The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult

Tatiana Kontou, Sarah Willburn, Sarah Willburn

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317042273
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Literature
• Categoría: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature

Critical attention to the Victorian supernatural has flourished over the last twenty-five years. Whether it is spiritualism or Theosophy, mesmerism or the occult, the dozens of book-length studies and hundreds of articles that have appeared recently reflect the avid scholarly discussion of Victorian mystical practices. Designed both for those new to the field and for experts, this volume is organized into sections covering the relationship between Victorian spiritualism and science, the occult and politics, and the culture of mystical practices. The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult brings together some of the most prominent scholars working in the field to introduce current approaches to the study of nineteenth-century mysticism and to define new areas for research.

PART 1
Haunted Laboratories and Ghosts in the Machine: Spiritualism, Science and Technology

1
Recent Scholarship on Spiritualism and Science

Christine Ferguson

In 1974, when nineteenth-century spiritualism was just beginning to be reconstituted as a legitimate object for serious historical inquiry, Malcolm Jay Kottler lamented that ‘it has been forgotten, ignored, or perhaps never known ... that in the second half of the nineteenth century a considerable number of renowned scientists were favourably disposed toward ... psychical phenomena’.¹ Since then, and largely as a result of pioneering history of science studies such as Kottler’s, this seemingly lost affinity has been recovered. Now the links between Victorian science and spiritualism are so well established as to be virtually truistic in the scholarship on the movement, second in ubiquity only to the assertions of spiritualism’s potential for feminist emancipation and gender subversion.² This new awareness has effectively challenged the supremacy of the crisis of faith hypothesis hitherto used to account for the popularity of séances and mysticism in a technologically sophisticated and ostensibly rational era. No longer is spiritualism viewed as a purely reactionary formation, a desperate, backwards clinging to the consolatory faith in spiritual immortality that contemporary science was rapidly eroding; now believers are instead usually painted as iconoclastic radicals whose convictions stemmed not from opposition but deference to the logic of a newly authoritative empirical epistemology, one which insisted that knowledge be derived from direct observation rather than faith. It is this empiricist edge which, according to Elana Gomel and others, distinguishes Victorian spiritualism from earlier forms of mystical belief.³ Writing in 2007, she states, ‘Spiritualism was only an exaggeration of a general nineteenth-century trend: the quest for the science of the supernatural ... the modern concept of the supernatural is a by-product of scientific empiricism.’⁴ Some, including myself, might question the alleged novelty of science and spiritualism’s consilience in the nineteenth century – after all, as Thomas Laqueur writes, ‘Every age, and not just the modern age, has felt the need to make its religious beliefs comport somehow with the best scientific and philosophical learning of its day’.⁵ There can be no doubt, however, that the rhetorical structures and Darwinist paradigms through which this synthesis came to be imagined in the Victorian period were decidedly new, reflecting, among other things, spiritualism’s defiantly democratic exotericism and science’s nascent professional status and cultural authority.

Attentive to these nuances, much of the best recent work on Victorian spiritualism has moved beyond simply asserting the existence of this scientific turn to focus instead on its implications and outcomes within specific contexts. Such studies consider to what extent, and where, modern spiritualism’s attempt to annex contemporary scientific authority and concepts succeeded. For Elana Gomel, the answer is not at all. In fin-de-siècle England, she argues, the movement’s appropriation of and deference to the truth-claims of science only worked to buttress an increasingly professionalized scientific community whose authority was based largely on its exclusion of the metaphysical.⁶ Considering an earlier episode in British spiritualist history, the scientific investigations of pre-eminent Scottish-American medium Daniel Dunglas Home in the 1860s, Peter Lamont comes to a pointedly different conclusion, arguing that the anti-spiritualist scientific establishment emerged the weaker from its contest with the mystics. The failure of sceptical scientists to provide a non-supernatural explanation of Home’s ability, Lamont compellingly argues, revealed the profound limitations of their own putative objectivity and insistence on verifiability.⁷ Lamont never suggests that this evidential dearth constituted proof of Home’s genuine ability (although the medium’s contemporary supporters were more than willing to embrace this negative proof fallacy), but rather that Home’s prowess induced a ‘crisis of evidence’ for scientists unable to provide empirical proof for their insistence that he was a charlatan.⁸ Thus the establishment position on Home – if not on the other prominent mediums such as Mrs Guppy, Henry Slade and Florence Cook who were all detected in fraud at various points in their careers – rested not on evidence, or even on viable hypothesis, but rather on a form of rationalist faith.

Although parts of Lamont’s argument seem unconvincing to me – I sense that ‘crisis’ might be too strong a word to describe the after-effects of the Home tests – I remain keenly impressed by his admirable willingness to interrogate the relationship between mid-century scientists and spiritualists at both of its poles, uncovering not just scientific responses to séance phenomena, but also spiritualist manipulations and subversions of scientific paradigms. The benefits of such a lateral approach are equally evident in Jennifer Porter’s fascinating work on the legacy of Victorian spiritualism’s metaphysical empiricism in twenty-first-century New Age belief. In her 2005 article ‘The Spirit(s) of Science’, Porter traces the survival of scientific metaphor and allusion in the movement’s modern incarnation, one in which followers regularly articulate their faith through scientific language and in which dead scientists – Einstein is a particular favourite – have replaced native Americans as the favoured type of spirit guide.⁹ Porter’s work seems to me immensely important for a number of reasons: first, for moving away from the singular focus on spiritualism’s reception by scientific elites – Alfred Russel Wallace, William Crookes, Oliver Lodge – that dominated much of the early scholarship on science and spiritualism;¹⁰ second, for forcing us to reconsider the criteria through which occultist and spiritualist – or, indeed, any popular – appropriations of scientific knowledge might be deemed unequivocally to have succeeded or failed. The success of spiritualism’s tactical deployment of science, argues Porter, lies not in its accuracy, but rather in its imaginative potency within its own faith community. Viewed from this perspective, it is irrelevant that Victorian spiritualists and their twentieth-century successors use terms such as ‘energy’, ‘vibration’ or ‘wave length’ in ways that would appal professional physicists; what matters is that they have found a way of making these ideas – however misapplied – productive within and constitutive of their own belief system, thus challenging science’s ability to copyright and police its own language. Porter concludes:

When members of the scientific establishment draw upon the authoritative image of science to bolster their own claims to legitimacy, or to debunk popular misconceptions of science, the perception of science as ‘sacral’ in the pursuit of truth is simply reinforced. As a result, science will continue to be colonized by spiritualists and other religious groups seeking to assert what they know, intuitively and spiritually, to be true, for in spiritualist perceptions, truth and science are inextricably linked.¹¹

Also central to the new science and spiritualism reception studies just described is a consequent refusal to treat either Victorian science or spiritualism as monolithic or internally consistent entities. Their depiction of spiritualist believers and, for that matter, of the Victorian scientific establishment, is becoming increasingly and commendably particularized, focusing on interactions between specific although non-mutually exclusive groups of converts – women, the working classes, non-whites – and carefully stipulated medical and scientific disciplines such as neurology, alienism, physics, psychical research, evolutionary biology, anthropology, sexology and telecommunications.¹² What this rich range of encounters reveals is that there was no such thing as a single, definitive scientific attitude towards afterlife belief and psychical phenomena in the nineteenth century, nor, for that matter, a uniform spiritualist position on all of the sciences. The movement’s relationship with the Anglo-American medical establishment, for example, was necessarily more vexed and anguished than its connection with the other scientific professions given that a significant proportion of its believers – Louisa Lowe and Georgina Weldon being the most prominent – were either subjected to or threatened with institutionalization as a result of their faith. Victorian doctors, neurologists and alienists were, as Edward Brown and S.D. Shortt have shown, generally the least likely of the scientific professionals to have sympathy with the movement, often suggesting that it had either caused or symptomized an epidemic of mental illness within the population. But the medical disdain was by no means shared evenly across the wider spectrum of the scientific professions. Perhaps most receptive of all, if only to judge by the numbers of notable converts who came from their ranks, were those practitioners trained in the physical sciences. One might argue that physical scientists such as Oliver Lodge, William Crookes, Camille Flammarion and Johann Zöllner were more open to the spiritualist hypothesis by virtue of their awareness of the operations of unseen but potent physical forces; an equally viable if somewhat less flattering explanation lies, as Thomas Laqueur points out, in their unfamiliarity with the new developments of psychology that were, at the end of the century, transforming traditional understandings of the mind.¹³ The fascinating questions of what difference, if any, disciplinary affiliation made in determining nineteenth-century scientific responses to spiritualism, and of which scientific disciplines were most likely to be courted and assimilated by believers, will hopefully receive more attention as ongoing research on the subject diversifies.

But perhaps more than any further localization of context, what the next generation of science and spiritualism studies seems, at least to me, to require is a careful reconsideration of its current historiographical and political assumptions. Chief among these is the oft-repeated notion that there is something uniquely modern and, with one hugely problematic hence, implicitly progressive or at least proleptically postmodern about the Victorian affiliation of spiritualism and science. The reasoning behind this assumption is understandable and to, a certain extent, convincing; after all, science’s status as a professional vocation and a culturally authoritative, not to say hegemonic, means of acquiring and ordering knowledge is undeniably recent. It is equally clear that many nineteenth-century spiritualists believed that the empirical and apparently objective nature of their séance investigations was proof of the movement’s radical innovation, of its rejection of the outmoded religious and political beliefs that they also held accountable for the oppression of women, the working classes, and African and Native Americans.¹⁴ But we are under no compunction to accept these assertions at face value, nor should we mistake the simultaneity of spiritualism’s scientific pose and its common – although by no means universal – advocacy of progress as proof of their mutual affinity. To do so is both to produce a one-sided picture of spiritualism’s wide...