Post #24. The Empire of the Dead: Spiritualism and the 19th-Century Occult Revival in London
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The Rise of Spiritualism: A New Religion of the Seance
Spiritualism, the belief that the living can communicate with the spirits of the departed, was not a new idea. But in the mid-19th century, it exploded into a mass movement, a new religion for a new, scientific age. The movement began in America in 1848 with the Fox sisters, who claimed to be able to communicate with a spirit in their house through a series of mysterious rapping sounds. The phenomenon spread like wildfire, and soon, mediums who could produce a whole range of spectacular physical phenomena – table-turning, levitation, automatic writing, and even the materialisation of full-form spirits – were touring the world.
London became a major centre of this new spiritualist movement. Seances were held in the drawing rooms of the wealthy and the back parlours of the working class. The city was awash with a new kind of magical practitioner: the medium, a person, often a woman, who could act as a channel for the spirits of the dead.
Spiritualism in the Victorian Era.
Why did the new religion of the seance take such a powerful hold on the Victorian imagination? The reason is complex.
The Culture of Mourning: The Victorian era was a period marked by high mortality rates, particularly among children. The elaborate and often morbid culture of mourning that developed around death created a deep-seated desire for reassurance that loved ones were not truly gone, that communication was still possible.
A Crisis of Faith: The scientific discoveries of the 19th century, notably Darwin’s theory of evolution, had shaken the foundations of traditional Christian faith. For many, spiritualism offered a new kind of proof, a scientific demonstration of the reality of the soul and the afterlife. The seance was a laboratory where the immortality of the soul could be empirically tested.
The Society for Psychical Research: The Scientific Investigation of the Supernatural
The phenomenon of spiritualism was so widespread that it attracted the attention of some of the leading scientists and intellectuals of the day. In 1882, a group of Cambridge scholars founded the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), an organisation dedicated to the scientific investigation of paranormal phenomena. The SPR was not a credulous believer’s club; it was a sceptical and rigorous organisation that sought to apply the methods of science to the study of the supernatural.
The SPR investigated mediums, collected accounts of apparitions and hauntings, and conducted experiments in telepathy and other psychic phenomena. Their work represents a fascinating and often overlooked chapter in the history of science, a serious attempt to bridge the gap between the material and the spiritual worlds.
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The Dark Side of the Seance: Fraud and Deception
The spiritualist movement was also rife with fraud and deception. The immense demand for communication with the dead created a lucrative market for fake mediums, who used a variety of clever tricks to simulate spiritualist phenomena. The history of spiritualism is a cat-and-mouse game between the mediums and the investigators, a constant struggle to distinguish between genuine psychic phenomena and cynical stage magic.
But the prevalence of fraud does not necessarily invalidate the entire movement. The very fact that so many people were so desperate to believe, that they were willing to be duped again and again, is itself a testament to the powerful spiritual hunger of the age.
Spiritualism was more than just a passing fad; it was a powerful social and religious movement that revealed a deep spiritual anxiety at the heart of the Victorian world. It was a mass, democratic form of magic, a way for ordinary people to seek direct, personal experience of the spiritual world. It was a sign that the black magic temple of London was not just a place of high, ceremonial magic or intellectual esotericism; it was also a place where the dead were a constant and pressing reality, a city haunted by its own past and desperate for a connection to the world beyond the veil.
In our next post, we will explore the revival of high ceremonial magic that occurred in the late 19th century. This movement would ultimately lead to the founding of the most famous and influential magical society of the modern era: the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
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Solomon Jones (Author/Researcher)
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