Through a Glass, Darkly

by Stefan Bechtel

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  JUST AS a wildfire needs dry conditions, spiritualism needed a receptive audience. What prepared the way? This passage from Eliab Capron’s Explanation and History of the Mysterious Communion with Spirits explains how insubstantial spirits can make very substantial rapping sounds:

  Again we are asked how a spirit can rap so as to make an audible sound. The spirits say they do not rap, but produce the sounds by will. We have examined a number of clairvoyants on this subject and all agree in this. We put a boy, who had no knowledge of the matter at all, neither was he noted for a remarkable degree of intelligence, into a magnetic sleep, and turned his attention to the subject. He was clairvoyant and said he could see who made the sounds. We asked him how the persons looked. His answer was, “they look light—just like gauze; I can see right through them.” Well, how do they make the sounds; do they rap? “No! they don’t rap or strike at all.” When after looking earnestly for a time he said: “they want it made, and it is made wherever they want it.” This was his simple way of telling what other clairvoyants have told in language somewhat different, but amounting to the same thing. This is the best explanation we have ever been able to obtain.

  The reader of today has no idea what Capron is talking about … put into a magnetic sleep? But Capron’s readers of 1850 did understand; they knew all about mesmerism.

  Mesmerism is named after Franz Anton Mesmer, the son of a German forester who married a wealthy widow, patronized Mozart, studied medicine in Vienna, then fled to Paris, where, in 1779, he published a pamphlet unveiling his pet theory of “animal magnetism.” He believed that a mysterious magnetic fluid connects our bodies with the earth and the planets and that if the free flow of this fluid gets obstructed, illness is the result. One of his followers in Paris, the Marquis de Puységur, developed the mesmeric trance (or magnetic “sleep”) in order to alleviate pain and cure disease.

  The trance was induced by making “passes.” Typically the patient would be in a sitting position, and during this sitting (in French séance) the mesmerizer would stare into the patient’s eyes while running his hands from the crown of the head downward across the face and down the front of the body. The hands came as close to the body as possible without actually touching the patient. In a few minutes—or more, depending on the patient’s suggestibility—the patient would lapse into a somnambulistic state.

  During this trance, the patient felt no pain and could undergo an operation without the crude anesthesias of the day (alcohol and opium). But much more intriguing was the fact that some people, when mesmerized, could see hidden objects or distant lands. They were suddenly clairvoyant—French for “clear-sighted.” While in trance, common laborers spoke languages they had never learned and recited snatches of poetry; young ladies witnessed shipwrecks occurring hundreds of miles away.

  By the 1830s, French mesmerists were exporting their wonders to Britain and America, and they brought their most suggestible patients with them. The most famous mesmeric patient of the era was Alexis Didier. He could identify the contents of sealed documents and describe faraway landscapes. One notable scene, recounted in Alison Winter’s book Mesmerized, describes a private party in London at which one Colonel Llewellyn gave Didier a small box resembling a surgical instrument case and asked him to identify its contents. In a scene later recounted by the London surgeon John Elliotson, Didier held it in his hands and slowly gave the following:

  “The object within the case is a hard substance.”

  “It is folded in an envelope.”

  “The envelope is whiter than the thing itself.” (The envelope was a piece of silver paper, Elliotson later noted.)

  “It is a kind of ivory.”

  “It has a point at one end.”

  “It is a bone.”

  “Taken from a body—from a human body—from your body.”

  “The bone has been separated and cut, so as to leave a flat side.” (The bone, which was a piece of the colonel’s leg, and sawed off after the wound, was flat toward the part that enclosed the marrow, Elliotson later wrote.)

  Here Didier removed the piece of bone from the case, and placed his finger on a part, and said that the ball struck here, pointing to a spot. “It was an extraordinary ball, as to its effect,” Didier told the colonel. “You received three separate injuries at the same moment.” (That was the case, Elliotson confirmed, for the ball broke or burst into three pieces and injured the colonel in three places in the same leg.)

  “You were wounded in the early part of the day, whilst charging the enemy,” Didier went on.

  In 1838, Elliotson gave demonstrations of mesmerism at the hospital of University College London, where he was senior physician and professor. In the audience was his friend Charles Dickens. They were to become lifelong friends (Elliotson was godfather to Dickens’s second son). And Dickens developed a lifelong interest, becoming a mesmeric “operator” in the process. While on a visit to Pittsburgh in 1842, he first tried his powers on his wife. Within six minutes of passes about her head, she became hysterical. Two minutes later, she fell asleep. Dickens was quite pleased with his newfound power, and he magnetized whoever would consent to it. In 1845, he wrote, only half jokingly, “I have the perfect conviction that I could magnetize a Frying-Pan.”

  But displays of mesmerism weren’t confined to private parlors or the amphitheaters of medical schools. Everywhere in Britain and America, traveling mesmerists of the 1840s put on road shows. Patients were placed into a magnetic sleep, and in that insensate state they endured electric shocks, pistols fired next to their ears, and fingers held directly above the flame of a candle. While this amazed most members of the audience, a few were angered; they claimed fraud. They thought they were being hoaxed. At a lecture in Norwich, England, one furious doctor suddenly took out a lancet and ran it deeply into the patient’s finger under the nail into the quick. While the boy gave no expression of pain at the time, he “suffered a good deal after he was awakened.” That reaction was another prelude to spiritualism: Some observers took offense and became irrational, insisting that if fraud were possible, then ipso facto fraud occurred.

  When spiritualism came along, proponents of mesmerism weren’t exactly pleased. Take the case of John Bovee Dods, a former Universalist minister who’d been lecturing on mesmerism for fifteen years. In April 1851, he traveled to Auburn, New York, to deliver a series of ten lectures in which he desperately tried to roll back the tide. It’s all mesmerism, folks! “The spirits of our departed friends in a future world have nothing to do with this matter,” he told his audience in Auburn’s city hall. When a medium writes or speaks while in trance, “he obtains all his knowledge from the same source that all mesmeric and psychological subjects do, and this is, not from spirits, but from the instincts of the involuntary powers of the mind in the back brain.” Yes, he said, we’ve all heard about the medium who merely thinks it and a table tips thirteen times. “But do you not understand, that mesmeric clairvoyants have done this in thousands and thousands of instances, and so often repeated, that the experiment has become stale? For who does not know, that a person who involuntarily falls into the mesmeric state, is in communication with surrounding nature, and with all persons of a certain nervous temperament in sympathy with his own, even though thousands of miles distant, and, for aught we know, throughout the globe—and receives impressions from their brains.”

  But try as he might, mesmerism was shattering into pieces—like the musket ball that hit Colonel Llewellyn in his leg. The ability to put someone in a trance became hypnotism, after the Scottish surgeon James Braid produced similar results by dangling a shiny object. Surgeons were only too happy not to share their operating rooms with mesmerists once a Boston dentist in late 1846 discovered ether vapor to be an effective anesthetic. As for the idea that the magnetic operator could dominate the patient’s will—a notion that always gave mesmerism the strong whiff of sexual scandal—it lived on at least as a plot device in novels like George du Ma
urier’s Trilby and Conan Doyle’s short story “The Parasite.” (And it lives today in the expression “he made a pass at her.”) Finally, the uncanny psychic effects, together with the fancy French lingo, became part of spiritualism. Most people accepted the idea that young girls who saw through walls, or who could see into other people’s bodies as if their skin were a sheet of glass, were aided by discarnate spirits rather than their own “back brains.” In the end, even John Bovee Dods had to agree and changed his tune after his daughter Jennie became a medium.

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  TRAVELING MESMERISTS weren’t the only group who were threatened by the spiritual wildfire. Most clergymen—not all, but most—thundered about the “moral abominations” that came from contacting demonic spirits. And the more they thundered, the more they motivated their rebellious parishioners to investigate a neighbor’s “spirit room.” Emma Hardinge, in her 1870 history, Modern American Spiritualism, wrote, “It would be difficult to determine which was the most effective form of propaganda for the spread of the belief, namely, the zealous enthusiasm of its admirers or the bitter persecution of its antagonists.”

  In part, their rancor betrayed their defensiveness. The various denominations and sects of Protestantism competed against one another for faithful congregants to fill their pews. And they all faced the headwind of a radically independent populace. Despite the mythmaking of today’s politicians, America never had a glorious past as a nation of brave, strong, pious, churchgoing Christians. When George Washington was president, no more than 15 percent of Americans were active church members.

  But another chunk of their animosity was due to this: Spiritualism was a movement of, by, and for women. Yes, there were a few “addle-headed feminine men,” as a detractor put it, but most of the movement’s leaders—including its mediums—were women. And to their detractors’ horror, they actually let women speak in public.

  It’s difficult to imagine today, but a woman in the mid-nineteenth century simply could not get up and speak in front of a “promiscuous assembly,” which was the current phrase for a group of both men and women. The few bold women who did so were criticized for promoting “degeneracy and ruin.” If they got that far: When the suffragist Lucy Stone graduated from Oberlin College in 1847, her classmates unanimously elected her to deliver the commencement address, but the school forbade it, insisting that a male professor read it for her instead.

  Even the most reluctant young student of American history knows that the women’s rights movement started in 1848 in the little town of Seneca Falls in upstate New York. But those early feminists were wary of crossing this taboo. When the historic Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 adjourned, the participants agreed to reconvene in Rochester two weeks later. The arrangements committee proposed that a woman preside over that Rochester convention, but Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton—two household names in the history of women’s rights in America—firmly opposed it as “a most hazardous experiment.” They wanted Lucretia’s husband to do the honors. Finally, they relented, allowing Abigail Bush to take the chair. Bush later described herself as “born and baptized in the old Scotch Presbyterian church … [whose] sacred teachings were ‘if a woman would know anything let her ask her husband at home.’”

  The spiritualists helped to change all that. At their large public gatherings in the 1850s, a man might well act as a master of ceremonies, as Eliab Capron did at Corinthian Hall. But the main attraction was a trance speaker, a woman like Cora Hatch or Achsa Sprague, who delivered an inspirational address while in a mediumistic trance. And although it was shocking to see a woman speaking on a public platform, it was somehow less of a shock if she was young and pretty and, unconscious of her own eloquence, could spend an hour speaking in verse about the next world. She wasn’t giving the lecture—because, after all, what woman could possibly do that? No, the spirits were talking through her. So it was more acceptable, but it broke the ice and helped pave the way for women to assume public roles in America after the Civil War.

  It’s a curious fact that both the spiritualist movement and the women’s rights movement began in the same year, 1848, less than four months and twenty-five miles apart. Pure coincidence? Not at all. Dissident Quakers supplied the critical mass for both groups. Besides Amy Post, who was the Fox sisters’ protector and mentor, there was the Quaker preacher Lucretia Mott, and Mary Ann McClintock provided the parlor table on which the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments was written in preparation for Seneca Falls. Susan B. Anthony was born into a Quaker family. Abigail Bush, who presided over the Rochester convention, was not a Quaker, but she was a close friend of Amy Post’s and one of the earliest witnesses of the new spiritual manifestations. A few days after the Fox sisters arrived in Rochester in 1848, Abigail Bush visited Amy Post and the Foxes, and they retreated to a bedroom where Abigail heard the raps for the first time. She became a lifelong spiritualist.

  The household names among suffrage leaders—Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott—were not committed spiritualists, but all had close friends and relatives who were. Later in her life, Susan B. Anthony would travel every summer from her home in Rochester to Lily Dale, the spiritualist camp in western New York that still functions as a summer retreat, to mount the rostrum for its annual Woman’s Day. She would talk strictly of worldly matters, notably her ongoing campaign to get the right to vote, but she was among friends, usually a couple thousand of them, who came out to cheer her on. Lily Dale records show that she was still mounting the rostrum in late August 1905, when she was eighty-five years old. That was her last visit; she died the following spring, more than a decade before the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.

  The official history of the early women’s movement, the History of Woman Suffrage, edited by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, acknowledged the ties that later historians chose to ignore. “The only religious sect in the world … that has recognized the equality of woman is the Spiritualists,” it noted. “They have always assumed that a woman may be a medium of communication from heaven to earth, that the spirits of the universe may breathe through her lips.”

  Not all suffragists were spiritualists, but all spiritualists were early feminists, and they all also agitated for the abolition of slavery. The three movements were intertwined. The Posts’ home in Rochester was one of the main depots of the Underground Railroad; one of their beneficiaries and close friends was Frederick Douglass, who stayed in Rochester and published the antislavery newspaper The North Star from 1847 to 1851. He never warmed to spiritualism, but he did speak at the convention in Seneca Falls. Most other prominent abolitionists embraced (or at least respected) spiritualism, including William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison attended a séance with Leah Fox in 1854 at which a bell rang by itself and a walking stick slithered, snakelike, around his feet. One of the visiting spirits identified itself as Jesse Hutchinson, a member of an abolitionist singing group, and as the group sang his song “The Old Granite State,” he kept time with his raps. Garrison and the entire group came away believing in the reality of spirit agency.

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  ON THE early morning of April 9, 1855, the steam packet Africa, from Boston, was drawing into Liverpool docks. Most of the passengers showed natural exultation, but among them was one who seemed to have no pleasant prospects in view. This was a youth some two and twenty years of age, tall, slim, with a marked elegance of bearing and a fastidious neatness of dress, but with a worn, hectic look upon his very expressive face, which told of the ravages of some wasting disease. Blue-eyed, and with hair of a light auburn tint, he was of the type which is peculiarly open to the attack of the tubercle. An acute physician would probably have given him six months of life in our humid island. He had hardly a relation in the world. His left lung was partly gone.

  The youth depicted in this scene loosely quoted from Conan Doyle’s Edge of the Unknown is Daniel Dunglas Home. Born in Scotland, D. D. Home was adopted by an aunt in America when he was nine. Rai
sed in Connecticut, he was a gentle, soft-spoken child. When he was seventeen, his aunt threw him out of the house anyway; tables and chairs went airborne as he entered a room. Left to fend for himself, he conducted séances around New England in the early 1850s, and according to the letters of firsthand witnesses his séances were marked by luminous spirit hands and tables that rocked and tilted. A small group of supporters in America raised the money to send him to Britain as a spiritualist missionary. Yes, D. D. Home was a medium—“the greatest on the physical side that the modern world has ever seen,” said Arthur Conan Doyle decades later in his last book, a 1930 collection of essays, The Edge of the Unknown.

  The scene at Liverpool docks is a condensed version of Conan Doyle’s own words; it’s a re-creation of the fateful moment that D. D. Home arrived in Britain, and spiritualism came to Britain with him. Yes, he had been preceded by another American medium, Mrs. Hayden, in 1852, but he had much more impact. The reason is the unusual versatility of his psychic power, said Doyle. “We speak usually of a direct voice medium, of a trance speaker, of a clairvoyant, or of a physical medium, but Home was all four.” He truly was “stranger than fiction,” which was the title of an 1860 article about him in William Makepeace Thackeray’s Cornhill Magazine. (Thackeray himself attended Home séances in both England and America.)

  Arriving in England, Home was to earn his reputation as the consummate houseguest, staying several months with the family of Thomas Rymer, a rich solicitor in the London suburb of Ealing. There he would give séances to friends of his host, and all distinguished callers for that matter, offering his abilities for free—he never charged money—to hundreds of the curious and the skeptical and the famous: On July 25, 1855, the poet Robert Browning and his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, visited Ealing for a séance with D. D. Home. She had been deeply interested in mesmerism and spiritualism for more than a decade. Robert? Not so much. Two days earlier, their friends Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton and his son, Robert, had attended a séance at Ealing; Robert Bulwer-Lytton wrote to her afterward of his experience. So they went into the séance with potentially different attitudes and emerged with a very sore subject in their marriage.