Post #24. The Empire of the Dead: Spiritualism and the 19th-Century Occult Revival in London
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Buy Now (Book Link) The 19th century was an age of contradictions. It was an era of the Industrial Revolution, marked by scientific progress and a vast and powerful British Empire that controlled a quarter of the globe. It was an age of material confidence, of rationalism, of a seemingly unshakeable belief in progress. And yet, in the very heart of this modern, industrial empire, a strange and powerful occult revival was taking place. While the engineers were building railways and the politicians were carving up continents, a significant portion of the population, from the highest levels of society to the lowest, was obsessed with talking to the dead. 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...