- 666 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
This volume addresses controversies connected to the testing of the capacities and potentials of mediums. Today we commonly associate the term "medium" with the technical communication between transmitters and receivers. Yet this term likewise applies to those who cooperate with agencies that exceed the presumed domain of the material world. Insofar as one presumes a division between distinctly opposed categories of religion and the secular, technical media tend to be associated with the secular and human (trance) mediums tend to be associated with religion after 1900. This volume concerns the ways in which the term medium still marks an overlapping of – and thus problematizes – the aforementioned division between religion and the secular, the personal and the technological.The term medium carries with it a seed of doubt that is itself inseparable from investment in the medium's power: insofar as they communicate with an "other" realm, mediums offer the hope and promise of new possibilities and improved efficiency, and thus of a better life; yet they have simultaneously been under suspicion of altering (or even inventing) the messages they communicate. It is due to this combination of promise and suspicion that "mediumism" has tended to evoke scientific, religious, and moral controversies. Thus, we can speak of a "mediumistic trial" – that is, a process in which a medium is put to the test concerning its potentials and trustworthiness. Around 1800, experts were asked if a modern secular institution would be capable of inspiring, domesticating or excluding trance mediumship. This question has stayed with us ever since, and the answers have remained inconclusive. That is why the past and present of mediumship may be asked to elucidate each other.
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Table of contents
- Contents
- Introduction
- The Mediumistic Trial. Testing and Contesting the Thresholds of Agency, Consciousness, and Technology
- Mediumistic Trials of the Long 19th Century
- The Therapeutic Mediologies of Animal Magnetism
- Quite as Powerful. The Mediumistic Controversy in the 19th Century
- A Case of Quasi-Certainty. William James and the Making of the Subliminal Mind
- Educating the Mediums. Albert von Schrenck-Notzing’s Work of Purification on Spiritualism
- ‘S. W.’ and C. G. Jung: From Mediumship to Analytical Psychology
- Mediumistic Trials of the Short 20th Century
- The Braunau Trance Mediums and their Spiritualist Circle Between the Two World Wars. A Local Study
- Passing the Examination. The Mediumistic Trial and its Double in the Writings of Jeanne Favret-Saada
- The Angel in the Machine. Divining Legal Authorship in Channelled and Computer-Generated Works
- The Return of the Controversy. Testing Psychics in the 1970s and its Consequences for German Parapsychology
- Clairvoyance for the Security of the Republic. Gerard Croiset and the Search for Hanns Martin Schleyer (1977)
- California Dreamin’. The Invention of Modern Western Shamanism as a Mediumistic Trial of the 20th Century
- Mediators of Trance. María Sabina – Gordon Wasson – Bruce Conner
- Psychic Spies. Cold War Science and the Military-Occult Complex
- Mediumistic Trials of the 21st Century
- The Magus of Silicon Valley. Immortality, Apocalypse, and God Making in Ray Kurzweil’s Transhumanism
- Fighting the Fakers and Fooling the Fighters. Skeptics between Triumph and Agony, or: The Birth of the Skeptical Movement from the Spirit of Magic
- Mediating Spirits. Sensation, Form and the Body in American Spiritualism
- Mediating “Mystery”. Pentecostalism, the Media, and the Social Production of Hope and Suspicion in the Brazilian Crime Debate
- “It Is Easier to Stay Out than Get Out”. A Sweat Lodge Ritual, the Entangled Ethnographer on Trial, and Irony as a Stance for Anthropological Analysis
- Shamanism on Trial. Acting in a Hall of Mirrors
- “I know . . . but still.” Popular Photography and the Mediation of Luck in Japan
- Burdens of Proof. Obeah, Petroleum Geology, and its Mediums in Trinidad
- Sufi Practices, the Masters’ Role and the Media of Legitimacy. On the Coincidence of Technical Media and Sufi Mediums
- Purity’s Perils. Race, Republicanism, and Relevance of Magic in Contemporary France
- Epilogue
- “I Believe in Science Now!” Skeptics Between Hope, Fear, and Loathing in Las Vegas
- List of Contributors
- Name Index
- Place Index