Dr Romany Reagan's talk at this week's Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub, The Victorian Seance:From the Occult to the Gin Parlour, was a densely packed, if not complete - that'd be near impossible, history of the heyday of Spiritualism, how it rose, and how, for the most part, it fell. It took in a cast list of characters that stretched from William Blake to Emanuel Swedenborg to Aleister Crowley and it covered themes as seemingly disparate as drunkenness, Americanness, and female liberation.
Although, as Dr Reagan was keen to point out, those last three things are not as disparate as they may seem. She claimed she managed to cover all three in just one person. Which was a little unfair on herself, she wasn't drunk (though the red wine she was sipping did look good) and she'd obviously been able to hold it together long enough to receive a doctorate from Royal Holloway in "performing heritage with a focus on community engagement", curate a series of four audio walks for Abney Park cemetery, and to put this quite long presentation together.
One that took us, initially, back to a time of Thomas Edison and an age of great scientific discoveries. Discoveries that transformed lives by harnessing previously unseen energies like electricity. These things seemed almost magical and led to wild speculation of what might be possible. Once Charles Darwin had comprehensively disproved creationism, some felt the ideas of Spiritualism provided solace, filled, if you must, the God-shaped hole.
The basic tenet behind Spiritualism was that spirits of those who'd passed away could communicate with the dead via mediums. It differed from mesmerism because that was a theory that claimed there was an invisible nature force that allowed communication between all living things (human, animal, and even vegetable) whereas Spiritualism was about contact with the dead.
The most famous early practitioners of Spiritualism were the Fox sisters, Maggie and Kate, who lived in upstate New York. In 1848 (when they were both teenagers) they found they were able to make weird noises by clicking the joints of their feet and, for a prank, fooled their mum into thinking there was a ghost in the house.
This trick proved to be so effective, or the locals were so gullible, that soon visitors were coming to the house just to witness these siblings who, it soon became believed, could bring messages from the dead. Maggie and Kate's older sister, Leah, started to smell money and soon she was working her sisters for commercial gain and the concept of Spiritualism started to take hold as copyists sprung up in the states of New York and Massachusetts.
Over in the UK, the US was still viewed, contests Dr Reagan, as an inferior copy of the mother country and its new craze of Spiritualism, therefore, could only be an inferior version of whatever belief was popular in Britain at the time. Women, too (in Dr Reagan's not particularly controversial view), were also viewed as inferior versions of men. As most of the Spiritualist mediums were female it meant the whole thing, to the British establishment at the time, reeked of inferiority.
The idea began to be promoted that Spiritualism had fostered insanity in America (certainly women were being incarcerated in lunatic asylums) and there was a fear that this madness may cross the Atlantic and arrive in London. Instead, London saw the rise of an 'intellectual' Spiritualism inspired by Swedenborg take hold. One that harked back to the writings of William Blake and Rosicrucianism.
Although both Blake's art and his poetry are so fantastical they could be open to a wide array of interpretations, the gist that the British Spiritualists took was that Blake, when he wasn't banging on about 'psychogeomancy' and 'mysticism', saw the world as a sensual place, a place experienced as much in the mind as in the body. He believed what happened in your mind WAS reality. He said "what seems to be - is" and that "a fool sees not the same tree as a wise man sees".
The philosopher and novelist Colin Wilson, in his studies of Blake, claimed that occultism, in general, regarded women as evil and even believed that women had had too much power over the last 1,800 years! The perceived faults of women were that they thought intuitively rather than logically and that they can't see long term. Men suffered by being unable to see short term. It's all Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus stuff and, frankly, it's bollocks.
The Marquis de Sade and Aleister Crowley rallied against the idea that the female need for security was, somehow, stifling male creativity. Not just creativity but the kind of rampant individualism that is doing so much to damage the social fabric now (it's probably no coincidence that the New Thought movement, which was followed by a young Donald Trump, should crop up). Whilst Spiritualism was, on one hand, all about social improvement this was completely undermined by its drive towards an individualism that thrived on the distrust of others.
There were further dualities at play and dichotomies unresolved within the Spiritualist world too. How did the misogynistic beliefs of Crowley and de Sade square with the campaigning for female rights? How could a movement that claimed to be about social improvement harbour so many drug and alcohol abusers?
It was the women who got the most shit over this, society being what it was (and, for the most part, still is). It was said that some of them "tipped bottles as often as they tipped tables" but some context is needed. In 1875, which went down at the time as "the most drunken year on record", being pissed out of your head on gin for most of the day was not uncommon. As it had been in London, if we're to believe Hogarth's Gin Lane, for well over a century.
While some Spiritualists railed against the use and abuse of alcohol (especially in the hands of delicate women), others, including the Fox sisters, took to it with, at first, gusto and then, latterly, with some shame. Young female Spiritualists who'd been on the sauce were said to be allowing unmarried men to fondle them and dance with them.
It all sounds like terrifically good fun but the drinking didn't stop when the fun stopped. Kate Fox died in 1892 aged 55 and her sister Maggie a year later aged sixty. Both of them deeply damaged by cocaine and alcohol abuse. Although their father had been an alcoholic there is also the suggestion that the stressful lives they led as public figures, forebears of a new movement, exacerbated the problem, as did the constant exposure to boozy seance parties.
In many ways it seems as if the Spiritualists were the rock stars of their day. They offered entertainment, salvation, and hope to their followers but themselves suffered lives of solitude, boredom, pressure - all things that would make drinking oneself into oblivion a tempting proposition. It's worth noting that most of the Spiritualists were of working class stock. Something that wasn't necessarily the case for those that promoted Spiritualist events. The rich knew where the money was.
Towards the end of her life, Maggie Fox denounced Spiritualism, saying it had been a fraud all along and that she felt guilty to have been one of its original perpetrators - though she couldn't know how far an innocent prank on her mother would go. The Spiritualists who had taken the baton on from her and ran with it said she couldn't be trusted. She was a mentally ill drug addict and therefore not dependable in the slightest.
As if to prove them right, she later retracted her denunciation. The motivation for this remains unknown but it didn't really matter. Spiritualism had moved far away from the Fox sisters clicking their joints and was now big business. They'd become a footnote in their own movement and they were both buried in pauper's graves in New York.
Within thirty years or so the game was up for most Spiritualists. So many mediums had been exposed as frauds that the public just weren't susceptible anymore. Of course, new fakes and phonies came along to fill the void. Eventually people like Derek Acorah and Uri Geller. These people, too, are constantly being debunked but like weeds in your garden, new strains keep reappearing. It seems the public don't mind a bit of woo if it makes them feel comfortable or if it reinforces what they already believe but that woo needs to be ever changing.
Dr Reagan's talk didn't really draw any conclusions on why that is or even if that's a good or bad thing but it was, despite going over some ground that had been covered at previous Skeptics and Fortean events, an interesting and worthwhile hour of my time and the illustrations of phrenology heads and the coda in the Q&A about a 1990s seance in Clerkenwell's House of Detention (a place I'd love to visit) were very much in the spirit of the evening. An evening in which I neither drank spirits nor conversed with any.
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