednesday
10 a.m. healing-. All welcome.
If someone sufficiently intrigued to investigate these
cryptic messages should turn up at the Mortfield Spiritualist
-1
Church , he would find himself in a typical inner suburban street
outside a modest brick cottage, externally distinguished only
"by an illuminated sign over the entrance displaying the words,
blue on a white ground, "Spiritual Church”.
Inside he would
find that some dividing walls in the front of the building
have been removed to create a room with seating arrangements
for about fifty people.
Around the walls are a number of
photographic portraits which inspection reveals to be past
presidents of Mortfield Church, and some reproductions of
religious paintings, including one of the Buddha and another
of Jesus.
At one end of the room is a raised platform decorated
with flowers, on which is a large lectern with a bible, a table
with a tray containing a number of paper bags, and, to one
side, a pedal organ, upon which a woman is playing strains
evocative of reposeful meditation.
Much of this scene, and of what follows, may remind our observer
of a Christian Church service.
The image of Jesus
doing here?
But there are jarring notes.
seems predictable, but what is Lord Buddha
What is the meaning of the paper bags?
And
why is it that, on a carved and polished wooden scroll behind
the platform, the words "There is no Religion Higher than Truth-
are emblazoned in gold?
Does this mean that there is no
3
Religion, only Truth;or that Truth is the Highest Religion?
In the preponderance of women and the under-representation
of the young, the gathering seems typical of the congregation
of an established denomination, but it is usually not as
formally dressed nor as reverent in its demeanour.
source of the paper bags in the tray is soon learnt:
each person enters, he or she places one there.
The
as
%
Two or more officiants step onto the platform, and the
2
service begins.
One of them greets those present, extends
a welcome to the person beside her, the presiding medium,
who "will do the flowers for us today”, and announces the
singing of a hymn.
Four or more hymns will be sung in the course of the service,
always to well-known tunes, sometimes to words taken from
"The British Spiritualist's Propaganda Hymnbook*, copies
of the 1922 edition of which are made available to the gathering.
These rewritten words affirm a distinctive cluster of assumptions
and values:
V/e all shall live for ever,
In realms so pure and bright,
0 aid us, then, our Father,
To think and act aright.
To cheer the broken - hearted,
To aid the suffering one,
And through life*s various changes
To say "Thy will be done”.
(#26)
Friends never leave us, those we call
The “dear departed” never do;
They are around us, though the pall
uf earth conceals them from our view.
(#107)
There's a beautiful shore where the
Mid the flowers decked in evergreen
And we know they have crossed o'er
And they dwell in that bright angel
4
loved ones are gone
bloom,
the dark-death wave
home,
Usually a prayer follows, often spoken by the medium.
Fere
is an example of the beginning of one:
I want you to unite with me
as we pray
and we each pray in our own way to God
I can't pray for you
I can only pray with you
and so we stand at this at this moment in the presence
of our Father God Almighty *
that great force from which we draw our very life- *
on this day
and through all eternity
and we stand together as brothers and sisters united one
to another
and though many times we forget this wonderful realisation
that in our communication with Thee
honest communication
we begin to realise that
we ask for many things
and oft-times the things we ask for are not the things
we need
for the thing we need more than anything else is thp
love of our fellow man
the love of our loved ones
the ability to give out love
and many times we forget
within that heart of ours
that as we expend
.
so shall we receive...
This kind of delivery is typical of oral sermonising.5
Conventional imagery, repetition and the linking of clauses
by simple "adding" combine to produce an effect well captured
by the following comment on a book of Madame Blavatsky: ^
Its verses ripple on in a rhythmic cadence aptly
suited to assist the feeling of mystical devotion...
5
it consists of ethico-spiritual maxims, which hardly
so much attempt to give a systematic exposition of
moral principles, as to reduce the spiritual essence
of these principles to a mantric form...'
Very often the prayer concludes with a chorus of the lord's
Prayer, the prayer, it may be explained, which M we are
taught to say on the Earth Plane**.
At this point a list of the names of people known to be* ill
may be read, together with a “healing prayer**, eg:
At this time may we also send forth
a prayer
of love
a vibration
of upliftment
to all thone who are sick
in mind
and body
and spirit
to all those who are in need
of that succour
and that strength
and that life.8
••
Cne of the officiants now reads from a written text.
Biblical passages which refer to the Holy Spirit or to
miracles, and non-Scriptural works which the medium considers
"edifying", are heard in approximately equal proportions.
Next, an officiant, usually the presiding medium, delivers
an address.
The style is like that of the prayers, or only
a little more "down to earth", so it is difficult to render
a just impression by alluding to themes or arguments.
Praise
of Spiritualism is, however, the touchstone of them all:
Personally I feel
that this is a religion that can never be stifled out
it is not a new religion
it is a very old religion
very very old
and has run through all civilisations
and will run through all civilisations
6
and our voice must go with the times
and not too fast for the times
for as we look into history
we find as our moral code demolishes
so does civilisation
die away
we have to look
for something within
to give us faith
and we have to find more than faith in Spiritualism
faith alone is not enough
we are expected to ask scientific questions
and we are to expect that scientific questions will be
answered
for there are many scientists on the other side of the
veil
who are willing
and over-anxious in many instances
..
to give to us
the knowledge that they had upon earth
and that advanced knowledge that they have gained from
Spiritualism..
After the sermon a "voluntary offering11 of cash donations
is collected and while another hymn is sung, the service
moves to its climax, the "demonstration" by the presiding
medium.
In Sydney the usual form of demonstration involves
"reading flowers".
The medium chooses one of the bags that have been brought
by those present, opens it, and takes out the piece of
vegetation inside - normally,though not always, a flower.
Holding the flower, the medium delivers a "message" or
"reading” for the person who brought it.
This is an
example of a very short reading:
It would seem there's a forest and trees
the forest can hide the trees
trees are of wood and wood builds houses so it would
appear you're prepared to go on building
but that's not literal
it means go on developing
yes that's spot on
go on developing
but you haven't found peace.
7
Who am I with?
(At this point, the bringer of the flower the medium
is holding makes herself known)
It would be beaut if things were easy
10
but one day you’ll say hey the forest's made of trees.
This procedure continues until everyone who brought a flower
has been given a message.
It is not expected that the medium
should be able to name who brought each flower.
At some
%
point, as above, the medium usually asks the recipients to
identify themselves.
What is expected is that he or she
deliver messages which the bringers can relate to their
personal concerns.
After the service the flowers are generally thrown away,
although sometimes the more attractive are kept by members
of the meeting to decorate their houses.
Some say that the
flowers last a long time as a result of being touched by
the medium, because of the spiritual power with which the
medium makes contact imparts itself to them.
After the demonstration, the service concludes with a final
hymn and a short "benediction**.
The medium
may rise, and suddenly breaking into - for example- a
heavily Scottish accent, 11 intone:
And may the light of His countenance shine upon ye
and may the peace be in y ’r heart
and may the good fellowship
and the love
and the rapport
that ye have found by bein' here this afternoon
keep ye warm
and keep ye safe
and may the peace that passeth human understanding
abide with ye
each and every one
while we are parted.
God bless.
If the curious observer I have imagined attends Mortfield
services regularly, he will notice that most weeks a different
medium presides.
Arrangements are made whereby the dozen
or so churches in Sydney invite mediums to their services
from a (more or less) common pool of mediums, who therefore
over a period of weeks or months do a "circuit** of
12
churches.
several
It is also likely that he will find himself drawn into the
social circle of the church.
After every service, many of
the audience retire to the kitchen of the house, where they
partake of tea, ‘biscuits and chatter.
These gatherings,
despite their informality, are an important aspect of
Spiritualist practice.
The main items of conversation,
apart from pleasantries and gossip, are the success or
failure of the medium's readings, news of Spiritualist
doings, and discussion of occult, religious, scientific and
historical ideas that bear on Spiritualism.
It becomes
clear that there is a group of Spiritual enthusiasts, most
of whom are or wish to become mediums, who take it on
themselves to Hget newcomers interested in the work*'.
I attended services regularly at Mortfield, and occasionally
at other churches, for nearly a year in the second half of
the 1970's.
I formed friendships with many of the participants,
visited them in their homes, interviewed them,and observed
and made tape recordings of their activities.
The bulk of
what follows is an attempt to describe and interpret their
sayings and doings.
But before resuming this task, a brief
outline of Spiritualism’s history is in order.
9
1.
This name, and all other names of people and places in
this study, is fictitious.
2.
Other descriptions of Spiritualist services in Britain,
California, Indiana and New England may be found in
Kelson (1969:213-214), Martin (1971), Zaretsky (l974:197f)
and Macklin (l974:402f)
3.
I have heard spiritualists address the deity in a
striking variety of ways, eg "learly beloved heavenly
father” , "Dearly beloved father mother god*, "Great
divine spirit of life", "Almighty god source of life,
energv end intelligence*1, and "God, wno does not care how
we address you, as long as we do it reverently".
*
4.
Mrs Campbell. In this and other vocal texts I have
pointed the speaking by indentation.
5.
cf Rosenberg (1974)
6.
Blavatsky, the co-founder of Theosophy, was closely
associated with Spiritualism ana there is a close
relationship between the two movements.
7.
Kuhn (19
8.
Mrs Miller.
9.
Mrs Campbell.
10.
Andy Johnson.
11.
This is a spirit, probably the medium's * guide” , "taking
control” , a phenomenon discussed in Chapter 3. Mrs Miller.
12.
I doubt if any medium has demonstrated at all churches,
or that any church has had services presided over by all
mediums: the "pool" is really a continually shifting set
of overlapping circles.
..
:272)
This reading is analyzed in Chapter 9.
CHAPTER 2
SPIRITUALIST HISTORY
11
Spiritualists and their history
Though only dimly aware of the movement’s history, Spiritualists
place considerable emphasis upon its historicality, or rather,
to be precise, its alleged lack of historicality.
medium Arthur Ford explains why.
The American
He writes that he explored
ancient literature in search of
corroboration of my own experience and observation *
in the total history of mankind...if the psychic
phenomena with which I was daily becoming more
familiar had been going on continuously since the
very earliest records of man's life on earth, I was
indeed on to something that had to do with the very,
structure and purpose of the universe itself.
He discovers what he seeks:
according to him, the Spiritualist
lineage stretches in a tortuous but unbroken line from ’'early
man”, through Homer, the Ancient Egyptians, Buddhism, Confucius,
the Persian and Hebrew prophets, Jesus, Paul of Tarsus, Lamaism,
Dante and Swedenborg.
true:
It has always been true,therefore it is
2
a time-honoured proof.
In its contemporary form,
however, Spiritualism is not "eternal", but historically specific.
Origins
In 1848, while revolutionary movements swept ?Jurope, the family
of John Fox, farmer, of Hydesville, New York State, was disturbed
by mysterious bangs and raps in their house.
The daughters,
Margaretta and Kate, attributed these noises to a spirit, with
whom they claimed to be able to communicate.
The phenomena
became the talk of the neighborhood; hundreds came to appraise
them; clergymen censured, scoffed or became interested.
The
Foxes moved to Rochester in 1849, but the spirits followed
their daughters, who quickly found themselves the centre of a
controversial cult.
rapidly.
Fanned by newspaper publicity, it grew
Many other “mediums'', claiming to be able to
communicate with spirits and to produce anomalies like the
Pox sisters, appeared all over the country, together with
"circles" of people interested in "investigating” their claims.
By the mid 1850’s, the Spiritualist "belief system had been
synthesised into an approximation of its modern form.
The
main tenets of this system were:
1) The immortality of the soul can be scientifically demonstrated
(satisfying the rationalist's need for "proof” and the religious
hankering for eternity, but opposing religious "faith" and the
materialist view of mind).
2) Existing religious beliefs are distorted perspectives-of the
one Truth (this appealed to freethinkers and Deists, without
condemning outright more orthodox beliefs).
3) Man's destiny is "Progress, onward, upward, from his birth
to eternity'^^Linking the movement with a "progressive" outlook
in politics and morality; since "eternity" was the timespan,
however, it was not millenial or revolutionary).
4) Certain people, mediums, have access to a spiritual "power",
a quasi-physical "subtle fluid", which enabled spirit communication to take place, as well as clairvoyance and apparent suspensions
of the "laws of nature"(this element of Spiritualism supplied
the drama and mystery).
In 1855 Spiritualism in the United States was as strong as it
would ever be, with, according to one historian "over a million
4
and a half believers and 150 practising mediums".
Evidently the doings of the Pox sisters, which at another time
and place might have provoked only priests, psychiatrists or
boredom, sounded a deep contemporary resonance:
whether they
believed in them or not, many people debated the purported
spirits with furious energy.
The historical roots of this resonance were complex.
There
were "folk" traditions of witchcraft, curing and fortunetelling
There was a European occult tradition, whose origins went back
to Greek mystery cults and beyond to Ancient Persia and Egypt,
and which surfaced in astrology and alchemy, medieval heresies,
Renaissance neo-Platonism, eighteenth century Freemasonry and
Rosicurucianism, and the magical cults of the French Revolution
No doubt much of this tradition was mythical; but the myfhs
fed reality.
By the 1840's these tendencies were represented in English
speaking countries especially by a group of curative and
diagnostic systems (for examples, Mesmerism, hydrotherapy and
phrenology), which contended with and made attempts to be
assimilated by
orthodox science and medicine ,but generally
remained on the fringes; and also by the intellectual religious
philosophy based on the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, which
had a small but energetic following among intellectuals in
Britain and the U.S.A.
Swedenborgianism, like Spiritualism, was a synthesis of aspects
of Christianity, Deism, rationalism and the ideal of "freedom
of conscience” associated with Puritan sectarianism.
Its
founder had claimed to have clairvoyant powers and to be in
regular contact with spirits.
It was politically progressive,
had a tendency to sexual libertarianism, and alluded to
"universal laws”.
Its practices included "faith healing".
All of these elements found their way into the complex stew
of Spiritualism.
7
Why these elements suddenly came together in a popular
movement remains one of those mysteries of culture which it
might "be necessary to consult a medium about.
that "the time was ripe".
But it seems
Spiritualism was only the most
popular and “plebeian" of a number of occult “revivals" of the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which included the
O
groups around Eliphas Levi in France, Anthroposophy in
Germany, and Theosophy and the Hermetic Crder of the Golden
Q
Dawn in Britain.
By the 1860*^, Spiritualism as a "fad" was already in decline
in America.
But on the pattern of crazes which have originated
in the central metropolis of capitalism ever since, it flowed
outward like a wave, successively peaking in England, Europe,
Australia and South America.
Except for a period in Brazil,
it was never able to establish a strong institutional base,
and ended up dissipating most of its energy, leaving behind
diminishing bands of followers who remained attached to the
core doctrines.
Perhaps the upheavals of 1848 had created in the wealthier
classes of Europe a desire to be distracted
by spectres less threatening than the one which Marx and
Engels in their celebrated tract proclaimed to be “haunting
Europe".
In any case, Spiritualism was to follow in England
the trail it had already blazed in the U.S., from fashionable
craze and topic of debate to popular movement.
Cn the continent
it was destined to remain in the first phase - although it was
from France, via Alain Karc’ec, that Spiritualism diffused
to Latin America, where it helped inspire a Spiritualist variant
usually distinguished by the name of Spiritism.10
Introduced to England in 1852, Spiritualism quickly made convert
of a number of influential people, including the utopian
socialist Robert Owen, the poet Elizabeth Browning, and the
biologist Alfred Wallace.11 Other intellectuals, including the
classicist Frederick Myers and the physicist William Crookes,
12
followed later in the century.
It has been suggested that in Britain there were two Spiritualisms, one the intellectual movement wnich spawned the Society
of Psychical Research ^ and esoteric philosphies like Theosophy
the other a "plebeian" Spiritualism of the working and lower
middle classes, based largely on the charismatic followings
built up by mediums.1^
This division may be a useful conceptual tool, but there was
never a clear line between these two aspects of Spiritualism,
Both relied on the medium as the focal point of their practices
and both were associated with secularism and freethought,
though the plebeian side had more to do with socialism and the
labour movement.
Spiritualism in Australia
Although it did not begin to grow until the late 1860's, much
of the inquiring restlessness in which Spiritualism took root
must have come to Australia with these who came in the 1850's
to make their fortunes on the gold fields.
15
One such seeker
was William Dixon Campbell Denoven, onetime spokesman for the
miners' anti-licence movement, subsequently journalist, goldbuyer, member of parliament, founder of the Bendigo stock
exchange and finally Bendigo town clerk.
Denoven became a
believer in Spiritualism about 1860, and formed the "Bendigo
Energetic Circle of Freethinkers'4 in order to investigate
psychic phenomena.
A book of his published in 1882 is a
692 page compilation of reports of such phenomena from all
over the world, including the findings of the Bendigo group,
interlaced with opinions on freethought, morality, primitive
Christianity and immortality.1^
Denoven's publisher was William Terry, the central figure in
Australian Spiritualism from 1870
till his death in 1903.
He also "belonged to the immigrants of the 1850's. After come years
in various Melbourne retailing businesses, he established'
himself in 1870 as a "spiritualist bookseller, medium, trance
and magnetic healer, and clairvoyant herbalist.”
In 1874
he launched the spiritualist monthly The Harbinger of Light,
which he edited and wrote much of for thirty years, and was
also a co-founder of the Victorian Association of Progressive
Spiritualists.
Two kinds of Spiritualist
activity of little significance
today were important at this time:
the public lecture and the
"lyceum” or Sunday School.
In a period where mass media were undeveloped,
few had access
to education beyond primary school and availability of books was
more restricted than today, public addresses and debates
combined many of the functions of contemporary current affairs
programs, libraries and dramatic entertainment.
In Melbourne
in the 1870’s, the Spiritualists began to put on guest lecturers,
many from overseas, whom people paid to hear on Sunday afternoons.
The most prominent was Emma Britten-Hardinge, who wrote what
is still the official creed of British Spiritualist National
Union.
She lectured in most large Australian cities in 1878
and 1879.
So, at the same time or a little later, did Dr
James Martin Peebles, American physician and Spiritualist •
missionary, later to defect to Theosophy; a Professor Denton,
who spoke on Spiritualism and Geology;and Mrs Ada Foye, "one
ever appeared in the ranks of Spiritualism", as she was
billed.17
The giving forth of what the churches regarded as blasphemous
doctrines on Sundays, and charging for them, was too much
for Christian sensibilities, and in the 1880’s the governments
of both Victoria and N.S.W. moved to suppress the lectures by
making commercial entertainments on Sundays illegal. Although
the law was almost impossible to enforce strictly, it seems
to have worked; at least, after this time the era of the great
public lectures slowly waned.
In 1872 Terry had founded the Melbourne Progressive Lyceum,
on the model of American Spiritualist "Sunday Schools", a
model which was also adopted by the Temperance Movement and
later by the Secularists.
The experiment, which in Melbourne
was shortlived, aimed to counter the influence of the wider
society by inculcating "high moral precepts** and a liberal,
rationalistic world view.
One of those involved was the
young Alfred Deakin.
Leakin, supposedly under the “control** of the spirit of John
Bunyan, had written uautomatically'* a book called A New
iq
Pilgrim's Progress which was published in 1877.
Its
theme is the religious quest of a ycung man called Restless.
In 1878 Deakin became president of the Victorian Association
of Progressive Spiritualists, and although he abandoned his
public advocacy of Spiritualism after he began his political
career in 1880, it is reasonably certain that the future
Victorian premier and co-architect of Australian federation
remained a believer for many years afterwards.
20
Although not as well organised as in Melbourne, Spiritualism
in Sydney also possessed devotees among the more “progressive**
members of the ruling classes, among them John Bowie Wilson,
sometime Minister for lands; the widow of John Woolley, the
first principal of the University of Sydney; and William
Charles Windeyer, a judge and Member of Parliament, who for
brief periods was Solicitor-General and Attorney-General.
There was also Annie Pillars, the widow of a minister of the
pi
Sydney Unitarian Church,
who after the death of her husband
had founded an elite girl's college.
She became a Spiritualist,
married Charles Bright, a lecturer for the Victorian Association
of Irogrespive Spiritualists, and became editor of the Harbinger
after the death of Terry.^
Australian spiritualism in the twentieth century
Ey 1900, although no longer a fashionable cause celebre,
Spiritualism was established as a reference point in popular
consciousness, as the abundant use of it in the press and in
23
popular novels shows.
In this period the movement assumed
its modern organisational form:
a network of loosely affiliated
"churches", in which the main ritual was the "reading of flowers”.
Mortfield Church was founded at this time by a medium and her
husband.
The last Spiritualist event to gain widespread public attention
25
in Australia was the visit of Arthur Conan Doyle. ^ Doyle
had converted to Spiritualism in 1915, and in 1920 embarked
on a lecture tour of the colonies accompanied by the kind of
promotional activity that was lateis to. become associated with
the visits of rock and roll musicians.
financial success.
His tour was a great
Cn 28 November 1920, 3,500 people filled
the Sydney Town Hall to hear him.
But many of the audience
must have merely been curious to see the creator of Sherlock
Holmes in the flesh, and no significant wave of recruits seems
to have ensued.
Occult seekers would in any case soon have
their attention diverted by the visit of Krishnamurti.
Pour months after the visit, a leader in the Harbinger of Light
asked with an air of resignation:
When the people who have been influenced by Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle come to Spiritualist meetings, will they find
what they are seeking - a better expression of religious
feeling - or will they find these Spiritualist Societies ?7
full of jealousy and so be driven out of them once more?
The decline, however, was slow, and numbers attending meetings
may even have picked up during the depression:
they were,
after all, cheaper than the cinema and more exciting than
church.
Spiritualism continued to be more than the faith*
of a tiny minority.
During the two decades following Doyle's
visit, more thsn thirty Spiritualist churches were operating
in Sydney, twice as many as today, in a city one quarter of
its present size.
About a quarter of the churches called themselves "United
Spiritualist Churches", just as they do today, but the movement
was anything but united.
Attempts to set up state or national
organisations have always come to grief on personal rivalries.
In the 1920's doctrinal disputes were also prominent:
in
Britain, Christian Spiritualists, who claimed Spiritualism
to be fully compatible with Christianity, broke with the
Spiritualist National Union.
Spiritualism was recruiting fewer people than it lost, and its
membership by the 1940's was ageing and- dwindling.
The
Harbinger, by then the oldest Spiritualist periodical in
the world, was deeply in debt and virtually reduced to
reprinting articles from overseas Spiritualist literature;
it ceased publication in 1948.
World War II brought no revival, and the decline continued
during the 1950’s and 1960's, until arrested by an
influx of representatives of the "occult revival** of the
late 1960's and 1970’s,who came into the movement to "check
it out,*'.
But few committed themselves, and by the beginning
cf the 1980's there were one or two fewer churches in Sydney
than there had been a decade earlier.
In the long term,
%
there seems little doubt that the movement is doomed to a
lingering extinction.
What is surprising is not that it
dying, but that it is taking so long.
..
21
1. Ford (1974:47-8) The writers of Spiritualist history
(distinct from hut inextricably tangled with the history
of Spiritualism) take a similar view. Barbanell says of
Socrates that "in one sense he can be called a Spiritualist,
for he had his daemon, the equivalent of the modern spirit
guide" (1969:121) and avers, that "Christianity owes its
inception ■ to the psychic phenomena for which Jesus was
responsible" (ibid 162). An article on the shakers in
Psychic News (12/4/75:5) emphasises their affinities and
connections with Spiritualism, which Spence discerns c*tso in
"witchcraft, demonic possession, poltergeistic disturbances
and animal magnetism" (1960:380).
In recent years, "occult histories", have achieved
considerable popularity (Pauwels & Bergier, 1971;
Brennan 1976). These books, alleging an "occult influence1*
oh the course of human history, exemplify the same logic.
2. George Woodcock (1975:35) notes that"anarchists are very
much concerned with the ancestry of their doctrine. This
concern springs from the belief that anarchism is a manifestation of natural human urges. If one accepts this
view, then anarchism cannot merely be a phenomenon of the
present; the aspect of it we perceive in history is merely
one metamorphosis of an element constant in society'.'
3. Edmonds (1860:59).
4. Pritchard (1976:319).
5. Thomas (1971).
6. Roberts (1974). On occultims in Europe before the nineteeth
century, see Yates (1972;1979)
7. Note that Spiritualism was probably the first popular
religion to accord female officiants the same status as
male ones.
After the rise of Spiritualism, Swedenborg’s philosophy
declined in importance, but aspects of it found their way
into latermovements, especially New Thought and Anthroposophy.
8. Me Intosh (1975).
9. Howe (1972).
10. Willems (1969).
11. Porter (1958).
12. William James, although remaining uncommitted, accorded
Spiritualist beliefs considerable plausibility (James, 1917)
13. See eg 6iauld (1968)
22
15. Gold and Spirit are, perhaps, not so different, The prolific
freethinking writer William Howitt, author of A Popular
History of Priestcraft (1834) and translator Ennemoser’s
ETstorv of Magic, came with his sons to Victoria to make
his fortune in 1852. He returned to Britain in 1854,
"but one of his sons, Alfred, remained to become an eminent
explorer and anthropologist. The Howitts knew the Brownings
and some of their circle; they also knew James Smith, who
had :migrated to Melbourne in 1854, where he became a
journalist and later the Victorian Parliamentary librarian.
Smith became converted to Spiritualism in the 1860’s,
and advanced the cause in the pages of the Age and the
Argus: he also wrote a Spiritualist book (Smith, 1875).
16. Denoven (1882)
17. Spence (1960:55)
Probably the most spectacular of the lecturers was Thomas
Walker, whose career, apart from what it reveals of the
cultural significance of Spiritualism at this time, is
worth retelling for its own sake. Born in 1858, he migrated
with his working class family to Canada, at the age of 16,
set up there as a mediu, A fatal accident which occurred
in the course of one of his "demonstrations** led to his
being found guilty of manslaughter. He fled to England,
where for a time he worked as a journalist. By 1876 he
had teamed up with Dr Peebles, and when the latter accepted
Terry's invitation to visit Australia, the nineteen year
old Walker accompanied him. He especially impressed
Melbourne Spiritualists when, at a meeting chaired by the
twenty one year old Alfred Deakin, he delivered a trance
lecture under the “control" of the spirit of Giordano
Bruno. By the end of 1881, after travels in Britain and
South Africa, he was back in Melbourne at the invitation
of the Victorian Spiritualists, but dramatically broke
with the movement, which he denounced as a fraud. In
revenge, the spiritualists released details of the Toronto
incident, and he removed himself to Sydney. Subsequently
he published poetry, wrote and acted in a successful play,
and established himself as a "secularist spokesman and
larrikin populist campaigner”, as the Australian Dictionary
of Biography (1966) has it. He advocated birth control,
easier divorce, rent control, abolition of capital
punishment and the establishment of a national bank. His
election to the N.S.W. parliament in 1887 culminated in
his shooting and wounding a clergyman in a drunken brawl.
After a period in New Zealand as a temperance lecturer and
elocution teacher, he settled in Perth, at first as a
journalist. He became a state Labour M.P. in 1905, A t t o r n e y
General from 1911 to 1916, and Speaker of the Legislative
Assembly from 1924 to 1930.
18. F.B. Smith (1963:28)
23
19. Deakin (1877)
20. See Murdock (1923), la Nauze (1965). Deakin married the
daughter of Hugh Tunor Browne. Browne another gold seeker,
had become the wealthy owner of a distillery, and was a
friend of John Bow Wilson, mentioned below. He became a
Spiritualist in the early 1870's, and wrote long and
repetitious works with titles like The Holy Truth or the
Coining Reformation (1876), Rational Christianity (1879)
The Religion of the Future: or The Higher law of Truth
and Right (1883) and The Grand Reality (1888)^ which
combine reports of mediumistic phenomena with theological
and historical speculation.
%
21. The Unitarian Church in Sydney continued to h;ve
Spiritualist mediums on its platform at least until the
1920 ' f .
22. Bright (1907)
23. For examples, see Praed (J90i_)?
Pratt (1910) and Marlowe (1918).
••
Hume (1890,1924),
24. However, the practice of "circulating'1 mediums by rotating
invitations does not seem to have became established till
later on in the century.
25. Doyle (1922)
26. Roe (1978).
27. Harbinger of light, March 21, 1921:270.
CHAPTER 3
SPIRITUALIST BELIEFS
The denial of death
Spiritualism purports to be based on the conviction that the
personality, or some aspect of itf survives after death as
a * spirit* which may be contacted by the living.1
The general decline of interest in death and survival in
industrial countries since the eighteenth century has been
2
commented on by a number of authors. Blauner regards it as
a consequence of increasing longevity, which has meant that
fewer deaths are highly disruptive of social relationships.
Aries, on the other hand, links it with the increasing
importance of the nuclear family and the allegedly decreasing
significance of the individual.
However this might bey from
the perspective of these conceptions, Spiritualism would appear
to be survival of or reversion to an archaic conception of
death.
But this archaism, while undeniably present, is superficial.
Most Spiritualists do not involve themselves in the movement
primarily because they desire contact with the dead, although
bereavement is sometimes the stimulus of their initial encounter.
Furthermore, Spiritualists are not particularly interested in
what happens to the soul after death.
The normal response to
questions about it is that they are "happy to wait until the
times comes" when "all will be revealed".
Their ideas about
the afterlife are confused and inconsistent.*
These days little is heard of Summerland, a locality which
typifies a sentimental image of the world beyond the grave,^
although many of the "regulars" hold to a simple dualism of
"this side" and the "other side".
Most mediums have constructed
for themselves a more elaborate theory, sometimes claiming that
it has been communicated to them from the Spirit world.
The
26
materials utilized in such constructions are mainly literary,^
and usually contain some reference to "levels” or "planes" of
increasing "height", through which souls pass as they “progress*1.
The most commonly mentioned such level is the "Astral*1.
Theosophy,
In
the Astral is a world formed by the non-material
"realisations" of affects; it is a "desire world*1, compared
8
by some to the Christian purgatory.
It is supposed to'be
inhabited not only by spirits of the dead, but by so-called
"elementals'^ a term which has entered Spiritualist
parlance,
and refers to "low” spirits such as fairies, demons, old gods,
and even legendary and fictional characters like Robin Hood
and Sherlock Holmes, endowed by human interest with a kind of
life.
9
Spiritualists’ ideas about the Astral are, however usually
much less precise than this.
For example, this is what the
young medium Ray Ferguson replied when asked to describe the
spirit world:
Spiritualists desire to communicate on three levels.
There’s the Astral Plane, which most people have travelled
on, either while asleep or during a daydream. The etheric
level is-j^Ij would say where moat spirits seem to be contained.
That's the level we must go to when we die.
The third level is the extra-terrestial, which requires
superpowers to be able to operate on ...But there does
seem to be another layer beyond the extra-terrestial.
Spirits contacted in the extra-terrestial appear to
refer to still higher levels for their knowledge...
Spiritualists don't worry about it too much, because
they know all will be revealed in time.
Common to all Spiritualist accounts of the afterlife is
an ambiguity:
it is difficult to say whether they refer to
a space, a form of
consciousness, or the possession of
certain powers and abilities. ^
they share a pattern
of the soul immediately after death being on a Plane “close *
27
to the Physical, usually in a disoriented state, and then,
as it acquires "wisdom,” moving away into "higher" and more
abstract realms.
This pattern mirrors the sentiments of the
living towards deceased intimates.
At first the loss is
felt keenly in everyday life (the dead one seems near);
later memory recedes.
There is another correlation: if a
medium fails to communicate with the spirit of someone who
%
has died recently, this can "be ascribed to the spirit’s
confusion;
a failure with a less recently "passed on**
spirit can be accounted for by the spirit's removal from
"mundane" concerns.
-Reincarnation
Many of the "regulars" at Mortfield Church, and a majority
of the mediums, believed that souls may return to earth
several times in different bodies.
Feincamation is appealing to Spiritualist* for two reasons.
In the first place, it is an idea vith a long and prestigious
historv, being s central tenet of Hinduism and Buddhism and
propounded by Pythagoras and Plato. ^
Some Spiritualists
also claim it to have been a secret teaching of Christianity,
and attempt to back this claim with Scripture. ^
Reincarnation
remains a live issue in the popular consciousness, as disseminators of "popular culture” are well aware:
the most noteworthy
example is the publicity given the "Bridey Murphy case”. ^
Secondly, the idea fits well with the Spiritualist insistence
on the importance of "individual responsibiltyw, and provides
ample time for each soul
to fulfill its supposed destiny of
limitless spiritual progress.
As Water remarked of the doctrine of karma, towards
which this "belief of some Spiritualists tends, it
constitutes
the most complete formal solution of the problem
of theodicy :..The world is viewed as a completely
connected and self-contained cosmos of ethical retribution. Each individual forges his own destiny
exclusively and in the strictest sense of the word.
Of those associated with Mortfield, the medium Elaine Harvey
gave the most elaborate description of a Spiritualist karmic
eschatology.
She claimed that everyone has seven souls,
some of which rtfall away** at death.
A “ special soul” the
“true self", is eventually reborn, the time, place and physical
incarnation being "on the decision of up there” .
that delays, which keep the soul "in limbo
Elaine said
up to a thousand
years**, were a punishment for errors committed in previous lives.
As a general rule, each reincarnation is a stage in the progress
ive development of the soul, although it is possible for souls
to "slip back”
9
Eventually the soul acquired ultimate wisdom and power and
love, and no longer needs to be reborn.
Such MBodisat.vas"
2.0
may, however, decide to return to earth, in order to “benefit
humanity and further the law of progress" .
According to Elaine, the memory of past lives is held in the
subconscious, and can be elicited with the aid of a psychically
gifted person.
21
Some Spiritualists reject metempsychosis, either because it
is ’’un-Christian" , or because they think the evidence for it
veak.
In Australia differences of opinion on the issue co-exist
within the various churches.
In the US and Britain however,
disagreement is reflected in the existence of rival organisation
It is true that in some respects reincarnation is out of key
with Spiritualist practices and beliefs.
An article in the
22
British Spiritualist newspaper Psychic News
raised several
objections to the concept from this viewpoint.
Human history
does not show much evidence of moral and spiritual growth
in this world, which might be expected if "higher spirits11
were being recirculated into it.
Rebirth is “earth-centred1*:
why should souls keep returning to this existence?
Last,
although some people under hypnosis or other abnormal states
of consciousness appear to be able to recall past lives
accurately, they cannot recall anything between incarnations.
In the opinion
of the author of the article, this lends
strength to the hypothesis that these cases are really due
to ESP or spirit possession.
23
With many others, Colin Wilson has pointed to the conservative
implications of karmic rebirth:
if our present state is a
result of past deeds and misdeeds, both the rich and powerful
and the poor and suffering deserve their fate.
would find this conclusion acceptable.
Few Spiritualists
It implies that it
is wrong to attempt to alleviate earthly misery, a "work" which
most Spiritualists regard as central to their movement.
It is interesting that the past reincarnations of spirits
are scarcely if ever discussed; as a general rule, past lives
belong only to the living.
Spirits
Most spirits do little but "make their presence known” through
a medium by imparting information or manifesting particular
30
characteristics which supposedly serve as identifying signs.
In addition, they may tender advice, usually of a moralizing
kind, which the medium passes on.
However, there are special
sorts of spirits which require further discussion.
Prom the beginning of the Spiritualist movement it has been
a thought that the living may be accompanied by a MbandM of
26
guardian spirits or “guides**.
Guides attempt to protect and
27
assist their charges in their dealings with "life".
Although guides are nearly always spirits of the dead, it is
only occasionally that the person they attach themselves to
has known them in the flesh. Most frequently they have an
OO
-exotic" origin - Egyptians, Africans, Chinese, American
Indians abound, and one Mortfielder had a guide who was
(or had been?) an
"extraterrestial".
Guides are not believed to be infallible, and less “elevated**
ones can be quite misleading.
The British medium Harry Edwards
warns against "guide-worshipM in the following terms:
Guides are noble personalities of good intent...
loveable and patient people, though at times they may
be rather eager to influence their human charge...we
should not impose upon the guide responsibilities beyond
his power to perform. No guide is omnipotent...let us
see them as they really are. Fine personalities, more
advanced in wisdom than ourselves, but who have limitations
as we have. y
In keeping with their ethos of individualism, Spiritualists
believe that as people progress in wisdom and spiritual
sensitivity, new, more advanced guides may replace old ones;
in spirit, as in life, friends can be outgrown.
Mediums are able to perceive and communicate with their own
guides, and sometimes with the guides of others.
usually believed that her guides help the medium
It is
"get in touch" with spirits, and generally assist her paranormal
powers.
However, some mediums say that all the information
they "give out” is supplied by their guides, while others
scarcely mention them, or even question their existence.
“Controls" are spirits who "take over” the body of a living
person, usually a medium.
Controls are often guides, but
need not be. ^
"Doorkeepers" are special guides who are responsible for
permitting or refusing “entry" to spirits who wish to present
themselves to a medium.
guide.
Some say
The doorkeeper is often the leading
that while the other members of the band
may change through life, the doorkeeper does not, being in
31
the mould of "faithful old retainer'*.
While most spirits are believed to be benevolent and wise,
there are also confused, unhappy and malevolent spirits,
who seek “control” over the living in order to express their
selfish “negative conditions'* rather than to "benefit humanity".
They are generally "trickster spirits" who make a nuisance of
themselves by causing accidents, disturbing material objects,
making noises and generally “seeking to gain attention".
*Xp
Most Spiritualists believe that these spirits have failed to
"move on" to "higher levels" after death, but have remained
"earthbound". This may have been because of the shock of a
33
sudden death , a deep attachment to some person or place
on the Earth Plane^, or because they lack sufficient moral
or spiritual merit.
Earthbound entities may cause obsessions
by haunting a living person, causing the latter to acquire
some of their dominant traits or habits, or even "take over"
(possess) the personality entirely.
The initial symptoms
of such an invasion include depression, pressure on the head
35
and unaccountable pains in the body.
Earthbound entities are subject to the Law of Progress; they
will eventually "come round**, and then move on to a level less
bothersome for the living.
Spiritualists try to assist this
process by "rescuing" them, a practice which is discussed in
more detail in the following chapter.
Spirit
Emphasis on the claim that souls survive death and can be
contacted by the living is one of the features which sets
Spiritualism apart from other contemporary occultisms.
But
more significant to Spiritualists themselves are beliefs
which are shared with other occultisms:
in paranormal
powers of perception and will, and in the existence of
laws which, applying to realms beyond earthly existence,
may give rise to apparent transgressions of the ones so
far established by science.
The anomalies believed in by
Spiritualists and evoked by mediums are seen as evidence
for, and in themselves partly constitute, the realm of
Spirit.
In the absence of a corpus of Spiritualist dogma^, the
nature of the spirit realm is largely left to personal
conjecture.
The term "Spirit", however, tends to be used
in two fairly distinct senses.
It is, firstly, the place where most spirits "dwell", or the
state of being which characterises them.
This is the "other
33
side" which has already been mentioned in connection with
survival beliefs.
In the second way it is used, Spirit is not a place or state,
but an agent or power which acts upon things.
This “super-
natural*1 force, encountered in many occultisms and systems of
magic, in this case resembles and to some degree is likely to
be derived from the hermetic concept of Spiritus,
37
component of IIeo-Platonism" in the Henaissance.
a central
%
A fifteenth century author in this tradition explained the
concept as follows:
...Between the anima and the tangible world...the
medium of communication is spirit, as between our souls
and bodies...The spirit is...a body so fine that it is
almost a soul...It is bright, warm, moist, life-giving,
and the source of higher endowments in the soul.
In this passage, the essential features of the Spiritualist
Spirit are mentioned:
it is high, animating, and a mediating
element between mind and matter, since it interacts with both.
However, in Spiritualism, Spirit is less clearly differentiated from the mental, so that as well as being an aspect
of, it can also stand in opposition to matter.
In the hermetic tradition, Spirit
traversed the universe and penetrated all things and
being itself intermediary between matter and soul,
carried the powers of the superior world to the
inferior one. Ficino had revived the idea of the spiritus
as a basis for magical operations...Man could use his
spiritus to work on the cosmic spiritus and attract
beneficial celestial influences.
These ideas were taken up by the seventeenth century English
/(osicrucian and alchemist Robert Fludd^0 , and later formed the
basis of Kesmer’s theory of animal magnetism.^ The existence
of "a supposed physical force emanating from the person of the
medium, and directed by his will, by means of which objects
may be moved without contact in apparent defiance of natural
laws"^was postulated by early psychic investigators, at the
same time as science formed the hypothesis of the ether as a
medium for the transmission of electromagnetic radiation.
The
ether was an lintenable concept, abandoned after Einstein
formulated the theory of relativity^, but for a time it
provided a "scientific" underwriting for speculations about
a substance that "traversed the universe and penetrated "all
things...*
Mortfield Spiritualists often conceptualize Spirit (which
in this sense is synonymous with spiritual or psychic power)
as vibrations in a paraphysical mpdium, emanating from
significant objects (charms, for instance, or the flowers
presented at the flower service) and from people, especially
mediums.
In its first sense, Spirit is ambiguously place or state,
in the second sense it embodies a greater tangle of contradictions, being partly mental and partly physical, and, like the
mathematical abstractions which contemporary physics takes
to be the basic constituents of the world, partaking of
apparently incongruous qualities:
substance, force and vibration.
it is simultaneously
Powers
Spiritualists believe that some people possess powers to
produce anomalies which signify the existence of Spirit.
Spiritualists call these anomalies ’’phenomena*.
are put into two categories:
Phenomena
physical phenomena, which are
disruptions to the normal expectation of material events,
and ‘'mental*' phenomena, which contravene expectations of
knowledge or volition.
These categories, it must be said,
are arbitrary; it will become apparent that some phenomena
are on the borderline 01 physical and mental, while it is
also true that mental phenomena shade into hypnotic phenomena
(which also contravene expectations of knowledge and will),
and that physical phenomena may at some point within the
Spiritualist milieu be exposed as “trickery*.
Physical Phenomena
This group includes rapping and table-turning (the "original14
Spiritualist effects), spirit writing, "direct voice*1, spirit
photography, apports, levitation, the production of ectoplasm,
materialization,spiritual healing, and some other phenomena
which most Spiritualists would find credible, although they
do not have an established place within the Spiritualist
tradition, such as "thoughtography1* (mentally projecting an
\44
image onto a photographic emulsion;
, bending metal, waterdivining, eyeless sight
45
, etc.
Spirit writing, (which must be clearly distinguished from
automatic writing, where the medium's hand provides the
motor force) allegedly occurs when a spirit writes a message
on a slate or sheet of paper.
Direct voice is the phenomenon of spirit voices issuing from
matter, usually trumpets provided "by the medium.
It stands
in the same relation to the "indirect voice” of speaking
“under control11 (discussed below) as spirit -writing stands
to automatic writing.
In spirit photography, spirits allegedly appear on a photographic
emulsion.^ As distinct from thoughtography, the shutter is
usually operated in the normal way, although the two phenomena
may coincide.
Apports are objects supposedly transported through solid matter.
A*7
They are usually small, flowers and jewellery pieces being
preferred.
Ectoplasm is
“a vaporous, luminescent substance supposed to
emanate from the body of the medium during a
/O
trance."
Its production is a form of materialization,
which refers to any conversion of a ”spiritual” substance
into one that is perceivable by normal perception.
The
production of ectoplasm,(which preoccupied some early investigators of Spiritualism^jjlevitation (associated with the
50\
noteworthy D.P. Hume j, and spirit writing and photography,
are virtually forgotten today, but apports are still discussed,
although I heard of no Australian apport mediums.^
There
was a direct voice medium working in Sydney until the mid
1970's.
Such phenomena have repeatedly been exposed as fraudulent,
and as a result
about them.
contemporary Spiritualists are ambivalent
There is a view that, if genuine, they are
“highly advanced", but they are also denounced as a "childish",
"materialistic" and therefore "low" form of mediumship.
Spiritualists say that they are practised less today than
in the past because of the threat of legal action for fraud,
but this threat seems to have declined rather than increased
over the last thirty years.
Perhaps these displays seem
more tawdry to audiences familiar with space flight, colour
television computers and science fiction than they did in
the last century.
spiritual healing is the most important form of physical
mediumship, and the only one regularly practised today in
Australia.
Healing
Several of the mediums who worked at Mortfield church claimed
a "healing gift", and a few specialiped in it.
The technique
used were those of "Spiritual" or "mental" healing, also
called "healing by touch", which Spiritualists are usually
5?
at pains to distinguish from "faith healing".
The technique
vary, but all consist of uouchings, strokings, manipulations
and "passings" (movements of the hands in the vicinity of
those parts which are afflicted, or said to be by the medium)
54 .
Homeopathic and folkloric remedies are also given , sometime
55
on the instruction of a guide
. The healer often prays,
usually silently.
Diagnosis is believed to occur in a variety of ways.
Most
commonly, the healer "takes onw the symptoms of the patient,
that is experiences the patient’s pains and discomforts as
if they were her own.
Many healers diagnose through thf
”health aura", discussed below, while others perceive the
patient's physical condition “clairvoyantly“.
The kind of healing which spiritual healing exemplifies has
a long history and widespread cultural distribution; often
it incorporates other practices, such as blowing breath onto
the sick person, the recital of spells and the use of talismans
56
and amulets.
In the eighteenth century Mesmer used some of these methods
in conjunction with his main technique, which consisted* of
seating his patients around a "magnetised” vat, grasping
pieces of iron which protruded from it.
He attributed the
cures that were claimed, as well as the trance states and
convulsions, to the action of a "magnetic fluid” which all
animals emitted.
57
Cne of the commissions set up by the French government to
investigate Kesmer^® in 1784 rejected the idea of a
magnetic fluid, but “admitted that favourable results might
59
accure, howpverj from imagination".
This line of explanation,
which led to Charcot's investigations of hypnotic phenomena,
is basically that taken by the medical profession on whatever
efficacy Spiritual healing might be deemed to possess.^
Healing occupies an important place in Spiritualist practice.
At Mortfield a husband and wife medium team ran a weekly
healing circle, and healing sometimes occurred after other
services.
At the Sunday services an "absent healing list**
of the names of people known to be unwell was read by the
medium, as a kind of blessing.
However, healinf. does not appear to loom as large in the
thinking of Sydney Spiritualists as it does in some other
pi ace a. ^
Skultans interprets healing as engendering acceptance by
women of the tensions and conflicts associated with the
feminine role.
She makes the point that in the group she
studied nearly all the healers were male, and that "healing
is a very erotic episode"
, involving the touching of females
by males and "deep breathing".^
Neither this eroticism nor the oppression of most of the"
women who attend healing circles is in dispute, and it is
also true that mediums often encourage an accepting attitude
towards “fate”.
However, at Mortfield there were as many
female healing mediums as male ones.
The clientele of the
regular healing circle was overwhelmingly female, but on
the other hand the wife played a more active role and
practised more healing than her husband.
Although Spiritualist
healing undoubtedly helps people to adjust to their situation
rather than challenge it, and helps more women than men, the
specific kind of expression of sex roles and sexism which
Skultans perceived among the Welsh Spiritualists studied
by her is not as clear at Mortfield.
Spiritualism bears from its origins some of the populist
feeling against orthodox medicine so much in evidence among
the alternative medicine movements.
In the nineteenth century
Spiritualism was almost as opposed to ’’doctorcraft*' as to
65
"priestcraft”.
Put today criticisms of the medical profession
are fairly muted.
Mental Phenomena
Mental phenomena are of two kinds, clairvoyance and control.
Clairvoyance involves the medium displaying access "to "truths
which would normally be unknowable. Control is when a spirit
takes over and uses the medium's body to communicate with
the living.
Clairvoyance
Clairvoyance (clear-seeing) in general denotes the capacity
%
to have experience either of, or as a result of the mediation
of, Spirit.
It is also used in a number of narrower senses.
In psychical research, the term can be a synonym for t&lesthesia, that is, ESP which is not telepathic, the "extra66
sensory perception of objects or objective events'* as
opposed to the perception of the content of other minds.
For theorists who explain ESP by the transmission and
reception of some kind of "mental energy", this remains an
anomalous category, since there appears to be no mental
transmitter.
This meaning of clairvoyance is not common
among Spiritualists.
Secondly, it may refer not to perception either of other
minds or of objects or objective events, but to the direct
perception of Spirit.
lastly and most specifically, clairvoyance may denote a
quasi-visual ESP.
Thus clairvoyance can be opposed to
clairaudience, the "hearing" of voices too far away to be
heard by normal means, or from Spirit, and to "clairsentience
which usually refers to "sensing the presence" of Spirit
in the absence of either visual or auditory imagery. ^
As well as these modes, clairvoyance in the general sense
41
may concern the present, the past (retrocognition) or the
future Vprecognition).
Clairvoyant imagery may also differ
in vividness and in the degree to which it is
paranormal.
perceived as
At one end of the scale, there are Hintuitions"
of a. diffuse and fragmentary character:
ideas which, having
intruded themselves into consciousness, only later acquire
an "eerie” significance.
%
The most memorable intuitions of
this sort are undoubtedly disturbing dreams of people faraway
who happen to be dying or in some other crisis.
68
The mere
presence of insistent imagery even without subsequent confirmation may be taken as clairvoyant by Spiritualists if the person
who experiences this imagery is thought to have mediumistic
powers:
"it must mean something", it is said.
When a precognitive intuition is accompanied by a. conviction
of its paranormal character, it is a premonition.
Particularly
vivid intuitions nay be called visions, and particularly grand
premonitions called prophecies.
The Aura
A special kind of clairvoyance is the ability to perceive
the "auras” of people.
In her study of Welsh Spiritualism, Yieda Skultans writes
Everyone is thought tu have an aura. It is
half-physical, half-spiritual, like a rainbow
surrounding the body. Although not visible
to the uninitiated it can be seen by ‘‘sensitives"
or those who are spiritually developed.
This description fits the ideas of Sydney Spiritualists. It
is widely thought that the seeing of auras is a very "high” or
42
“deep*’ form of mediumship, indicating great psychic sensitivity.
Almost anything that can "be known about a person can be
revealed by the aura if the clairvoyant has the ability tu
interpret i+:
personal history, inmost thoughts, character,
temperament and destiny.
70
Fsychometry
Psychometry is a kind of clairvoyance, for which it
is necessary to have some object such as a letter,
a lock of hair, a glove, belonging to the person
concerning whom the inquiry is being made...If the
Passive is sufficiently sensitive to get en rapport
with the subject, there will arise in the mind's eye,
a series of pictures or scenes, or yet only vague
appe^jeptions of form, colour distance, locality, time
etc.
Control
“Control'* occurs when the medium allows a
spirit
"take over" her body in order to "communicate".
to
The spirit
may "speak through" the medium (the phenomenon of "automatic
speaking11), in which case the medium's voice often takes on
accent and intonation patterns supposedly characteristic of
the controlling spirit, or may use the medium's hand for
"automatic writing".
Control involves some kind of trance state, although this is
usually mild:
autonomic phenomena like glossolalia occur,
72
but very rarely.
lewis Ppence declares that the trance state is under the
"ultimate control" of the medium, but the trance medium
studied by Macklin claimed to be quite unconscious of what
occurred and what she said when "under control", leaving
73
everything to her gatekeeper-guide.
My observation of mediums at Mortfield did not resolve this
issue.
Mediums often claimed to be unconscious of what was
happening when under control, but I never observed one unable
to "get back1* to normal consciousness.
As in several other
aspects of mediumistic behaviour which abut
on trance and
hypnotic states, the issue of voluntary control seems incapable
of a clear resolution because it is premissed upon the dubious
hypothesis of a unitary, willing subject.
The speech or writing of mediums under control, although it
varies with the "control1', does have some distinguishing
linguistic features.
It is repetitious,prone to transpose
normal phrase order, and heavily laced with the tropes of
classical rhetoric, especially hyperbole and oxymoron, the
result being a style described by Spence as "involved, obscure,
inflated, yet possessing a superficial smoothness and a
suggestion of flowing periods and musical cadences.
rj
are...all but lost in a multitude of words”.
a
The ideas
In other words,
controlled discourse displays the same traits as the typical
75
Spiritualist prayer or sermon.
Sometimes controlling entities are not "spirits” but character
traits or experiential states.
Thus, someone may ‘‘take on"
or ’’pick up" the kleptomania of a deceased friend, for example.^
I have already mentioned how healing mediums may experience the
pains of their patients.
This mild form of control, sometimes
called "getting impressions’*, shades into clairvoyant "intuition",
and shows that clairvoyance and control are not really distinct
kinds of phenomena.
A control is a benevolent spirit or "entity" whose access is
permitted by the "gatekeeper*' of the medium.
When an unwanted
44
or harmful "earthbound* entity gain? influence over someone,
the result is possession or obsession, more commonly called
"attachment".
In the first case the personality of the
possessed individual is completely "taken over".
More
usual is a situation in which the intruder "attaches" itself
(often conceited as a literal attachment to the aura)
now and again
^nd
"breaks through" - that is, the individual
involuntarily acts and speaks in a way which is interpreted
as the spirit "taking control”.
The crucial distinction
between this pathological state and trance mediumship
rests
on the intactness of the controlled person’s personality as
perceived by his or her peers.
This in turn is shaped by
her reputation as a medium, by her ability to "come back to
reality", and by the degree of evident distress she experiences
77
under control.
All such phenomena would be interpreted by many non-Spiritualists
as symptoms of mental abnormality, and there is an undeniable
resemblance to the delusional condition known loosely as
IP,
"split personality".
Astral travelling
A
phenomenon not easily classified as either mental or
physical
is astral travelling or astral projection, a
hypothesis which links together three distinct kinds of
alleged experience:
(a) "Cut of the body experiences" (OCBE’s) in which there
is a sensation of displacement from the physical body,
sometimes to
the point where the subject "looks back" and
perceives his own 'oo4y.
79
(b)
I'he experience of travelling great distances in a
"phantom ‘body" and thereby coming to know of things beyond
the range of normal perception.
’his pheonomenon may be
ftO
identified with the flights of shamans,
and has been used
81
as an expl anation for clairvoyance ’ and even for vampirism
and werewolves.
(c)
82
Apparitions of living people a^r sometime.0 seen by'
people distant from then, usually as a cataleptic imafe of
8
the phsycial body''. V<hen this supposedly occurs as a result
of the conscious intention of the person to "project”
themselves elsewhere, it is sometimes distinguished from
(a) and (b) as "astral projection’’.
Astral projection may occur consciously, or as a result of
"subconscious desire", or "accidentally*.
mediums at Mortfield and a few others
Many of the
claimed to
have experienced it, though none as a regular event.
ftA
True to shamanic traditions, it was typically associated with
times of medical or emotional crisis, and was often connected
with the acquisition of psychic powers.
85
Conclusion
Some of their complexity and contracictoriness will be
explored further in later chapters, but it should be clear
already from this summary that Spiritualist beliefs are a
thicket of cosmologies, mythologies, rationalisations,
explanations and mysteries.
Before attempting to discern
a structure underlying this confusion, it is necessary to
provide further details of Spiritualist practices and
organisation, the task of the following two chaptex's.
46
1.
This denial of the reality of death has linguistic
conseauences; when they die, people "pass on” , are
"promoted",”go to the other side" or "join the people
upstairs” .
2.
Blauner (1966).
3.
Aries (1974)*
4.
Firth (1955:6) makes the point that this vagueness is
typical of "primitive societies". Brandon (I967:98ff)
shows that Christian eschatologies, while sometimes
vivid, are not without contradictions. It remains
curious that Spiritualists should be so unspecific ^bout
a supposedly central article of faith.
5.
The Summerland idea originated with the 19th century
American healer and spiritualist Andrew Jackson Davis
(Macklin;1977:77).
6.
Zelinsky (1976:191) has pieced together the cultural
stereotype of the afterlife from the most common names
given to U.S. burial sites:
It is an elliptical tract of rolling hills and
indeterminate size, one that stretches far towards
the west and east, but is quite narrow on its northsouth axis, and is surrounded at some distance by
water and high mountains. It is monochromatic,
green featuristic land of perpetual...morning or
evening lying under a cloudless, windless, sunny
sky, but where brooks and fountains flow nonetheless,
and trees, flowering shrubs and grassy lawns thrive
in a park-*-like ensemble, yet without any animal life.
It is a rural place of intense tranouillity and
silence, where nothing goes on except the enjoyment
of the view and reposeful recollection (Zelinsky,
1976:191).
Theosophy, and spiritualist books like these of Cummins
(1932), Crookall (1961) and Ford (1974), are examples
of important literary influences.
7.
n'his is one of many examples of the deep effect on
Spiritualism of the pedagogical situation. Vhe "levels**
of spirit are like the grades of school.
B.
Cavendish (1975 :41f).
9.
The Astral plane is itself subdivided into seven levels,
the third of which Spence identifies with Summerland,
"where spirits live in a world created by their own
thoughtp" (1960:41)
10.
There appears to be no settled relationship between
Etheric and Astral. Ashby (l972;144) and Wilson (1973:146)
identify them. Cavendish says the "etheric body* is the
"animating principle of the physical body" (1975:44)Others relate it to European folk beliefs in a wdouble"
(Krappe, 1930:225-6; Encyclopedia of Magic and Superstition,
1974:166) Both ideas, leavened with the ,Tether” of
nineteenth century electromagnetics, Findlay (1931:8)
were combined to form the "etheric double" of Theosophy,
which is conceived of as a "bridge" between the Physical
and Astral Planes, and forms part of the aura, discussed
below (Spence, 1960:150)
11.
The "extra-terrestial" was a concept held only by Ray
and Jimmy Green.
12. Of course, this is true of the afterlife in many other
belief systems, including Christianity.
13. Although Kardecian Spiritualism, which affirms metempsychosis, was pre-Theosophical, dating from the 18!?0*s,
it is possible that the idea of reincarnation has also
re-entered Spiritualism from Theosophy.
14.
Burnet (1962:43) The Platonic dialogues
Timaeus and
Critias assume a karmic eschatology; they also exhfbit
many other ideas associated with contemporary occultisms,
including "number mysticism'4, a creator Craftsman, the
idea of a -world soul", the lost continent of Atlantis,
and a dogmatic "mythic“style (Plato, 1970)
15. The best support the New Testament can offer, however,
is Matthew 17:12-13. Evidently the claim refers to
Qrpheo-Gnostic cults associated with early Christianity
(Brandon, 1967:194)
16. Wilson (1973:672ff)
17. That is, the issue of punishment for evil deeds and.
rewards for good. ones.
18. Weber (1965:145)
19. Elaine once crushed an ant with the comment "happy
reincarnationI"
20. The word comes from Mahayana Buddhism. In Theosophy,
Bodisattvas are an elevated order of spirits responsible
for the inauguration of new religions and philosophical
systems (Spence, 1960:73)
21. One spiritualist said of another: "I think we knew each
other a long time ago". The innocent ethnographer
made some observation about the resumption of old
friendships. "Oh,w she said, "it was a very long time
ago. In Egypt at the time of the Pharaohs'1.
22. 26, April, 1975:2
23. This is only the first example of an anomalous phenomena
being open to competing explanations. Hobbie Robinson
tackled the problem as follows: "We are, before our
departure from above, dipped in the lake known as the
waters of Lethe. This final preparation for our return
entirely wipes out and erases t- e memory of our heavenly
experiences. We could not be expected to remain content
and satisfied here if we retained the picture of above,
now could we?"
47
48
24. 1973:672
25. True to his reactionary politics, Robbie saw in this
fatalism an advantage of the doctrine:
In the East man is less envious of his fellow
man, because he accepts his position as the
outcome of his conduct in a former life. At
the same time he appreciates that the other is
being rewarded for his former deeds.
26. Sometimes the word "guide** is reserved for the leader
of each person's spirit band.
27. Nelson (1969:56) suggests the belief is derived from
Amerindian shamanism, but ideas of this sort are so”
widespread that it would be difficult to pinpoint such
a particular influence.
28. The exotic is a form of anomaly.
discussion in chapter 7.
This bears on the
29. Edwards (n.d: 19-20) Mediums often blame their guides
for poor or misleading messages, as lauer (1974:35)
mentions.
30. Gaynor (1973:73) says that "control11 and "guide" are
synonymous, but this is not true at Mortfield.
31. In the U.S.A., doorkeepers
"gatekeepers".
are more commonly called
32. Trickster spirits of this sort are commonly believed
in across a wide range of cultures. The modern
literature often calls them by the German word •poltergeist.
Gauld and Connell (1979)» in a highly documented study of
the alleged phenomena allegedly produced by poltergeists,
rejected all the numerous speculations which would explain
them on the premisses of "natural science'".
33. In De occulta Philosophica. (1531) Cornelius Agrippa
wrote that ,rafter death man's soul remains near his body
if it loves the body beyond the grave, or if the corpse
is unburied, or if death has come by violence" (Schumaker,
1972:154). Cavendish (1975:41) notes that the souls of
those who have died suddenly may be dangerous, and the
British medium f*ia Twigg adds that a state of confusion
may persist for several days, until they have managed to
shake off their "ectoplasmic vehicles" (Twigg, 1973:164)
In a"case" which became an international media event of
the 60's the son of Episcopalian bishop James Pike committed
suicide, allegedly while under the influence of L.S.D.
"Cn discovering his plight, he was desperate. He produced
every kind of poltergeist effect within his power smashing things, disarraying clothing, moving objects,
bending and distributing safety pins, moving books that
would call attention to his memory - all to attract help
in his plight" Pike enlisted the services of Twigg
(ibid, 120-130) and the veteran Californian Arthur Ford,
from whose book this quotation comes (Ford, 1974:112)
He became a vigorous propagandist for Spiritualism (Pike
1969) before his own death in the Judean desert in 1969
(Twigg, 1973:152-174).
3 4 . This motif quite often refers to the cultural myth of
"a criminal returns to the scene of his crime’'.
49
35. The terminal symptoms of possession are the symptoms of
psychotic delusion. Sometimes earthbound entities are
identified as ’’ghosts", but ghosts may also be believed
to be ’’vivid impressions” on the “astral field”. Such
impressions are most likely to be made at times of crisis,
and become visible under certain conditions and/or to
"sensitive" observers. Another idea is the ghosts are
the "astral corpses" of souls who have ”died“ in the
Astral and gone to higher levels.
(Cavendish, 1975:43).
These theories are meant to account for the recurrence
of most x'cported ghosts in the same building or place,
,and also for the catalepsy generally attributed to ‘them.
(They also provide a good explanation for a medium not
being able to communicate with a ghost).
36. For "there is no religion higher than truth”.
37. Newton invoked the concept to explain action which did
not come within the scope of his mechanics: gravity,
capillarity, cohesion, combustion, fermentation, electricity
and mind/body interaction (Rattansi, 1973:160)
38. Marsilio Ficino's Ie Vita Coelitus Comparanda (1489),
in Schumaker (1972:127). See also Seligmann (1975:85ff,
H6f).
39. Schumaker (1972:161)
40. In his Fhilosophia Mo.ysaica (1637) See Podmore (l963:26ff).
41. Crow (1973:303)
42. Spence's definition of ecteric force (1960:133)
43. d'Abro (l950:116f)
44. Grattan-Guiness (1976:250)
45. Ostrander & Schroeder (I971:170f)
46. Depending on interpretation, Kirlian photography (q v )
might be considered a type of spirit photography.
47. "t'asy to conceal**, the skeptic would intrude.
48. Chambers (1966:55)49. eg Schrenk-Notzing (1920).
50. Spence notes that levitation was commonly attributed to
early Christian saints, and also to Savonarola. Hindu
yogis were also said to possess this power (1960:250).
Wilson discusses the renowned case of St. Joseph of
Copertino (1973:280ff). Levitation has not lost its interest
for contemporary propagandists of “popular science"(see
Taylor, 1976:109-111; Ostrander and Schroeder, 1971:291-2)
51. Psychic News (May 10,1975:1) reports a case of apport
mediumship in Britain.
52. Spiritual healing occurs as a result of the powers
exercised by the medium; faith-healing - according to
Spiritualists - occurs as a result of the attitude of
the patient, and therefore does not constitute evidence
of Spirit.
53. Boddington (1947:128)
50
54. I was once recommended a daily dose of port and olive
oil for my back.
55. Healing mediums often have guides who were doctors in
their life on earth. Spiritual healing is not considered
incompatible with other treatments, including orthodox
medicine. One of the circuit mediums in Sydney is an
ex-acupuncturist, and at the time of fieldwork was
involved in zonal therapy, a homeopathy based on
correspondences between the body's organs and parts
of the feet.
56. Kiev (1964) ; Maclean (1974)*
57. Both Wilson (l973:364f) and Parsinnen (1979:114) draw
attention to the sexual component of Mesmer's treatments.
Spence (1960:315) claims Paracelsus to be the first to
connect occult influence with the magnet. Karl von
rieichenback also claimed unusual interactions between his
patients and magnetised objects (1977)*
'‘
58. This illustrious body included Benjamin Franklin;
astronomer Bailly and the chemist Lavoisier, who died
in the Terror, and Dr Guillotin, whose humane invention
was the instrument of their death.
59. Grow (1973:305)
38-47)*
Also Podmore (1963:55f), Douglas (1976:
60. Frank (1961:65-74); Levi-Strauss (1963:167-205); Neu
(1975),
61. I have already mentioned Skultans1 study (1974). The
British Spiritualist weekly Psychic News de otes about
25% of its columns to stories related to health and
healing. The Californian groups studied by Zaretsky
(1974:173) performed healing after every meeting. Mac lin
(1974:405; reports that healing is less important for
New England Spiritualists than Mexican Spiritists, a fact
which it is plausible to explain in terms of differences
in medical access, family structures and attitudes to
illness.
62. Skultans (1974:45). This theory is commonly met with
in the anthropological literature - see, for example,
lewis (1970.
63. Skultans (1974:50).
64. Controlled breathing is commonly practised by both healer
and patient, ostensibly as a way of achieving a steady
and concentrated consciousness.
65. the medical profession responded in kind, but mental
healing seems never to have posen to it anything like
the challenge to its legitimacy represented by lay
healers in the medieval period (Hughes, 1968), Astrology
in the seventeenth century (Wright. 1979) or Mesmerism
in the nineteenth (Parssinen, 1979).
66. Ashby (1972:145); also Heywood (1948:16), "Telaesthes/a »
was coined by F.W.H. Myers (1954: xv).
67. Wo elf (1976:27).
68. Freud (I973:60f) discusses some cases of this sort.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.
75.
Skultans (1974:30)
51
Mrs. Miller claimed to be able to detect kinship relationships
by comparing auras. There are reports from Perth (Drury and
Tillett, 1980:38) and Britain (Psychic News, 5/4/75:2) of
clairvoyants drawing up Mauric diagrams’* or **auraschopes"
(on the model of "horoscope"), but this was not done in Sydney.
Sepharial (1973:310,312)
Like the hypnotic state, which it is correlative with, if not
identical to, Spiritualist trance may be manifested by
"alterations in memory and consciousness, increased susceptibility to suffestion, anaesthesia, paralysis, muscle rigidity,
vasomotor changes etc, but need not be characterised by any
of these.'* (.tosen, 1963:800). The author of this passage
notes that "almost every aspect of the subject is controversial"
Spence (1960:415) Mackiin (1977:53).
Spence (1960:56).
A short passage from what is probably the moat famous
example of automatic writing (Cummins, 1970:49) will’
suffice to illustrate these characteristics:
Human personality does not survive death, but the
soul or real mind survives, however changing the
mastc of human personality, whatever have been the
misunderstandings between the son's and mother's
personalities, there is a unity deep down and
behind their masks.
Memories persist like the leaves of the tree, from
the consciousness the living self or person discards
them. But all that is deepest and best or worst
continues after and before death.
76.
77.
78.
79.
In this other state the human soul continues living,
expanding or contracting. Describe the soul, and
say. It is something essential, rately recognizably
expressed, save in the highly developed, through
the outer trappings during the span of existence on
earth.
The hypothesis of spirit provides ready made explanations
for all the ’'irrational" behaviour which psychoanalysis
would like to explain.
It is because of the danger of possession and attachment
that mediums often advise people seeking spiritual
“development’’ never to “ sit** - ie attempt to invoke
spirits - alone, but always in a properly constituted
"circle" (Skultans, 1974:47).
Wilson (l973:581f), Schreiber (1975) This point is discussed in more detail by Skultans (1974:81).
Ashby (1972:151), Lauer (1974:341), Douglas (1976:32333?), Drury and Tillett (1978:95-98), Drury and Tillett
(1980:160). Some say that there is a "cord" or "cable”
attaching the phantom body to the physical body while it
is alive. (Kuldoon and Carrington, 1974:76ff). Some
authors (eg Cavendish, 1975:44-) refer for confirmation of
this to Fcclesiastes 12:6: “Remember him before the silver
cord is snapped and the golden bowl is broken''. If the
body of someone i<=. disturbed while their "astral body” is
travelling, the cord may be damaged or even
broken (Macklin, 1974:405).
5?
80. Halifax (1979:l6f), Castaneda (1970:125f), .Elkin (1946:
52-67;
81. Ashby (1972:156; says "travelling clairvoyance" is “often
confused with Astral Travel”. This is not surprising,
since by the first he means the Astral Body moves about
and as a result the percipient experiences things beyond
the reach of the senses, while in the second the percipient
merely seems to move about.
82. Wilson (l973:592f)
83. Chambers (1966:19). This phenomenon, resembling levitation
insofar as it involves the incogruous placement of &n
(apparent) body (Wilson; 1973:280f) might account for
ghosts, and related entities like the ominous "double"
or ’’fetch” of European folklore (Anon, 1974:66). Wilson
illustrates astral projection with a story about the
writers John Cowper Powys and Theodore Dreiser.
84. Some said it was habitual for the Astral Body to go
wandering in sleep, but people are not normally conscious
of this.
85. Cf
Macfclin (1977:45)
CHAP?FA 4
CIKCI.ES
In Chapter 2 I described a typical Spiritualist ’’service”,
the main vehicle for mediums who give public "demonstrations”
As in all Spiritualist practice, it centres on the figure
of the medium, who evokes, concentrates, channels and
communicates spiritual power, and thus draws her audience
nearer to the Spirit which this power both is, and is a
sign of.
The other main Spiritual ritual arena is the seance or
"circle".
Circles are gatherings, usually '’private" in
nature, of people who have come together to contact Spirit
or raise Spiritual Power.
There are several named varieties
of Spiritual circle, which are distinguished as much by
context (who organises them, where they are held etc) as
by the activities that occur.
The home circle
The following instructions, which date from the nineteenth
century,
were reprinted in the Mortfield Church magazine;
Spiritualism:
How to Begin Investigations
If there is an earnest desire to gain knowledge of
the truth of Spiritualism, it is by no means necessary
to go to some far off public medium. The family in
which there is not at least one member possessing this
gift is the exception.
The investigation of psychic phenomena is best
conducted in the home circle. It is there that loved
ones return. Anxiety to receive on our part is met by
even greater desire to communicate on theirs.
Sensitiveness, or the mediumistic faculty, is possessed by
all in varying degrees and is capable of cultivation.
There is nothing miraculous or mysterious about it.
Sometimes a member of a circle that gathers around
a table for the first time is found to be mediumistic,
and communications are at once received. This is not
often the case, however, and several attempts may have
to be made before results are obtained.
55
Although there is nothing arbitrarily fixed in the
matter 01' forming a circle, as is generally supposed,
there are rules the observance of which will facilitate
development. The number in a circle should not be less
than four nor more than twelve, '''he members should be
so selected that, as a whole, there will be perfect
sympathy and harmony, i'he date of thf meeting should
be fixcrt and unchanged, and every member should attend
regularly. The seances shouio be held at least once a
week, but no more than twice. It is best, where practical,
to have a room set apart for the circle, and invariably,
meet there. The members should always occupy the same
place round the table, except when requested by the
communicators to make a change.
The sensitive, or known medium, should form part of
this circle. At the beginning joining hands has
advantages, but afterwards the hands can be placed on
the table, palms downward. No one should be allowed
in the room who does not sit in the circle. Pure air
and convenient seats, ensuring perfect ease and physical
comfort, are essential to success. Even more necessary
is freedom from mental excitement, dogmatism and selfassertion. Vicious and ignorantly credulous persons also triflers and arrogant sceptics - should be rigidly
excluded.
When manifestations are received through such a circle,
tests may be applied and the means are at hand for a
thorough study of the subject. What is more, we furnish
communicators with the means whereby to approach us,
and make known to us not only their identity but their
undying affection. We catch a gleam through the parting
curtains of life beyond, and become conscious that the
real life is Over There.
As well as the rules mentioned in this text, circles often
forbid the crossing of arms or legs, which may "stop the
Power”,^ and efforts are sometimes made to insure that the
seating arrangements, which are supposed to be circular,
conform as closely as the sex ratio will allow to the ideal
of males and females alternating.
As a typical example of a home circle , there follows an account of
the proceedings at one of a series of seances I attended at
Nary Jay's house.
Present on this occasion were Mary and
56
and Elaine Harvey, "both mediums who frequently attended
Mortfield;
Margaret Sendelbeck and myself, likewise
regular Mortfield goers;
three women who attended Mary's
circile most weeks but were seldom seen at Mortfield; and
two young men whc were casual invitees.
-he lights were turned off and the lord's Prayer recite^
by Mary.
There was no touching of hands.
for some fifteen minutes.
We sat in silence
The effect of concentration in
these circumstances is psychotropic, and many people will
experience odd sensations, and perhaps distortions of
thought and perception.
way atypical of her.
Finally Mary began to speak in a
This was a spirit "coming through".
Whoever it was delivered an harangue on the infant Jesus:
There was a boy
he came to die for us
but also the live
to show us that there is life hereafter...
I-'ary stopped talking, and Elaine said "Thank you" to the
spirit who had spoken through her.
After more
silence, a
second control spoke through Mary, a sharpspoken woman who
gave advice on how to conduct the circle, mainly emphasising
that the sitters should have the right attitude of reverence
and enthusiasm.
She informed the participants that
they were not to "get discourage d", as "very evidential
phenomena" would soon be received.
As usual the traffic
noise was very loud at Mary's, and it was difficult to
concentrate.
Commenting on this, the control said not to
mind, she had sat in a circle during the blitz.
laine, apparently under the control of a guide, concluded
the seance, giving thanks to "the eternal Power of Spirit"
for enabling the participants to receive this "evidence".
Later, over cups of tea, there was discussion of these
events.
Elaine
gave a physical description of Mary's
sharpspoken control, whom she had perceived clairvoyantly.
She said that the only person to survive the war who had
belonged to the circle referred to had been the famous
5
medium Ena Twigg.
Mary informed us that Elaine*s deceased husband Eric
had been trying to "come through**, although Elaine had not
perceived this.
hair.
He "looked like a film star” and had curly
Elaine confirmed these evidential details.
Mary
said that Eric had “brought his material conditions with
him'*, and a few other people agreed they had felt the
presence of “negative vibrations".
Elaine scowled.
MHe
knows not to do that", she said.^
The home circle is more informal and intimate than the
service.
Much of the time may be spent in silence and
darkness.
What " action" there is, in the sense analysed in
7
Goffman's essay , is usually initiated by the medium who is
the recognised circle leader, and others often take only a
minor role.
Pour types of speaking normally take place at a seance.
Firstly, there axe invocations, prayers and expressions of
gratitude to the spirits, which are particularly prominent at
the beginning and end.
Secondly, sitters may describe their perception of the
"conditions” and "vibrations" in the circle.
The voice is
that of the speaker although he or she may be relaying
information from the Spirit.
This type of speaking resembles
that of the “messages" given to the audience of a service.
Thirdly, the medium may "go under control" and a spirit
"speak" with his or her vocal cords.
This is the hallmark
of a successful seance.
Finally, asides on the action occur, although they aay
be thought inappropriate at solemn or exciting moments.
Open Circles
Home circles are held in private homes, and admission is by
invitation only.
An "open circle* is held at a church or
other "public" meeting place and can in theory be attended
by anyone who is interested.
However, since only those who
are welcome would normally be told of a circle's existence
the last feature is only real for large and regularly held
circles.
The term dates from the heyday of "physical"
mediumship, when an "open circle" usually meant a gathering
of people who paid for admission to witness direct voice,
apportage or the "materialization" of spirits.
There are
very few of these today, and "open circle" has come to mean
in practice a circle not held in a private home.
Q
Thus both
the Godwin's healing circle and Peter Siman's development
clasg, discussed below, were referred to as "open circles".
Development circles
Development circles are specifically intended to develop the
psychic gifts of potential mediums:
called "classes".
they are also often
Open development circles work with the
egalitarian assumption that anyone who hears of the group
and wants to attend is a potential medium.
In other cases,
development circles are set up by established mediums in an
attempt to consolidate their following and "routinise their
i r. v
charisma".
Q
59
Such a circle includes only the proteges of
the medium - those who are regarded by him or her as less
developed but "worthy followers", and who are willing to
accept this status.
Peter Siman conducted a weekly open development class which
usually attracted between twenty and thirty people.
Peter
was not a "platform"medium, although he sometimes attended
the services at Mortfield.
He was a Spiritualist "intellectual",
with many contacts in an "occult milieu" which extended
beyond Spiritualism.
Those who came to his development
circle comprised a high proportion of "psychic seekers" on
the Spiritualist fringe, and were noticeably younger, more
middle class, and more "counter-cultural" than those in
services.
Although the proportions were often close to equal, there
was no attempt to alternate sexes in seating arrangements
at this circle, which I attended several times.
The only
light was that coming from the electric radiators and a
blue light bulb (blue being a Spiritual colour ).
The meeting always opened with the Lord's prayer, after which
members of the circle would read passages from Spiritualist
literature - writings of spirits with names like "Silver
Birch", "Pope John the twenty third" and "Demetrius",
in the style of the sermons and prayers quoted in Chapter 2.
The procedure was similar to that in home circles, beginning
with a long silence while the group meditated.
Instead
of the leading medium going under control (or "giving off"
as it was usually called in this group), pressure was put
on the others to do so.
Usually a few would show signs of
trancing, and occasionally a spirit would "come through".
When a control had departed, it would be farewelled with
the words "God bless you, come again".
j-Jven for those who did not trance, there was strong pressure
to speak about what they had "seen":
daydreams and mental
imagery were discussed and interpreted by the circle leader
as possible cases of clairvoyance.
The circle always ended with a test of "psychometry".
Sometimes flowers were used, as in the service, but more
often personal belongings such as jewellery and keys.
Steps were taken so that people did not know the identity
of the owner of the article they attempted to "read".
Healing circles
These differ from other circles in that they represent not
an "investigation" of Spirit, but a summoning of Spiritual
Power for thaumaturgical purposes.
The presiding medium
or mediums undertake spiritual healing on the others.
Pealing circles begin and end with a prayer.
The rest of
the action is dictated by the ailments of those present and
the treatments of the medium.
The healing is interspersed
with discussion in the Spiritualist jargon, the relaying of
gossip, and occasionally the giving of a ’’reading" to
someone, or the delivery of a trance lecture.
At Kortfielri there was little overlap between those who
attended hf aling circles and those who attended flower
services.
In other churches, however, there has recently
been a tendency to precede flower services by healing
sessions.
The number attending the Godwin's weekly circle
was about fifteen, mostly women over thirty years old.
Private readings
Circles incorporate elements of "investigation", which although
led by a medium is essentially a co-operative endeavour,
and "display”, which is basically an assymetrical relationship
between "givers” and "receivers'*, a relationship most obvious
in the healing circle.
In the private reading or "consultation" this assymetrical
relationship becomes dyadic.
Private readings may be given
free of charge, but they are also a way of making money for
mediums with a high reputation.
Bill Maddigan tried to set
himself up as a consulting medium with little success, but
Elizabeth Johns built up a respectable "practice” in the
years following my involvement with the Mortfield church.
Charging for "spiritual services" leaves a Spiritualist
medium open to charges of "materialism”, but neither Bill
nor Elizabeth seemed to incur much stigma for it.
The
clients of "psychics" who give private readings include a
large number of people who would not consider themselves
Spiritualists, and are not in any way connected with the
movement.
Many "go to see a fortune teller" out of curiosity
or because an acquaintance has recommended one.
Nor are
psychics who give readings necessarily Spiritualists:
in
fact most would identify more closely with witchcraft,
astrology, palmistry or some other movement, or merely see
themselves as "psychic" or "clairvoyant".
This is one of
the fronts upon which Spiritualism merges with contemporary
occultism.
6i
Rescue Work
This is another area in which the activities of Spiritualists
merge with other occultists.
Three fairly distinct types
of rescue work can be distinguished.
(a) It sometimes happens that a member of a church or circle
shows what would conventionally be considered signs of mental
disturbance, and these characteristics are defined as
symptoms of the presence of "earthbound entities” .
In other cases there is no evident disturbance about the
person in question, and the attribution of obsession or
possession is a fairly clear example of "labelling behaviour”1®.
As an example of this, Pat, a young woman who occasionally attended Mortfield church services and was a friend of
Ray Ferguson and Jimmy Green, once turned up at Mary Jay's
home circle.
or by whom.
It was not clear whether she had been invited
During the seance she went under control, and
the spirit who came through, while not more coherent than
usual, spoke with a great deal of authority.
by holding up a cross in front of her.
Mary responded
Later she asked Pat
if she had had any contact with "black magic"; Pat said she
had a friend who was "interested".
After she had left, Mary
said that Pat was in the grip of evil powers.
A plausible
way of interpreting this interaction is that Mary felt
hostile to Pat because of the challenge implicit in the act
of going under control and assuming the prerogratives of a
"developed" medium.
Margaret Sendelbeck later admitted to
that she herself had not thought Pat’s behaviour "evil".
It sometimes happens that a person will be "rescued" from
me
63
obsessing or possessing spirits by prayers and therapeutic
discussion, either in a circle or in private consultation
with a medium.
But this is rare, involving as it does the
submission by the subject to a stigmatizing judgement.
If
a person labelled by a medium or group as needing "rescue”
is not coping with everyday life, then he or she will most
likely fall into the net of professional psychiatry; on. the
other hand, if the person is coping, he or she will most
likely cease to associate with those who believe that there
is something wrong.
(b ) But in a way characteristic of Spiritualist parlance,
"rescue work" is ambiguous:
it can be from or of a controlling
entity, and the latter sense is by far the commonest.
In the following incident, described in the Mortfield
magazine, a medium allows herself to be the instrument of
an unhappy spirit's rescue:
What started out as an ordinary Sunday Service
turned into a spectacular demonstration of spirit
rescue. The speaker hadn’t turned up, so my husband,
Joe Frazer, one of the management committee of
Drabville Spiritualist Church, volunteered to do the
address.
When he had finished his stirring lecture on the
"rescue of Barthbound Spirits', Mrs Hyde, a
medium of about 50 years standing, and who, for
a few years ran Drabville Church with Mrs Hill,
stood up and asked to speak. But, it was NCV
Mrs Hyde.
On the way to the church she had collected a
earthbound spirit and she allowed him to use her
as an instrument to voice his feelings. He was
very upset and said he had been a drunken man
and had been wandering around in the dark. He
said the man on the platform was right, that it
was indescribable, and had to be seen to be
believed.
The congregation silently prayed and my husband
talked him over. It was very moving and there
was hardly a dry eye in the whole congregation.
We then sang the hymn "Open my eyes, that X-pay
see, Glimpses of Truth, Thou hast for me!"
It was a very apt tune for the occasion.
’’White leather”, who is Mrs Joy Scott's guide,
said when they were doing the inspirational
readings of the flowers, th&b it was not by
accioent that my husband took the platform
that day and gave the address. Ker guide said
that hundreds were rescued with the "drunken
man". Apparently Spirit had it all worked out
AS USUAL. They never let us down.
I am sure that the whole congregation felt as
we always do after a rescue. It is the most
rewarding and uplifting feeling that one can
have, you really feel as if you are "serving"
and that is what this work is all about.
(c) Lastly,"rescue work" may refer to the exorcism of
earthbound spirits from particular houses or places, where
they have lingered, frightening people, but not necessarily
obsessing or possessing them.
This kind of work may involve
rescue of the entity in sense (b), or merely doing or
saying something that will make it go away.
*
*
*
Ostensibly concerned with investigating evidence for a
factual hypothesis, in reality Spiritualist practices
are stereotyped rituals.
The next chapter demonstrates an
analogous gap between the ideal and the reality of the
Spiritualist community.
Spiritualistn like to think of
themselves as an harmonious band of self-effacing, tolerant
and altruistic seekers of truth.
In fact, They spend much
energy competing among themselves for personal prestige
and influence.
65
1. Like many terms in the Spiritualist parlance, "demonstration"
is ambiguous, meaning birth a "display” (of the medium’s
■talents) and a "proof" (of the existence of Spirit).
2. Spence (1960:104) Ashby (1972:45). Crow (1973:245) suggests
that the “circle" is a descendent of the witch's esbat
or coven.
3. They derive from the Lyceum Manual (Britten, 1957).
4. S)rultans(l974:49) mentions this, discerning in it a sign
of sexual derepression. Spiritualists with whom I
discussed the practice linked it with the s i g n of the
Christian cross.
«
5. The seance ip legitimised by reference to other seances,
and the mediums by allusion to famous mediums. luring
the seance, Spiritualist ideas are validated by appearing
in the mouths of spirits, the members of the group confirm
each other's spiritual experiences, and spirits offer the
prospect of future “evidence11 - and by the end of the
seance this offer has itself become “evidential". All this
is part of the ideological work done in the circle.
6. This interaction is a fairly amiable illustration of
competition between mediums.
7. ‘‘Activities that are consequential, problematic and
undertaken for what is felt to be their own sake11 (Goffman
1972:185).
8. Kelson (1969:213)
9. locke (n.d.' 5ff)
10. Becker (19*53)
11. I do not know the source of this hymn.
CHAPTER 5
MOJiTPIELD POLITICS
67
The size of Spiritualism in Sydney
At the time of fieldwork, in the mid 1970’s, there were more
than 50 spiritualist churches in Australia, of which 13 were
in Sydney, chiefly in older Western and Southern suburbs of
the city.
They were mostly in low to moderate socio-economic
areas, and located where transport networks make travel easier
for those without automobiles.
In 1976 approximately 15 weekly
Spiritualist "services”, and another 6 healing and development
"circles", were advertised in newspapers.
Extrapolation from the attendance figures of the services and
healing circles I attended yields a figure of the order of five
hundred for those who attend such activities each week in Sydney.
This may overestimate the number of regular, active Spiritualists,
because most services contain a proportion of people who have
never come before and never will again, and because a few
people regularly attend more than one function per week.
Cn the other hand, five hundred is a considerable underestimate
of the number of people in Sydney who would regard themselves
as Spiritualists.
Up to half of every congregation consists
of people who attend fairly regularly but less than once a week,
and in addition there is a "hinterland*1 of believers who very
rarely participate in Spiritualist practices, or do so chiefly
in private homes.^
Vhe number in this category is probably
incalculable, as it shades off into other occultisms, and
into the population at large.
Spiritualist Organisation
Mortfield is unusual in that the building is held by a trust,
the result of a beouest made decades ago.
For most
68
Spiritualist churches in Sydney (and elsewhere), services take
place in a hired hall.
The governing body of a church is, in
effect, the person or group of people who is responsible for
organising the public meetings.
2
Around
this group is an
"urban cultic network" “ of friends and allies - who are also
potential rivals.
In some cases, as at Mortfield, the group
is formally constituted as a Committee.
Spiritualist organisation, then,centres on the medium's
"demonstration".
Without this, Spiritualism would be more like
other groups within the field of the occult, such as those
which "study” magic or astrology; in other words, it would be
more like a ''hobby”.
The churches have little formal connection with each other, and
in Australia attempts to create affiliations even along the
looseknit pattern of those existing in the U.S. or Britain have
been only partially successful.
However, there is a dense
network of informal contacts between the churches, facilitated
by the system of visiting mediums, whereby most mediums visit
a round of churches over a number of weeks.
•3
Decades of academic debate about the organisation of small
religious groups has built upon Troeltsch's application to
the development of Christianity in Europe of three ideal types
of correlated organisation and belief.
There is the Church,
conservative, involved with the secular order, claiming to
mediate between the world and the supernatural, attempting
to dominate the masses, and closely associated with the ruling
classes.
Opposed to the Church there is the Sect, essentially
indifferent to the secular order as irrelevant to salvation,
fostering a direct relationship between the individual and
God, small, based on personal ties, and associated with nonruling classes.
Between the Church and the Sect, and co-
existing with both, is Mysticism, a type of religiosity which
emphasises inner ecperience and ecstatic forms of expression,
and tends towards doctrinal tolerance and pantheism.
Troeltsch
saw in Mysticism an expression of bourgeois individualism.^
In terms of this model, Spiritualism conforms most closely
to the Mystical type.
It is typified by what Roy Wallis has
felicitously dubbed "epistemological individualism”, in that
no means of access to salvation, enlightenment or truth
can be established as privileged over others, and no importance
is accorded organisation as such over and above individuals.
These features characterise a "cult", although from the
perspective of other typologies, Spiritualism could also be
6
7
called a "voluntary organisation" or even a “circle".
Spiritualist feuding
In reality Spiritualist organization chiefly functions as a
domain for the exercise of personal and political intrigue.
During my association with Mortfield church
personal relation-
ships among its members were characterised by personal intensity
and instability of alliances and enmities.
It is true that the
organisation of Mortfield contained anomalies which would have
probably created tensions in any circumstances, and it is also
true that small interest groups are prone to internal feuding.
But these factors do not explain the particular character of
Mortfield infighting, and only go some way towards accounting
for its extraordinary vehemence.
The property of Mortfield church was vested in a trust, the
two executors of which had long been Martin Robbinson, known
to all as "Robbie” , and Mrs Bragg.
Both were in their late
fifties or early sixties, and had been associated with the
church for decades.
Mrs.Bragg occasionally gave^platform”
flower readings, but was not an inveterate attender of services.
Robbie, on the other hand, was very active, being present at
the church for two or three services or seances per week,
Mrs Bragg was thoroughly conservative, finding reasons for
opposing any suggested change.
Robbie, although his politics
were reactionary, was a progressive on matters affecting
Spiritualism and the church, and as a matter of principle gave
support to new mediums who were "up and Cuming1*, because they
were what "the work" needed.
Because of the length
of his association
with Mortfield, his
active participation in its activities, and his dominating
personality, Robbie, although officially vice-president, was
the leader of the committee and the church; the nominal president,
a frail and absent-minded old lady, had little effective power.
In theory, decisions affecting the running of the church were
vested in a committee which met monthly.
Membership of this
committee appeared to rest on the criterion that anyone who had
ever been elected or nominated to it had a right to participate
in its deliverations unless someone
objected, which would have
normally been considered an “un-Spiritualist11 thing to do.
At most meetings there was a hard core of about twelve, who
nearly always attended, and up to another dozen who came
occasionally.
(fhly a handful of the hard core were often
seen at Mortfield services).
An Annual General Meeting which
71
was supposed to elect the committee (but did not on the occasion
I observed it) was constituted from all those who paid an
annual Church membership fee of 40 cents.
This membership,
which overlapped but did not coincide with those who commonly
attended Mortfield services, totalled about 130.
After a few months of participation in church activities, I
was informed, along with Uup and coming" medium Plizabeth Johns
that ’’Robbie wants you on the committee".
subseouently elected us to their ranks.
The committee
Although I had never
professed belief in Spiritualism, I was obviously interested,
and according to Robbie the committee needed "new blood".
It turned out that he felt the need of supporters in a number
of looming conflicts.
The meetings of the committee were often confused sessions of
bickering, complaint and abuse.
Complex power games in which
even the protagonists seemed to lose themselves often led to
uproar, but few issues endured for long, and opponents and allies
changed positions frequently.
Everyone deplored the incessant
quarreling as "unspiritual", and many excused it as the symptom
of exceptional circumstances.
"In the old days", Mrs Bragg
claimed, Hthere was never no friction between anybody".
However,
the historical and sociological evidence indicates that it has
always been typical of Spiritualits organisations.
During my association with Mortfield, three issues in particular
caused dissension.
Cne concerned an attempt to consolidate
Q
a would-be National Association of Spiritualists. The other
two grew out of
tensions associated with the rise of mediums
who saw themselves as independent of and in some ways opposed
to and better than the "old guard1'.
Tales of Power
Tha National Association of Spiritualists had been set up by
Mrs Joan Campbell, a Sydney medium wno had persuaded a number
of churches in N. S.VV. and elsewhere to endorse her position
as its ‘'nominator'1.
She succeeded in having the N.A.S.
proclaimed a religious organisation by the Australian Federal
government; in material terms, this meant for Mortfield a
remission of Council rates.
What else it involved was unclear.
In particular, what Mrs Campbell's position as "nominator”
implied was a topic of dispute.
She claimed xhat it meant -
or, perhaps, should mean - the right to certify mediums as
sufficiently "developed" to give "demonstrations", and to
ordain "ministers of the National Association of Spiritualists".
The bitter faction fighting at Mortfield about the N.A.S.
grew from the ambitious rivalry of a handful of mediums,
chiefly the new "up and coming", who were in need of some
formal recognition and legitimation of the mediumistic talents
they claimed for themselves.
dilemma:
It was premissed on the following
if Mrs Campbell had the legal powers which she claimed
and intended to use them to confer status on one, then one
should support her movement and Mortfield's continued affiliation with it; but if she was not going to use her claimed
powers to confer status on one, then one should do everything
to undermine the legitimacy of her powers, and dissociate
Mortfield from the N.A.S.
This dilemma was acute for Kobbie.
He had been close to the
former president of Mortfield, Herbie Brown, who had been
"promoted" many years previously.
Herbie had foretold to
Kobbie that "you'll be a reverend one day", and Kobbie had
never forgotten this prediction.
He supported the N.A.S.
at first, at least partly because he saw in it the possibility
of fulfilling the words of the old clairvoyant; however, when
it became clear that Mrs Campbell regarded him with some
disdain and was unlikely to make his wish come true, he turned
savagely against her.
At the first committee meeting I attended, the feeling was
unanimously against Mrs Campbell approving mediums for platform
work, or in any way interfering with the running of the church.
A national organisation was a good idea, but "one person
shouldn't be allowed to take over the movement".
Bobbie
explained with disarming candour that the president and he had
approved the appointment of Mrs Campbell as nominator of the
N.A.S. without informing the committee.
The president said
she didn't remember.
The next committee meeting witnessed a change of tack,
nobbie
informed the committee that the local Council had remitted
the church property rates as a result of its affiliation with
the N.A.S., and asked the committee to recommend him and
Elizabeth Johns to Joan Campbell as "officiants” of Mortfield
Church.
Although the last meeting had been abuzz with derogatory
gossip about the N.A.S. and its "nominator”, everyone went along
with this apparent turnabout.
A few weeks later, three "new" mediums who at that time saw
a lot of each other, Elizabeth Johns, Mary Jay and Elaine Harvey,
visited Mrs Campbell and came away flattered and impressed.
Mary later reported that Joan Campbell's spirit was developed,
"although dark in the health aura".
They pushed for her to
be invited to address the Mortfield church on the N.A.S.
issue.
In any case, she claimed the right to do so because,
according to her, she had been made a T,life member” many years
ago.
This could not be checked, because the records were lost,
but in any case Robbie agreed to extend an invitation, and
moved a motion that all life memberships be reconfirmed at
the impending Annual General Meeting.
Mrs Campbell never came to Mortfield.
days later and had a furious argument.
She and Robbie met some
She said that she
could come in at any time and "take over the church committee
with the assistance of the coppers if necessary” , threatened
him with legal action for fraud because although a trustee
he audited the T-ortfield books, and claimed that Mortfield
was “a place no Spiritualist would be seen dead in*'.
Among
other insinuations, Robbie alleged in return that she was
"after the property of Mortfield” and that her husband was a
"communist11 (because he belonged to the Australian Labour
Party).
It was about this time that Robbie had occasion to complain
about a flower message he received from Elizabeth Johns that
he was "too high and mighty”.
He commented that “if that’s
a reference to the Campbell business, she's a bitch and that's
all there is to it” .
At the following committee meeting, Robbie, at his most ferocious,
proposed sending a letter from the trustees to the appropriate
government minister demanding that Mrs Campbell be removed from
the position of nominator of the N.A.S.
was wild.
The ensuing debate
Although Mrs Campbell gave regular flower readings
to other churches, it was alleged that she intended to abolish
them as "not Spiritual enough".
Mrs Bragg, who opposed the
N.A.S. because she was opposed to any innovation, attacked
Elizabeth, Mary and Elaine for allowing themselves to be
"taken in”.
Elizabeth responded that Joan Campbell was "a
complete liar".
Robbie cajoled everybody on the committee into signing the
letter, even the reluctant Peter Siman, who made the reasonable
point that if Mrs Campbell had the powers she claimed, the
letter might provoke her into using them, while if she didn't,
sending it was a waste of time.
The meeting ended by
passing a motion cancelling all previous life memberships.
Although the committee went along with him, the general feeling
was that Robbie was being too stubborn and irrascible.
At a
following meeting at which he was absent, it emerged that
Elizabeth Johns, the committee secretary, had not sent the
letter.
it.
She claimed that a uchurch lawyer1' had advised against
The government would not recognise Mortfield as a separate
church.
Mrs Campbell had too much support from other churches
to be overthrown.
If at some later time she anatagonised more
Spiritualists, she could be ousted without splitting the
movement.
(By this stage, everyone seemed to assume that the
letter had withdrawn Mortfield from the F.A.S.)
After a brief
and fairly calm discussion, it was moved by Peter Siman and
passed that the letter “be destroyed before the committee".
The letter was neither sent nor destroyed before the committee,
and the issue slowly died.
Mortfield remained nominally
affiliated to the N.A.S., which included most Sydney churches
and a handful from elsewhere, but Mrs Campbell never achieved
any real power over it, or over any church where she did not
already have direct personal influence.
A few months later,
Elizabeth Johns, having passed the K.A.S. "medium's examination'*,
was ordained a minister of that "religion".
The Ne* Guard
The early seventies saw a influx of occult "seekers” into the
Spiritualist movement, and some members of this influx
became mediums.
At Mortfield the new wave was represented
especially by six people:
Elizabeth Johns, Mary Jay and
Elaine Harvey; Jimmy Green and Ray Ferguson; and Bill Maddigan.
(There was also Andy Johnson, who after a bout of intensive
activity the year previous to fieldwork, had all but withdrawn
from church activities to study for exams; perhaps it was
mainly because of this that he seemed well-liked, although he
had only recently been the centre of raging controversy.)
Jimmy was a stevedore and Ray Ferguson an erratically employed
popular singer.
Both were in their twenties and dressed and
spoke in conformity with contemporary styles:
"trendy".
they were
Supported by Robbie, they actively propagandised
Spiritualism in a way that disturbed some of the older churchgoers, who were shy of publicity.
Jimmy Green was particularly active; he came to Spiritualism
from an evangelical Christian sect, and brought with him some
of the fervour of that environment.
He was the driving
force behind the establishment of a lending library at Mortfield,
and with Robbie and Ray Ferguson and two or three others produced
a roneoed magazine which was distributed for a nominal price
in Spiritualist churches throughout Mew South Wales and some
other states.
The editors foiled the inevitable criticism
with the unvarying response that no one was entitled to
criticise the magazine or its contents unless they were prepared
to contribute to it.
This gambit resulted in a good deal of
copy, and, since everything submitted was printed, a lively
"house style". But like all ventures dependent on the enthusiasm
of a small group, the magazine was destined for a short life,
and ceased publication after about a year.
Mortfield church had a substantial number of books on
Spiritualism and related matters which had been collected
before and during the 1920*s, but these had been neglected
for decades. Jimmy proposed setting up a lending library at
the church, and augmenting the existing collection with modern
books on similar topics.
He argued that this would "bring
people into the church" and raise the sophistication of
discussions at Mortfield regarding Spiritual matters.
He
spent about $2000 of his own money on books, with the understanding that the church would reimburse him in installments.
A few hundred dollars of church funds were also spent on
library eauipment and bookshelves.
He and Robbie pressured
a reluctant member of the church who was a librarian to help
with the cataloguing.
Some opposed the library, particularly Mrs Bragg, who thought
the money would be better spent on renovating the church
building.
She maintained thao some of the books Jimmy had
bought were "unsuitable*', and this complaint was not without
foundation, since many espoused points of view which, although
within the ambit of occultism, were far removed from traditional
Spiritualismsand a few appeared to lack even a remote connection.
Mrs Bragg also complained of Jimmy and Aobbie spending
money on purchases for the library without prior permission of
the church committee ("this committee is just a farce**, she
said on one occasion).
Mrs Bragg, staunchly “proper" in attitude and demeanour,
did not agree on many issues with the ebullient Jimmy, who
was of the type which used to be described as "wiseacre*'.
They fell out over the issue of the after-service “tea-leaf
readings".
Mrs Bragg reckoned they were "no good - just
78
fortune telling", and added that she didn't like the tea at
Mortfield. Jimmy thought that reading tealeaves was no different
in principle to reading flowers, that they were a much needed
form of “counselling" and comfort, and believed the practice
an ideal way of "getting people interested".
But in spite of
these and other conflicts, Mrs Bragg, at Robbie’s insistence,
eventually agreed to accept Jimmy as a co-trustee of Mortfield
church.
Jimmy and Ray's most spectacular missionising activity was
an appearance on a popular daytime television show to "demonstrate" mediumship.
In terms of their reputation within the
movement, this was a risky thing to do, since they were
relatively inexperienced and could have been accused of not
showing Spiritualism "at its best".
As well, any medium
seeking publicity is likely to be accused of being egotistical v,I-am-ish" - and therefore ’’unspiritual".
But Jimmy and Ray
deflected any jealousy or disparagement which might have been
felt for them onto Bill Maddigan, another "new'1 medium, with
whom until this point - and even to some extent after it they were in a kind of alliance against the "old guard” of
mediums who had been ”on the circuit" for many years.
Some weeks after the event, Jimmy and Ray showed a videotape
of their performance, which few of those present had
seen, after a flower service.
As soon as the tape was
finished, Robbie led an attack on Bill Maddigan, who was present.
Exactly what had occurred remained unclear, but it emerged that
Bill had contacted Mrs Campbell about the show, and subsequently
she had rung the station to dissociate the N.A.S. from Jimmy
and Ray.
(Actually the two had specifically mentioned that
they did not represent any organisation).
Everyone present joined in the attack on Bill, though some
were more vehement than others.
Robbie blustered in his
usual way, telling others to "shut u p 1* and accusing Ray at
one point of "lying like a pig in mud".
Jimmy referred to
Bill Madigan’s psychiatric history, and Ray Ferguson said
he was "beyond redemption".
Bill kept cool and refused to
admit that he had made a mistake, responding to insults with
comments like "Thank you, Robbie", and "That’s a very
spiritual thing to say, Jimmy”.
Bill had got involved with Spiritualism about the same time as
Fay and Jimmy, and was about the same age, although his dress
and manner were noticeably more "straight“.
He became
increasingly unpopular at Mortfield, although some other
churches in Sydney continued to ask him onto their platform.
He was accused of being to nI-am-ish" - but so was every
medium, by someone at some time.
He also caused offence by
not "conforming" and not being ’’reverent" :
he sometimes
yawned loudly or muttered things to himself in seances, and
once excused himself from one to go and buy himself a Chinese
meal.
He denied the existence of spirit ’’guides”, claiming of
his clairvoyance that "he did it all himself".
Most important,
his habit of "chatting u p ” unattached women and in various
ways alluding to sexuality was strongly deprecated; most of
the gossip about him was scurrilous.
No one threw doubt on his mediumistic powers - in fact it
was said more than once that he gave readings that were
*spot onM - but his behaviour was thought to be ''unspiritualu
and his mediumship "undeveloped".
In short, he was "psychic”,
not "spiritual", in the sense discussed below.
Bill was more and more ostracised from Mortfield, hut
continued to attend services in spite of silences and insults.
The church committee debated whether he should be refused
entry, but unwilling to take this step, voted instead to
return his 40 cents membership fee.
After a final confront-
ation with some members of the church over this action, he
dropped out of Mortfield altogether.
The activities of Elizabeth Johns, Mary Jay and Elaine Harvey
were not as provocative as those of Jimmy, Ray and Bill.
Personality and age differences with the "old guard" were not
as pronounced either (for one thing, Mary and Elaine were in
their fifties and sixties, older than some of the established
mediums).
But they felt excluded, perhaps more so than the
male mediums.
The strongest expression of this feeling I
heard came from Elizabeth Johns.
To a group of visitors who
included Robbie, Jimmy and me, she said that if certain Mortfield Spiritualists, including William Veldt, one of the most
popular visiting mediums, and the elderly president, were not
prepared to accept “changes**, then as far as she was concerned
they could "arse off*'.
(No one flinched).
At about the same time that the N.A.S. issue reached crisis
point and Bill Maddigan had his membership fee refused,
Elizabeth, Elaine and Mary formed their own church in an
adjacent suburb.
The Ashwood Heart of spiritual Truth was
the first new Spiritualist church to open its doors in Sydney
for many years.
It may be because there was so much else
happening that the move created little hostility, and in fact
was welcomed by many, although Mrs Bragg returned her
invitation to the opening with the excuse that "I do not go
out much at night and anyway I am giving everything to
Mortfield".
Elizabeth and Elaine retained their places on the
Mortfield church committee, and all three continued to appear
there, both in services and on the platform.
One of the first
mediums invited to demonstrate at the Ashwood Heart of
Spiritual Truth was Mrs Campbell.
Medium Competition
For these and the majority of Spiritualist disputes, the
struggle for approved mediumship - the legitimation of claimed
paranormal powers - is either the generating factor, or the
code in which they are expressed.
because a medium or aspirant
That is, either they arise
feels threatened by the promotion
of another, or, arising for other reasons, they are expressed
in terms of a tournament of clairvoyance or of "spiritual”
(psychic and/or moral) merit.
Because this competition occurs within the context of a movement
which is open, pluralistic, and has a strong vein of egalitarianism, it has to be euphemised, expressed evasively, in
language which refuses to call things by their true
names.
In other words, it is expressed in a code which is
metaphorical or '‘symbolic”.
Hence, Spiritualists who are disliked are not, for this code,
Spiritualists at all, but merely '•psychic".
Again, those
who are regarded as having mediumistic ability or spiritual
merit are sometimes referred to as "power houses" or "power
generators" :
they "give off” power, which is “taken in"
or "absorbed" by others.
If a medium exercises her gifts
too strenuously, she may suffer a diminishment of power, which
usually has somatic effects - she feels weak, tired and terise.
But some mediums - those who are "merely" psychic, and make
one feel uncomfortable, bored or threatened - have the
capacity to “ draw off*4 psychic energy form those nearby, so
that their powers do not weaken, but those in their presence
allegedly feel weak, tired and tense.
This is called a
11powerdrain" , and thobe responsible stigmatized as "powerdrainers’1.
Mediums who are liked "give off a lot of power";
those who are disliked are M power drainer s’*.
1.
Nelson (1969:243). Skultans says that home circles are
"the most widespread and important form of Spiritualist
encounter" (1974:2-3).
2.
Locke (n.d.:l).
3.
Kelson (1969:212). Cne or two mediums who are the primary
figures in •'their" church never go elsewhere: this type
of church in which the only mediums to appear are the
church leader and his or her proteges, is really a survival
of what used to be the dominant pattern. A few other
mediums abandon "platform work": nobbie Kobinson, one of
the trustees and the central figure at Kortfield, and
Peter Siman, who led the weekly “development class" were
examples. The most popular mediums give one, or even
more, demonstrations every week, but most appear less
freouently, sometimes sharing a platform with an associate.
4.
Troeltsch (i960).
5. Wallis (1975:9f).
6. Gordon and Eabchuk (1959).
7. Kadushin (1966).
8. For the sake of anonymity, I have given this organisation a
pseudonym.
83
CHAPTER 6
mHF BACKGROUNDS OF MORTFIELD SPIRITU AT I ST1S
Like the many attempts to construct typologies of them,
sociological theories about why people are attracted to
unorthodox religious movements owe much to nineteenth century
German sociological history.
In particular, they tend tu
elaborate the view, present in Troeltsch and Weber,1 that
sectarian dissent and religious salvationism in general is an
expression of social protest:
What they cannot claim to be, they replace by the
worth of that which they wTTl one day become.
When religious dissent lacks clear identification with any
particular class or stratum, or occurs among economically
privileged groups, appeal to a more encompassing jiotion of
deprivation than the material becomes necessary.
Many
factors which are not specifically connected with class have
come to be seen as motivating people to affilitate with
groups and ideas which are outside the "'mainstream*'.
The
latter are typically
explained as a response to a range of either personal
or collective unsatisfied needs or aspirations deprivation, frustration, oppression, anomie, personality
disorder or alienation.
Specifically, these hypothetical factors include
(as well
as class), status, age, sex, life histories marked by
emotional anc’ physical disturbance, and mental pathology.
Attributing an important causal role to such factors in the
induction of people into unorthodox movements is a theory
of "deprivation".
There is as well an even more general and vague concept of
deprivation which can be appealed to, that of "alienation'*.
Occultism and "countercultural lifestyles” may thus be
attributed to the stress of living in a "highly organised
and institutionalised society, experienced as unresponsive,
unreasonable and absurd*^. In this way, Fischler, noting
that the appeal of astrology in contemporary France is
greatest for middle class urban youth, links its popularity
with the anxiety and anomie associated with "loss of community
in the big city^.
Regardless of whether economic deprivation or alienation is
the underlying cause of the attraction of a movement, it
remains a problem why some people are drawn into it and others
not.
At this point sociologist are likely to appeal to
“disorganisation":
family disruption, migration, rapid social
mobility, "marginality", "maladaptive personality" and so on.
These kind of theories shade off imperceptibly into psychiatri
models of social deviance.
Deprivation and disorganisation theories have come under fire
in recent years.
Some studies suggest that the distinctivenes
of beliefs and actions possessed by members of unorthodox
movements is at least as much an effect as a cause of their
affiliation.
7
As well, there is increasing recognition that
deprivation and disorganization theories embody a dismissive
attitude to their object.
This
way of conceptualising religious sectarianism, for
example, may appear to be far removed from the overtly
evaluative and prejudiced model gf the public stereotype,
but it is fundamentally similar.
Finally, all such theories run the risk of circularity unless
carefully formulated.
They can easily collapse into non-
explanations such as that people join a movement because they
would be unhappy if they did not join it, or appeal to a
deprivation or disorganisation factor, the only evidence for
which is the joining of the movement.
Recent studies have
tended to bypass the issue, concentrating instead on how
movements are organised, the importance and role of social
networks in recruitment, and a more fine-grained approach
to the cognitive background of attraction to movements9,
I conducted long inter-views with thirty seven Spiritualists,
who comprised most of the people who attended Mortfield
services regularly, and all the mediums I met who were willing
to be interviewed (sixteen of the sample are in this category).
Deprivation or disorganisation hypotheses receive only faint
or ambiguous confirmation from the biographical material 01
these interviews.
The main results are given below.
Spiritualism has more appeal to women than men
d male.
The sample was 62% female and 38/,
This was close to
the average sex ratio at most Mortfield services, although at
some other churches I attended, and at the Mortfield healing
service
the proportion of women was higher.
Iaon Lewis
has suggested that movements which emphasis trance states
have a special appeal to women, operating as a tension release
for those of marginal status1^.However, the Spiritualist sex
ratio is not dramatically different to that of Christian
11
church attendance in Australia . The proportion of female
mediums was lower ., at 56%.
Spiritualism and age
As is probably true of most religions, Spiritualism has more
appeal for the elderly than for the young.
The age ratio of
the sample, however, also showed some over-representation of
people in their late twenties and early thirties (Table 1 ).
88
Age in years
<25
11%
25-34
19%
35-44
14%
45-54
16%
55-64
30%
65+
11%
Table 1: Mortfielders by age.
Employment if working; previous
if retired; of household head if
"home duties*.
No regular employment
5%
Manual
19%
Sales, retail
24%
Clerical, officework
30%
Business, self-employed
Professional (eg teacher,
engineer, social worker)
Table 2:
8%
14%
Mortfielders by occupation.
Years of formal education
Table 3 : Mortfielders by education.
It is
probable that this pattern is a reflection of
several disparate factors: the intrinsic appeal of
Spiritualism to those who have lost many friends and
relatives and who are closer to death themselves; the
preoccupation of most women in their middle years with
raising children; and the attraction exerted in the late
sixties and early seventies by occult movements on young
people, many of whom were over twenty five by the mid
seventies. The proportion at any one Spiritualist service
of under 25's was higher than the sample, but very few
attended regularly.
Spiritualism and Class
It is true that most Spiritualist churches in Sydney
are located in suburbs of relatively low mean income,
but some caution is required in interpreting this fact.
In the first place, population density is higher in these
suburbs.
Again, there are more locations in these areas
which are accessible to public transport. My impression admittedly not an easy one to document -
is that there
is a large middle class Spiritualist "fringe", comprising
people who may not attend church services very often,
but do attend home circles and go to mediums for private
readings. In any case, my sample of Mortfield Spiritualists
and mediums does not show Spiritualism to appeal to any
one class. The distribution of employment categories
99
is representative of the Australian population, if the
age and sex skews are borne in mind (Table 2). The same
can be said of the educational background of the sample
(Table 3).
This leaves open the question of whether Spiritualism is
a class movement, in the sense of expressing the consciousness
of one class over and above that of others. Political
parties typically display a wide cross-section of socioeconomic backgrounds, but most represent class interests
in a relatively straightforward way. However, Spiritualism
cannot be said to be a movement numerically dominated by
people from one class.
Spiritualism and "disturbed" environments
In economic terms, Spiritualists do not appear to be
atypically insecure
12
another question.
But again, unless a deprivation theory
, but emotional disturbance is
is presupposed, the evidence on this issue remains ambiguous.
It cannot be established whether emotional disturbance
gives rise to a predilection for Spiritualism, or whether
both result from another factor. Again, there are obvious
difficulties in evaluating a life as "disturbed",
although lives such as Elaine Harvey's and Bill Maddigan's
would appear to be candidates:
Elaine was born in Essex during World War I.
Her father, an alcoholic doctor, went bankrupt,
and for a time the family had slept in the
fields in a tent. Her mother died when she
was eleven, and her father soon remarried. Elaine
said she had been mistreated by her stepmother.
91
Her father went to London, and after a period with a
friend of her mother's, at thirteen Elaine followed,
and was placed in a Convent, an experience she
remembered with bitterness. At sixteen she went into
service, but in her words ’’got into trouble”, and
went back to live with her father. When she was
eighteen her stepmother died, and "the new woman was
worse”, so she left. She married, and her husband
spent much of the Depression out of work. His mental
state was affected by the following war, and after a
long period of emotional instability and physical
illness, he had committed suicide in the mid 1950's.
r'er three children having grown up, Elaine had
followed h(r son and daughter-in-law to Australia in
the early 1970's.
Bill Faddigan's mother had died v/hen he was very young,
and h< had been raised by his father in Dunedin, u.Z.
He remembered a succession of housekeepers, one in
particular "intensely evangelical”. He came to Sydney
when he was 26, set up an electrical wholesaling business
and married. After seven years he left his wife and
three children, and had obviously been through a period
of severe strain, for a while coming under psychiatric
treatment and social work guidance. It was during this
period that he had been drawn to Spiritualism, although
his interest in "psychic phenomena" dated back to his
NZ days.
38% of the sample seemed to me to have led lives of comparable
instability, and a further 22% had experienced traumatic
events (a divorce or the death of a close relative or friend,
for instance), to which they attributed great emotional
significance.
It is only possible to guess at how "normal” these figures
really are, but they seem high.
27% reported either having
come under psychiatric attention or having had a “breakdown11
at some stage of their lives.
Again, this seems high.
Ray Ferguson told me he had had two breakdowns, in
which he perceived strange beings who spoke to him,
promising that they would make a "more effective
personality" of him, and that he would become a
successful singer. At the time he was confused by
these experiences, and "afraid of being brainwashed*',
but "that was before he learnt about spirit guides'*.
He had come to realize that many so-called cases of
schizophrenia were really manifestations of
clairvoyance and clairaudience. -*-4
The rate of psychiatric disturbance among mediums was about
the same as the sample average
(25%), but nearly all mediums
reported a period of mental stress and crisis at the time they
decided that they had mediumistic powers.
Spiritualist and traditional religion
It may be that a repressive inculcation of religious values
and attitudes which are rejected forms individuals who, even
while dismissing orthodox religious systems, continue to desire
••religious" answers to "religious" questions.
15
At any rate,
73% of the sample reported having had a (Christian) religious
influence in childhood which they described as "strong",
‘'strict1' or "fanatical". 32% claimed to have rejected or had
doubts about such strict "orthodoxy" for as long as they could
remember; the rest had not "moved on" till adulthood.
Spiritualism and seekership
The idea that movements within the cultic milieu are formed
16
by "seekers after truth" , who are prepared to give any
system a try which seems as if it will be a "growth experience",
also received confirmation from the sample.
86% of the men
said they had been involved with one or more unorthodox
religions, movements, cults, sects or
found Spiritualism.
ideas
before they had
Among the women, this figure was only
35%; perhaps this reflects the narrower opportunities for
women to "sample around", and their lower social horizons.
Spiritualist Conversion
Focussing down to the specific context of recruitment, it is
first of all noteworthy that Spiritualists do not embark on
systematic conversion campaigns.
In line with the movement’s
"epistemological individualism", which is characteristic of
the occult r.enerally, even when they are propagandising
Spiritualists never do more than invite people they think
might be interested to meetings, and explain Spiritualist
parlance and beliefs.
In some cases there is a perceptible
suspicion of outsiders and a reluctance to accept newcomers.
lynch
17
has proposed a model of conversion into occult sub-
cultures which divides it into four phases:
(l) the reading
of literature on the subject; (2) first hand experience of
’‘nonordinary realities11; (3) meeting people involved with an
occult subculture; (4) reaching a point at which the subculture
becomes the centre of the convert's social life.
The outlines of this model fit with the Mortfield sample,
with one clear difference.
Whereas the group studied by
lynch was largely composed of well educated members of the
middle classes, Spiritualism is not, and this is probably
why the reading of literature is not such a critical factor.
Nevertheless, 27% of the sample said that they had been induced
to investigate Spiritualism through reading a book or noticing
an advertisement in a newspaper.
Nearly all claimed ’’psychic
experiences", and 40% said these had occurred since childhood.
59°> said that their first encounter with Spiritualism had been
through a friend or acouaintance, and 11% said that it "ran
in the family".
These figures must be interpreted bearing in mind that they
are largely derived from Spiritualist s* recollections of their
own conversion.
Beckford has made an important point in relation
to Jehovpb's Witness's accounts of their "conversion11 which is
valid for all ‘‘ideological minorities".
IB
^uch accounts are
reconstructions whic^t incorporate the movement's own views of
itself and a more o^ less conscious model of what the conversion
process should be like.
Spiritualism sees itself as manifesting
eternal truths of existence.
It thus naturally sees conversion
as a process of inner awareness and discovery of which the
rejection of orthodox "belief systems and of normal standards
of behaviour may be a symptom.
The whole of a Spiritualists
life is re-interpreted in the light of this principle, and this
must involve a certain amount of "editing".
For example, it
is likely that many people have had “uncanny experiences*' in
childhood.
Spiritualists give these experiences a special
significance and attribute to them a causal role in the conversion process which may be almost entirely retrospective.
1. This framework had already been anticipated by Engels
(1975).
2.
3.
Weber (1965:106) This passage could be applied to Spiritualists:
they canlt "make it" in this world, so they imagine a Spirit
world in which they can "make it". The formulation is basic
to many accounts of movements which are located in economically
disadvantaged groups, such as working class sectarianism
(Niebuhr, 1929; Pope 1942) or milXarian cults in the Third
World or Medieval Europe (Worsley,1970;Lanternari,1963;Cohn,1970)
They offer the promise of an advent which will overturn the
existing order and give or restore freedom to the oppressed.
Beckford (1978a: 110).
4.
Adler (1974:289) •
5.
6.
Fischler (1974).
Thus Vincent-Keidy and Richardson reject findings that there
is "scant evidence for pathology” among Pentecostals, and
allege that Catholic Neo-Pentecostalism -‘has an inbuilt bias
in attracting those who are emotionally disturbed or truly
mentally ill". (1978:225). The underlying values of this
position are shown by the shift .nade by Klibanov (1965),
who follows lenin in seeing pietist and spiritual sects
in pre-revolutionary Russia as a form of social protest,
but regards their continuation in modern Russia as the
expression of deviant personalities and umarginalityM .
Aberle (1965) and Glock (1964) are classical statements of
the deprivation view.
7.
Hine (1974), Beckford (1975), Garrison (1974).
8.
Beckford (1978a :11o)
9.
eg Beckford (1977), Price (1979), Wallis (1975), lynch (1977).
10.
lewis (1971).
11.
Mol (1971 :23f) provides a figure^ 59c
/ female for church
estimates of attendance in the 1950's and 60's.
12.
I did not question interviewees on their income, which
would have antagonised some, and elicited Questionable
replies.
13.
14.
of
Interview5Interview.
15.
The results of the survey in Hartmann (1976) seem to
confirm this, as does Downton*s study of American converts
to the Divine light Mission (1979).
16.
"Seekership" may be evaluated positively, as in Balch and
Taylor (1977), or as a symptom of emotional disturbance,
as in much of the literature.
17.
lynch (1977).
18.
Beckford (1978b).
CHAPTER 7
THE Sri.lITUAIIST MOVEMLMT
So far, I have described the main beliefs and rituals of
Mortfield Spiritualists, given an account of their internecine feuding, and discussed some factors which may have
influenced their recruitment to the movement.
I have been
fairly brief about these issues; they are not my main
concern.
In the two succeeding chapters, I lay the ground for the
analysis of Spiritualism elaborated in Chapters 9 to 12,
by placing it in a social and philosophical context, and
by advocating certain ways of understanding it.
In Chapter
8, I advocate that Spiritualism be interpreted as a
marginal ideology, and outline some appropriate analytical
tools.
The present chapter argues that it is a pluralistic
occult, gnostic movement, and attempts to explain the
meaning of these terms.'1'
What is Spiritualism?
Although its connections with most of them are fairly loose
Spiritualism belongs with a group of abstractions which
people began to formulate in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries:
anarchism, feminism, socialism, surrealism,
o
communism, humanism and fascism are some examples.
With
much else besides, these words basically denote what, for
the present, can be loosely referred to as "ideas” .
In
the case of Spiritualism the core idea has been summarised
as the "belief that departed spirits communicate with and
show themselves” to the living.
•3
Unfortunately, this statement of the Spiritualist idea is
as contentious an any short (or long) outline of anarchism
or feminism.
Such ideas can be separated neither from their
connotations, their history, the practices through which
people seek to express them, nor the presuppositions and
theories in
terms of which attempts to explain, support or
condemn them have been expressed.
For example, in the “popular imagination*', Spiritualism is
associated with witchcraft, "black magic'1 and fortune telling,
and shares with them a pall of ridicule and fear which has
made it a suitable literary setting for both mystery thrillers
and satirical comedies.
These connotations of gullibility
and evil are vigorously rejected by Spiritualists, who regard
their belief as both benign and scientific,^ but the widespread
negative evaluation of Spiritualism has left its mark.
Like
the other isms mentioned previously, Spiritualism has been
embattled from birth, and consequently its adherents are ever
ready to define and defend their position against
’’orthodoxy*' —
the established modes of religion, science and common sense.
This stand has become one of its intrinsic features.
Some groups of ideas, not necessarily less precise than
Spiritualism,have usually not precipitated practices coordinated by planning and a sense of solidarity (materialism
or romanticism, for instance).
Spiritualists, however, come
together to form groups which have as their purpose the performance of activities judged to be appropriate for Spiritualism,
and sometimes also attempt to persuade outsiders of its merits.
It is in the practices of these small circles, churches,
societies and lodges, and larger leagues, unions and
associations, that Spiritualism finds its main forms of
99
expression.
However, unlike the denominations and sects of latter day
Christianity, or "centralised cults" like Scientology and
Theosophy, spiritualism does not persist through its
organizational forms, which are essentially impermanent,
even though some endure for decades.
Although familial and
neighbourhood traditions are significant, it is primarily
embodied in written texts:
nothing like it could have
5
existed before mass literacy.
It follows that an understanding based mainly upon observation
of Spiritualists and discussions with them would be as inadeouate
as an understanding of science founded upon watching and conversing with scientists, or a study of socialism which paid scant
attention to socialist literature.
I have made extensive use
of data from participant observation, but information culled
from books, pamphlets and periodicals written for and by Spiritualists occupies a position of eaual importance in iny
argument.
What is the most appropriate term for such a social phenomenon,
part abstract idea, part concrete text, part organisation?
Spiritualists themselves say they belong to a “movement", and
although it is not as precise as could be, I have adopted their
usage.
What kind of movement is Spiritualism?
The practices, concerns and relationships of Kortfiel-ders
and the casual and unsystematic character erf their beliefs
about the afterlife are evidence that Spiritualism is not
100
fundamentally a doctrine of death, judgement or salvation,
even though the core of its "abstract idea” is communication
with the dead.
With this, all studies of the movement concur.
None of them take it seriously as an eschatology.
Some treat it as a therapeutic movement.
Harwood's study
of Puerto Rican spirit mediums in New York more or less takes
them to be an autochthonal species of community health worker,
and psychotherapy is never far from Skultans' discussion of
Welsh Spiritualists.^
So construed, Spiritualism
shares
a domain with medicine, folk remedies, social work, entertainments, psychiatry, charity and the etiquettes of politeness
and caring.
It is one of the various ways of attempting to
make people wfeel better1*.
But in spite of the fact that many Spiritualists themselves
say that the movement is basically concerned with the alleviation
of human suffering, many of its beliefs and practices cannot
be related to this concern.
It seems more accurate to say that
Spiritualism intersects the curative domain, rather than
occupying it.
A wider framework is offered by Bryan Wilson's classification
of Spiritualism as "thaumaturgical", that is, as concerned with
the working of miracles.
As discussed in chapter 3, it is true that Spiritualists
suppose powers to exist which could only be explained as
"non-material forces11 (whatever that might mean); or as physical
forces which have not as yet been comprehended by science
or "common sense” ; or on the basis that the universe is
radically different from the way we are accustomed to conceive
it, so that explanations in terms of '’forces" are misguided.
But what is a miracle?
Whatever kind of explanation they
might have for the powers they allege to exists, most
Spiritualists would maintain that there are no such things
as miracles, because the universe is law-governed.
David
Hume’s classical statement of the empiricist case against
miracles would find as sympathetic an audience at ftortfield
as at many a scientific conference.
9
To affirm that Spiritualists believe in miracles even though
they deny it w^uld seem to run the risk oi missing something.
V;e can retain the point of Wilson's classification, however,
if we say that Spiritualism postulates and is -preoccupied
with anomalies - specifically those "psychical" anomalies
which in some way or other contravene the expected regularities
of mental functioning.^
This is true, and will be taken up in the next section,
but it does not relate to some of most characteristic traits
of Spiritualism, such as its pervasive tolerance of diversity,
its emphasis upon symbolic modes of thought, the ethic
of self-
sacrifice and self-help, or the concept of Ttrrnal Progression.
Kacklin implicitly allows this when she- postulates that
Spiritualism and its Latin variant Spiritism originated as
thaumaturgies, but having failed to compete with orthodox
medicine, "became syncretised with the beliefs and rituals
of established religions".
It is certainly true that Spiritualism is syncretic, although
102
this tendency was already present in its older cousin Swedenborgism : it does not seem to have occurred as a consequence
of a medical rebuff.
Nor has the borrowing been restricted to
Christianity and Eastern religions as perceived by Western
"seekers’*.
It also incorporated relics or resuscitations of
European folk traditions; scientific and progressivist ideologies
glimmerings of rationalism, aestheticism, and secularism; concept
reminiscent of and possibly derived from shamanism and animism;
and values reflecting working class populism.
It now resembles
an archeological site in which successive levels of occupation
have become inextricably scrambled.
But to relegate the non-therapeutic aspects of Spiritualism
to a residue, "syncretic* and therefore apparently not
amenable to analysis, can lead easily to the conclusion that
there has been “a complete failure to develop a coherent and
12
comprehensive doctrine.**
At one level this is true:
Spiritualism i_s incoherent -
although it is arguable whether Christianity, or for that
matter science, are very different in this respect (not
to mention communism or surrealism).
But as levi-strauss's
celebrated analogy between mythmaking and bricolage was
intended to show, the novel recombination of disparate materials
does not preclude the possibility of system in a broad sense,^
I want to show that there is a “ science" underlying the nature
and extent of Spiritualist incoherence, which is taken not as
a conclusion, but a starting point.
As a first step in this
project, I classify Spiritualism as a gnosticlsm. a category
proposed "by Bryan Wilson in an early paper on sect typology^*
although later abandoned by him.
Gnosis was the Greek word for knowledge, but in the 1st century
Gnosticism came to refer to a specific set of ideas, influenced
by a variety of sources, which stressed the struggle between
the powers of good and evil, centred on the idea of redemption
through revelation, and evolved an elaborate system of magical
rites and symbols.
I am not using the word in this narrow sense
15
, but
neither do I want it to be as wide as the pursuit of any sort
of knowledge for any sort of reason.
Somewhere between these
senses, there is a grasping for what sociologists of religion
are apt to call "ultimate meanings".
16
A Gnostic fragment
describes the object of this search as:
The knowledge of that which we are and of that which
we have become, of whence we came and to where we have
fallen, of the goal towards which„we hasten, and of the
conditions of our redemption.... '
In this sense, gnosticism is an impulse which can be recognised
in many different cultural forms and contexts.
Gnosticisms are never able to describe the way precisely, nor
where it leads:
they only hint, sometimes in paradoxical
terms, at where it may be looked for, and assert that it
leads to something of supreme value.
As to the Tao itself,
It is elusive and evasive.
Evasive, elusive...
Yet within there is a vital force.
The vital force is very real,
And therein dwells truth.
Sometimes it is suggested that the Way has no end, or that
it takes you back to where you began (it is the Way, not the
goal, which is the supreme value).
104
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
7/ill be to arrive at where we started
And know the place fro the first time.
In gnosticism the logically neat but practically untidy
divide between facts and values, or knowledge and ethics,
is put aside.
on
The Way is both a means and an end, an
activity which determines its own goal, and in it knowledge
and goodness, power and power and purpose, are fused.
It is plausible to detect in the inexpressible attraction
of the gnostic Way that yearning for infinite satiation and
21
oneness which Freud saw as a bastion of religion. "
As well,
the Wav is awesome and set apart from the everyday, and these
qualities align it with the sacred, which for Lurkheim was
the constitutive element of the religious.
22
But in the sense in which I am using it, not only the
conventionally designated field of religion but also those of
science, politics and art can manifest the gnostic impulse.
It reveals itself in characteristic forms and expressions,
rather than in distinct institutions.
What kind of gnostic movement is Spiritualism?
In attempting to locate Spiritualism within the parameters of
contemporary gnosticism, I will try two strategies.
The first
begins with abstract ("philosophical") attributes of the
Spiritualist world-view and compares these with the world-views
of other gnosticisms.
The second attempts to characterise the
specific attributes of the Spiritualist way and that of
movements similar to it.
The first strategy involves placing Spiritualism in relation
to four axes of difference,these being (a) voluntarist/
fatalist, (b) subjective/objective, (c) materialist/idealist
and (d) rational/intuitive.
(a) For voluntarist gnosticisms, the Way is firmly within
the ambit of human comprehension and abilities.
Both the
vision of a “rational** technocracy promulgated in the utopias
of Fourier^ and “irrational” Zen Buddhism are examples, for
in both enlightenment results from an exercise of will.
In
contrast, doctrines which proclaim a predestined Elect or
Chosen People, or emphasise the bestowal of Grace or the role
of Providence, are more or less fatalist, insofar as will is
irrelevant.
In common with most of the contemporary manifestations of the
gnostic impulse, Spiritualism is voluntarist - the critical
importance of individual decision-making is one of its major
tenets.
(b) In a fairly straightforward way, Zen seeks gnosis of an
inward sort, as do Scientology
OA
and psychotherapy, for instance.
In other cases it is clear that the Way involves a modification of what lies beyond the ego.
Such is the case with
utopianism, or the identification fantasy of the myth of
stardom.
In the former case, the Way may have external signs,
but in the latter it is essentially an alteration of the real.
The opposition subjective/objective will serve to describe
this axis, which is parallelled by Bryan Wilson’s depiction
of the "introversionist sect”, in contrast to which other
OR
sects are implicitly extroversionist.
Although it is typically believed to be made manifest through
the acquisiton of objective ("paranormal" or anomalous) powers,
the Spiritualist gnosis is subjective: in the final analysis,
it is conceived as a transformation of the *'internal" psyche.
But this does not prevent individual adherents from pursuing
"objective" (psychic) powers for their own sake.
(c) The third axis needs more explanation.
p f.
The difference
I have in mind can be illustrated by a contrast that may be
drawn between two popular myths of "fringe science", those
27
of the lost Continent of Atlantis and that of a visit to
Earth in Antiquity by astronauts from a superior extra28
terrestial culture.
Two structuralist analyses of these myths exist which point
29
in opposite directions. Carroll is concerned with the
similarities of the myths. He argues that they both represent
resolutions of the recurrent mythological oppositions nature/
culture, life/death, and high/low.
Ashworth
also sees both
myths as mediating certain oppositions (for him, they are
historically constituted out of developments in SCIENCE and
RELIGION and contemporary experience of TECHNOLOGY and
HUMANITY^) but he also points out that they are profoundly
different from one another.
He believes them to be expressions
of two opposed philosophical tendencies:
Danikenism represents a mythological variant, or a
variant in mythological form, of that tradition which,
on the one hand, derives its roots from prophetic
Judaism and millenarian Christianity, and on the other
derives its roots from that form of mechanistic materialism
which goes back to the Dorian Greek writers, Democritus
and Lucretius...Like mechanistic science, it not only
explains reality in purely empirical/material terms,
but it relegates all forms of Platonism...to the status
of falsity and illusion...Atlanticism in its modern form...
107
is...a rewrite of...Plato*s...Theory of Ideas. History
is the expression of...an Idea which is the same as
Perfection and Harmony, "but of which the empirical/material
world ia a progressively imperfect and degenerate copy.
For this reason Atlantis, which is the perfect society
incarnate, exists at the beginning of history, and not at
its end...it is anti-science, if by 'science’ one means
mechanistic materialism, because unlike the latter it
sees everything as a ’reflection* or manifestation of
one single hidden reality, which is essentially ’ideal’
or ’psychic', but certainly not material;
This passage raises a great many more issues than can be
discussed here.
What I want to stress is the distinction
drawn between those myths which postulate an ideal realm of
which this world is an imperfect "copy” (representation,
embodiment, metaphor...), and those for which there is one and
only one "real world".
33
materialist.
The first are idealist, and the second
Thus Scientology and Transcendental Meditation are materialist,
while the myth of stardom as expressed in the activities of
"’fan” clubs, for example is clearly idealist.
34
Spiritualism inclines towards the pole of materialism: the
barrier which separates us from the nother side” where spirits
dwell is not metaphorical but metonymic; "this” side and
the "other” are sides of the same world.
But there is over-
laying this a strong vein of idealism, especially in those
ways of thought which align it with Theosophy.
(d)
Some gnosticisms stress that gnosis must be achieved
through understanding of and adherence to governing principles
of laws (Canonical Buddhism, the theology of Loyola,
Scientology).
In contrast to these rational gnosticisms, there are intuitive
ones, which may go so far as to deny the validity of any laws
(antinomianism):
Zen, the Franciscans, surrealism.
While Spiritualism has a systematic, "scientific” face,
signified by its penchant for laying down ’’principles” end
"laws”, this is undermined by the movement's pluralism,
which tolerates if not encourages disagreement over a wide
range of issues, and marks any attempt at systemisation as
a purely individual expression.
These four pairs of ideal types
35
provide a way of locating
Spiritualism in relation to a large number of "world views".
It is, to sum up, voluntarist and subjective, more materialist
than idealist, and fairly balanced between reason and intuition
This distinguishes Spiritualism from Calvinism, Socialism and
Freemasonry, for examples, but to characterise Spiritualism
more closely it is necessary to consider it in relation to
ideas and movements which are linked to it through shared
language and discourses, and to and from which there is a
considerable mobility of adherents.
The anomalous
Although the social and philosphical environs of Spiritualism
have shifted considerably since 1848, initially from Swedenborgism and Mesmerism to secularism and political
radicalism,
later to Theosophy and Christian Science, and roost recently
to homeopathy and meditative practices, throughout its
history it is most comfortably placed within what Colin
•X£
Campbell has dubbed "the cultic milieu"J , and is most
37
commonly called "the occult"
.
109
A typical listing under this heading would include most of the
following topics, which are either gnosticisms, or phenomena
which are almost invariably given a gnostic signification:
alchemy ,*•alternative" medicine (naturapathy, iridology, faithhealing etc, including some forms of psychotherapy), Anthroposophy, astrology, ESP, flying saucers, fortune telling,
graphology, the I-Ching, the Kabbalah, magic, meditation,
numerology, out-of-the-body experiences, palmistry, para psychology, phrenology, poltergeists and ghosts, psychokinesis,
ftosicruciansim, Satanism, Scientology, the Tarot, telepathy,
Theosophy, witchcraft, yoga.
The reason these topics have been called "occult” is that
they often claim to contain gnostic "secrets”, and in any
case are more or less esoteric.
ment among writers
But there is growing agree-
in the field that the distinguishing
trait of these topics is not "secrecy" (some, on the contrary,
are indubitably "popular")jbut anomaly:
they are, in one way
or another, preoccupied with "things anomalous to our generally
accepted culture-storehouse of 'truths’".
70
Of course, this criterion is only as good as the concept of
"generally accepted 'truths'".
The difficulty is that this,
"storehouse" is divided into many compartments and is undergoing constant renovation.
What little investigation has been carried out indicates that
popular belief in some of the "anomalous" phenomena listed is
at a level comparable to belief in Christianity^,
not usually considered "occult".
which is
On the other hand if "science"
is taken as the bench mark of general acceptability, then the
**■
110
curious conclusion results that any belief which lacks scientific
endorsement is "occult**- a net altogether too wide.
Perhaps anomaly should be regarded not so much as a
contravention of accepted "truth1* as of normal expectation.
Even if they are thought to exist or be possible, few think
of USP or levitation or faithhealing as “normal*. But neither
are comets, revolutions or new sporting records.
There is no way of overcoming these difficulties.
The concept
of anomaly, while it is the unifying core of "the occult",
is itself ambiguous, and therefore the field it demarcates
is uncorrectably blurred.
What kind of occult, gnostic movement is Spiritualism?
Spiritualism is constituted within the occult domain not by
one or any number of beliefs.
The concept of "belief" in
this sense is misleading, since it encompasses a wide variety
of commitments, from unquestioning allegiance to the unreflective recognition of the social value of a sign.
40
In any case, Spiritualists "share" nearly all their “beliefs"
with Theosophists, modern witches and magicians, fringe
healers, unaffiliated clairvoyants and charismatic Christians.
What distinguishes these groups and individuals from one another
is not differences in the sets of their “beliefs", but the
way these movements are structured as systems of practices.
This helps explain why people commonly move from one “occult"
movement to another, or affiliate to more than one at a time.
A typical occult seeker will probably have been
a Rosicrucian, a member of Mankind United, a theosophist,and
also a member of four or five smaller specific cults.
The pattern of membership is one of continuous movement
from one idea to another.
Seekers stay with the cult
until they are satisfied that they can learn no more
from it or that it has nothing further to offer them.41
At least as regards Spiritualism this statement is a consider-
111
able exaggeration, but it is true that in all forms of occultism, and perhaps of voluntarist gnosticism, there is a strong
tendency towards this kind of "seekership".
A O
The Spiritualist
configuration is strictly provisional, and its adherents remain
interested in and sometimes combine it with related movements
in the way that oppositional political affiliations are often
mixed, as satirized in the bumper sticker "land rights for
gay whales” .
And just as there are "independents" on the left,
there are occult seekers who fail to find a group or system
which suits them:
none "make enough sense", stress the
"important issues" or have the "right" practice.
Such people
remain on the fringes of Spiritualism, equally attached to
and detached from astrology, herbal medicine, the I Ching,
numerology or whatever.
Other gravities may pull them out
of the occult orbit altogether, into neighboring gnostic
fields like sectarian Christianity, academic study - or some
form of "madness".
Truzzi detects "a continuum from scientific to purely mystical
proofs"
of occult claims, instanced at one end by parapsychology,
and at the other by personal revelation.
This continuum
assumes that science is essentially "intersubjective" and
mysticism essentially “private", a model which is inadequate.
The "private" world of the mystic is a social construction,
"intersubjective" inasmuch as anyone knows anything about it,
while science is also experienced "privately", by "subjects".
The difference lies not in the boundary of the knowing subject,
but in the kind of knowledge involved.
Science is systematized
knowledge of causal, formal and generative connections:
broadly speaking, it is metonymic and synecdochal^. The
kind of knowledge Truzzi calls "mystical", on the other
hand, is of paradigms, resemblances, analogies and significations:
45
it is fundamentally metaphoric.
In terms of this opposition, Spiritualism has affinities with
the metonymic fields of parapsychology, and is linked more
generally to orthodox science via that profitable no-man’sland of "quasi", "proto"
j
r
popular "
i n
or "fringe" science,
where von Daniken, Isaac Asimov, John Taylor, Linus Pauling,
Colin Wilson, Buckminster Fuller and Lyall Watson mingle in
theoretical promiscuity.
But Spiritualism has also borrowed freely from religious
traditions, especially Christianity, and is close to therapeutic
systems which are explicitly metaphoric.
Finally, it has roots in "folklore” , the domain, neither
particularly metonymic nor metaphoric, of "popular" perceptions,
attitudes and practices, where hobbies are followed, jokes
made, news communicated, compassion, boredom, resignation,
antipathy, envy and desire formulated, salt thrown, wood touched,
charms worn, where people strive or not to "do the right thing",
and intelligent forces beyond the ken of humankind are vaguely
believed in.
As it shades into this territory,
Spiritualism
becomes first '’superstitious” , then "proverbial” and finally,
"popular".
Alone of all contemporary occultisms, it can
still be justly called "plebeian".
All this shows that Spiritualism is nothing if not eclectic.
More, whenever it is conscious of its eclecticism it proclaims
it gladly and regards it as a source of strength.
Spiritualism
wants to be scientific and religious, magical and everyday,
systematic and intuitive, idealist and materialist, "high"
and plebeian.
It seeks the truth, but confesses that there
may be many ways of getting there.
113
This pluralism is one
of its most characteristic features.
Understanding SpirituaJism
Academic studies of Spiritualism are not united by a. shared
theoretical approach.
Most are historical; for some reason
the place of Spiritualism in nineteenth century literature
and literary circles is covered in especial detail.
The sociological studies represent a wide range of theories
A g
50
and styles; ranging over socioliguistics , microsociology
,
51
applications of network theory and phenomenology' , speculations
r2
on the social origins of Spiritualist values ^ , acknowledgement
of the resemblances between Spiritualist mediums and shamans
53
and argument concerning Spiritualism1s status as a religious
. *.
54
organisation.
These perspectives do not provide a comprehensive context
into which Spiritualism as a movement can be set, but rather
yield observations which an overall understanding would have
to take account of.
there are three kinds of perspectives which appear broad
enough to offer the possibility of such an understanding.
Firstly, Spiritualism may be taken for a science, a way of
truth, and endorsed or rejected as such.
Secondly, there is
the treatment of it as a type of social or cultural activity,
the study of which has been M disciplined*' into a branch of
Sociology.
lastly, there is an approach which would attempt to make sense
of Spiritualisr-1 in terms ol the concept of ideology.
Spiritualism as a science
Fort writing about Spiritualism is partisan.
It is also
,
114
discursive, anecdotal, and usually assumes a readership of
"true believers".
This is also largely true of the comparatively
tiny quantity of anti Spiritualist propaganda.
55
They both
take factual claims of Spiritualism at face value, as
signifiers not signs, and assess them accordingly.
If Spiritualism were "true" in the classical sense of correspondence with reality, then perhaps there would be no need to
seek further explanation for the shape of its doctrines:
they
would simply exist as discoveries, though there might still
be room for curiosity about how the Spiritualisftruth" was
"discovered".
The main difficulty, however, would be to
explain how it is that most people have failed to be converted.
Today the classical conception of truth has few adherents,
and the nicest thing philosphera can say confidently about science
is that it "approaches" truth.
56
But even without this
epistemological caution, it is clear that Spiritualism as a
whole could not
"correspond" with anything, since there is
open disagreement on many issues among its followers.
If
one were to advocate a consistent Spiritualism, it would have
to be that of a very small group, if not of a single individual.
Perhaps this step would be justifiable if I had found a
Spiritualist doctrine which seemed to me to be true, or if
I had evolved one of my own.
But although I am not dogmatically
attached to denying the existence of spirits, and would be
interested in communicating with them, nothing I observed
over the year I spent many hours of each week in the company
of Spiritualists shook my agnosticism.
So if I were to treat Spiritualist knowledge claims in their
own terms I would have to attack them.
But this also leads
to difficulties. Since such attacks assume that Spiritualists
are guilty of correctable error, even at their most
’’understanding” they imply a standard of truth and logic from
which Spiritualism is explained as a "pardonable” deviation.
Often they simply attribute the error to gullibility,
stupidity or mental pathology.
This approach is unsatisfying, because Spiritualists on the
whole do not seem to be madder or less intelligent than anyone
else.
What seems to be needed is a way of analysing Spiritual!
which will ’’bracket” its truth-claims, so that they can be
discussed not in terms of the value they give themselves,
but in terms of their values in a higher order of understanding
At the same time, it is necessary to avoid the implication
that all truth-claims are equally valid, because then nothing
at all could be said (validly) about anything.
In other words,
our analysis must incorporate the notions of object language,
in which the doings and sayings of Spiritualists are reported,
and metalanguage, in which the object language is discussed.
58
This method leads beyond the polemical to the critical, from
the philosophical to the sociological.
Spiritualism as a religion or wav of life
Sociology assigns the objects of its study a place within
social action, thereby relegating them to the status of
representing modes of existence which are typical, if not
universal (the ’’economic” , "political”, ’'sexual" etc).
1
have already adopted this strategy in arguing that Spiritualism
is gnostic, and although I have reservations about it, as a
116
way of thought it is too deeply embedded to be altogether
abandoned.
This assignment of a study object to the "social* should
have the effect of bracketing its truth claims.
But in
practice the issues those claims raise continue to be
troublesome.
The distinction between object language and
metalanguage cannot be consistently maintained without intolerable pedantry.
As well, the situation is complicated by the
fact that Spiritualist language contains its own metalanguage,
its commentary upon itself.
As well, the theorist's assumptions
regarding the truth claims of the object language will be coded
in the sociological metalanguage, most conspicuously by the
amount of attention accorded to those aspects of the object
language perceived as "problematic*, and the explanations provided for them.
Inevitably the polemical code of empirical truth
intrudes into the critical code of sociological truth.
Examples of this are easy to find.
It is so common a "theory”
in the sociological literature that millenarian, sectarian and
generally unconventional movements are distorted expressions
of political and/or psychological discontent as to be virtually
a cliche.
✓
59
Such a view presupposes that the ideas espoused
by these movements are false:
it is, in effect, an attempt to
explain (llsociogically” ) how untruth may be believed.
By contrast, some hermeneutic and pheonomenolgyical studies do
not avoid, or even proclaim, relativism.
60
Between these two
tendencies it is probably impossible to maintain a balance.
Within sociology, a study of Spiritualism would conventionally
be assigned to the sociology of religion.
Although I have
freely mined this discipline for analytical concepts, my
position is that nothing is gained by treating spiritualism
as a religion, if that entails either using Spiritualism to
117
test an existing theory about the nature of religion, or to
consfruct a new or modified theory on the basis of its particular
characteristics.
In the first place, I take seriously the doubts raised by
Smith
fil
object.
concerning the viability of religion as a theoretical
whether these are justified or not, it is scarcely
arguable that the ’’scientific study of religion" is not in
fact a complex set of partially overlapping paradigms which
are as diverse and contradictory as the phenomena they claim
to elucidate.
More specifically, Spiritualists themselves describe their
movement as not only a "religion", but also a ’’science" and
a "way of life", and it should already be clear that this
description is correct.
Spiritualism could just as easily be classified as a hobby,
art-form, entertainment or therapy as a religion; of course,
the sociological study of the last is much more developed,
but that has very little to do with Spiritualism.
One sociological category wide enough to comfortably accommodate
Spiritualism is "popular culture".
Put this concept is even
vaguer than that of religion, and studies within the field
lack any shared theoretical basis.
Tony Bennett has made a
cogent defence of popular culture as a "teaching object",
a way of studying the "alignment of the relationships
between the culture and ideology of the dominant classes and
the culture of subordinated classes".
But this defence is
nevertheless premissed on the recognition that
There is no such thing as popular culture...it is
useful...only...in being used to refer, more
abstractly, to a particular set of processes and
relationships.^3
It would seem best to see if there is a theoretical
framework which will allow that "set of processes and
relationships" to be apprehended more directly.
The one which
I believe to be most fruitful is that of ideology.
118
119
1.
2.
In general, the critique of existing literature entailed
by this approach has been left implicit.
It is worth reiterating the historicity of these abstractions.
- The primacy of the Roman bishropic, valorisation of the
real or imagined attributes of classical antiqity, and
fantasies of equality (for examples), existed before Roman
Catholicism, humanism or communism. To come into being, the
latter required a specific moment of self-consciousness.
3.
Concise Oxford pjiglish Dictionary.
4.
In a similar way, anarachists protest the popular association
their creed with terrorism.
5.
Jones (1975) makes a similar' observation.
6.
Harwood (1977), Skultans (1974)
7.
A nineteenth century radical physician wrote that "politics
is medicine writ large11.
8.
\vilson (1969)
9.
David Hume, i-nnuiry, Section 10 Part 1 n A miracle is a
violation of the laws of nature: and as a. firm anc
unalter-pbie experience has established these Laws, the
proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact,
is as entire p . r any argument from experience can possibly
be imagined" (ibid:491) However, when Hume goes on, in
the second part of the essay, the doubt curing, prophecy
and the raising of the dead, Spiritualists would part
company with him.
10.
I'any Spiritualists are interested in such pet anomalies
of fringe science as the Jurin shroud, the .Bermuda triangle
or Stonehenge, but it is wthe hidden powers and abilities
of the mind" which are in focus.
11.
Macklin (1974:393)
12.
el son (1969:84)
13.
Levi-Strauss (I966:l6f).
1’he point is made again in
Iebdige's study of British Youth subcultures (1979).
14.
Wilson (1959).
15.
It is likely that some of the specific ideas of Spiritualism
are ultimately derived from Gnosticism, via Christianity
and perhaps through other, subterranean sources, but there
is no real hope of tracing any such links, even if the
project was thought worthwhile.
16.
host influential has been Geertz's definition of religion:
"a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful,
pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men
by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence
and clothing those conceptions with such an order of
factualitv that the moods and motivations seem uniouely
realistic"
(Geertz, 1966).
17.
Quoted in Eouisson (1976:27).
120
19.
T.S. Elliott, little Gidding, V.
The gnosticism of Elliott's historical/nationalist/
religious nostalgia is parallelled in the ensuing
lines of the chapter of the Tao-te Ching just quoted:
To pass on is to go further and further away.
To go further away is to return.
20.
It is again to David Hume that we must go for the
classical statement of this gap.
liume argued that
there was no logical connection between ’’is" statements
statements (Hume 1960:455f)*
and "ought"
21.
Freud (1957), Westlake (1971).
22.
lurkheim (1965)•
23.
Fourier (1971)-
24.
Wallis (1976).
25.
Wilson (1569:366).
26.
The standard put-down among Mortfielders of this
attitude was that it characterised "psychism" rather
than "Spiritualism".
27. See the bibliographies of Carroll(1977) and Ashworth (1980).
The earliest source is Plato’s Timaeus (1970).
28.
Von Daniken (1969) and others.
29.
Carroll (1977)
30.
Ashworth (1980)
31.
Ashworth uses capitals to name myths in a sense like that
established by Barthes:
"a second order semiological
system" which has been appropriated so that it distorts
reality ("Barthes, 1973:109,114).
32.
Ashworth (1980:363-365)
33.
This is materialism in the strictest sense, from which
all connotations of physicalism are excluded. Nonphysical entities (spirits and psychic forces) may be
material of the real. Or, no less "real", they may
nevertheless also stand in a relationship of signification,
representation or transcendence to the world of the senses
in which case they belong to an idealist system.
*
34.
I’ame (ano; its stepmother Creativity) are gnostic; they
confer a kind of power ano knowledge•which for the "fan"
is experienced in fantasy. The connotation c.f vulnerability}..’, of not be inf able to survive in thf "real w o r l d " ,
so frequently attached to the Star, clearly reveals the
idealism of this myth. The effort of approximating
an ideal so weakens tlu mundane self that sexual
unhappiness, drug addiction melancholy and illness may
result; conversely, they may be the levers by w h i c h the
Star b> comes sufficiently detached from the w o r l d to
121
find the ideal. A tragic death, especially an early one,
always enhances the aura of a star:
sordid reality cannot
then tarnish the ideal which he or she alive can only
imperfectly instantiate (hence the post-mortem sanctification
of Judy Garland. James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, the Kennedys,
Janis Joplin etc). These features align the myth of the
Star with cettain idealist gnosticisms of former times:
the sickly, bohemian, Artist (Keats, Schubert, van Gogh),
the Holy Innocent/Idiot, the Martyr, the Shaman.
35.
Of course, my method here is idealist.
36.
Campbell (1972)
37.
Thus Wilson (1973), Tiryakian (1976) and Drury and Tillett
(1980). Gloch and Bellah (1976) speak of the "new religious
consciousness", Davidson (1975) of the "new mysticism”.
38.
Truzzi (1976:246)
39.
For example, a survey carried out in Sydney in the mid
seventies among college students and their contacts had a
majority believing in ESP, precognition and telepathy,
and larger numbers professing credence in graphology,
faithhealing and clairvoyance than in a ’’personal*' God
(Martin, n.d.) Campbell (1971:25) cites another survey
which claims that in 1970 in Britain about 3/4 of people
"touched wood" and i "threw salt", while Warren (1970:599)
cites Gallop Poll figures indicating thau about 50% of
Americans in the 1960's believed flying saucers to be Mreal“,
and that 5% claimed to have seen one.
(A similar pei-centage
claim to have seen ghosts).
40.
Also, to speak of "beliefs” implies that possibility of
dettachment from their context - that the "belief in
reincarnation" in Mortfield is somehow identical to the
"belief in reincarnation** in Benares.
Chapter 8 makes
the same point about ”idea“.
41.
Buckner (1968:225-226)
42.
The term seems to have been first used in this sense by
Iofland and Stark (1963).
43.
Truzzi (1976:249)
44.
Metonymy is the substitution of one name for the name of
something contiguous; synechdoche of genus for species or
vice versa. My calling science metonymic and synechdochal
is itself a metonym. It is not that science itself performs
these substitutions, but rather that it is concerned with
those relationships of contiguity and classification which
underpin the linguistic processes of metonymy and synec doche.
45.
I am using Jakobson*s (1956) sense of a substitution by
.similarity, rather than the wide Aristotelian sense adopted
by Turbayne (1970:11-12), according to which metaphor is
any "improper* application of a signifying unit, a meaning
which includes metonymy, synecdoche, catachresis and in fact
all the tropes of classical rhetoric. ( Again, my usage of
this description is metonymic.) Although it often is,
mysticism need not be expressed metaphorically. But its
122
objects are those "symbolic1' relationships of resemblance
upon which metaphor plays. The metonymy/metaphor distinction
as it occurs in Spiritualist ideology is discussed in
chapter 9.
46.
Truzzi, 1976:249
47.
Ashworth (1980)
48.
Moore (1977), Barrow (1980). Brown (1970), Pearsall (1972),
Goldfarb (1978), Kerr (1972).
49.
Zaretsky (1974)
50.
Skultans (1974)
51.
locke (n.d.)
53.
Skultans, (1974), Macklin (1977) and Nelson (1969) all
make this point.
54.
Nelson (1968)
55.
There ha? in fact been scarcely any anti-Spiritualist
literature of note since McCabe (1920), but there are the
more generally anti-occult attacks of Gardner (1957), and
Randi (1980).
56.
See Popper (1959), Kuhn (1970), Lakatos (1970), Mulkay
(1979), Chalmers (1976).
57.
These terms come from the logical study of semantics
(eg Carnap, 1964); obviously I am using them to do different
work than elucidating problems of modality and intensionality.
58.
This line goes back to Feuerbach, and Marx's characterisation of religion as "the expression of real distress and
also the protest against real distress...the sigh of the
oppressed creature*1 (Marx & Engels, 1975:39).
59.
"his ir especially true of many popularisations of the
occult, where anything offbeat is taken seriously, but
the attitude also pervades some "academic" work as the
book edited by Tiryakian (1974) shows.
60.
Smith (1963).
61.
The pages of the Journal of Popular Culture, or collections
such as Bigsby (19767
are ample evidence of this.
62.
Bennett (1979:28). Hebdige (1979) uses the concept of
subculture in a similar fashion.
52.
Macklin (1974,1977)
CHAPTER 8
DISCOURSE, CODE AND TEXT
Ideology
The concept of ideology derives from the insight that what
is done and thought is dependent - and not just superficially
so - on the social environment in which thinking and doing
occur.
But this insight, true and important as it is,
scarcely constitutes a distinctive theoretical paradigm.
Rather, the use of the term signals an attempt
to conceptualise the relationship between meaningful activity
and the world, between text and context, in a particular way.
From its first use, ideology has been political, imbedded
in outlooks which associate unhappiness, inequality and lack
of freedom with the production of wrong ideas
(being
uneducated ^ , ruled by the ideas of the ruling class, not
having the right ’’line” ...). Making the text better and
making the context better are conceived as linked tasks.
2
Thus, two linked groups of questions are raised, having
their origin in the dual character of ideology as a "sociological” concept and a "political” one.
One group is addressed
to the issue of how society is reproduced:
what meanings
must exist for a social formation to function?
The other
is concerned with how and why social representations are
distortions of what they purport to represent:
why is it
that people believe to be true that which from other
perspectives, is false?
As a reproducer of social relations ideology represents the
social function of ideas, how they work to maintain social
3
order.
When incorporated into historical materialism, this
function helps to explain how ideology presents distorted
representations.
Because social order is the order of some
class or classes over others, ideology is "false", firstly
because it reflects the contradictions of a class order (a
contradiction cannot be "true”) and secondly because the social
order is oriented to the requirements of the ruling class:
ideology expresses its truth, which may not be "the" truth.4
It is too easy to say that this attribution of "false con-
sciousness" begs the question of what "true consciousness"
might be.
Ideology had a political birth, and the criticism
of ideas - which assumes a position on their truth - is
essential to it.
Besides, any use of language implicates
the user in problems of truth.
Marx's critique of classical political economy remains the
paradigm analysis of the processes through which ideology
distorts.
Briefly, it inverts, makes the part stand for
the whole, displaces, fragments and creates imaginary unities.^
Ideology and signification
Humans produce material culture by modifying nature.
They
also communicate by means of systems of communication, that
is, they produce signs, which "mediate all social life". ?
Since ideology consists of the attribution of meanings, that
is, is a signifying practice, "whereever a sign is present,
ideology is present too.
a semiotic value".
g
Everything ideological possesses
As Ivepham puts it
Ideology is structured discourse...the view that ideology
is made up of ideas is itself misleading...We cannot
understand ideological concepts or ideological
propositions as standing in some one-to-one relation
with non-ideological, non-distcrU?d factual or scientific
concepts, propositions or facts.
In fact, there are several reasons for not thinking of
ideologies as composed of ideas.
For one thing, ideas are
usually thought of as subjective thoughts or impressions,
but ideology is by definition a "social fact", and to that
extent "objective".
For another "idea" implies an autonomy
which the constituent elements of ideology lack: it makes
sense to speak of "ideas" moving from one system of "belief
to another while remaining the same, whereas ideologies, if
they are to treated as systems of signification, must be
thought of as structures in which the elements are defined
by their mutual interrelationships.
Thus, an ideology is not a bundle of "ideas" (more or less
correct, vivid, strange etc), but a structure of
interrelated signifying practices or discourses.
Two points must be made about this description.
As MacCabe
points out, the word "discourse" has a specific connotation
in recent discussions, being intended as an anti-"logicist"
(nonempiricist) and anti-subjective substitute for "theory",
"speech", "intuition" etc.^ That is, its use implicitly rejects
theories of knowledge which have as their starting point the
creation by a "knowing subject" of an idea corresponding to
a reality "out there".
Second, the word "structure", being based on the metaphor of
building, may lead the reader to think of something firm and
mechanically constructed.
like that.
in:
Ideological structures are not
They are fuzzy, organic and easy to get entangled
in Barthes’ memorable image, "sticky" . ^
Text and Code
Of critical importance in understanding the structure of
discourses are the notions of text and code.
Texts are the
products of signifying practice, the empirical reali ations
of discourse.
Codes are relatively autonomous systems of
signification within discourse.
12
Every text is an ennunciation
of the intersection of a set of codes, which are linked by
denotation and connotation, including such figures as
metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche; by logical connections
including deduction, induction, contradiction, opposition
etc; and perhaps by other, more obscure linkages.
This
structure is (more or less) learnt by individuals and
reproduced over time as all language is.
never perfect.
The process is
Misunderstandings occur; contradictions
and unsatisfying features of the structure, which are
always present, create instability and an internal dynamic;
there is ceaseless interaction with other ideologies; and
finally, the ideology must continue to make some kind of
sense of the changing material practices with which it is
associated.
Revealing how texts are constructed by the operation of
the codes which compose them, that is, decoding, is the
basic strategy by which
semiotics gives us a sort of photomechanical
explanation of semiosis, revealing that where
we thought we saw images there were only
strategically arranged aggregations of black
and white points, alternations of presense
and absence...
The issue then shifts away from the * image* of the text,
what it "means* to the meaning of the presences and
absences which compose it, the placing of its codes within
discourse.
Codes, however, are not literally "in" discourse;
but rather *in* the reading of discourse.
A reading is a
translation from one discourse to another, and the
deconstruction of an ideology is possible only from the
vantage of another ideological si te . ^
128
Contradiction and regeneration
In Marxism, ideology embodies contradictions because, in
Stuart Hall’s words, of "the fundamentally antagonistic
nature of culture under capitalist conditions*.
14
T.
For
Levi-S’
trauss, on the other hand, mythology - a term which
15
denotes a field very similar to that of ideology - is directed
to overcoming logical contradictions which may beMuniversal"
1
“natural” or "mental".
But whether it is conceived in terms
of logical opposition or of political or psychodynamic struggle,
there is wide agreement that ideology works to express and rework
contradictions.
growth:
This creates an element of instability and
ideologies strive to resolve these contradictions,
and in doing so dialectically regenerate themselves.
Different ideologies are produced in the context of different
classes, institutions, activities, interests and biographies.
An image for this multi-levelled character of ideology is
imbrication, the overlaying of tiles, although this image risks
giving insufficient emphasis to its "ready-made** heterogeneity.
Perhaps it should be said that Ideology is imbricated bricolage.
Ideology is not simply a collection of ideologies, but a
M structure-in-dominance*, in which elements and relationships
which support the ruling order predominate over those which
do not.
Hall* s summary of the place of the mass media can be
generalised; ideology as a whole does the
work of ’classifying out'the world within the discourses
of the dominant ideologies. This is neither simply, nor
consicous, ’work’ : it is contradictory work - in part
because of the internal contradictions between those
different ideologies which constitute the dominant
terrain, but even more because these ideologies struggle
and contend for dominance in the field of class practices
and class struggle. There is no way in which the ’work’
can be carried through without, to a considerable degree,
also reproducing the contradictions which structure its
field.
Thus the regenerative, dialectical tendency of ideologies
is materially constrained.
Ideological transformations
which do not serve the hegemonic structuring of the social
circumstances in which they arise may encounter active
resistance,^ or incorporation^.
They are censored (like
pornography), suppressed (like political dissent), or
relegated to specialised, institutional contexts (like
v 20
sociology;.
When they appear to be fairly "harmless",
they become marginal: like Spiritualism.
Spiritualism as a marginal ideology
A product of the mid-nineteenth century, Spiritualism has
remained ever since on the ideological margin, slowly
waning, in a state of semi-suspended animation.
Nevertheless
it remains sufficiently attractive to have maintained itself
for more than a century, and most of the time has been
regarded by the state as "harmless".
raises three sets of questions.
This situation
One has to do with why
and how Spiritualism is marginal^that is, with those features
which are disjunctive from or in opposition to the ruling
ideologies. Another has to do with Spiritualism as a
transformation of dominant ideological structures, that is,
with those features which have saved it from extinction cr
suppression.
Finally, there is the issue of why Spiritualism
has continued to be attractive for sone people.
Spiritualists
are aesthetic consumers (and producers). Their activities
give them pleasure, which is why they continue to pursue
them, rather than spending their leisure reading, playingsport watching television or making love21- which is
not to say they are never bored with their activities
130
(they quite often are).
Spiritualism is a marginal ideology, ♦’deviant” by the norms
of dominant ideologies.
Nevertheless, it is closely
related to those dominant ideologies, both in its assumptions
and values, and in the way it constitutes itself as an
" entertainment” .
The following chapters analyse this compound
of traditional texts and variable beliefs, of stereotyped
practices and fragile groups, as a system of signification.
22
In the following chapter I discuss six codes which I argue
comprise the core of Spiritualist discourse.
For Spiritualists,
this discourse, and the hegemonic discourses of which it is
itself a transformation, constitute a familiar.
Spiritualist
texts appear to create pleasure by "playing around” , that is,
transforming this familiar, so that it assumes forms which
are both novel and recognisable as transformations of the
known.
ChapterslO and 11 illustrate by textual analysis two
of the characteristic ways in which this is done.
1.
131
••De Tracy's school of 'ideologues' .. .wants to educate
the French people, and above all, the young people, so
that a rjust and happy society can be established" (larrain,
1979:27)
2.
larrain (I979:17ff); Hall (1977b).
3.
This role is given particular emphasis in Althusser’s
influent!pi essay (1971).
4.
These are the crucial theses of the seminal fragment, The
German Ideology (Marx & Engels, 1978)
5.
When the concept of ideology as a misleading phenomenal
form is abandoned, the use of the word moves out of the
materialist orbit. Cf the discussions of Lacan in Willemen
(1978:67-69), Garnham (1979) and larrain (1979:168-169).
6.
Hall (1977a: 323,337); Poulantzas (1973).
7.
Hall (1977a: 32a).
8.
V.N. Volosinov, Karxism and the Philosophy of language,
quoted in Hall (T977a:329).
9.
Kepham (1974:102).
10.
KacCabe (1978/9:29f).
11.
3arthes writes of “ an implacable stickiness* which is
"the essence of ideology" (1975:29).
12.
For extended treatments, see Eco (l976:32ff), Metz (1970),
Barthes (1974J.
13.
Eco (1976:50).
14.
Hall (1977a:323).
15.
levi-Strauss (1963:209).
16.
Ibid:229. levi-Strauss's use of expressions derived from
structural phonemics, and Greimas' “ semantic square"
(Leo, 1976:81f) are examples of formalisations of such
logical oppositions.
17.
Hall (1977a:346).
18.
Hall, referring to Gramsci, stresses that hegemony Hhas to
be actively won and secured; it can also be lost1* (l977a:333).
Connell_and Irving (1980) is a writing of Australian history
from this perspective.
19.
Hebdige (1979:93f).
In a paper about scientology, Wallis
(1975a) has shown how the resistance of "society** can
accelerate the marginalisation of a movement, driving it
to greater - extremism” , a point already r^ade in Cohen (1972)Willemen (1979:67).
21.
Barthes has lamented that
22.
Since speech and writing are the central and the most
elaborate forms of signifying practice, ideologies are
realized most centrally in spoken and written texts.
It is not accidental that Spiritualism, in common with
most marginal and ostracised movements, has developed
its own dialect, a jargon which "includes lexical items
which label every facet of the church life and belief
system” (Zaretsky, 1974:166).
hedonism has been repressed by nearly every
philosophy...It seems that (our) society
refuses (and ends up by ignoring) bliss to such
a point that it can produce only epistemologies
of the law ^and of its contestation), never of it
absence, or better still: of its nullity.
(1975
90).
132
CHAPTER 9
THE CODES OF SPIRITUALISM
In what follows I discuss six codes of which Spiritualist ideology
may be viewed as an intersection.
particular codes is motivated:
My choice of these
I want to indicate that
Spiritualism incorporates and modifies codes which are
important in the dominant ideologies of the social context
in which it survives.
different set of codes.
Other purposes might generate a
But this does not imply that
Spiritualism could be fruitfully analysed in terms of any
set of codes equally easily.
In the first place, the six
codes correspond to categories which Spiritualists themselves
use in explaining what they do and believe.
Second, as
the analysis of Spiritualist texts in chapter 11 shows,
these systems of meaning are constantly alluded to in
Spiritualist practice.
I have given the codes such names as "Communication”,
"the Symbolic", "love”, and "Science".
In this context,
such terms do not have their normal denotation (the media
of communication, the domain of symbols, the emotion of love,
the institutions of science etc).
A code is a meaningful
system, a set of signs organised according to certain rules
which form a space within which meaning is created - which
does not mean that the rules are never broken, modified or
replaced, or that this semiotic space must be filled.
In
simpler cases, like the "logical codes" of chess notation
or botanical description, ^ the rules can be specified and
are complete.
For the more general, fuzzier, cultural codes
which constitute ideology, like those discussed in this
chapter, and the code of amour dissected by Barthes,
p
the
rules are too complex, shifting and ambiguous to be clearly
formulated, and are incomplete:
all that can be done is to
indicate the site upon which they operate, the place of the
space formed by them.
A code includes the myths attached to its name.
Thus any
135
model of message flow (or its absence) belongs to the space
formed by the code of Communication;
Love (which in Spiritualist
discourse is only weakly linked to sexuality) points to that
which generates expressions of kindness, sympathy, caring,
giving, incorporation and oneness; Science indicates the
domains of experiment, theory, causation and the inquiring
attitude; Individualism signifies pluralism, tolerance,
autonomy, selfishness, charisma etc.
A code includes the antonyms of its name.
Faith (and also
Culture, Art, rteligion etc) inhabits the site of Science, as
Science inhabits the site of Faith; Love also connotes
suffering; the rules which define the individual reciprocally
define the collcctive.
The manifestation of these codes in Spiritualist discourse
is intrinsically incomplete and contradictory, a mirror of
primary process:
Ultimately it is unimportant whether the text's dispersion is rich here and poor there; there are nodes,
blanks, many figures break off short...he who utters
this discourse...does not yet know that as a good
cultural subject h<-. shouiti neither repeat nor contradict
himself, nor take the whole for the part; all he knows
is that what passes through his mind at a certain
moment is marked,like the printout of a code.
The limits of discourse cannot be defined. For that reason
following resume of Spiritualist codes is, like them,
incomplete and "intuitive".
yjach of us can fill in (these codes) according to his
own history; rich or poor, the figure must be there,
the site (the compartment) must be reserved for it...
the property of a Topic is to be somewhat empty: a
Topic is statutorily half coded, half projective (or
projective because coded).
What we have been able to
say below...is no more than a modest supplement offered
to the reader to be made free with, to bemadded to,
subtracted from, and passed on to others.
Communication
It is not accidental that so many words in the Spiritualist
jargon have today acquired a primary referrent in understand
ings of modern forms of communication, especially of broadcasting.
For examples:
medium, message, tune in.
transmit, contact, control, channel
Spiritualism, which assumed its
present form about the time that the technical means of
electronic communication were becoming forseeable, is,like
them, concerned with a form of communication which is
intermediate between direct perception and traditional
means of representation like the verbal description or the
drawing.
like the latter, electronic communication is
mediated by technology, and, at least since the invention
of recording, is not govern, ed by the constraints of "real
time".
On the other hand, unlike the painting or book,
it presents; it does not represent.
It is a transcription,
not an imitation.
The Spiritualist medium is like a camera or microphone,
through which Spirit, however fugitively and with what
distortion, is conveyed.
She does not bear the inscriptions
of Spirit; rather, Spirit "comes through" her.
She is a
medium or a channel; she tunes in anc having made contact,
transmits messages and is controlled.
Spirits, it is said, are eager to communicate with the
living.
They usually have benevolent intentions, being
either former acquaintances wishing to demonstrate their
continued existence, or guides who desire to pass on
"elevating" advice and information.
/lthough often
attributed "higher" wisdom and greater knowledge than the
living, spirits are not infallible; sometimes, as in
"rescue work”, it is they who stand in need of advice.
But always the basic mode of discourse with Spirit is
pedagogical and didactic.
When mediums and spirits communicate
what they do is teach and preach to each other and their
witnesses.
5
"Messages" are also "lessons” .
The complexity and ambiguity of the Spiritual communication
circuits can be illustrated by a consideration of the
central Spiritualist ritual practice of divination.
(Although Spiritualists themselves are sensitive about
accusations of "fortune telling", because of its association
with legal persecution, psychometry, including
*
flower
reading’^ clearly belongs in this category.)
Divination is concerned with a flow of information from the
world to the diviner (in this case, the medium).
This
communicative process involves a special part of reality
which is "marked off" and in some way or other catalyses
the information flow.
It also involves Spirit, because
divinatory information is paranormal, anomalous in terms
of conventional expectations.
Without the term of Spirit,
divination becomes diagnosis, the perusal of symptoms in
£
search of underlying conditions.
Without the marked off
catalyst, the omen or portent, divination reduces to
clairvoyance.^
Scores of divinatory techninues have been practised, from
aeromancy (which uses the weather as omen) to x.ylomancy
(twigs or burning logs).
Craens are often produced by human
activity, as in the fall of the T'arot cards, the cast of the
I Ching yarrow stalks, the administration of poison to an
animal, or the distribution of tealeaves in a cup, although
138
as astrology, palmistry or phrenology show, human intervention is not necessary.
What is necessary is that the pattern
or process which is taken as the omen be free of intentional
manipulation.
Divination privileges an aspect of reality
which is out of human control, and reads into it a human
significance
Jpiritualists tend to be attracted to all kinds of popular
divinatory techniaues, such as astrology, palmistry, the
Q
'J'arot, biorhythmic analysis and tealeaf readings, but at
Mortfield flower reading is the central and most elaborated
divinatory p r a c t i c e . F l o w e r reading is "explained”
(implicitly, except by Spiritualist intellectuals, who may
bring the matter into consciousness) by at least four
different models of information flow, which are outlined
below.
(I) Psychometry.
Psychometry was "discovered" by Joseph Buchanan, a nineteenth
century American physician, who advocated it as a method of
medical diagnosis.^ Buchanan himself suggested a Mesmeristic
explanation
12
which Sepharial links with the aura:
The functions of this sense...imply...the existence
of subtile aura attaching itself to every material
object...This aura...is a storehouse of every experience
attaching to the body it is related to...
This provides an inbuilt explanation for psychometric
failures.
The psychometric sense may be interfered with
if the object has been handled by more than one person
who will impress his or her "vibrations”.
That is why only
the person who wants a reading should touch the flowers
presented to the medium at the flower service.
139
(2) Guidance
However, it is also normally believed by Spiritualists that
in delivering messages, a medium is directed by his or her
guide(s).
Sometimes, too, the guides of the recipient pass
on messages to the. medium.
In a reading, for example, a
medium might say
I can see a nun in Spirit standing behind you.
She would be about fifty years old.
Her face is wonderful
a beautiful person
She instructs me to tell you that she is going to
take good care of you
and to keep your pecker up.
(Mrs Miller, flower reading)
Medium? frequently make such references to guides and other
Spirit information sources, this appeal to authority being basic,
to the fabrication of message authenticity.
(3) Telepathy
Some Spiritualists argue that there is a large element of
telepathy in psychometry, that the omen functions to facilitate mental communication. (Whether this communication is
with the recipient, people significant to the recipient,
or spirits, is not very clear, but in any case the imagery
and conditions which the medium "picks up” must be allowed
to be ones of which the recipient is not necessarily
conscious).
This interpretation is along the lines given
by Mario Schoenmaker, a Perth "psychic” discussed by .
Drury and Tillett.^ Not a Spiritualist, but sharing much
of their jargon and interests, Schoenmaker, hpving studied
tarot cards, pendulums, crystal balls and so on...
believes that all these material things, including the
photograph and item of personal jewellery that he may
use, are simply points of focus for 'tuning in'. They
have no particular value in themselves.
Here the medium is implicitly depicted as a counsellor or
confessor with a special technique for gaining access to
her clients’ minds, and the flowers "become “centering
devices" which enable the medium to concentrate her clairvoyant
faculties.
This is a very common interpretation of teacup
readings.
(4 ) Clairvoyant diagnosis
Drury and Tillett contrast Schoenmaker with a palmist, who
believes that "he has no intuitive or psychic gifts at all,
receives no impressions and does no 'tuning in'".
Hedgcock "is as scientific as possible.
Mr.
It is never guess-
work or 'intuition', but an exact analysis of specific
aspects of the hands’’"^.
Here the paranormal element
("Spirit" or whatever), if it enters at all, arises in the
connection between the "world" and the omen (ie,it
is not
clear how a person's fate impresses itself on the palm).
17
Drawing "clairYoyant” conclusions from the physical properties
of an object presented for psychometry does not make any
sort of “common sense", and some mediums, aware of this,
speak of being "thrown off the track" by them (that a pansy
makes me think of thought should not imply that the person
who presented it is thoughtful...). But other mediums do
not see this as a problem. Mrs Bragg, for example, was in the
habit of basing entire readings on the appearance of the
flower, proceeding from stem to leaves to petals, and
relating the colours, wilt, texture etc of each to
alleged conditions affecting the recipient.
In this case,
a causal “Scientific" interpretation seems to have been
abandoned entirely in favour of the Symbolic principle of
correspondence.
141
The endemic ambiguity of Spiritualist communication circuits
will come up again, when the "bases of “evidence** in the code
of Science are considered.
The different models of divination
above include almost every possible circuit:
in psychometry,
from world to omen to medium, with Spirit operating as
facilitator; in guidance, from world to Spirit to medium,
with the omen as facilitator; in telepathy, from world to
someone's mind (via ordinary perception) to medium (with
Spirit and omen facilitating the last stage); in clairvoyant
diagnosis, from world to omen (facilitated by Spirit) to
medium.
What is important is not how but that:
the world
is, for this code, a vast network of informational exchange,
upwards, downwards and across.
Life is a school, in which
humans and spirits, pupils all, though in different grades,
struggle to imbibe knowledge and graduate to the ultimate
gnosis.
Individualism
Spiritualists place great stress on the principle that an
individual's fate is ultimately determined by the life
choices made by that person.
Two of the seven "Principles
of Spiritualism" drawn up by the British Spiritual National
Union in 1950, which at Mortfield functioned almost as a
catechism, are "personal responsibility" and the related
••compensation and retribution hereafter for all the good and
18
evil deeds done on earth".
These principles imply "selfhelp"; not only material success but also psychic development
19
and spiritual progress are "up to the individual".
The
endemic pluralism of the Spiritualist movement has already
20
been mentioned.
The code of Individualism aanifests itself especially in
three Spiritualist contexts:
the construction of mediumship,
the relationship of freewill to "salvation” (gnosis), and
the "problem of evil”.
(a) Mediumship as gift/faculty.
Cn the one hand psychic ability and the attainment'of '
gnosis are constructed by Spiritualists as ‘‘natural gifts",
bestowed on some and lacking in others.
But they are also
seen as "perfectible qualities"; all humans have equal "psychic
potential".
This contradiction provides one of the main
axes along which competition between mediums is played out.
The first idea justifies
elitism and fatalism; the second
supports egalitarianism and freewill.
21
(b) Gnosis and freewill
“Personal responsibility" denies original sin and grace.
In terms of Troeltsch:s categories, it opposes the ecclesiastical, but contains elements of both mystical and sectarian
soteriologies.
In its insistence that the individual will
be rewarded or punished according to his or her own efforts,
it shares an
original impulse of dissenting Protestantism.
But Spiritualism is mystical in its refusal to posit a final
judgement, and in its depersonalisation of the dietv to the
point where God hardly bears any resemblance to the loving
and threatening parent figure of sectarian soteriology.
Fatalism and freewill are placed in an equilibrium which
can easily become unstable.
(c) The problem of evil
like all beliefs which hold out hope for the suffering by
maintaining that the universe is basically good, Spiritualism
is caught up in a fundamental problem:
why is there evil
in the world at all? Answers to this question within
143
particular ideologies are closely bound up with their
placement of the individual subject, and again, Spiritualism
reveals fundamental ambiguities.
Weber gave the name theodicies to "consistent philosphies
of moral meaning" which attempt to answer this question.
Spiritualism does not have a theodicy in this sense.
22
it
combines aspects of the doctrine of karma, "which postulates
a complete closure of the moral system over timespans
altogether incommensurable with the human life span",
with elements which embody tne conception of a transcendent
providence, u an absolute, all-powerful God, whose ’motives'
23
are in principle inaccessible to human understanding".
The problem of evil remains unsolved
24
, and Spiritualists waver
between four possible "solutions" to it:
evil is caused by
the
weakness of the powers of good, in particular of good spirits;
by the moral and psychic failings of people; by a basic flaw
25
in the design of the universe;
or is, perhaps together
with the physical world in general, an illusion which vgreater
understanding" will unravel, 2 6 as the following passage from a
sermon delivered at a National Spiritualist Conference suggests:
Some people say
if you're sick you should stay sick
because it's an act of God.
But in my opinion
God
never made anything in this world which is impure.
It is the hand of man that has made things the way they are
and anyway it's the physical body that suffers all these
ailments
and when the physical comes into it
it’s got nothing to do with God
it’s got to do with man himself.
Personal responsibility has a positive and a negative side.
holds out hope for each individual to "succeed", but it also
confronts humanity with an image of its inadequacy;
world is a good place, but spoilt because humans are
the
It
144
"unworthy” of their freedom.
This in a familiar guilt paradigm.
But it is in the back-
ground of Spiritualist thought, since other explanations of
evil may be easily activated (as providence or illusion).
Love
When Spiritualists reflect upon what they do and why they
do it, the concept of love predominates.
Spiritualists say
that the "work” they are involved in is one of "service to
humanity", and believe that "the inability to give and
receive love is the fundamental cause of the world’s problems."
Cne of the few passages in the Christian Bible which can be
read as endorsing Spiritualist practices is Paul’s first
letter to the Corinthians, in which "spiritual gifts" are
discussed, among which are named prophecy, healing, miracleworking and ecstatic utterance.
The author limits the
importance of these activities by arguing that they are
simply aspects of the same immanent power:
There are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit. There
are varieties of service, but the same Lord. There are
many forms of work, but all of them, in all men, are the
work of the same God. In each of us the Spirit is
manifested in one particular way, for some useful purpose.
This passage is followed by a renowned paean to love which
many Spiritualists appear to know virtually by heart:
I may speak in tongues of men or of angels, but if I
am without love, I am a sounding gong or a clanging
cymbal. I may have the gift of prophecy and know
every hidden truth; I may have faith strong enough to
move mountains; but if I have no love I am nothing.
I may dole out all I possess, or even give my body to
be burnt, but if I have no love, I am none the better.
...Are there prophets? their work will be over. Are
there tongues of ecstasy? they will cease. Is there
knowledge? it will vanish away; for all our knowledge
and our prophecy alike are partial, and the partial,
vanishes when wholeness comes...In a word, there are
91
three things that last for ever: faith, hogg and
love; but the greatest of them all is love.
These sentiments echo through the whole of the Spiritualist
outlook.
According to Jimmy Green, a medium is
" a person
who has decided to do God’s work for humanitarian motives
and gives out messages from Spirit to help their fellow man!1
Both he and Bill Maddigan told me that they considered
Spiritualism to be a form of social work.
As Jimmy explained
in the Mortfield Church magazine which he edited, people
drawn to Spiritualist churches are often
sad or lonely or depressed; on their downers,
recovering from a broken marriage or an unhappy love
affair, some mixed up, still others looking for answers
or seeking spiritual truths. No greater service can
be chosen by man, or woman, in their service of God,
than mediums developing to the extent that they can
alleviate pain or distress. All we are doing is following God's commandement by using the spiritual gifts
promised to,us in his name by St Paul in I orinthians
Chapter 12.
There is an ambivalence in the Spiritualist code of love,
captured in the opposition of the Greek agape and eros, as
construed by Nyrgren:
Agape is the New Testament word for Love, and the noun
had virtually to be invented to express it; the verb
was used among other things, for the patient seeking
of another's well-being, no matter whether they responded.
The Platonic tradition in particular took eros as
aspiration towards God, a kind of sublimation of sexual
desire, a direction of the libido towards the spiritual. ^
The goal of gnosis, even while, in the Spiritualist ideology,
it is intrinsically bound up with agape, with service, is
34
fundamentally self-centred,
and therefore erotic. "Each
soul's progress is an individual and often lonely one.
The
journey back to one's source has to be bravely undertaken".
Although the lover of gnosis needs the love of others, and
although to "progress" one must give love to others, the
giving of love may so weaken the self through "powerdrain"
35
146
that the quest may be endangered.
Therefore mediums often warn that one should not become too
involved in helping others.
Personal responsibility may
be invoked as a counter to agape :
There are many times
in life
when we just want to sit and cry
when we see the problems people are coining to.
We see the problems that we ourselves and our kids and
our loved ones fall into
and it's a lot harder sometimes
to stand back and not pick them up
much harder and it hurts much deeper.
I3ut if they don't l<arn to walk
not only kids but all of us
then what we gain in one way we lose in another.
So to me Spiritualism is a wonderful philosophy.
It has taught us all
these principles
but over and above all
it has taught us personal responsibility.
(Mrs Iviller, sermon)
Sometimes love (agape) ip contrasted with discipline:
vo matter how difficult it is
to share love with discipline
discipline is still part of the things God's given us.
(Andy Johnson,sermon)
In chapter 5 I mentioned that Spiritualists use two Urms
for mediumistic ability:
"Spiritualism", which is laudatory,
and "psychism", which is derogatory.
It seems clear that the
former represents agape (it is selfless, dedicated to serving
humanity), whereas psychism is a pure manifestation of eros,
of power and knowledge sought for its own sake.
It is possible to discern attempts with Spiritualism to overcome this opposition between agape and eros, Spiritualism
and Psychism.
Cne is along thf lines of Newton's
vision of a continually active and creative God whose
love for his creation was imperfectly mirrored in
human love, as it was, at a lower level, in the cosmic
sympathy, immanent in a spiritus,which bound the
147
universe together.
37
This leads to the Symbolic code, discussed below. Another resolution
of the antinomy is some practical solution which emphasises
the "work” of Spiritualism.
IQ
Above all, it is healing which
most clearly works tc reconcile the tension with Spiritualism
engenders between the imperative to progress towards gnosis,
and the imperative to love and give to others.
Making this
explicit, Boddington writes that healing is a "solvent” for
the problem of "psychic powers" versus "spiritual insight",
since it both makes "a breach in the walls of materialism"
(as an anomalous phenomenon) and "through its sympathetic
treatment of suffering ennoblers the healer and expands .
the soul of the sufferer by gratitude".
XQ
As this passage indicates, love and suffering are complements
in Spiritualist ideology - one evokes the other.
especially reveals itself in two contexts.
with health, happiness and healing.
Suffering
One is the concern
The other is the risk
of madness and worldly ruin associated with the gift ana
pursuit of mediumship.
^he path of the Spiritualist medium does not involve ordeals
and trials of physical and mental strength associated with
many shamanistic cultures and some movements within contemporary
occultism.
one:
Nevertheless, the goal of progress is a dangerous
the "psychic sense" which the medium aims to "develop"
is not easily distinguishable from, and can become, madness,
and this is a risk of which Spritiualists are keenly aware.
Thus, a columnist in a British Spiritualist newspaper makes
mention of a "closing down" exercise, by means of which
a person who is clairvoyant or has potential mediumship,
which is causing some embarassment or discomfort, can
be taught to close the channel until he or she is
ready, or desires, to use these gifts in some type of
148
In conversation, Mortfielders'concern about the danger
of madness was shown "by remarks like:
There are just as many people in lunatic asylums
"because of religious fanaticism as from drugs.
(Robbie Robinson)
One day, if he keeps on the way he's going, that
guy is going to meet the real thing, and when he does,
he'll fly apart.
(Andy Johnson, of Ray Maddigan)
My mother can't bear crowds. It's because of her
spirituality, because as you get higher, you become
more vulnerable to spiritual attack.
(Elizabeth Johns)
Somehow the medium has to contain or resolve the contradictions
of Spiritualist belief, as well as the eaually pressing and,
as I would argue, fundamentally identical contradictions of
society in general.
This need presses upon mediums with
particular insistence, and is the source of the power of the
image of the moving eouilibrium within Spiritualist ideology.
Growth is not simply expansion:
it must also be regulated
and balanced.^
In this work, the first thing is to have balance.
(Robbie)
I would say to you
as you move througkuthis great flowing imitation of
earthly time ^
as you move forward into that which is to unfold as
the new age
so do you need to understand
the harmmy which is needed
that the body
and the heart
and the mind
may be maintained
in beauty
and in pep.ee. (r'rance lecture)
Progress
Cne of the principles laid down by the. i-.ritish S.'J.U. states that
149
there is a path of Eternal Progress open to every
human soul thaX wills to tread it by the path of
Eternal Good.
In a general sense, Spiritualism connotes Progress in the
manner of all gnostic occultisms and miraculous systems.
The sign formed from the relationship of anomaly and the
Beyond signified by it is itself a signifier of ascent,
transcendence and progress.^
"uplifting":
(That is why miracles are
if they fail to "lift up", they fail as miracles,
and are merely confusing or frightening). The "language of
45
growth" ' is one which Spiritualism shares with many
similar movements.
Within Spiritualism, Progress is open to both "agapic" or
"erotic" interpretations.
In the first sense, the Law of
Progress means that everyone is, or could be, or should be,
becoming more selfless, kind and understanding.
In the
second sense, the Law means that everyone (now or in some
future
life) is moving towards greater psychic power and
knowledge.
June Macklin has noted that the notion of progress held by
the New England Spiritualists studied by her was anachronistic
in its particular stress on the optimistic individualism
associated with 19th century capitalism, particularly in
its "Yankee" variant.^
Something of this also lingers in
the attitudes of some of the older members of Mortfield church,
but for most of the younger ones the idea of progress has
taken on the more consciousness-oriented and fatalistic
shades of "New Age" mysticism:
progress is seen less as
"self-improvement", and more as the expansion of awareness.
The Spiritualist notion of progress has two features which
justify the description "Faustian".4?
Firstly, in Spiritualist
150
discourse about "progressing", there is a tendency to
exclude meanings or values which transcend "human" ones.
Robbie Robertson's Danikenist interpretation of the Gospels
is an only slightly extravagant example of this tendency.
According to him, Jesus was a visitor from the "Universe
of Nebadon".
What the average Spiritualist fails to appreciate is
that although Jesus the Christ did a wonderful job in
visiting us and helping us, he was also helping himself.
His status, His spiritual prestige, was enhanced and
uplifted among His fellow Spiritual Princes by His
descending to the lowest rung ofgthe ladder to live
the life of an ordinary mortal.
This passage also illustrates another frequently recurring
"Faustian" idea, that the individual must take on all worldly
and other worldly attributes (the "highest" and the "lowest")
49
to further its upward reach.
Cne medium informed a meeting
that he was looking forward to being reincarnated as a
woman.
He knew this would happen, since in its spiritual
progression the soul has to experience existence both as a
male and as a female.
He added that for the same reason
souls are reborn under every astrological sign of the zodiac.
Science:
50
anomalies and proofb
The influence of Science on Spiritualism is shown in part
by the number of words in the Spiritualist jargon, which
allude to scientific methodology ("proof", "demonstration",
"evidence", "condition")or translate mental or psychic
pheonomena into physical imagery ("projection", "powerdrain",
"wavelength", "vibration", "positive", "negative").
metaphor of place is particularly prominent:
The
mental conditions
are "with" people, a medium "places" a message, entities
"attach" themselves and may be "thrown off" or "picked up"
etc.
— ^
".. .
Secondly, there is the preoccupation of Spiritualists with
finding proof or evidence of Spirit.
Spiritualism retains a positivism inherited from its origins
as a nineteenth century attempt to ’’prove" (scientifically)
the correctness of "faith” (in life after death ) . ^
Though
ambiguous, the motto "There is no religion higher than Truth"
is usually given a positivist interpretation, to mean "Don’t
believe anything you haven't experienced for yourself".
But this scientism does not cut very deep.
CO
Spiritualism is
much less confident about the validity of its beliefs than
Science is in its laws and theories, as Spiritualism's endless
search for "proof" indicates.
Spiritualists, adherents of a
minority creed that is more often ridiculed than taken
seriously, are defensive.
The most active and apparently
convinced members of Mortfield frequently expressed this
tension:
They (the spirits) send you false information to test
your faith. Sometimes they give you things to think
about, too.
(Elizabeth Johns)
They take you up just to bring you down.
(Jimmy Green)
Sometimes I wonder if 1 should give it all away.
(Robbie Robinson)
Spiritualists have evolved a complex patterning of faith and
53
doubt.
When the "evidence* is plausible, they are positivists,but
if positivism threatens basic tenets, they are likely to
turn to mysticism.
But this tension can only provide the ground for more doubt,
which in turn can only be dispelled by further "proof".
We all know that at certain times we need proof
and then afterwards
reproof
of what we have found
Sometimes light and vision are taken away.
How can I do what is right in these times.
It is not easy to stand up for truth.
(William Veldt, a sermon)
The need for "proof and reproof" becomes a compulsive craving,
and forms the underlying rationale of Spiritualist ritual.
Spiritualist ritual is concerned with providing a context
in which either (a) spirits can affirm their existence by
presenting themselves to the living and authenticate themselves
54
by supplying "evidence", that they are who they claim to
be, or (b) the "phenomena" described in chapter3 can be
exhibited, in order to demonstrate the reality of a world
"beyond the physical".
There is, in fact, much effort made by Spiritualists to
insure that the phenomena they seek are "genuine".
aspects of the flower service illustrate this.
Some
There is an
acute awareness that mediums might be alleged to fudge their
readings in the way described by Joseph Me Cabe, who explains
that mediums
watch carefully the faces of sitters and find their
way by changes of expression. "I see a young man"
says the medium, with half-closed but very watchful
eyes. There is no response on behalf of the sitter.
"I see the form of a young woman - a child", the medium
goes on. At the right shot the sitter’s face lights
up with joy and eagerness, and the fishing goes on.
Probably in the end, or after a time, the sitter will
tell people how the clairvoyant saw the form of her
darling child "at once".
The flower service and psychometry in general offer an
"evidential" advantage over other kinds of mediumship, because
the medium does not, or is not supposed to, know the identity
56
of the person to whom he is giving a message.
It is true that some clues are available concerning who
"brought which flower.
Mediums are occasionally in the church
or hall when the audience enters, and might have an opportunity
to identify bringers of flowers by noting the colour and shape
of the bags they are wrapped in.
The bags axe placed in the
tray roughly in the order of entry, and if the medium has had
a chance to observe the latter, it could conceivably provide
another source of clues.
In a reasonably small group it is
easy to deduce the owner of the last flower.
Finally, guesses
can sometimes be made about the personality and mood of the
bringer of a flower from the nature of the floral offering.
57
For the majority of mediums conscious attempts at fraud would
be exceptional.
In any case, if anything ever occurs in a
Spiritualist service which cannot be explained by assuming
that mediums are ouickwittcd, imaginative, and able to
communicate vividly, I never observed it.
It is a problem that the more fraud-proof a procedure, the
less spectacular it is.
Early Spiritualism specialized in
rappings, levitations, materializations and so on, but such
phenomena were repeatedly exposed as tricks.
In abandoning
them, Spiritualism has cut its risks, but also forgone the
prospect of really "miraculous” demonstrations.
In any case, in all Spiritualist ritual the presence of a
medium is required to make contact with Spirit, and this
opens up a second area of doubt.
In addition to qualms about
the reality of Spirit, there is room for skepticism about the
validity of claims by individuals to be sufficiently "developed"
to sensejdescribe,and communicate with Spirit accurately.
Unanimous agreement about the distribution of ''development1'
among these who claim it is never achieved in mainstream
Spiritualism, leading to what Locke appropriately calls
Ma culture of imperfect charisma".
cp
154
A believer is not obliged
to take any failure of a "proof of Spirit” as evidence against
the existence of Spirit.
Such failures can be, and usually are,
ascribed to the medium, who is presumed to be insufficiently
developed, to have misinterpreted Spirit, to have been misled
by a mischievous or malevolent entity, to have suffered a
59
powerdrain from a hostile medium etc.
The supplementary
need for ’’proof of thf medium” therefore becomes primary,
since if Spirit is refuted to anyone’s satisfaction, that
person ceases to be a Spiritualist.
The "proof of Spirit"
for those who continue to be Spiritualists thus becomes an
investigation of the quality of individual mediums.
So it comes about that demonstrations are competitions, in
which mediums pitch themselves against Spirit.
The audience
of the Spiritualist demonstration is preoccupied with comparing
the merits of different mediums.
Liking one medium more than
another is explained - pluralistically - by the Law of Sympathy
(below):
"like attracts like’’. ^
Prom all this, it follows that it is quite consistent for
mediums to denigrate the abilities of other mediums, doubt
their own powers, and issue warnings against "gullibility",
as in the following examples
Conversation between Ray Ferguson, Robbie Robinson and
Elizabeth Johns:
Ray:
Robbie:
Ray:
Robbie:
I don't know. I feel my powers are going
off a bit lately. I think, well, it's
because I've been ignoring my clairvoyance.
My clairvoyance has almost gone I think. And
other things too. I've been trying to concentrate
on getting the names and addresses of people.
I've had some success with that, but maybe I'm
trying too hard.
Listen, you can't choose what you want to do.
It's them up there who make the decisions.
Yes, yes, I know that, but I feel, I feel
strongly, that they want me to do this.
Ray f y0U know, and everyone else knows,.that
' 155
that’8 because you've been trying too hard.
Elizabeth:
Yes, that's right. Sometime
they take it
away from you, and when they do that, you've
just got to accept it, because it means that
they're preparing you for something higher.
A sermon of Mrs Miller:
Someone might came along to a meeting with a business
problem
and the medium might contact that person's mother.
Now let's say that the mother says through the medium
sign the document.
let us be honest with ourselves
many people who come to church would take this as advice
to sign
and then if- things went badly
they would blame the medium.
But they forget that the mother might have been the
worst businessman in the world.
Understand this:
all Spiritualism does
is contact spirits in the Astral
and there are just as many dunderheads up there as
there are down here.
If you've got business problems you should take them
to a business consultant.
Part of a conversation with Ray Ferguson:
How was Johnny Glen tonight? About half right? Well
that's about average for him. Mind you, it takes a
really good medium to be right eighty, ninety, one
hundred per cent of the time. Only really famous
mediums are that good. Jimmy and Elaine and me, well,
we're not in that class, but those people, people like
John and Robbie and William Veldt, they're not developing
now. They've got to a certain level and they stay with
that.
Far from imposing a rigid formula for assessing the worth of
alleged "proofs of Spirit", Spiritualism encourages the
proliferation of interpretive options.
This is shown if
we compare the Spiritualist with the skeptical position
regarding an alleged "phenonenon".
The latter has to decide
between "luck", trickery, suggestibility, or some unknown
physical explanation.
The Spiritualist may, without
sacrificing his beliefs, opt for any of these possibilities,
as well as construing the pheonomenon as a genuine signifier
of Spirit.
But this pluralism works to invalidate the status of phenomena
as evidence.
For an event to be evidential, it must be placed
within a model of causal interaction.
Spiritualist phenomena,
however, are not construed in an unambiguous way:
as
a result,
the most that could be said of them is that they only
constitute an incomplete ’’proof11 6f a "Beyond”.
Without going too minutely into the epistemological ramifications
of this claim, I will illustrate it by outlining some of the
different models which Spiritualists use to construe
"phenomena”,
and which constitute them as intractably ambiguous "evidence".
(l) Physical phenomena
In many ways the simplest Spiritualist phenomena are those
which resemble the stereotypical "miracle”, where an "obvious"
violation of the "laws of nature" occurs.
It may be that
these never happen; however, the point is that even if they
did, it would not be possible to give them a coherent meaning
within Spiritualist ideology.
phenomenon of apportage.
Take, for example, the
If genuine, at least three causal
models could explain its occurrence.
(a) The medium wills that an object pass through solid matter.
The power of Spirit joins with this will, which then is able
to cause the anomaly.
Apportage is a "supernatural ability";
Spirit is the "motor" of this ability.
(b) The medium wills that the power of Spirit cause an object
to pass through solid matter.
Apportage is not an ability,
but an effect of having harnessed Spirit to one’s will;
Spirit functions not as a "motor", but as a "tool".
It is true this difference is not clearcut.
The difference
between a motor and a tool is clear enough in some casesj b u t
in the typical "machine”, the two become fused.
Perhaps
this fusion represents a third type of model - Spirit as a
machine.
(In any case, the modus operandl of the anomaly
remains obscure.)
Furthermore, the distinction is blurred
by the ambiguity of the medium's "will”, which becomes quite
problematic in some cases of physical phenomena.
In the
alleged movement of furniture during a seance, for example,
what is supposed to be happening?
Does it occur as a result
of the medium's will or as a result of a spirit's
will?
What is it that makes medium and Spirit indispensable
to one another?
(c) There is a third way of conceiving physical phenomena,
sometimes put forward as an interpretation of magical
”changing".' This theory would seem to have an affinity with
Spiritualism, and the language appropriate to it is readily
elicited,
although
I never heard it formulated clearly.
Perhaps it is not "the world" (objective reality) which
changes, but the way in which witnesses perceive the world:
the object does not really pass through solid matter, but
somehow everyone is made to think that it has.
Here,
physical phenomena become a form of ESP, by which a telepathic
suggestion is induced.
The induction is paranormal, since
it applies to all witnesses at all times.
(2) Control
A medium speaks in a voice not her own or writes in a hand
not her own.
How does this provide "evidence”?
The controlling spirit stands in the "place” of the medium's
"mind”.
The body, in truly Cartesian fashion, is now a
machine with a "ghost".
156
What "proves" that the medium's body is not under her "control"
are the signs of otherness (the trance, the accent, the form
of words, the style of writing).
But these are precisely
what are unnecessary for a "scientific" hypothesis.
If the
spirit writes with the hand of the medium, why cannot it
write in the hand of the medium?
(It does so to "prove"
itself, but this "proof" itself makes the phenomenon doubtful).
(3) Auras
Seeing auras might appear to involve looking at
directly.
seeing.
Spirit
But most mediums say it is not like "ordinary"
Perhaps they only "seem-to-see" auras, clairvoyantly,
as they perceive future conditions or past events.
On the
other hand, according to some the aura is at least partly
"physical" (or, strictly, "paraphysical", since established
science does not recognise its existence).
In that case,
aura-seeing is neither the seeing of Spirit nor the quasiseeing of Spirit, but the super-seeing o f
matter.
(4 ) Healing
As a general rule, Spiritalists conceive mental healing to
work rather in the way that Mesmer said it did.^ Thus there
*
is a cleansing effect, a drawing out of mental and physical
"poisons".
The sweeping motions of the hands induce out
and brush away sickness, often via the fingertips and toenails.
The healer wrings her hands at intervals to disperse
65
the "poisons” which have become attached to them.
Vitality
is conveyed from healer to healed, and this "powerdrain"
means that healers have to be careful of their own health.
But at the same time, while there is no tendency on the part
of Kortfielders to attribute sickness to delusion, in the
67
manner of Christian Science,
nor cures to the patient's
"suggestibility", processes are believed to take place in
healing which do not conform to the "magnetic fluid” model.
Sometimes people get sick because their "etheric body” has
been displaced
or because an "earthbound entity" has
69
attached itself.
As well, in any successful cure,
"balance” is restored to the patient, and this balance,
obscurely mental and physical, is difficult to relate to
70
the theory of a auasi-physical fluid.
Podmore discusses further accounts of Spiritualist healing
which attribute it neither to hypnotic suggestion nor to
modifications of a "physical" medium like that postulated
by Mesmer, but to the influence of the same "power"
(whatever it is) exercised in physical phenomena, or to
the action of spirits.
71
(5) Astral travelling
Astral travelling is hard to make sense of in terms of .
7?
any paradigm that resembles those of science.
Some
psychic researchers attempt to explain its effects by
73
telepathy,another claims that "the only mechanism likely
to be operating is the electomagnetic aura",^ while others
feel that OOBE's are hallucinatory, though giving some
credence to the clairvoyant and apparitional aspects of
75
the phenomenon.
Spiritualist's attempts to be "scientific" fail.
Actually
it is necessary that they do so, because the code of
(positivist) Science is antithetical to the Spiritualist
gnosis.
Spirit manifests itself through anomalies, which are
violations of the conventionally " e x p e c t e d " T h e s e
violations operate as signifiers of gno®is:
being in
this world but not of it, they point beyond it.
Such
signifiers require proof of their validity, otherwise
"who is to say1' that Spirit is not imaginary?
But positivist
assumptions, the most likely recourse of an attempt to be
’’scientific”, require that all phenomena be brought within
the ambit of determining laws.
Spiritualist phenomena
are therefore not usually supposed to be miracles, but are
thought to be governed by ”laws" which are "higher” than those
of natural science.
However, if the Spiritualist anomalies were "proved” to be
lawlike, they would cease to be violations of the expected
and, no longer being anomalous, they would cease to point
to gnosis.
Spiritualists are on the horns of a dilemma, caught between
gnosis which cannot be ’’proved” (positivistically), and
proof which cannot be gnostic.
The Symbolic
Spiritualism is "not just a science”; it expresses values
methods and imagery which derive from ’’aesthetic” domains:
from Art and Sensibility (mediums are "sensitive"); that is,
the site ruled not by Proof but by Poetry.
"Like attracts like”, Spiritualists say, understanding the
corollary that unlikes repel each other.
The phrase is
of deep significance.
It is an expression of the hermetic Doctrine of Correspond-
77
ences, a concept "at the root of all occult interpretation”.
There exists
a certain subtile correspondence or analogy...
between the superior and inferior worlds...between
the noumenal and phenomenal, between the mind of man
and his bodily condition, between the spiritual and
the natural.
A modern astrologer stresses the fundamental character of
this vision of the universe as an analogical totality in
the following terms:
No mastery of stellar science is possible without
understanding the degree to which nature herself has
dramatised the essential relationship among things
in general...Astrological judgement is an orderly
analysis of various relationships through their most
simple significance... Symbolism must be seen to be
revealing because it is natural...Man may divide up
his universe in everyday living, but he cannot cancel
out the relationships of any one part of it with
every other part. The whole remains total or complete.
•he Aesthetic, metaphorical principle of "like attracts
like” appears in Spiritualism in a number of distinct
contexts.
(1) Phenomena as metaphors
RO
'.'he chronic "cognitive dissonance”
of the attempt to
conceive Spiritualism as a Science is tolerable because
models of causation are not fully brought into play.
Instead, putative anomalies may be explained by postulating
relationships of signification between different domains,
which need not be presumed to have a causal basis.
R1
Where
Science conceives the world to be like a collection of
machines, the Symbolic construes the world as an expressive
system in which self, matter and Spirit are linked by a
series of symbolic correspondences.
The causal connections
which are ruptured by anomalies and which Science seeks to
82
restore are no longer seen as fundamental.
(2) The levels of Spirit
The various levels or planes of Spirit sort themselves out
on the basis of attraction and repulsion.
or below in hell
0- 2
Fere on earth -
- the "grossest" elements are knit
together, and have sunk away from and below "purer" element
which are similarly knit together at higher levels. "Good”
souls congregate together away from the less purified, who
also keep company.
In this way, the principle underlies
the karmic elements of Spiritualist eschatologies, and also
supplies a rationale for internecine "sectarianism" (since
the "good”, the "pure” and the "correct” will seek each other
out, as will their opposition).
(3) Reading
Experience of Spirit in its "raw” state, no matter how vivid,
seldom contains much of clear value for the living.
As
the medium experiences it, it is a stream of images.
Even
when Spirit "speaks” to a clairaudient, or through a trance
speaker, the "true meaning" of the words, wrapped up in
’’elevated" and "archaic” phraseology, is often obscure.
Usually, therefore, the material requires "reading" Spiritualism and contemporary criticism having independently
generalised this term iri the same direction to mean decoding,
the analysis of signifiers.
Just as thf ability to interpret
"normal" sensations is necessary for "normal" perception,
th. ability to "read" supposedly "paranormal" sensations is
necessary for clairvoyance.
A person may be a "natural”
psychic, in that their minds are bombarded with paranormal
input, but if she cannot learn to translate this input into
meaningful output, her mediumship remains ’’undeveloped”.
She is like a radio receiver without a modulator.
(she ’’sees” but cannot "read”).®^
Clairvoyance, then>requires not only the "reception" of
experience attributed to a paranormal source, but a diagnostic
skill;
the ability to constitute this experience
pc
"solution” - that is, as a "message”.
as a
In this work of translating from Spirit to the world, the
medium may unintentionally introduce distortions into the
messages intended by Spirit.
Therefore mediums will sometimes
simply "pass on" an image or a phrase, without interpretation.
"I'm giving it to you as I get it”, they say.
(4) Control
Control can also be seen as governed by the law of "like
attracts like", because it is influences which in some way
are "in sympathy" with the sensitive which are most likely
to be "picked up ", That is one reason why spiritual progress
is thought to involve .a Faustian pursuit of diverse experiences,
since it is by experiencing many things that a medium
acquires "sympathy" with many things, and is thereby able
to "open up" to a wider range of psychic influences.
(5) Auras
The aura is often identified with the cloud of light said
to surround holy persons and portrayed in Christian iconography
as the ahlo or nimbus.
Another common citation among
p /:
Spiritualists is Joseph's "coat of many colours".
Paracelsus had written in the sixteenth century that "the
vital force ..in man...radiates round him like a luminous
ft7
sphere".
In 1844, Keichenbach theorised about an "Gdic Force"
surrounding people and objects.
88
However, the aura in its
contemporary occult conception is largely the work of Charles
89
Leadbeater .
According to this, the aura is composed of the emanations
of the human being on the different "planes" in which it
qn
exists.
These resolve themselves into several distinct
auras, the perception of which is dependent on the
clairvoyance
used.
type of
There is the aura of the astral body,
which reveals by its colour and patterning the passions,
emotions and sensations which the subject is experiencing
or is prone to.
There is another aura which indicates "what
sort of use he has made of his life so far in this
incarnation", another by which the sensitive may know "how
far his real life as a soul has advanced, and what progress
91
the ego has made in its unfoldment towards divinity
There is also a health aura, which, being composed of etheric
matter, "needs much less-developed sight than the astral part
92
of the aura"
and is composed of "an infinitude of straight
lines radiating evenly in all directions from the pores of
the body...on the advent of disease, there is an instant
change, the lines in the neighborhood of the part affected
becoming erratic, and lying about in all directions in the
wildest confusion, or dropping like the stems of faded flowers.
Leadbeater's book on the aura was published in 1902.
Nine
years later, W.J. Xilner, a physician and surgeon at St.
Thomas' Hospital in London, published The Aura, in which he
claimed that it could be made visible to normal sight by
viewing through lenses coated with dicyanin.
^hus seen,
the aura supposedly appeared as a "faint grayish cloud" ^
divided into three parts, the form and colouration of which
qc;
cold “
be of assistance in diagnosis,
Kilner's book, while
having no effect on orthodox medicine, continues to
influence people interested in "the psychic" and "popular
science".
Taylor, for example, while dismissing Kilner's
claim that the aura is composed of radiation in the ultraviolet as having "little substance", goes on to suggest
that it is part of the body's infra-red radiation.^
Many contemporary authors identify the aura with the
mysterious patterns recorded by a photographic plate
placed adjacent to an object in a strong electro-magnetic
97
field, called Kirlian photography after its discoverers.
The idea that there are several auras has become fairly
widespread.
For example, a recent exponent of ’’higher
consciousness" refers to the astral, mental and vital auras,
indicative of emotional, medical and intellectual conditions
98
respectively.
Most Mortfielders, however, refer to the aura
as a singular entity.
Thus, the aura has as ”scientific" a background as any
Spiritualist phenomenon.
In reality, however, it functions
as a symbolic field; like a medieval painting or the neon
lights of a city, it is replete with signs.
The size, shape, texture, pattern and luminosity of the aura
are all part of this symbolism, but most important is colour.
The Spiritualist colour symbolism pertains not only to auras,
but is generalised to include especially clothing, jewellery,
interior decoration :.and the flowers brought to the Spiritualist
service.
Just as there is a pluralism concerning the causal models
which may underlie phenomena, there is a pluralism concerning
the symbolic coding of auric colours, for ”no two people ever
99
receive psychically or spiritually in the same way’’. ^ There
is, however, a reasonable consensus, as is shown by
Table 4, which compares the colour associations generally made
by Mortfielders with those of Leadbeater,100 33ruCe Copen,
a "popular science” author,^®^
and Genevieve V/oelflf, a
102
contemporary Californian medium.
(6) Flowers
In the flower service, the flowers are not simply objects
for psychometrising, but introduce both literal colour and
166
COPEN
COLOUR
MORTFIELD
LEADBEATER
Black
Evil*
sickness,
depression,
anxiety*
indulgence
in drugs and
tobacco.
Hate, malice. Hate, malice.
Brown
Grey
Avarice,
selfishness,
jealousy.
Depression,
fear
Avarice,
selfishness,
jealousy.
Fear,
depression
WOELFL
Depressed
feelings.
Gentleness,
goodness,
love of truth,
divine zeal.
Sublimity,
Royal quality,
Purple
Occultism,
love of
glory,
psychic
ceremony.
exhaltation,
powers.
honour, magnetic
attraction.
Psychic
Eark blue
ability.
indigo
SPIRIT,
'
Religious
Will,
Spirituality.
"Hue
spirituality,
feeling.
spiritualist
religiosity.
perception,
truthfulness,
realisation.
Culture,
Turquoise
spirituality,
high morality.
Adaptability, Sympathy,
Green
Healing.
Immortality,
altruism,
cunning,
growth,
versatility, charity,
hope,
ingenuity
sympathy,
endurance
compassion. compassion.
Intellect,
Intellect,
MIND,
Wisdom, will,
Yellow
intelligence. intelligence. intellectuality. intuition,
Godliness
love of light,
Gold
peace.
Wisdom,
Pride,
Vivacity,
Health,
Orange
ambition
justice.
aspiration.
liveliness
Love.
Avarice,
Crimson
maliciousness.
Anger.
PHYSICAL,
Human love,
Red
Sex,
friendship,
healing.
violence.
health,
vigor, love.
Link
Love,
Divine love,
gentleness,
amiability,
friendliness.
Purity,
Pure spirit.
Spirituality,
White
meditation.
godliness,high
aspiration.
Greyblue
Violet
Table 4 : Auric colour symbolism.
associational richness.
167
Flowers are in common use throughout
the world as decorations, offerings, omens and emblems.
In
modern societies they are appropriate at marriages and
funerals, military parades and peace demonstrations.
Women
are courted and the sick comforted by flowers.
Cirlot notes two distinct sets of floral associations.
They
103
are "symbolic of transitoriness, of Spring and of beauty".
They are also, because of their shape, "an image of the 'Centre'",
of quintessence, concentration and the soul*.
Since flowers are, as Freud mentions, "the genitals of plants",
105
are transformed into seeds, and are conventionally linked with
Spring, they connote fertility and vigour.
Finally, the scent
of flowers, like Spirit itself, is all-pervading, intangible,
ineffable, essential.10^
There is also an aesthetic of the varieties of flowers.
In
Hamlet, Ophelia, inventing her own flower ceremony, distributes
flowers and herbs to the Danish court, saying
There's rosemary, that's for remembrance;... and there
is pansies, that's for thoughts...There's fennel for
you, and columbines; there's rue for you; and here's
some for me; we may call it herb of grace o'Sundays.
Oi you must wear your rue with a difference. There's
a daisy; I would give you some violets, but they
withered all when my father died.
Shakespeare is here drawing upon a magical law closely
related to Paracelsus's Doctrine of Signatures.
A charming
expression of it is to be found in The language and Poetry
of Flowers.108
This book, published in 1877, concerns
"that graceful symbolism which has in every nation entwined
itself around the floral gifts of Creation", and contains
"a complete vocabulary; quotations illustrating the various
sentiments and meanings attached to flowers and plants;
flower language in bouquets etc; together with a collection
of selected poems illustrating the nature, beauty, sentiments,
teachings and associations of the floral world etc.
168
Every plant likely to "be familiar to a nature enthusiast of
Victorian England is correlated with an emotion, character
trait or sentimental condition, from abecedary (volubility)
to zinnia (thoughts of absent friends), and from absent
(wormwood) to zest.
From it, we learn that fennel represents
strength, columbines folly, rue disdain (it also symbolises
grace - "o' Sundays"), daisies innocence,and violets faithfulness or modesty.
With the aid of this set of correspond-
ences, posies become "flower messages".
Martin mentions that some of the mediums of the church she
studied "have a complex and well-developed code of meanings
in the flowers which the spirits so often 'present* to their
living kin".^'1'® At Mortfield, floral significations were
confined to the auric colour code, aiid occasional remarks
about the appearance, size, perfume or condition of a
blossom or herb.
Conclusion
In Chapter 1, a model of Spiritualism as an ideology was
discussed which could be represented figuratively like this!
D O M I N A N T
C O D E S
transformations
SPIRITUALIST CODES
e n u n c i a t i o n s
S P I R I T U A L I S T
T E X T S
t#9
This chapter has sketched a nap of the main Spiritualist codes
sometimes cutting away below the surface to investigate the
archeology of the salient features.
Some parts of the map
are blank, others blurred, yet others exhibit pentimenti —
underlying layers of past meanings which intrude into the
present.
This is necessarily so, because ideologies are
incomplete, ambiguous, contradictory and in constant flux.
Accounts of them, being themselves ideological, are bound
to reflect these features.
As to the "dominant ideologies", there are "readings" of
novels, films, newspapers and even conversations
112
which
are concerned to expose the insistence of ideological
distortion, and to assess how the texts in question reinforce
or undermine it; and there are a number of intensive investigations of specific ideological fields, among them Marx's
theories of commodities and of the wage relationship,11*5
Lukaos' of reification11^ and recent theorisations of the
115
construction of subjectivity. ' But because it can only
be grasped from the inside, in terms of itself, the perception
of ideology is necessarily partial; it can be glimpsed only
"through a glass darkly":
Commonly said: "dominant ideology". This expression
is incongruous. For what is ideology? It is precisely
the idea insofar as it dominates: ideology can only be
dominant. Correct as it is to speak of an "ideology of
the dominant class", because there is certainly a
dominated class, it is quite inconsistent to speak of
a "dominant ideology" because there is no dominated
ideology: where the "dominated" are concerned, there
is nothing, no ideology, unless it is precisely - and
this is the last degree of alienation - the ideology
they are forced (in order to make symbols, hence in
order to live) to borrow from the class that dominates
them. The social struggle cannot be reduced to the
struggle between two ideologies: it ie^the subversion
of all ideology which is in question.
This exaggerates - for what is the ideological terrain from
which it speaks?
Struggle and contradiction are present in
all ideology:
the dominated evolve distinct ideologies
117
which manifest signs of resistance.
But apart from
the problem of finding a site from which to compare
ideologies in this way, there are great difficulties
concerning verifiability, not to mention the sheer
complexity of the signify systems concerned.
I shall therefore turn aside from the task of analysing
how Spiritualism is a transformation of dominant ideologies
Instead, the focus of the next two chapters will be on how
Spiritualists texts function as enunciations.
1
.
171
Fiske & Hartly (1978:60)
2.
Barthes (1978). In another place, Barthes says "the code
is a perspective of quotations, a mirage of structures;
we know only its departures and returns; the units which
have resulted from it (those we inventory) are themselves,
always, ventures out of the text, the mark, the sign of a
virtual digression toward the remainder of a catalogue"
(1974:20).
3.
Barthes (1978:4)
4.
Ibid:59
5.
Zaretsky (1974:171) remarks that Spiritualists "are particularly attuned...to he talked at lectured to, and verbally
managed".
6.
Ginzberg (1980) explores the ramifications of this fact,and
the consenuent intimate connections between divination and
science, art history, medicine, criminology and psychoanalysis.
7.
Cicero (1938:235) divided divination into two sorts: "natural"
(by means of dreams and prophecies) and "artificial" (by
observation of "portents'*). My discussion is concerned
only with the latter, since "natural” divination is the same
as clairvoyance.
8.
Feuerbach (1881)
posited that the projection of the
human onto the non-human was the constituting factor of
religion. This theory provides an example of "the logic
of the supplement"(Derrida, 1976:141-164), whereby what
appears at first as something “marginal with respect to a
plenitude - as writing is to the activity of speech or
perversion to normal sexuality - is identified as a substitute
for that plenitude or as something which can supplement or
complete it. It then becomes possible to show that what
were conceived as the distinguishing characteristics of the
marginal are in fact the defining qualities of the central
object of consideration" (Culler, 1979:168). The elevation
of the distinctive characteristics of divination to the
defining element of religion in general results in an
interpretation of religion as alienation.
9.
In its "popular form", as it appears in some daily masscirculation newspapers, biorhythmic analysis is a divinatory
technique resembling astrology, where the omen is a
mathematical function of the time of birth.
10.
The original Spiritualist phenomena,, the "rappings" so
seldom heard today, were also omen-s, but in this case the
message code was public, not the esoteric property of the
medium:one knock for "yes", two for "no" etc.
11.
Buchanan (1885); Heywood (1948). Buchanan (1814-1899)>
described by the Dictionary of American Biography as
"erratic" (Johnson, 1929:216-217),was a proponent of
••eclectic medicine", a movement opposeo to the “materialistic**
172
outlook of orthodox medical science, and was also a
Rousseau/s^ educational reformer (Buchanan, 1882). He claimed
"that any person of a highly impressionable temperament, who
will cultivate his faculties for such investigation, may
learn..to recognize and describe the action of the various
organs, and to estimate their relative strength by the
impressions which he receives from contact*’(Buchanan 1885:
24-25).
12.
Buchanan (1885:23),
13.
Sepparial (1972:310) This explanation makes a lot more
sense of the psychometrzing of personal possessions than
of flowers. Psychometry has a close affinity with contagious
magic. Foucault cites a seventeenth century author on magic,
who refers to "mourning roses that have been used as obsequies,
which, simply from their former adjacency with death, will
render all persons who smell them sad and moribund".
(Foucault, 1970:23)*
?4.
Drury and Tillett (1980)
15.
Ibid:39-40. This theory parellels a common theological
position on the worship of images in Christianity, Buddhism
etc.
16.
Ibid:40
17.
The obverse of this account of palmistry in the usual
explanation of astrology. While the palm (the omen) is
an effect of the fate, in astrology "the stars” (the omen)
is the cause of the fate.
18.
Nelson (1969:193)
20.
Dolgin (1974) shows how even "dogmatic” Mormonism encompasses
a wide diversity of individual beliefs.
21.
Macklin, citing Dubois (1955), argues that Americans
believe that all men are created equal, while
holding that man is perfectible. This
contradiction is also embodied in Spiritualist
philosophy. So it is that all of the mediums
in the sample claimed on the one hand that all
humans are endowed by Natural law with some
psychic abilities (so in that we are all equal),
while on the other hand...all knew of gifted
relatives in their backgrounds, from which one
could infer that they perceived a legitimate
claim on a genetically bestowed ability that
made them special, more sensitive instruments
(Macklin, 1977:68;.
22.
Parsons (1965:XIVIII).
23.
In the case of Spiritualism, this deity is a remote,
beneficent, obscure "intelligence''.
19.
Macklin (1974:415)
173
24.
"Brother John", the author of a Dorothy Dix type column
in Psychic News, quoted the following letter:
I cannot pray since my cat was killed. I asked
the spirit guides to take care of him when
crossing the road. What good did it do? He
suffered "badly for an hour and a half. I can
still hear him whimpering...I just say, "Bless
you“ - hut who will do the blessing I don't
know.
Brother John replies,
not possess unlimited
important, that, "life
and fatalities" - and
cat.
basically, that spirit guides do
powers, that pets are not all that
on our plane must have its accidents
that he is sorry about the reader's
But fatalism is modified by a reiteration of the idea that
evil is "unavoidable owing to man's contributory causes".
Each person can contribute towards overcoming it by
"personal responsibility, which we would discharge by
developing and becoming attuned to the spirit world".
25.
Perhaps,although this is not elaborated, a necessary flaw,
along the lines of Leibniz's idea that this is the best of
possible worlds. (leibniz,1965). The theological difficulties
concerning the "freedom of God" which this doctrine causes
Christianity would not touch Spiritualism's conception of
the deity as an abstracted intelligence: God,a vague, loving
c r a f t s p e r s o n , is not even clearly conce ived as volitional,
let alone omnipotent.
26.
This view, not a dominant one in Spiritualism, is the
distinguishing idea of Christian Science. An underlying
motif of Hindu - Buddhist philosophy - the world as may a it is also present in Christian thought: "Whatever is* is
good; and evil, the origin of which I was trying to find,
is not a substance...For you (God) evil does not exist...
Yet in the separate parts of your creation there are some
things which ve think of as evil because they are at variance
with other things. But there are other things again with
which they are in concord, and then they are good...And
since this is so, I no longer wished for a better world,
because I was thinking of the whole of creation" (Augustine,
1974:148-9)
27.
lauer (1974:346)
28.
New English Bible, I Corinthians, Ch. 12, vs 4-8.
29.
Ibid, Ch. 13, vs 1-3, 8-9, 13.
30.
Interestingly, there is no mention of the recently bereaved,
who are a small minority of "seekers".
31.
32.
ie wLove your neighbour as yourself"
(Matthew 22:39)
Elaine Harvey illustrated the theme of love and service with
a reminiscence which has the quality of a parable. A
friend's “heart had stopped", and she had “gone to the other
side, and seen the people and buildings there.” St Paul had
appeared before her, and asked, "Will you do God's work?"
She replied that she would; if she had refused, she would
174
to be put off as long as possible - as if the MphysicalM
was not such a bad place after alii) She had been
allowed to "come back", and ever since had done "God's
work" of helping and caring for people and being "kind
and cheerful", even though she herself had been sick
and in and out of hospital.
33.
Quoted in Ferguson (1976:108). For the purposes of my
discussion it does not matter whether Nyrgren's
interpretation is correct or not.
34.
The gnostic journey is back to the self's source, to the
place where the seeker and the sought become fused. "God
is outside of none, present unperceived to all; we break
from Him, or rather from ourselves; what we turn from we
cannot reach; astray ourselves, we cannot go in search of
another; a child distraught will not recognize its father;
to find ourselves is to know our source" ^Plotinus, Sixth
Bnnead, IX,10; 1952:358).
35.
Pettitt (1974:12)
36.
It must be said that to women who spend most of their lives
tending the needs of others, this is usually good advice.
37.
Eattansi (1973:165)
38.
As in the following prose piece by Mary Jay:
39.
Boddington (1947:118-119)
40.
Psychic LTews, 4 January, 1975:7
41.
Halifax makes a similar point about shaman?:
As intermediary between the realms of the divine,
the nether world, and the middle world, the shaman
becomes a master of thresholds...Just as twilight
in the temporal threshold, shamanic equilibrium is
the process of occurring at that threshold, where
the shaman - wizard becomes the guide, the path,
the vision, the image the personification of both
Who is to say. Who does God's work. I am no
better than you. And you are no better than me.
We are all God's children. Colour and creed alike.
So each and everyone of us has the same rights. I
thank God for my free-will. And for every day I
live. To walk under the sun, and feel its warm
rays. To feel the gentle breeze on my face. The
falling rain, as it hits the roof tops. Stars that
shine so brightly, like jewels. The sweet soent of
the flowers, that bloom. Listen to the birds that
sing. For all !\ature, creatures big and small. To
feel apart and know God is within. To always walk
tall. For what i did wrong today. Try to put right
tommorrow. Try to see good in everyone. Pray to
help me be wiser as I grow old. To keep my childhood
dreams. Have Faith, love and above all Grace. This
is how I feel. If you the reader do not think I
should do God's work. Then I am truly sorry. God ~
bless us all.
175
42.
This and the following line contain the peculiar trope
of referring to something by describing it as a metaphor
("imitation", precursor) of itself. Such a catachre is
can only connote "madness", since it undermines all
"reality11. Perhaps it becomes necessary to discover the
’•true names” of things. (See FN 63).
43.
Nelson (1969).
44.
This terminology relies on the scheme outlined by Barthes
in Mythologies (1973:114f).
45.
Balch & Taylor (1977:85 ).
46.
Macklin (1974:391; 1977:68-70, 73-74).
47.
This concept comes from Spengler, for whom it represents
a distinctively modern and European attitude:
The Faustian soul1s...prime symbol is pure
limitless space...the Faustian is an existence
which ip led with a deep consciousness and
introspection of the ego, and a resolutely
personal culture evidenced in memoirs, reflections,
retrospects and prospects and conscience” (Spengler,
1946:183)
Wilson (1973:25) cites Faust’s "longing for the occult"
as an attempt to escape the "dusty room of his personal
consciousness".
48.
Said in conversation. Here, true to ’’individual
responsibility", even the love of Jesus is really a matter
of His "looking out for Himself”.
49.
Hence Faust's onymoronic declaration:
50.
This fragment of personal mythology is rich in connotations,
representing a pluralist acceptance of sexes and zodiac
signs (since I have been or will be these other things,
how could I be critical of them?), and also referring to
the Doctrine of Correspondence, since by "vibrating" on
the “wavelengths" of different modes of existence, the
self "tunes into” and thus becomes more like the
Universe as a totality.
51.
Falfreman (1979)-
52.
Macklin's comments on "Mrs M." (Macklin, 1977:72) hold
for most Sydney Spiritualists. Mrs. M. "hears, sees and
feels the spirits speak to her, appear to her, and touch
her”, like scientists, she takes replicability to be
I vow myself to excitment, intoxication, the
bitterest pleasures, amorous hatred and stirring
remorse. My heart, now free of the longing for
learning, shall close itself to no future pain.
I mean to enjoy in my innermost being all that is
offered to mankind,to seize the highest and the
lowest, to mix all kinds of good and evil, and
thus to expand my self till it includes the spirit
of all men - and with them, I shall be ruined and
perish in the end. (Goethe, 1949:54-55; Faust I
lines 1765-1775)
176
essential in providing evidence for a theory, and therefore seeks - and finds - "proof of spirit" from other
mediums as well as her own experiences. She “maintains
a skeptical antidogmatic attitude" and "values inductive
reasoning".
53.
Discussing the skepticism which had been voiced in the
press about Yuri Geller*s feats, Jimmy Green claimed the
following etymology for the word ’’guru". In Sanskrit,
wgu" meant dark and "ru" meant light. The guru is therefore
one who if-aris from darkness to light. "These days
Jimmy concluded,"it1s hard to know who's a guru and vho's
a rugu!" (Guru is Sanskrit, but it meant grave, weighty
or dignified).
54.
Either in the form of details of circumstantial details
of names, dates, places, personal characteristics etc,
or as vaguer ’’conditions".
55.
Me Cabe (1920:105).
56.
The use of "billets", which for flowers substitutes
tickets on which a cmestion is written by the recipient
carry this testing a stage further. The medium does not
look at the question until after the reading is finished,
and so has to "demonstrate’’ clairvoyance under the
circumstances of neither knowing the recipient nor
the auestion asked by the recipient. Billets were not
used in Sydney at the time of fieldwork, but have
caught on recently, probably from the U.S. (Zaretsky,
1974:199-200). Chinese Spirit mediumship involves a
similar practice (Elliott, 1955)*
57.
The difficulties of providing a situation in which
empirically adeouate psychometric "proof" can be provided
are greater in home circles than in services. In one
circle which agreed to have a regular psychometric
ritual, there was a lively discussion about the details.
Some wanted the objects to be personal possessions (rings,
watches etc), but it was objected that since the members
of the circle knew each other fairly well, there was a
good chance that people could be identified by such
signifiers. It was therefore agreed that flowers should
be brought. A further objection was then made that people
should not use plain brown paper bags, because if two
people brought the same kind of flower, it could be
impossible to tell whose flower was being read. So flowers
should be enclosed in marked or otherwise easily identifiable bags. In the event, at the next seance most of the
bags were plain brown ones, and nearly half contained
jewellery rather than flowers.
^8.
Locke (n.d.: 7-8).
59.
m this, Spiritualism is like "normal science" (.Kuhn)
except that it never solves any problems set by its paradigm.
See also Nelson (1968:480),
177
60.
A medium's reputation need not be based on ’’platform
work"; Peter Siman and Robbie Robinson confined themselves
to circles and private readings, while Mr & Mrs Godwin
concentrated on healing. Platform work, however, is the
normal way of building a clientele of followers and
augmenting one's prestige and influence.
61.
Here Ray is using the word in one of its more specific
senses, as direct perception of Spirit, or the E.S.P.
of visual imagery.
62.
The closestl heard to it came from Jimmy Green: "physical
phenomena are really just a form of mental phenomena”.
But comments like "nothing on the earth plane is truly
real”, are a stock-in-trade of Spiritualist discourse.
63.
This speculation is a easy springboard into metaphysics.
If something can be made to appear as other than what it
is, what is it, really? In a trilogy of “children's"
novels by Ursula le Guin (1971,1974a, 1974b), the magic of
the imaginary world of Earthsea is premised on a kind of
supernatural nominalism, whereby power over things is
obtained by knowing their "true names". This doctrine
seems very logical, if things can really be made to appear
as if they are something else.
The model of magical changing, incidentally, is not o n l y a
philosophical fantasy, but alive and well in "popular culture".
In a recent Superman comic, lex luther hypnotizes the world
into not being able to perceive the Man of Steel (Superman
Pocketbook ->/16t 1980 :20f).
64.
But Boddington's claim that without the theory of a "vital"
fluid, "the whole fabric of Spiritualism falls to the
ground" (1947:124) seems a great exaggeration.
65.
Boddington (1947:130-1,137) notes the necessity of
-cleansing passes" to -stroke away the diseased particles”,
which cling both to the patient and the healer. A trance
lecture on healing printed in theroneod magazine of the
Kortfield Church refers to "drawing away...these darkened
cloaks of fear, these false cloaks of prtence, these heavy
cloaks of the weariness and the poisoned matter wxth which
the body has become lopded. The greater part of thF healing
work that you do is in cleansing...so that the light and
beauty of the spirit may begin to H o w and show..."
66.
Boddington (1947:130) speaks of ’’saturation passes'* whioh
convey power to the patient. See also Wilson (1973:231)-
67.
Podmore (1963:249ff), Douglas (197C:47), Wardwell (1965).
68.
Spiritualists usually believe that a possessing soul needs
to be "talked round" - in fact, it is as unhappy as the
person possessed, and needs love. But sometimes their
expulsion is more abrupt, m the course of an anecdote,
Mrs Campbell told me how she had expelled one spirit:
"you get to buggery out of here, I said, and they got out".
178
70.
In a ’’trance lecture" a Mortfield medium said, "When
you are seeking to heal, look at those whom you meet and
ask within yourself: what part of this person needs
balancing? for invariably the lack of balance often lies
in the lack of love, and therefore as you seek to love
each other and as you try to radiate love into the world
that is surrounding you, so you are in very truth radiating
the healing energy of divine life which is creativeness,
and creativeness is contained within the tenderness of love.“
Halifax refers to “shamanic balance" as “ a process that
is intrinsic to all of shamanism" (1979:19). See also
Bowen (l978:85ff)
71.
Podmore (l963:192ff)
72.
Drury and Tillett (1980:162)
73.
Watson (1974:306-7), Muldoon and Carrington (l973:20f)
74.
Taylor (1976:155)
75.
Ashby (1972:151)
76.
As for any occultism, the theme of anomaly runs right
through Spiritualist ideology, extending to the kinds of
Spirits which are “contactedu, these freouently, in fact
normally, being from exotic times, places and cultures
(Africa, China, Egypt etc). There is a connection here
with Spiritualist pluralism (an acceptance of anomalies
tends to an acceptance of difference).
77.
Sepharial (1973:VI)
78.
Ibid: V. The writer goes on to state that ’'the mystic,
the poet and the creative artist are all unconscious
interpreters of this universal law...which binds the
Microcosm to the Macrocosm" (ibid:Vl). William Blake,
a follower of Swedenborg, expresses the Doctrine of
Correspondence in the po^m Auguries of Innocence:
To see a World in a Grain of Sfjid
And a Heaven in Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour. (Blake 1958:62)
Spence points out that magical spells"appear to have
arisen in the idea that there is some natural and intimate
connection betwen words and the things signified by them...
Thus, if one repeats the name of a supernatural being the
effect will be analogous to that produced bv the being
itself M(Spence 1960:377).
79.
Jones (1971:7-9). After astrology, the most complex
working out of this metaphorical paradigm is the Doctrine
of Signatures (the "signs of nature"), advanced by
Paracelsus in the sixteenth century and elaborated by
Dells. Porta, a system of analogues between botanical
and human physiology which provides a rationale for herbal
treatment. (Crow, 1973:211-212; Schumaker, 1972: 112f;
Krappe, 1930:236).
179
80.
According to the influential theory propounded by
Festinger (1957), discrepant cognitions create tension
which the individual strives to reduce by making his
cognitions more consistent. Festinger et al (1965)
used the theory in a study of a Californian flying saucer
cult with spiritualistic features to explain why failures
of prophecy did not result in the immediate demise of the
movement. Based on a behaviourist paradigm, the theory
in its more refined versions borders on circularity, but
can be disconfirmed in more concrete formulations (cf
Chaparis & Chaparis, 1964).
81.
The distinction between “causal" and "metaphorical"
explanations of anomalies parallels Pierce's distinction
between indices, connected to their referrent by causality
or continuity, and icons, connected by resemblance (Singer,
1980). (However, the difference is ignored by Saussure
(1966), questioned by Kco (l976:191f) and revamped by
leach (1976:12-16)). The distinction between "metaphor
and metonymy is magical thought was first made explicit
by Frazer (l970:14ff) in his discussion of homeophathic
and contagious magic. See leach (1976:29-31).
82.
Since psychic research attempts to bring miracles within
the scope of causal models of explanations, it is antagonistic
to the Symbolic, though both agree against "orthodoxy”
that anomalies exist and are significant. Jury's concept
of synchronicity, rhowever, may be an attempt tq bridge the
gap (cf Coll.ins and linch, 1979; Mayne, 1966).
8;?.
Ideas of hell are not well-developed among Mortfield
Spiritualists, most of whom tend to think of "this sink
of iniquity" (Robbie) as as bad as place ?s can be found
anywhere. In the U.S., with its stronger "fire and
brimstone" fundamentalist tradition, there seems to be
more emphasis on the idea that "sin and wrong doing will
necessarily bring remorse and suffering that would be
difficult to describe in words*'. (Natural Spiritualist
Associations of the U.S.A. Spiritualist Manual, 1967, p39,
quoted in Macklin (1977:59).;
84.
The case of Dennis is an example of how recognized "psychic
powers" do not necessarily coincide with successful
mediumship. Dennis was introduced to the church by Mary
Jay, to whom he was distantly related. Mary's belief
that he "showed a lot of promise" was agreed with by
others, and after a few weeks he was encouraged to so
some public mediumship, "reading” some of the flowers at
a Sunday evening service. His readings were hesitant and
uninteresting, and recognising this he soon stepped down,
later he said that he could "see colours all over the room”
from the auras, a sensation he had previously reported
at Peter Siman's developeuint circle . No one denied
Dennis's "promise", but it became clear that Dennis was
unable to make whatever was happing in his head real fox*
others. After a few more weeks he dropped out of church
activities, excusing himself on the ground that his child
was ill.
85.
180
A few mediums claim that their guides do this diagnostic
work. A British medium claims to receive "like a host of
others...symbols, such as a clock in a tower offering the
same time on all four faces, a broken coin, dirty windows
being washed to afford a clear view of the countryside**,
but that he does not have to read these himself. "Quite
simply, the interpretation is supplied, but not in sound
or words.** (Psychic News 5 April, 1978:2). A few
Mortfield mediums experienced this kind of assistance
from their guides, but it is not usual. Symbolic diagnoses
can be used to create many effects, from bathos and grandiloauence to self-parody. An example of the last isatongue
in-cheek report from the Mortfield Church magazine:
A progressive pioneer Spiritualist, one of the
better known mediums on the Spiritualist church
circuit, really brightened up a recent service.
He was getting a message from a spirit called
Richard. He wasnft sure whether the spirit was
in thr spiritual or in the physical spheres.
He said, wWait - they’re showing me a box - he's
definitely in spiritlM A trifle u n c o n ^ e n t i o n a l
perhaps, but these little verbal titbits help to
brighten up our spiritual services.
86. Genesis Chapter 37:3, King James Version (more recent
translation have "a long-sleeved robe"). recause he had
precognitive dreams and was persecuted for their, Joseph
is an appealing figure to Spiritualists.
87. Spence (1960:51)
88. Reichenbach (1977)
89. ieadbeater (1971). The publication dates of this book
provide a revealing index of the acceleration of interest
in the “psychic": 1902, 1920, 1942, 1952, 1959, 1964,
1969, 1971...
90. Ibid: 6-9.
91. Ibid: 64
92. Ibid: 117
93. Ibid: 115
94. Kilner (1974:21)
95. Ibid: 6
96. Taylor (1976:126)
97.
Cstrander & Schroeder (l971-200f), Watson (1974:141-150),
Copen (1976:28), Sydenham (1979), Drury & Tillett (1980:
166-167). Copen (1976:5) links the aura tu the body's
electro-inductive properties.
98. Metzer (1971:5) Colour symbolism is important in the
occult/popular science/fringe medicine generally.
(There
ip a " chromotheropist"practising in Sydney, who" treatp
people by seating them in light coloured in such a way as
to counteract their “conditions".) Most of the
anthropological literature on colour symbolism is
preoccupied with physiological correlations: white
is the colour of semen and milk, red of blood etc
(Eliade, 1976:93ff; Turner, 1965)
99.
100.
181
Woelfl (1976:77). While most Mortfielders associated red
with sex and violence, Andy Johnson affirmed it to be
"the true and original colour of spiritualility".
Leadbeater (1971).
- Kay Stanford (1970:30), says that Leadbeater is
'
•
‘generally correct**, although he Mdiffers slightly
from my own experience in interpretation of subtleties
in a few of the colours*1. Stanford claims to see rosy
pink auras around the lower abdomens of pregnant women
(ibid:l-3)
101.
Copen (1976:40)
10?.
Woelfl (1976:77). The words that most recur in this
matrix provide a succinct summation of some primary
Spiritualist preoccuptions: spirit, love, health,
intellect, fear, depression...
103.
Cirlot (1971:109). It is these connotations which make
flowers particularly apt as Buddhist offerings, as the
Pali stanzas whica has colour and scent, I offer at the
blessed feet of the lord by this merit may there be release
(Moksha). Just as this flower fades, so my body goes towards
destruction* (Orombrich, 1971:115-6). Cirlot argues that
the tlreco-Koman use of flowers at funerals was "not so much
an offering as an analogy**, and their presence at feasts
an example of pn antithetical symbol, ’’like the skeleton
which the Egyptians would bring to their banouets, as a
reminder of the reality of death and as a stimulus towards
the enjoyment of life** (ibid:110).
104.
Ibid:110. Spiritualists, with many others, consider flowers
to be excellent images for concentrating and clearing the
mind in mediation (Edwards, n.d.:7).
105.
Freud (1974:192). Freud claims in this passage that in
dreams blossoms "indicate women’s genitals, or in
particular, \irginity" (ibid:192). (This, of course, is
not the "structuralist” Freud of contemporary fashion"!)
106.
nTo manifest itself as a smell is the nearest an objective
reality can go towards becoming a concept without leaving
the realm of the sensible altogether" (Gell, 1977:29).
"Spirit*1 originally meant "breath” , a pheonomenon which
has somethings in common with scent.
107.
Shakespeare (1959:898)
108.
Anon, 1877
109.
Ibid: title page.
182
110.
Martin (1971:152). In this case, the messages are
"overheads" , and the flowers are present only "in
spirit".
111.
locke (n.d.) has produced a structuralist analysis of a
Spiritualist "cosmology", based on participant observation
of a group in Perth, which bears some striking resembalances
to the present one. He makes a distinction between elements
which are dualistic or binary (derived, he claims, "from
Gnostic influences'1) and those which are not. In the
former category he lists high/low, spiritual/material,
control/surrender, right/wrong, self-giving/self, active/
passive, development/regression, evidence/illusion, spirit/
human and higher self/lower self. " ImportantM non-binary
elements include power, medium, knowledge a.nd agent. He
argues that these elements and their relationships produce
two kinds of structures. Firstly, they “ delineate fundamental
states of being and activities” which comprise “the modal,
Spiritualist pattern of culture". Second, they generate the
”structural features of optative action".
112.
Eg Woolfson (1976). In recent years it is film criticism
which has taken this sort of ideological analysis most
seriously (cf Screen Reader I. 1977)
113.
Marx (1976).
114.
lukacs (1971).
115.
Cf Coward and Ellis (1977).
116.
Parthes (1975:32-3).
117.
See, eg Jayawardena (1968).
CHAPTER 10
THE DELPHIC VOICE
The medium and the message
The critical enunciator of Spiritualist texts is the medium,
a figure with something in common with the doctor, the priest
and, not least, the entertainer.
In their study of television - another entertaining medium Fiske and Hartley use the word “‘bardic" to describe oral
texts which function to provide a confirming image of a
culture to itself.
In its bardic role, television, they
argue, articulates consensus, implicates individuals in
dominant value systems of the culture, celebrates the doings
of the culture's members, gives assurance of the culture's
practical adequacy, exposes its inadequacies, supplies its
audience with a status and identity, and transmits security
and involvement.^
i
These characteristics of television texts’are shared with
those uttered by Spiritualists mediums.
Both “media*1
struggle to reflect, maintain and enforce the ways of
thinking, feeling ana acting of the culture in which they
are imbedded, by reiterating and reworking the set of codes
in which they find expression.
flower readings is examined m
This bardic function of
Chapter 10.
2
At the same time, mediums are brought into competition with
each other, and this means they have to make their readings
not only confirmatory, but interesting.
One way of doing
this is variation. There are distinct message "styles” At
Mortfield, the "old guard" tended to emphasise the giving
of circumstantial ''evidence'' relevant to the recipient of
the message, such as names, dates, and descriptions of
places and persons, while the "new guard" gave greater
185
prominence to inner experience and symbolic language.
Mediums tend to acquire personal stylistic •'trademarks'*,
and at the same time - like television stations - they vary
their ’•programming", or else the interest of even an ardent
audience would flag.
In the course of reading the flowers
at a service, the same medium is likely to deliver messages
in a number of different styles.
However, the most p e r v a s i v e
entertaining device of t h e
flower reading is one which it shares with all oracular texts:
the quality of delphism.
The delphic text
The delphic text is distinguished by its suggestive indeterminacy.
Like the patterns of the Rorschach test, it encourages
reading, but refrains from substantiating itself.
It remains
ambiguous, open and tantalizing.
Clearcut examples are "Biblical" prophecies and astrological
"predictions", but delphic aualities obtrude into a wide
range of texts, including poetry^ and political rhetoric.4
The delphic text is suggestive because, like narrative and
pedagogical texts, it provokes the formulation of enigmas.
Questions emerge, which prompt the reader to invent and
review possible answers, and to continue scanning for answers
raised by itself which gives the suggestive text its "meaning"
for the reader.
Kead "as they are meant to be read", classical narrative and
pedagogical texts
do not disappoint;
the reader who scans
them "in the right way" will find there the answers to the
ouestions they (seem to) raise.
“closed".
In this sense they are
Those "modern" texts which deliverately pitch
themselves against the classical model (Nietzsche and Kafka,
for instance) deliberately "disappoint":
?8€
they raise questions
which they refuje to answer, thus challenging the reader to
complete them. Such texts are (defiantly) MopenH.
The delphic text does not declare itself either open or
closed.
Many of its enigmas it neither answers, nor
deliberately fails to answer.
The reader is left scanning,
and since solutions cannot be found within the text, there
is pressure to import them from outside the text, that is,
from the context of the scanner’s biography and knowledge just as happens with the Rorschach blot.
The recipient of
the clairvoyant text is neither supplied with a completed
text, nor challenged to complete one, but is rather Inveigled
into writing unawares.
Analysis
The following extract from a flower reading of Joy Scott,
one of the regular platform mediums at Mortfield, provides
an illustration of this technique, whereby an illusion is
generated that the solution of an enigma raised by the
text comes from it, whereas in reality it comes from the
context.
And as I come to this little flower here
I feel a nervous condition a great impatience
Oh I am feeling
I am all tensed up
Who a m I with first please?
Who owns this little flower?
(The recipient identifies himself)
Are you expecting something to take place soon?
Recipient: My wife's expecting a baby in five weeks.
The text attributes a condition of impatience to the recipient.
Enigma:
what is the cause of this impatience?
(Of course,
such an attribution would be difficult to refute; who does
not live in expectation of something?)
The medium refers
the enigma to the recipient, whose biography provides an
answer.
It seems that because the text has initiated the
scanning, it is attributed gnostic potency:
this reading
was considered a "great success", because Joy Scott had
"picked up the condition" of impending paternity "at once".
Characteristic delphic devices are the cliche, the symbol
and the paradox.
Because of its vagueness, the fading of
its meaning from over-use, the use of a cliche raises the
question of its precise significance ("in this context");
but because it poses as self-explanatory, transparent, the
text in which it appears can fail to clarify without
appearing evasive.
Spiritualist readings are riddled with cliches.
Here is an
extract from a reading of Mrs Miller, another Mortfield
"regular":
There has been a little bit of
you could almost call it a storm in a teacup
I have been a little bit uptight about something over
the recent period
but now I'm coming to an understanding that
as the saying goes
all’s well that ends well.
I'd just say to whoever you are
to;just let things settle down and take their course
because that's just the way it's going to be
all's well that ends well.
What storm in a teacup? (Any storm might turn out at some
future date to have been in a teacup; on examination, any
teacup might turn out to contain a storm...)
What have
"I" (the recipient^) been uptight about? (What is it to be
uptight, anyway?)
What will end well?
settle down? (And so on.)
anything.
things.
What things will
These phrases are applicable to
They may apply to the same thing or to different
The passage is a collection of signifiers in search
of something to signify, and it is up to the recipient to
help it find them.
tsa
As a more extended illustration of the dynamics of the
delphic text, there follows a longer message given by Mary
Jay to Elizabeth Johns.
(The lines of this text,which will
be returned to in the next chapter, are numbered for convenience of reference.)
1. I get a stitch in time saves nine.
2. Do you ever feel as though you're having your leg
pulled?
3. Because somebody just pulled my leg.
4. Er I don't know if it's coming with this flower or not
5. but there was a auestion put up with this flower
6. I feel
7. and the answer's yes
8. there's nothing to stop it
9. go all the way
10. things'll never look back
11. Also I feel somebody's going to do me out of a job
here
12. so I'm not going to ask you to finish reading this
flower
13. but I feel that this person also could get up here
and read flowers and probably have done.
14. There's um a little bit of tidying up around this
person to be done
15. um
16. I see things scattered everywhere
17. and I feel that they've go to do a bit of
18. tidying up or picking up pickinguup the pieces
19. more or less
20. Ihere's also a problem
21. with this person
22. I feel that it weighs pretty heavy at times
23. but I'm being told
24. that a lot of the problems are our own makings
25. and we are the only ones
26. that can really solve our own problems
27. I hope you can understand
28. what it is
29. but then the message is for you and no one else.
30. I feel that this person's moved around a bit too
31. and I feel that there's um
32. more moves ahead.
33. Who a m I with?
34. Elizabeth: Thank you Mary.
35. Where am I going?
36. Mary: Place the message?
37. E: Yeah
38. No.
39. M: Okay.
40. E: Yes thank you very much.
41. M: That’s it
42. there's nothing to hinder what you're doing
43. it's very straight
44. and I'm being told to say
45. go ahead go along with it
46. all the way.
t89
A reader unfamiliar with Spiritualist discourse will feel
the need for some clarification of some of the jargon
used-here.
1. "get": receive from Spirit.
4. ie I don't know if the foregoing or following (?)
impression is intended by Spirit for the bringer of
this flower or has meaning in some other context.
5. Sometimes people (are said to) ''place" specific
questions on their flower - somehow "think the question
in relation to the flower" - which they wish the medium
to "pick up" and reply to.
10. Probably a concatenation of "things'11 never be the
same" and "you'll never look back".
11. "do me out of a job":
is or will be a medium like me.
23. ie by Spirit (spirit guides).
35. Refers to
32.
36. ie does the message make sense to you?
The text generates a series of enigmas, hardly any of which
are resolved within it.
Some, such as that arising from
32.' (ie what moves?) could definitely be "solved" by the
recipient's biography:
Elizabeth had recently returned to
Sydney after several years living in Newcastle.
Others,
such as those raised by the imagery of intidiness and the
attribution of a "problem" ( 14- 26), may or may not have
made "sense" to her.
If a message sets enough signifying snares, one or two are
bound to catch a signified.
In this example, it is the
following sequence which most succeeded in this:
Who is pulling Mary's leg?
(3)
What is the question on the flower?
To where are there more moves ahead?
(6)
(i?)
Reinforced by the prediction that the recipient is a
(potential) medium ( 11- 13), these acquired a linked
series of answers from the (contextual) fact that the
reading is for Elizabeth.
It is Elizabeth who i-s ’’pulling
Mary's leg”, by seeking a reading when she is (at least)
as well "developed" as Mary; the question on the flower
may be ’’Will my mediumship continue to develop?"; and the
"more moves ahead" are a symbol of this future development.
Awareness of this interpretation motivates the ironic,
teasing interchange of
33- 4-0, and the affirmations of
41- 46.
Only occasionally do things "fall into place" like this.
Most of the snares of delphic texts temain empty, or at
least trap only flotsam of dubious value.
catch-phrase for such disappointments.
Mediums have a
If an image or
attribution fails to elicit a response, they often say,
"I'll leave it with you", meaning "Think about it,its
significance may become clear to you later".
Weeks or
even months later, a signified may wander into the lure,
causing in the recipient a sudden rush of gnosis:
that's
what it meant!"
"so
1.
2.
191
Fiske and Hartley (1979: 850-7)
There is a further similarity between the two media.
Just as commercial television channels compete with
each other for "ratings", so mediums, different
"channels" to Spirit, compete with each other for
prestige and influence. Both types of channel, because
they are in competition, are impelled to amplify their
differences from each other; but because they are
competing by the same means for much the same audience,
their products all tend towards a predictable sameness.
This metaphor, of course, is not perfect. Television
produces commodities which are (indirectly) exchanged
for commodities. Although mediums sometimes charge for
their services, and churches depend on the donations of
their congregations, on the whole mediumistic products
are marginal to commodity circulation. This peripherality
is probably a reflection of their low value in an open
market situation; but whatever the explanation, it does
seem that Spiritualism could be commodified relatively
easily.
Secondly, and more importantly, anyone can try to be a
medium. The situation is comparable to one in which the
state maintained no control over the operation of
broadcasting stations. Mediums recognise that it would
be in the interests of all to have a "licensing system"
for mediums, and there is incessant discussion of this
possibility - analogous to boards of "self-regulation"
set up by broadcasting stations. In this way, the anarchy
of competition could be controlled, and "standards" of
mediumistic discourse imposed.
3.
Cf Hmpson's classic (1973)
4.
See, eg, Corcoran (I979:166f)
5.
These, like all the oral texts quoted in this study,
are verbatim transcriptions.
It will be apparent that
Spiritualist mediums have quick imagainations and a
ready facility with words.
6.
In both texts quoted so far, the recipient of the
message is referred to as "1"- the medium" puts herself
in the place of the person whom she is addressing (whose
identity is unknown). Other terms in Spiritualist
messages for the recipient are "you", "somebody", "this
person", "they" (as a third person singular pronoun
unmarked for sex) and as included in "we".
"Personal
pronouns always deserve notice" (Fowler and Kress, 1971:
201). In this case, the pronominal floating is a
consequence of the anonymity of the recipient.
CHAPTER 11
THE BARDIC VOICE
While delphism propels the reader or hearer forward and outward
in a quest for answers, the bardic art is one of saying
the same things over and over again in ways that only
seem novel. The delphic text is a structure of endlessly
varied vagueness. The bardic text is a structure of recurring
allusions.
The enunciation by Spiritualist texts of the central codes
of Spiritualism discussed in chapter 9 is analogous to the
variation of motifs in a musical composition. Some features
are altered while others are held constant; elements are
bunched up, spread out and regrouped; patterns inverted,
transposed and repeated.
The texts reticulate these variations. Barthes has described
the intersection of codes as it occurs in the classical
narrative as a "weaving".^ This metaphor implies something
rather too calculated and regular for what normally happens
in a flower reading or Spiritualist sermon. On the other
hand, the juncture is usually more orderly than a tangle.
What usually occurs is perhaps most appropriately described
as a knotting.
Many more codes find their way into this knotting than the
central ones of Communication, Individualism, Love, Progress,
Science and the Symbolic, but it is these which recur
most insistently. In this chapter I indicate some of the
typical ways in which the reticulation of these codes and
their variations occurs in Spiritualist texts.
A Brief Bardic Reading
The following message, delivered by Andy Johnson from a
flower I brought to a service, was quoted in chapter 1:
194
1. It would seem there’s a forest and trees
the forest can hide the trees
trees are of wood and wood builds houses so it
would appear you're prepared to go on building
but that’s not literal
2. it means go on developing
yes that’s spot on
go on developing
3. but you haven't found peace.
4. Who am I with?
5. It would be beaut if things were easy
6. but one day you’ll say hey the forest's made of trees.
The main framework on which the codes are threaded in this
message is the symbol of the forest hiding the trees, itself
an inversion of the proverb " can't see the wood for the
trees", which here is implicitly inverted to "can’t see
the trees for the wood". By metonymic and metaphoric
steps, this image is cleverly made to represent the Spiritual
progress of the recipient. A secondary framework is the
attribution of a lack of peace to the recipient, a reference
to suffering which gives the medium an opportunity to offer
comfort.
All but one of the six codes figure in this reading, which
is typical in this
respect: the Symbolic (l); Progress (2);
Love (3, 5)J and,finally, Science, Individualism
and Progress
are all connoted by the clairvoyant (hence "evidential*')
promise of future Spiritual development for the recipient, to be
propelled by a recognition of the true value of the individual
( 6 ).
A reading of Elizabeth Johns provides another brief example
of the Spiritualist bardic text (Table 5).
Analysis of a Sermon
Sermons provide the most straightforward example of the
bardic text in Spiritualism. In the extract quoted in chapter
1 it is clear that the codes are brought together in a more
195
Text
Codes
You suffer with your headaches and worries
A piece of "evidence* for
clairvoyance (Science).
Also Love.
if you can't go over or
through things you can go
under or around them
Progress Symbolised.
you should also say what
you mean
Honesty - a secondary
Spiritualist code, which
relates to the integrity
of the Individual.
you should give love a try
Love.
this is the right path
Progress.
you hear when Spirit talks
to you
An assurance of mediumship
(Progress); a piece of
evidence (Science); a
flow of information (Communication).
but you should share your
knowledge which is what you
came here for
Communication; destiny of
the Individual; Love.
your material life must be
put in order before you do
anything else
Personal responsibility
(Individualism) is a prerequisite of Progress.
throw off the old
you could quite easily walk
away you have your life they
have theirs
j Progress
Individualism
Table 5 : Bardic analysis of a reading of Elizabeth Johns.
196
open weave.
Personally I feel
that this is a religion that can never be stifled out
it is not a new religion
it is a very old religion
very very old
and has run through all civilisations
and will run through all civilisations
This affirmation of the historical continuity of Spiritualism
is, I argued in chapter 2, part of an argument that its
ideas are true, that is, Scientific. The text now adverts,
not altogether consistently, to Progress:
and our voice must go with the times
for as we look into history
we find as our moral code demolishes
so does civilisation
die away
The speaker has been reminded of history by Spiritualism's
lack of history, and of Progress by history. But the Progress
here is the advance of decay. Decadent civilisation must
be opposed by the Individual:
we have to look
for something within
to give us faith
Faith is an antonym of Science, and so the text returns to
the code that it commenced with.
and we have to find more than faith in Spiritualism
faith alone is not enough
we are expected to ask scientific questions
and we are to expect that scientific questions will be
answered
Asking and answering is Communication, a code which continues
to be reiterated throughout the concluding lines of this
extract. .But Love enters here as well, in the form of a
desire by spirits to alleviate
ignorance.
197
for there are many scientists on the other side of the
other side of the veil
who are willing
and over-anxious in many instances
to give to us
-what they know of Science, and Science as it has Progressed
in Spirit the knowledge that they had upon earth
and the advanced knowledge that they have gained
from Spiritualism.
The knots of the bardic text
The previous chapter offered an account of flower readings
in one of their dynamic aspects. As delphic texts they sustain
interest by a variety of suspense - by raising questions
which keep their hearers scanning text and context for possible
answers.
As bardic texts, flower readings sire static. They create
interest by forming an abstract pattern of code references,
like a computer card, the pattern on which corresponds to
2
a set of electronic states within a computer . Thus, the
reading given by Mary Jay to Elizabeth Johns, which was
analysed in the last chapter as a delphic text (pp 188-190),
can be reduced to a bardic tabulation, as outlined in
Table 6.
We begin to approach that perspective from which, in the
words of Eco quoted in chapter 8, "where we thought we
saw images there (are) only ... alternations of presence
and absence*. The surface of the knot of the Spiritualist
text is a pattern of codes. The codes which are the cords
of this knot form part of a vast web of ideology. Caught
Lines
1
2
3-4
6
Gobbi.
*
*
Indiv,
Love
* ■
*
*
*
*
14-18
23
*
45-46
|
*
*
30-32
44
*
*
*
24-29
42-43
Science Symbolic
• -............
7-13
20-22
Prog.
*
*
*
*
Table 6 : Bardic tabulation of Mary Jay's
reading (p. 188)
199
in this web, Spiritualists pick and tug, trying to unravel
a thread which will deliver them to gnosis.
200
1. Barthes (1974: 20).
2. Levi-Strauss (1963: 230f).
/
CHAPTER 12
GNOSIS, IDEOLOGY AND RITUAL
Problems and Paradigms
Until recently, academic studies of M cult movements were
largely guided by two paradigms, which sometimes opposed
and sometimes were complementary to one another. On the one
hand, it was assumed that they are symptoms of social or
individual malaise. In contrast to the attitude of anthropologists
towards comparable activities found in remote tribes,
sociologists often considered them to be the expression of
lacks which a kinder or more orderly society would rectify.
Second, cults tended to be analysed in terms of conceptual
frameworks developed for the study of Christian sectarianism.
The first paradigm might have led to a deeper questioning of
the model of social "health" on which it was based. But more
commonly it resulted in the assumption that the beliefs and
activities of cults are merely epiphenomena of social pathology,
and that it is therefore superfluous
to attempt to understand
them as discourses in their own right. The major product of
the second paradigm was a scholastic proliferation of typologies,
as each newly studied movement - and each movement newly
studied from a different point of view - failed to fit comfortably
into existing sect/cult classifications.
The influence of both approaches is waning. Simplistic deprivation
theories have come under fire. Sociologists are less preoccupied with typologies, and it is increasingly recognised
that cults are not just "religious", but also aesthetic,
political and ” scientific*, or at least philosphical. Their
internal organisation, the social milieux in which they
operate, and their relations with the state and the mass media
are being examined more closely, and their beliefs treated
more seriously.
These new approaches represent an advance on the old. But they
share few if any common paradigms. In this study, I have
taken account of their wider view, while trying not to write
from an eclectic perspective. At the same time, I hare aimed
at providing an interpretation of those features of Spiritualism
which I regard as most problematic.
At first I was struck by the contrast between the strange
beliefs on grand topics, and the down-to-earth normality
of those who held them with such enthusiasm. But two other
aspects of Spiritualism came to concern me more; its ritualism,
and its incoherence. The interpretation I have presented
of Spiritualism as the ideology of a gnostic movement is
an attempt to come to terms with these features.
Spiritualism as an Occult Gnosticism
Although it claims to be * progressive” , and a "science**,
Spiritualism exhibits, in a number of different ways and
at a number of different levels, a repetitive, static character.
It has changed little in over a century. Each service and
seance repeats essentially the same events. Each Spiritualist
text reiterates the same small cluster of codes and utilises
much the same set of rhetorical devices. All these traits
exemplify ritualism.
It is true that by the standards of "orthodox* religion,
Spiritualism is not particularly ritualistic. But it is, if
judged by the standards it sets itself - those of philosophy
and science.
I confess that as Spiritualist activities became familiar
to me, my boredom threshold sank. I was not alone in this.
Even devotees had a similar problem. "What can we do to
brighten up our services?* was a recurrent topic of conversation.
Ritualism is not without its defenders, who praise it as both
necessary and creative.^But it is difficult to forget Freud’s
argument that the repetitive, compulsive character of both
ritual and the obsessive actions of neurotics results from
the symbolic expression of repressed desires, which provokes
2
guilt and anxiety, but fails to satisfy the libido.
Rituals
may still be necessary, but such an analysis compels us to
question whether they ought to be.
I have to confess that although I often felt bored during
services, after them I nevertheless sometimes experienced
a feeling of peace and elevation and "effervescence*
which
I thought was more than just relief that the ritual was over.
I felt - or felt that I could have felt - "redeemed*.
I
came to believe that this emotion was a hint of what Spiritualists
meant when they spoke of Spirit, and so began to conceive
of the movement as a gnosticism, a seeking for enlightenment,
perfection, totality.
Spiritualism is a particular kind of gnosticism. It is occultic,
that is, it attributes significations of gnosis to anomalous
phenomena. Ciphers of gnosis are believed to be written in
the world as contraventions of normal expectations or established
natural laws.
A consideration of magic helps to set this preoccupation in
a wider context. Two distinct emphases can be discerned in
anthropological
theories of magic. Many nineteenth and early
twentieth century writers, most notably James Frazer*, saw
magic as fundamentally instrumental/rational in orientation,
a failed science. This view, later stigmatised as "intellectualist",
205
still has defenders , but emphasis on magic's expressive/
symbolic aspects, persuasively argued for by Malinowski^,
has been more influential in this century. Magic has come
to be seen as an emotional and aesthetic activity, rather
7
than as a flawed craft .
In a paper which addresses several important issues, Alfred
Gell has outlined a position which he hopes would bridge
the gap between magic as art and magic as craft. In doing
so, he offers an alternative understanding of magical
ritual to Freud's theory, while retaining some of the latter's
critical element.
With Meyer Fortes, Gell takes magical ritual to be primarily
concerned with making manifest a realm which does not belong
o
to the "patent" realm of everyday experience . In other words,
magic is occultic. Gell argues that the occult realm is
constituted by the postulation of a domain whose defining
attribute is that it is incomprehensible:
It is of the essence of the occult that it cannot be
grasped in itself ... (it) is the modality of events
which transcends, or lies beyond, the horizon of possible
awareness.
For Gell, the symbolic character of magic can be traced to
nature of the conceptual act which establishes the occult
realm.
Only a doctrine which 'semantises* the perceptual world
can break down the otherwise impenetrable barrier,
allowing access to the imagined totality of which the
perceived world is only a fragment. Occult thinking
is founded on the proposition that the relation between
experience and the totality of the cosmos can be mediated
by signs... The occult...is by nature incapable of
direct representation, since it does not correspond to
anything in the world... Hence the sole possibility
remaining is oblique expression in more or less
inadequate symbolism.
206
This account of the phenomenological constitution of the
occult helps to illuminate the antinomy discussed
in
chapter 9; if an alleged "phenomenon" were indisputably
confirmed and
scientifically theorised, it would no longer
be anomalous and so cease to be a sign of gnosis; but conversely,
if phenomena were held to be intrinsically immune to such
validation, that is, to be purely "symbolic", they would
cease to be admissable as "valid" evidence. Of all the dilemmas
created by Spiritualism for itself, this one, which is premissed
on the opposition of scientific/rational to symbolic/expressive,
is perhaps the most fundamental.
According to Gell, the reason occultism becomes ritualised is
that it can never achieve its object. Its compulsive repetitiveness is the obsession of frustration:
The occult or transcendent can only be found as an
image or cipher of something unreachable in itself,
and the image or cipher can only exist within, and not
beyond, the boundaries of the patent sphere. Consequently...
we may accurately represent the patent sphere as bounded
from the transcendental sphere by a reflecting surface,
so that the external skeleton of the world construct
takes on the aspect of a hall of mirrors - a surface
which endlessly reflects back what takes place within
the space it encloses but which has the property ot
seeming to allow access to a virtual space which lies
beyond the untransgressable boundaries of the world
construct... In attempting to make forays into (the
occult realm), magical thought only encounters its own
reflections, endlessly adumbrated in looking glass space.
Ultimately there is no gnosis to be found within Spiritualism, only
variations of the familiar: paraphrases and fragments of
derivative texts. Unable to comprehend its impossible object,
it keeps on repeating the same patterns, yearning for a redemption
which must always remain beyond reach.
13
Spiritualism as an ideology
Over the period of my involvement with Mortfield Church, it
gradually became clear to me that in spite of much clever and
207
persuasive talk, the adherents of Spiritualism
have very
confused ideas about its fundamental tenets. On survival
after death, the nature of Spirit, the workings of "evidence",
the meaning of "love", the manifestations of "progress" and
many other issues, I received hesitant, ambiguous and
inconsistent
explanations, and the deeper I delved, the more
tangled the knots became. Spiritualists are fully aware of
this incoherence, and with the disarming eclecticism of the
occult milieu, explain that each person must find their
own way to "Truth".
As with my finding its ritualism problematic, some will
see in my concern with Spiritualism’s incoherence evidence
of excessive rationalism. To such an objection there can be
no infallible answer: it may be that this is basically a
14
matter of taste . But once accepted, I would argue that
the incoherence of Spiritualism follows from its ideological
character. It is a reflection of the incoherence of the
society which has given birth to it.
Religion is the self-consciousness and self-esteem of
man who has either not yet found himself or has already
lost himself again. But man is not an abstract being
encamped outside the world. Man is the world of man, the
state, society. This state, this society, produce religion,
an inverted worl4-consciousness, because they are an
inverted world. 5
It is with this critical position
in mind that I have
represented SpiritualisB as an ideology, as a structure of
amorphous, incomplete and inconsistent codes. The texts
which enunciate these codes
entertain and edify. They produce
aesthetic experiences through the use of "rhetorical" devices,
most distinctively the delphism analysed in chapter 10. At the
same time they compose a bardic discourse, as discussed in
chapter 11. This bardic voice of Spiritualism adverts to
fragments of signifying structures which are only incidentally
about spirits. More fundamentally, they are concerned with
information transactions, scientific validation, metaphorical
paradigms, the ego, evolution, and with suffering and its
requital.
The problems engaged by Spiritualism are, in fact, basic
questions of epistemology and morality that also occupied
Plato and Newton, Augustine and Goethe. To observe that
Spiritualism fails to solve them is not to denigrate it. But
actually its attempted formulations and solutions are riddled
with antinomies, omissions and dubious conflations. Some of
these have been created or given a special significance by
Spiritualism for itself. Such are Spirit, the afterlife, and,
as I have already noticed, law and anomaly. But most of them
have been taken over with the cultural expressions in which
Spiritualists have been given them: autonomy and heteronomy,
freewill and providence, mind and matter, hierarchy and
equality, metaphor and metonymy. Failing to resolve these
contradictions, Spiritualists
nevertheless cannot let them
alone, but, in the image of the last chapter, must pick away
at them, teasing and tugging, but failing to untangle. This
is the ritualism of ideology, to complement the ritualism of
the occult.
From this perspective, the contrast between the abnormality
of the Spiritualist belief system and the normality of most
of its followers is easier to grasp. On the one hand, it is
true that Spiritualism readily provokes scorn and ridicule from
209
non-believers, and apology or defiance from devotees. Although
not so incomprehensible as to be "insane", nor eo threatening
as to be "criminal", it
is definitely "marginal". And yet
its dominant codes are enunciated in discourses which are by
no means marginal. In outline, if not always in detail,
the concepts, assumptions and problems of Spiritualist ideology
are thoroughly conventional. To mention a few of the more
obvious connections implicit in chapter 9, the idea of progress,
the valorisation of science and the centrality of the individual
are completely typical of the ideology of modern capitalism.
In this way, the marginality of Spiritualism comes to appear
less obvious than its essential ordinariness.
*
*
*
Thus, I represent Spiritualism as suspended between two illusions.
The Spiritualist gnosis is an illusory hope, while the world
which that gnosis would be a redemption from
is a reality
grasped through the illusory senses of ideology.
210
1.
Eg Turner (1969), Douglas (1973).
2.
Freud (1907).
3.
Durkheim*s word (1965).
4.
Frazer (1970).
5.
Horton (1964).
6.
Malinowski (1954).
7.
Beattie (1966).
8.
Gell (1974).
9.
Fortes (1966).
10. Gell (1974: 20-21).
11. Ibid: 21-22.
12. Ibid: 25-26.
13. I am thinking of the boy in Escher's lithograph "Belvedere",
who contemplates a
cube-like absurdity in his hands. He gazes at this
incomprehensible object and seems oblivious to the
fact that the belvedere behind him has been built
in the same impossible style (Escher, 1977: 16).
14. Feyerabend's "anarchist" critique of scientific method
is a very thorough application of this principle ( Feyerabend,
1975).
15. Marx and Engels (1975: 38).
REFERENCES
212
Aberle, David P. 1965. *'A note on relative deprivation as
applied to millenarian and other cult movements**, in
W.A. Lessa and E.Z. Vogt (eds), Reader in Comparative
Religion (New York: Harper and Row).
d'Abro, A. 1950. The Evolution of Scientific Thought (New
York: Dover).
Adler, Nathan. 1974.
*Ritual, Release and Orientation", in
Zareteky and Leone (1974).
Althusser, Louis. 1971. "Ideology and State Apparatuses",
in Lenin and Philosophy. (London:New Left Books).
Anonymous.
1877.
Ward, Lock).
The Language and Poetry of Flowers (London:
Anonymous. 1974. Encyclopedia of Magic and Superstition
(London: Octopus Books).
Aries, Philip. 1974. "Death Inside Out” , in P. Steinfels
and R.M. Veatch (eds), Death Inside Out (New York: Harper
and Row).
Ashby, Robert H. 1972.
The Guidebook for Study of Psychical
Research (London: Rider).
Ashworth, C.E.
1980.
"Flying Saucers, Spoon-Bending and
Atlantis*, Sociological Review, vol.28 (2).
Augustine of Hippo. 1974. Confessions (Harmondsworth: Penguin),
(c. AD 398).
Australian Dictionary of Biography. 1966.
University Press).
Balch, Robert W. and Taylor, David. 1977.
(Melbourne:
"Seekers and
Saucers", American Behavioural Scientist, vol. 20(6).
Barbanell, Maurice. 1969.
Spiritualism Today (London: Herbert
Jenkins). .
Barrow, Logie. 1980. * Socialism in Eternity. The Ideology of
Plebeian Spiritualists, 1853-1913"» History Workshop.
# 9.
Barthes, Roland. 1973. Mythologies (London: Paladin).
Barthes, Roland. 1974.. S/Z (New York: Hill and Wang).
Barthes, Roland. 1975.
The Pleasure of the Text (New York:
Hill and Wang).
Barthes, Roland. 1978., A Lover* s Discourse (New York:
Hill and Wang).
de Bary, Wm Theodore, et al. 1960.
Sources of Chinese
Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press).
Beattie, John. 1966. "Ritual and Social Change*, Man (New
Series), vol. 1 (1J.
213
Becker, Howard a. 1963. Outsiders (New York: Free Press of
Glencoe).
Beckford, James A. 1975. The Trumpet of Prophecy (Oxford:
Blackwell).
Beckford, James. 1977. "Sociological Approaches to Religious
Movements", International Social Science Journal, vol. 29(2).
Beckford, James. 1978a. "Sociological Stereotypes of the
Religious Sect” , The Sociological Review, vol. 26 (1).
Beckford, James. 1978b. "Accounting for Conversion", British
Journal of Sociology, vol. 29 (2).
Bennett, Tony. 1980. “Teaching Popular Culture", Screen
Bduoation. #34.
Bigsby, C.W.E. 1976. Approaches to Popular Culture (London:
Edward Arnold).
Blake, William. 1958. * Auguries of Innocence” , in J. Bronowski
(ed), William Blake (Harmondsworth: Penguin). (1803).
Blauner, Robert. 1966. "Death and the Social Structure",
Psychiatry, vol. 29(4).
Boddington, Harry. 1947. The University of Spiritualism
(London: Spiritualist Press).
Bouisson, Maurice. 1976. "Gnosticism and its Survivals in
Christianity” , in Tiryakian (1976).
Bowen, P.G. 1978. The Occult Way (London: Rider). (1936).
Brandon, S.G.P. 1967. The Judgement of the Dead (London*
Weidenfeld and Nicolson).
Brennan, J.H.
1976. An Occult History of the World (London:
Futura).
Bright, Annie. 1907. A Soul's Pilgrimmage (Melbourne: George
Robertson).
Britten, E. Hardinge, Kitson, A., Kersey, H.A.
1957. The
Lyceum Officer1s Manual. 6th edn. (Manchester: S.N.U.).
Browne, Hugh Junor. 1876. The Holy Truth (London: Arthur
Hall).
Browne, Hugh Junor. 1879. national Christianity (Melbourne:
the author).
Browne, Hugh Junor. 1883. The Religion of the Future (Melbourne:
the author).
Browne, Hugh Junor. 1888. The Grand Reality (Melbourne:
George Robertson).
214
Buchanan, Joseph Rodes. 1882. The New Education: Moral.
Industrial. Hygenic (Boston: the author).
Buchanan, Joseph Rodes. 1885. Manual of Psychometry: the
Dawn of a New Civilisation (Boston: the author).
Buckner, H. Taylor. 1968. "The Plying Saucerians", in M.
Truzzi (ed), Sociology and Everyday Life (Englewood Cliffs,
N.J. : Prentice Hall).
Burnet, John. 1962. Greek Philosophy (London: Macmillan).
(1914).
Campbell, Colin. 1972. "The Cult, the Cultic Milieu and
Secularisation” , in Michael Hill (ed), A Sociological
Yearbook of Religion in Britain #5 (London: S.C.M. Press).
Carnap, Rudolf. 1964.
University Press).
Meaning and Necessity (Chicago:
Castaneda, Carlos. 1970. The Teachings of Don Juan
(Harmondsworth: Penguin).
Cavendish, Richard. 1975. The Powers of Evil
and Kegan Paul).
(London: Routledge
Chalmers, Alan Francis. 1976. What is This Thing Called Science?
St. Lucia: Queensland University Press).
Chambers, Howard V. 1966. An Occult Dictionary for the Millions
(Los Angeles: Sherbourne Press).
Chapanis, Natalia P. and Chapanis, Alphonse. 1964. "Cognitive
Dissonance", Psychological Bulletin , vol. 61 ( 1 ).
Cicero. 1938. De Divinatione (London: Heinemann).
Cirlot, Juan Eduardo. 1971. A Dictionary of Symbols
Routledge and Kegan Paul).
(London:
Cohen, Stanley. 1972. Folk Devils and Moral Panics (London:
MacGibbon and Kee).
Cohn, Norman. 1970. The Pursuit of the Millenium (London:
Temple Smith).
Collins, H.K. and Pinch, T.J. 1979. "The Construction of the
Paranormal" in Wallis (1979).
Connell, R.W. and Irving, T.H. 1980. Class Structure in
Australian History (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire).
Copen, Bruce. 1976. Magic of the Aura
Academic Publications).
(Hayman's Heath, Sussex:
Corcoran, Paul E. 1979. Political Language and Rhetoric
(Austin: University of Texas).
21$
Coward, Rosalind and Ellis, John. 1977. Language and
Materialism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul).
Crookall, Robert. 1961. The Supreme Adventure (Cambridge:
James Clarke).
Crow, W.B. 1973. Witchcraft. Magic and Occultism (Hollywood,
Calif: Wilshire).
Culler, Jonathan. 1979. "Jacques Derrida" in Sturrock,
John (ed), Structuralism and Since (Oxford: University
Press).
Cummins, Geraldine. 1970. Swan on a Black Sea
Routledge and Kegan Paul).
(London:
Cummins, Geraldine. 1932. The Road to Immortality (London:
Ivor Nicolson and Watson).
von Daniken, Erich. 1968. Chariots of the Gods? (London:
World Books).
Davidson, Ian. 1975. wThe New Mysticism**, Australian Humanist,
Sept.
Denovan, W.D.C. 1882. The Evidences of Spiritualism (Melbourne:
W.H. Terry).
Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology
Hopkins University Press). (1967).
(Baltimore: Johns
Dolgin, Janet. 1974. “Latter Day Sense and Substance* in
Zaretsky and Leone (1974).
Douglas, Alfred. 1976. Extra-Sensory Powers (London:Gollancz).
Douglas, Mary. 1973. Natural Symbols (Harmondsworth: Penguin).
Downton, James V., 3n r » Sacred Journeys (New York: Columbia
University‘Press).
Doyle, A.C. 1922. The Wanderings of a Spiritualist (London:
Hodder and Stoughton).
Drury, Nevill and Tillett, Gregory. 1978. The Occult Sourcebook (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul).
Drury, Nevill and Tillett, Gregory. 1980. Other Temples.
Other Gods (Sydney:Methuen).
Du Bois, Cora. 1955. *The Dominant Value Profile of American
Culture**, American Anthropologist 57 (6).
Durkheim, Emile. 1965. The Elementary Forms of the Religious
Life (New York: Free Press). (1912)•
Eco, Umberto. 1976. A Theory of Semiotics (Bloo«ington: Indiana
University Press)
216
Edmonds, J.W. 1860. letters to the "New York Tribune* on
Spiritualism (New York: Spiritual Tracts #10).
Edwards, Harry,
n.d.
A Guide for the Development of Medium-
ship (London: Spiritual Association of Great Britain).
Eister, Allan W. 1974. "Culture Crises and New Religious
Movements" in Zaretsky and Leone (1974).
Eliade, M. 1976. Occultism. Witchcraft and Cultural fashions
(Chicago: University Press).
Eliot, T.S. 1950. Four Quartets (London: Faber).
Elkin, A.P. 1946.
Aboriginal Men of High Degree (Sydney:
Australian Publishing Co.).
Elliot, J.A. 1955. Chinese Spirit-Medium Cults in Singapore
(London: L.S.E. Monograph on Social Anthropology #14).
Empson, William. 1973. Seven Types of Ambiguity (London:' Chatto
and Windus). (1930).
Escher, M.C. 1977. The Graphic Work of M.C. Escher (New
York: Ballantine).
Ferguson, John. 1976. Encyclopaedia of Mysticism (London:
Thames and Hudson).
Festinger, Leon. 1957. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance
(Evanston, 111.: Row, Peterson).
Festinger, L. et al. 1965. When Prophecy Fails (New York:
Harper).
Feuerbach, Ludwig. 1881. The Essence of Christianity (London:
Trubner).
Feyerabend, Paul. 1975. Against Method (London: New Left Books).
Findlay, J. Arthur. 1931. On the Edge of the JStherlc (.London:
Psychic Press).
Firth, Raymond. 1955. The Fate of the soul (Cambridge: University
Press).
Fischler, Claude. 1974. "Astrology and French Society", in
Tiryakian (1974).
Fiske, John and Hartley, John. 1978. Reading Television
(London:Methuen).
Ford, Arthur. 1974. The Life Beyond Death (London: Sphere
Books).
Fortes, Meyer. 1966. "Religious Premises and Logical Technique
in Divinatory Ritual", in Ritualisation in Animals and Man,
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.
Series B, vol. 251.
217
Foucault, Michel. 1970. The Order of Things (London: Tavistock).
Fourier, F.C.M. 1971. Design for Utopia (New York: Schocken).
Fowler, Roger and Kress, Gunther. 1979. "Critical Linguistic#",
in Fowler et al (1979).
Fowler, Roger,
Hodge, Bob,
Kress, Gunther and Trew, Tony.
1979. Language and Control (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul).
Frank, Jerome David. 1961. Persuasion and Healing
John. Hopkins University Press).
(Baltimore:
Frazer, James George. 1970. The Golden Bough , abridged edn
(London: MacMillan). (1922).
Freud, Sigmund. 1907. “Obsessive Actions” , in Standard Edition
vol. 9 (London: Hogarth Press).
Freud, Sigmund. 1957. Moses and Monotheism (New York: Vintage
Books). (1939).
Freud, Sigmund. 1973. New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
(Harmondsworth: Penguin). (1932).
Freud, Sigmund. 1974. Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
(Harmondsworth: Penguin). (1917)-
Gardner, Martin. 1957. Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science
(New York: Dover).
Garnham, Nicholas. 1979. ”Subjectivity, Ideology, Class and
Historical Materialism**, Screen, vol. 20 (l).
Garrison, Vivian. 1974. "Sectarianism and Psychosocial
Adjustment", in Zaretsky and Leone (1974).
Gauld, Alan. 1968. The Founders of Psychical Research (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul).
Gauld, Alan and Cornell, A.D. 1979. Poltergeists (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul).
Gaynor, Frank. 1973. Dictionary of Mysticism (secaucus, N.J. :
The Citadel Press).
Geertz, Clifford. 1966. "Religion as a Cultural System” , in
Banton, Michael (ed), Anthropological Approaches to the
Study of Religion (London: Tavistock).
Gell, Alfred. 1974. "Understanding the Occult", Radical
Philosophy. #9.
Gell, Alfred. 1977. "Magic, Perfume, Dream..." in I. Lewis
(ed), Symbols and Sentiments (London: Academic Press).
Ginzberg, Carlo. 1980. toMorelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes:
Clues and Scientific Method", History Workshop. #9.
Glock, C.Y. 1964. "The role of deprivation in the origin and
Evolution of a religious groupu in R. Lee and M.W. Marty
(eds), Religion and Social Conflict (New York: Oxford
University Press).
Glock, C.T. and Bellah, R.N. (eds). 1976. The New Religious
Consciousness (Berkeley: University of California).
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. 1949. Faust (New York: New
Directions). (1808).
Goffman, E. 1972. Interaction Ritual (Harmondsworth: Penguin).
Goldfarb, R.M. and Howard, C.R. 1978. Spiritualism and Nineteenth
Century Letters (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University
Press).
Gombrich, Richard F. 1971. Precept and Practice: Traditional
Buddhism in the Rural Highlands of Ceylon (Oxford: Clarendon
Press).
Gordon, C.W. 1959. "Voluntary Organisations", American Sociological
Review, vol. 24 (l).
Grattan-Guiness, I. 1976. "Ufology and its Social Predicament",
Annals of Science , vol. 33 (2).
Halifax, Joan. 1979. Shamanlc Voices (Harmondsworth: Penguin).
Hall, Stuart. 1977a. "Culture, the Media and the ’Ideological
Effect'", in Curran, J., Gurevitch, M., and Woollacott,
J. (eds), Mass Communication and Society (London: Edward
Arnold).
Hall, Stuart. 197Tb. "The Hinterland of Science: Ideology
and the ’Sociology of Knowledge'", Working Papers in Cultural
Studies #10.
Harbinger of Light. Melbourne.
Hartmann, Patricia A. 1976. "Social Dimensions of Occult
Participation", British Journal of Sociology, vol. 27 (2).
Harwood, Alan. 1977. Ry: Spiritist as Needed (New York: Wiley
and Sons).
Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: the Meaning of Style (London:
Methuen).
Heywood, Rosalind. 1948. Telepathy and Allied Phenomena (London;
Society for Psychical Research).
Hine, Virginia. 1974. “The Deprivation and Disorganisation
Theories of Social Movements" in Zaretsky and Leone (1974).
219
Horton, Robin. 1964. "Ritual Man in Africa**, Africa vol. 34(2).
Howe, E. 1972. The Magicians of the Golden Dawn (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul).
Howitt, William. 1834. A Popular History of Priestcraft (London:
Chapman).
Hughes, Muriel Joy. 1968. Women Healers in Medieval Life and
Literature (New York: Books for Libraries Press). (1943).
Hume, David. 1952. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
(Chicago: Encyclopedia
Brittanica). (1748).
Hume, David, i960. A Treatise Concerning Human Nature, Book
III (Cxford: Clarendon). (1740).
Hume, Fergus William. 1890. The Man with a Secret (London:
White).
Hume, Fergus William. 1924. The Whispering Lane (London: Hurst
Blackett).
Jakobson, Roman. 1956. "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types
of Aphasic Disturbances” in Jakobson, R.,and Halle, M. ,
Fundamentals of Language ('.y-Gravenhage: Mouton).
James, William. 1917. Human Immortality (London: Dent).
Jayawardena, C. 1968. "Ideology and Conflict in Lower Class
Communities", Comparative Studies in Society and History,
vol. 10(4).
Johnson, Allen (ed). 1929. Dictionary of American Biography,
vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons).
Jones, Marc Edmund. 1971. Astrology
(Baltimore: Penguin). (1945).
Jones, R.K. 1975. "Some Sectarian Characteristics of Therapeutic
GroupsM , in Wallis ( 1975).
Kadushin, Charles. 1966. "The Friends and Supporters of
Psycho therapy**, American Sociological Review, vol. 31 (6).
Kerr, Howard. 1972. Mediums and Spirit-rappings and Roaring
Radicals: Spiritualism in American Literature, 1850-1900
(Urbana: University of Illinois).
Kiev, Ari. 1964. Magic, Faith and Healing (New York: The Free
Press).
Kilner, W.J. 1974. The Aura
(New York: Samuel Weiser). (1911) •
Klibanov, A.I. 1965. "The Dissident Denominations in the Past
and Today11, Soviet Sociology vol. 3(5).
Krappe, Alexander Haggerty. 1930. The Science of Folklore
(London: Methuen).
220
Kuhn, A.B. 1930. Theosophy (New York: Holt).
Kuhn, Thomas. 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
(Chicago: University Press).
Lakatos, I. and Musgrave, A.
1970.
Criticism and the Growth
of Knowledge (Cambridge : University Press).
La Nauze, John Andrew. 1965. Alfred Deakin. vol. I
University Press).
Lanternari, Vittorio.
(New York: Knopf).
(Melbourne:
1963. The Religions of the Oppressed
Larrain, Jorge. 1979. The Concept of Ideology (London: Hutchison).
Lauer, Roger. 1974. "A. medium for mental health** in Zaretsky
and Leone (1974).
Leach, Edmund. 1976. Culture and Communication (Cambridge:
University Press).
Leadbeater, C.W. 1971.
Man Visible and Invisible (Madras:
Theosophical Publishing House). (1902).
Le Guin, Ursula. 1971. A Wizard of Earthsea (Harmondsworth:
Penguin).
Le Guin, Ursula. 1974a. The Tombs of Atuan (Harmondsworth:
Penguin).
Le Guin, Ursula. 1974b. The Farthest Shore (Harmondsworth:
Penguin).
Leibniz, C.W. 1965. The Monadology (1714) in Philosophical
Writings (London: Dent).
Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1963. Structural Anthropology (New
York: Basic Books).
Levi-Strauss, Claude.
and Nicolson).
1966. The Savage Mind (London: Weidenfeld
levi-Strauss, Claude. 1970. The Raw and the Cooked (London:
Jonathan Cape).
Lewis, I.M. 1971. Ecstatic Religion (Harmondsworth: Penguin).
Iocke, R.G. n.d. “The Structure of Action Defining an Urban
Cult Network" (mimeo, Perth: West Australian Institute of
Technology).
lofland, John. 1966. Doomsday Cult (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice
Hall).
lofland, John and Stark, Werner. 1963. "Becoming a WorldSaver", American Sociological Review 30 (6).
lukacs, Georg. 1971. History and Class Consciousness (London:
Merlin).
221
Lynch, Frederick R. 1977. “Toward a Theory of Conversion and
Comirfitnient to the Occult*1, American Behavioural Scientist,
vol. 20 (6).
MacCabe, Colin. 1978/9. "The discursive and the ideological
in film*, Screen, vol. 19 (4).
McCabe, Joseph. 1920. Is Spiritualism Based on Fraud? (London:
Watts).
McIntosh, Christopher. 1975. Eliphas Levi and the French
Occult Revival (London: Rider).
Macklin, June. 1974. "Belief, Ritual and Healing: New England
Spiritualism and Mexican-American Spiritism Compared", in
Zaretsky and Leone (1974)•
Macklin, June. 1977. "A Connecticut Yankee in Summerland" in
Crapanzano, V. and Garrison, V. (eds), Case Studies in
Spirit Possession (New York: Wiley).
MacLean, Una. 1974. Magical Medicine (Harmondsworth: Penguin).
Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1954. Magic. Science and Religion
(New York: Loubleday).
Marlowe, Mary. 1918. The Women Who Wait (London: Simpkin,
Marshall, Hamilton, Kent).
Martin, Bernice. 1971. *The Spiritualist Meeting” in Hill,
M. (ed), Sociological Yearbook of Religion In Britain #4
(London: S.C.M. Press).
Martin, John and Hall, Adrienne, n.d. "Superstition and
Religion” (mimeo, Sydney: Macquarie University).
Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital (Harmondsworth: Penguin).
Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich. 1975. On Religion (Moscow:
Progress Publishers).
Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich. 1978. The German Ideology
Part 1 (1846), in Tucker, R.C. (ed), The Marx-Engels Reader
(New York: Norton).
Mayne, Alan J. 1966.
Theoretical and Philosophical Aspects
of Psychical Research
Research Group).
(Hastings, Sussex: Metaphysical
Mepham, John. 1974. "The Theory of Ideology in ’Capital’**,
Working Papers in Cultural Studies #6.
Metz, Christian. 1974. Film Language (New York: Oxford University
Press).
Metzer, Ralph. 1971. Maps of Consciousness (New York: Collier).
222
Mol, Hans. 1971. Religion in Australia (Melbourne: Nelson).
Moore, R.L. 1977. In Search of White Crows (New York: Oxford
University Press).
Muldoon, Sylvan and Carrington, Hereward. 1973. The Phenomena
of Astral Projection (London: Rider). (1951)Muldoon, Sylvan and Carrington, Hereward. 1974. The Projection
of the Astral Body (London: Rider). (1929).
Mulkay, Michael. 1979. Science and the Sociology of Knowledge
(London: Allen and Unwin).
Murdoch, Walter. 1923. Alfred Deakin: a sketch (London: ConstableJ.
Myers, Frederic w.H. 1954. Human Personality and its Survival
after Death (New York: Longmans, Green). (1903).
Nelson, G.K. 1968. "The Analysis of a Cult: Spiritualism",
Social Compass #75.
Nelson, G.K. 1969. Spiritualism and Society (London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul).
Neu, Jerome. 1975. "Levi-Strauss on Shamanism", Man
10(2).
New English Bible with Apocrypha. 1970. (Oxford: Oxford University
Press and Cambridge University Press). The Authorized
translation is also cited.
Niebuhr, H.R. 1929. The Social Sources of Denominationalism
(New York: Henry Holt).
Nyrgren, A. 1969. Agape and Eros (New York: Harper and Row).
Ostrander, Sheila and Schroeder, Lynn. 1971. Psychic Discoveries
Behind the Iron Curtain (New York: Bantam Books).
Oxley, H.G. 1974. Mateship in Local Organisation (St Lucia:
University of "Queensland Press).
Palfreman, J. 1979. " Seances and the Scientists", New Society
48 (872).
Parsons, Talcott. 1965. "Introduction" to Weber (1965).
Parssinen, Terry M. 1979. "Professional Deviants and the
History of Medicine", in Wallis (1979).
Pauwels, Louis and Bergier, Jacaues. 1971. The Morning of
the Magicians (London: Mayflower).
Pearsall, Ronald. 1972. The Table Rappers
(London: Joseph).
Pettitt, Florence E. 1974. Shrines of Psychic Power (Wellingborough, Nths: Thorsons).
Pike, James A. 1969. The Other Side (London: Allen).
223
Plato. 1970. "Timaeus" and "Critias" (c. 350 BC) in R.M.
Hare and D. A. Russell (eds), The Dialogues, vol. 3 (London:
Sphere Books).
Plotinus. 1952. The Six Enneads (Chicago: Encycolpedia Brittanica).
Podmore, Frank. 1963. From Meaner to Christian Science (New
York: University Books). (1909)
Pope, Liston. 1942. Millhands and Preachers
(New Haven: Yale
University Press).
Popper, Karl. 1959. The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New
York: Harper and Row).
Porter, Katherine H. 1958. Through a Glass Darkly (Lawrence:
University of Kansas Press).
Poulantzas, N. 1973. Political Power and Social Classes (London:
New Left Books).
Praed, Rosa. 1901. As a Watch in the Night (London: Chatto and
Windus).
Pratt, Ambrose. 1910. The Living Mummy (London: Ward).
Price, Maeve. 1979. "The Divine Light Mission as a Social
Organisation*, The Sociological Review, vol. 27 (2).
Pritchard, Linda K. 1976. "Religious Change
in Nineteenth
Century America" in Glock and Bellah (1976).
Psychic News. London.
Randi, James. 1980. Flim-Flam (New York: Lippincott).
Rattansi, P.M. 1973. "Reason in Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Century Natural Philosophy", in Teich, M. and Young, R.
(eds), Changing Perspectives in the History of Science
(London: Beinemann).
keichenbach, Karl von. 1977. The Mysterious Odic Force (Wellingborough: The Acquarian Press). (1844).
Roberts, J.M. 1974. The Mythology of the Secret Societies
(Frogmore, Herts: Paladin).
Roe, Jill. 1980. "Three Visions of Sydney Heads from Balmoral
Beach", in Roe, J. (ed), Twentieth Century Sydney (Svdnev:
Hale and Iremonger).
Rosen, Harold. 1963. "Hypnosis",in The Encyclopedia of Mental
Health (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press).
Rosenberg, Bruce A. 1974. "The Psychology of the Spiritual
Sermon", in Zaretsky and Leone (1974).
Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1966. Course in General Linguistics
(New York: McGraw Hill).
224
Schreiber, Flora Rheta. 1975. Sybil (Harmondsworth: Penguin).
Schrenk-Notzing, Baron von. 1920. Phenomena of Materialisation
(London: Paul, Trench, Trubner). (1913).
Schumaker, Wayne.
1972. The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance
(Berkeley: University of California).
Screen Reader I. 1977. Cinema/Ideology/Politics (London:
The Society for Education in Film and Television).
Seligmann, Kurt. 1975. Magic, Supernaturalism and Religion
(St Albans, Herts: Paladin). (1948).
Sepharial (pseud). 1973. A Manual of Occultism (London:
Rider). (1910).
Shakespeare, William.
1959. Hamlet. Act IV, scene v, in
Craig, W.J. (ed), The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
(London: Oxford University Press).
Singer, Milton. 1980. * Signs of the Self*, American Anthropologist,
vol. 82 (3).
Skultans, Vieda. 1974. Intimacy and Ritual (London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul).
Smith, F.B. 1963. "Joseph Symes and the Australasian Secular
Association*, Labour History. #5.
Smith, James. 1875. Original Story: A Tale of the World (Maryborough) .
Smith, Wilfred Cantwell. 1963. The Meaning and End of Religion
(New York: Mentor).
Spence, Lewis. 1960. An Encyclopaedia of Occultism (Secaucas,
N.J.: The Citadel Press).
Spengler, Oswald*. 1946. The Decline of the West, vol.I (New
York: Knopf). (1918).
Stanford, Ray. 1977. What Your Aura Tells Me (New York:Doubleday).
Stark, Werner. 1967. The Sociology of Religion, vol. 2 (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul).
Superman Pocketbook # 1 6 . 1980. (London: Egmont Publishing).
Sydenham, Peter. 1979. "The Kirlian Effect*, Electronics
Today. July.
Taylor, John. 1976. Superminds (London: Pan Books).
Thomas, Keith. 1971. Religion and the Decline of Magic (London:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson).
Tiryakian, Edward A. 1976. On the Margin of the Visible (New
York: John Wiley and Sons).
225
Troeltsch, Ernst. 1960. The Social Teaching of the Christian
Churches (New York: Harper). (1911).
Truzzi, Marcello. 1976. "Definition and Dimensions of the
Occult", in Tiryakian (1976).
Turbayne, Colin Murray. 1970. The Myth of Metaphor (Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press).
Turner, Victor. 1967. "Colour Classification in Ndembu Ritual",
in The Forest of Symbols (Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University
Press).
Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process (Chicago: Aldine).
Twigg, Ena and Brod, Ruth Hagey. 1973. Ena Twigg: Medium
(London and New York: W.H. Allen).
Vincent-Reidy, M.T. and Richardson, J.T. 1978. "Roman Catholic
Neo-Pentecostalism: the New Zealand Experience*', The
Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology vol. 14(3).
Wallis, Roy (ed). 1975. Sectarianism (London: Peter Owen).
Wallis, Roy. 1975a. "Societal Reaction to Scientology", in
Wallis (1975).
Wallis, Roy. 1975b. "Scientology: Therapeutic Cult to Religious
Sect", Sociology, vol. 9 (l).
Wallis, Roy. 1976. The Road to Total Freedom (London: Heinemann).
Wallis, Roy (ed). 1979. On the Margins of Science: the Social
Construction of Rejected Knowledge, Sociological Review
Monograph #27.
Wardwell, W.I. 1965. "Christian Science Healing", Journal for
the Scientific Study of Religion vol. 4(2).
Warren, Donald I. 1970. "Status Inconsistency Theory and
Flying Saucers", Science, vol. 170, #3958.
Watson, Lyall. 1974. Supernature (London: Hodder Paperbacks).
Weber, Max. 1965. The Sociology of Religion (London:
Methuen). (1922).
Westlake, Mike. 1971. "The unconscionably long death of God",
Social Praxis, vol. 1(3).
Willemen, Paul. 1978. "Notes on Subjectivity", Screen, vol. 19(1).
Willems, E. 1969. "Religious Pluralism and Class Structure:
Brazil and Chile", in Robertson, R. (ed), Sociology of
Religion (Harmondsworth: Penguin). (1965).
Wilson, Bryan R. 1959. "An Analysis of Sect Development",
American Sociological Review, vol. 24 (l),
Wilson, Bryan R. 1969. "A Typology of Sects", in Robertson, R.
(ed), Sociology of Religion (Harmondsworth: Penguin).
226
Wilson, Colin. 1973. The Occult (St Alban's: Mayflower),
Woelfl, Genevieve. 1976. Psychic Experience (Menlo Park, Calif: ..
Redwood Publishers).
Woodcock, George. 1975. Anarchism (Harmondsworth: Penguin).
Woolfson, Charles. 1976. "The Semiotics of Working Class
Speech*, Working Papers in Cultural Studies. #9.
Wors ley, Peter. 1970. The Trumpet Shall Sound (London: Paladin).
Wright, Peter W.G. 1979. "A Sociology in the Legitimisation
of Knowledge", in Wallis (1979).
Yates, Frances. 1972. The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul).
Yates, Frances. 1979. The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan
Age (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul).
Yinger, J. Milton. 1957. Religion, Society and the Individual
(New York: Macmillan).
Zaretsky, Irving. 1974. "In the Beginning was the Word", in
Zaretsky and Leone (1974).
Zaretsky, Irving and Leone, Mark P.(eds). 1974. Religious Movements
in Contemporary America (Princeton: University Press).
Zelinsky, Wilbur. 1976. "Unearthly Delights", in Lowenthal, D.
and Bowden, M.J.(eds), Geographies of the Mind (New York:
Oxford University Press).