Shakespiritualism

Shakespeare and the Occult, 1850–1950

J. Kahan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349448531, 9781137282200
• eBook ISBN: 9781137313553
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This study concerns itself with a now-forgotten religious group, Spiritualists, and how their ensuing discussions of Shakespeare's meaning, his writing practices, his possible collaborations, and the supposed purity and/or corruption of his texts anticipated, accompanied, or silhouetted similar debates in Shakespeare Studies.

Chapter 1

Shakespeare, Poet of the Impossible

THE YEAR IS 1876. MELBOURNE. A GROUP of Spiritualists flock to the home of Hugh Junor Browne, the wealthy owner of Australian Distillery Works. Soft music hovers in the air. The medium, dressed in black, enters. His name is Charles Henry Foster, a renowned American Spiritualist.1 The faithful gather round. Foster removes his jacket and then rolls up his right sleeve. His forearm is pasty, but then he waves his exposed flesh before a flickering candle and mutters a magical incantation: “Magna Mater! Magna Mater! … Atys … Dia ad aghaidh’s ad aodann … agus bas dunach ort! Dhonas’s dholas ort, agus leat-sa! … Ungl … ungl … rrrlh … chchch.” Almost immediately, writing begins to appear on his naked arm.

A series of cards and envelops are then handed out. Foster asks everyone in the room to write a question to a particular dead friend or relative. They do so. The questions are sealed in separate envelopes. The envelopes are handed to Foster, who proceeds to touch the first envelope to his forehead and to issue an answer—“Yes, Fred watches you and your family; he worries about the farm, but says that all will be well.” Foster then opens the envelope and reads aloud the written question: “My brother Fred died last year in a farming accident. Is he here? Is he fine?” Foster proceeds to the next sealed envelope. He touches it to his forehead: “Your mother is fine; she still gardens and takes great pride watching you from above.” The envelope is opened; again, the answer corresponds to the question. Foster moves on to the next envelope: “Your boy Sam was killed in a mining accident. His legs were blown off, but he is able-bodied now and happy.” The envelope is unsealed; yet again, Foster’s answer is in uncanny accord.2

Now to serious business. The shades are drawn; all lights are extinguished, save a single, thick white candle. Flame and shadow dance on the medium’s face. The participants sit round the table. They hold hands. They grow silent. There is a preliminary prayer:

O Infinite Spirit, manifesting Thy love and tenderness from fragile flower to mightiest oak; impressing in many ways Thy Infinite care and wisdom, we turn to Thee this hour and would be blessed by a more complete understanding of life’s obligations and opportunities. We would have a more perfect understanding of the laws which govern our being, a more perfect comprehension of our duties, and greater strength to perform them. We would learn more and more of that great world of spirits to which the vast multitudes which have peopled the earth have gone from time to time.3

Then, quoting Hamlet nearly word for word, the medium continues: “We would know more of that country toward which we are all travelling—more of its structure, more of its spheres, its conditions, its illuminations, its glories.” This is followed by a hymn:

I need Thy presence every passing hour.

What but Thy grace can foil the tempter’s power?

Who, like Thyself, my guide and stay can be?

Through cloud and sunshine, Lord, abide with me.

I fear no foe, with Thee at hand to bless;

Ills have no weight, and tears no bitterness.

Where is death’s sting? Where, grave, thy victory?

I triumph still, if Thou abide with me.4

Before the first hymn is finished, the medium lapses into silence, his head gradually nodding. The other members of the séance continue to sing, but they too halt when a strange muttering begins to emanate from Foster. His head rolls slowly back then suddenly jerks forward. His eyes are now glittering with a strange new intelligence. A Spirit has possessed Foster’s body.

The Spiritualists around the table are not alarmed. They know who it is. They can tell by looking at the calendar. On Monday evenings, Foster’s body hosts the Spirits of two theologian-mystics, Emmanuel Swedenborg and Franz Anton Mesmer. On Tuesday and Friday nights, Foster is possessed by William Shakespeare, who happily elucidates the meaning of the universe to all present. It is Friday Night. Shakespeare’s night. Shakespeare has not come to entertain the Spiritualists; no, he has come to remind them that death is but the beginning of a new phase of life. Shakespeare informs the Spiritualists seated around the table, “This world is but the seminary for the great university of the spheres, where all pupils, without exception, must graduate, where eternal fountains of everlasting light and beauty glow, showing to man that there is a higher state than his present being.”5 Still more occult language follows: Shakespeare goes on to explain that his soul floats on “magnetic fluid” and that he can speak through Foster because of the medium’s immense “magnetic will,” which allows him to see “magnetic life.”6

To understand “Shakespeare’s” statements, as well as why he, along with Swedenborg and Mesmer, formed a Spiritualist trinity, we will need to move through time and space, visiting a variety of salons, lecture halls, and public theaters in London, Stratford-upon-Avon, Vienna, and Indianapolis.

The year is 1744. London. Emmanuel Swedenborg—(failed) inventor of a flying machine, a submarine, an air gun, a slow-combustion stove, and a “perpetual motion” machine—awakes on a cloudless afternoon from a postprandial nap. He writes in his journal, “I … saw him face to face. It was a face of such holy mien and everything indescribable and smiling so that I believe this was how he looked when he was alive … I woke, trembling, and came again into the state where I was neither asleep nor awake but in thought as to what this might mean, was it Christ, the son of God, whom I saw?”7 Later that same year, while eating in a London restaurant, Swedenborg has yet another vision: Christ appears before him and tells him that, henceforth, he will be communing with Spirits.8

Swedenborg then brags to any and all that God has “accorded to him the remarkable gift of communicating with departed souls at his pleasure.”9 As a consequence, no secret is safe from this self-styled mystic, who, with the aid of his swift and servile Spirits, sees all. One of the more famous exhibitions of his Spiritual powers is recorded by the philosopher Immanuel Kant: “Madame Herteville (Marteville), the widow of the Dutch Ambassador in Stockholm, some time after the death of her husband, was called upon by Croon, a goldsmith, to pay for a silver service which her husband had purchased from him. The widow was convinced that her late husband had been much too precise and orderly not to have paid this debt, yet she was unable to find this receipt. In her sorrow, and because the amount was considerable, she requested Mr. Swedenborg to call at her house.” Swedenborg accepts the invitation. Upon his arrival, Madame Herteville apologizes for having troubled him, but she feels sure that “if, as all people say, he possesse[s] the extraordinary gift of conversing with the souls of the departed,” he can save her from financial ruin. Perhaps he would “have the kindness to ask her husband” the whereabouts of the receipt for the silver service? Swedenborg does “not at all object.” Three days later, Swedenborg returns with news that he has “conversed with her husband”: “the debt had been paid several months before his decease, and the receipt was in a bureau in the room upstairs.” The lady replies that the bureau has been searched but no receipt has been found. Swedenborg then inspects the desk and, after pulling out the left-hand drawer, pops a lever. A secret compartment is then disclosed, containing the receipt.10

More visions follow. When attending the funeral of Christopher Polhem, his former teacher, Swedenborg tells all in attendance that Polhem’s seemingly undetectable Spirit is present; the mystic then converses with the unseen ghost while onlookers gawk.11 Another so-called miracle occurs in 1759: a nearby town is on fire, but Swedenborg tells everyone not to worry. The fire will be put out around 8 p.m. His prediction proves to be accurate. Still another vision occurs in July of 1762, in which he sees in his mind’s eye the murder of Tsar Peter III of Russia. Again, all of Swedenborg’s details are corroborated.12 Soon after, a curious King Adolphus Frederick of Sweden invites Swedenborg to his court. His wife Queen Ulrica is “but little disposed to believe in such seeming miracles” and, therefore, demands a demonstration of his powers. She tells Swedenborg that her brother, the Prince Royal of Prussia, once whispered something in her ear. She adds that what he had said could not have been repeated to anybody nor had it ever escaped her own lips. Swedenborg’s test, therefore, is to commune with his Spirits and then to reveal the secret message. Some days later, Swedenborg returns with a request for a private audience. The queen, playing cards, refuses. What he has to say can be said before the company:

but Swedenborg assured her he could not disclose his errand in the presence of witnesses: that in consequence of this intimation the queen became agitated, gave her cards to another lady, and requested M. de Schwerin (who also was present when she related the story to us,) to accompany her: that they accordingly went together into another apartment, where she posted M. de Schwerin at the door, and advanced towards the farthest extremity of it with Swedenborg; who said to her, “You took, madam, your last leave of the Prince of Prussia, your late august brother, at Charlottenburg, on such a day, and at such an hour of the afternoon; as you were passing afterwards through the long gallery, in the castle of Charlottenburg, you met him again; he then took you by the hand, and led you to such a window, where you could not be overheard, and then said to you these words:——.” The queen did not repeat the words, but she protested to us they were the very same her brother had pronounced.13

With his reputation as a psychic now secure, people begin to ask Swedenborg all kinds of questions. Do the Spirits have internal organs? Yes, he replies, an obliging Spirit has color-coded its own brains, marrow, lungs, liver, stomach, intestines, and even genitals for Swedenborg to see.14 Do Spirits speak Hebrew or Latin? No, Swedenborg explains, Spirits speak and write to each other in a language different from that which they use when speaking to mortals, though the Spirits themselves are unaware of this phenomenon.15

Other questions put to Swedenborg suggest a confusion between Heaven and heavenly bodies—that is, the planets. Swedenborg reveals that his astral essence has visited Mercury, a bucolic land of oxen, cows, stags, and hinds tended by Mercurian men and their beautiful and slender women. On the planet Venus, he discovers “two kinds of men, [each] of opposite character; the first mild and humane, the second savage and almost brutal.” The Spirits of the moon are a skittish sort, afraid of their own belching or “eructation.” The ultimate Sprits of the universe reside on Jupiter and are known for their “gentleness and sweetness, and tender care of their children.”16

Chary astronomers questioned why they had never observed people on Mercury and Venus, but Swedenborg had a ready reply: these beings dwell on the spiritual plane of other planets and are thus unobservable to science. In some instances, the Spirits may not even be aware of the material world at all: “the earth or planet Jupiter itself does not actually appear to spirits and angels; for no material earth is visible to the inhabitants of the spiritual world, but only the spirits and angels who are from it.”17 Fine, then, did the dead somehow live on or within the Spiritual Realms, and, if so, what did they do for all eternity? Swedenborg explained that the souls of the dead did indeed pass into the “World of the Spirits,”18 where they spend much of their time(lessness) improving themselves through college courses. (We might here recall that Shakespeare’s Spirit told Charles Henry Foster that souls float in a “great university of the spheres.”)

Swedenborg also related a series of dreams (or astral dreams) concerning these universal universities. During his first visit, Swedenborg attended a lecture. In another dream, he entered five Spirit schools specializing in grammatical instruction; another dream had him entering a Spirit school of philosophy, wherein he argued with the philosopher Spinoza—Swedenborg converted his misguided colleague to his view of things seen and unseen.19 Swedenborg also visited a Spiritual Library, wherein his eternal self discovered that every book that has ever been and would ever be written exists in a “large Library, which was divided into Classes containing different Books according to the different Sciences.” As a “further Confirmation in these Particulars, they [three disembodied mortals accompanied Swedenborg in his visits to the Spiritual Realm] were conducted to the Houses of the Scribes, who transcribed the Copies of Writings written by the Wise Men of the City, and they inspected the Writings, and wondered to see them so neat and elegant.”20 (The importance of the Spiritual Library will be explained in subsequent chapters of this study.)

Soon enough, Swedenborg turned all these anecdotes into a cohesive system of spiritual and material interrelations. Drawing upon the ancient traditions of the Pythagoreans, who saw in man harmonic correspondences with the cosmos, and the Kabbalah, a Jewish mysticism that argues that every element of the universe is interconnected, Swedenborg preached that humans and angels, though apparently separated by full awareness of each other, are actually part of a single divine entity.21 It therefore follows that human events (revolutions and assassinations, for example) have an effect on their Spirit Realm, just as the activities of the spirits have an effect on our world. That view, of course, dovetailed neatly with Shakespeare’s various expressions of heavenly order or upset: Odysseus’s speech of social and astral harmony in Troilus and Cressida, or its negation, the sudden riot of come...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Notes
• Works Cited