Paranormal Nation

by Marc E. Fitch

  It should be noted, however, that Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and the rise of Spiritualism are not directly related. Origin was not released until 10 years after the Fox sisters began to communicate with spirits of the dead. Within that 10-year span, Spiritualism swept across the United States and crossed the pond to Europe where it became a fascination of the Victorian wealthy. Evolutionary theories, however, had been circulating for some time before Darwin. The nature of cultural shifts, reactions, and progress can never be confined to direct causal relationships; instead, it is a complex assortment of different factors. Much like the European witch-hunt that cannot be directly attributed to the Malleus Maleficarum or the revolution, neither can Spiritualism be directly related to On the Origin of Species. While Darwin’s theories were circulating among a select group of scientists, the public was becoming more and more aware of and fascinated with the mysteries of life. The very exploration of these mysteries called into question some of the orthodox religious assertions about the divine origins of the universe.

  Amid all this turmoil were the general hope and uneasiness that coalesced around the great passion of the age: science. The telegraph, which had been invented only four years before the Foxes first summoned the spirits, revolutionizing communications as surely as the telephone, television, and the computer would in their time. Railroads were just beginning to crisscross America. Most of all, electricity held an abiding fascination, fraught with promise and mystery. Everyone knew it existed and was immensely powerful, but no one was quite sure what it was or how it could be safely or effectively harnessed.16

  Thus, the public reaction in the form of Spiritualism was not necessarily against Darwin’s theories, but against the massive inroads that science was making into the inner workings of life.

  However, it was Darwin’s theories that would generate the biggest reaction and greatest public outcry as it, ultimately, uncovered the origins of man, plants, and animals, and called into question man’s very soul. “Orthodox religion was also fending off attack from discoveries in such diverse fields as biblical criticism and geology. Textual studies of the Bible called into question its divine authorship, and new evidence about the earth’s age and development threatened to undermine scriptural cosmogony.”17

  While the overriding concept of the European witch craze centered around the issue of control of the cosmos, and whether that control existed with God, witches, or the government, the concept surrounding the rise of Spiritualism seems to be that of nature, and whether or not man is more than animal. The primary belief of Spiritualism is that the soul of man survives death, thereby separating man from animal and maintaining the belief that mankind is divinely created. While the Fox sisters clearly knew nothing about Darwin’s coming revolution, the gate of nature had begun to be opened by current science. The Fox sisters, when they began communicating with departed spirits, were not doing anything essentially new, as these practices had been in existence since ancient times. However, the public reaction to and fascination with the Fox sisters and their subsequent imitators and innovators represents a deep-seated yearning to bolster old beliefs in the face of emerging science. Spiritualism was closely linked to Christianity, but it also allowed believers to sidestep some of the more difficult theological questions brought about by science. Spiritualism was hardly ever a set or organized religion; Spiritualists’ beliefs ranged from Orthodox Christian beliefs to belief in alien planets inhabited by the souls of the long-departed. This allowed Spiritualism to change and mold itself as science changed and molded society. However, it could not escape the inevitable conflict between the idea of man as an animal that had been produced through natural selection and man as a spiritual, divine being. Ultimately, that is what played out upon the public stage. It was a reaction against the scientific theories that portrayed man as an advanced animal rather than a demigod. The two great passions of the age—science and Spiritualism—clashed, and would continue to clash throughout the next 80 years.

  Nowhere is the clash between science, Spiritualism, and the public more manifest than in the exhausting studies conducted on some of the greatest spiritual mediums of the time, and the uproar that these experiments created. The studies would sometimes be conducted over a period of years and showed a scientific methodology at odds with something completely unscientific—the spirit world. And while there were many frauds discovered (probably the majority of so-called mediums were frauds), there were the occasional mediums that seemed to defy the sciences for explanation. Ironically, it was these extensive and often successful attempts to demonstrate a medium’s fraud that led to greater belief in Spiritualism. Dr. Charles Alfred Lee toured New York showing how the Fox sisters were able to create the spirit knocks and raps by cracking the joints of their fingers and toes. He demonstrated this by exhibiting a man who was able to mimic the sisters’ work through the use of this strange ability. “The results of the tour were unexpected. Instead of being warned away from the tricks of false mediums, many of those in Dr. Lee’s audiences became converted to spiritualism by his earnest attempts to discredit it.”18

  Similarly, during a séance with famed medium Florence Cook, in which she manifested a ghost by the name of Katie who would walk around the room and converse with the sitters, a patron by the name of William Volckman grabbed the entity by the arm and refused to let go. The other sitters came to the rescue of Katie and released his hold. The entity then retreated back into the very same closet that held Florence Cook, who was supposedly tied up at the time. When Cook emerged from the closet she was visibly shaken. For a long time there had been comments made by skeptics and believers alike that “Katie” closely resembled Florence Cook, even though Cook, of course, vehemently denied it. However, this clear unveiling of a fraud was met with outrage. “Reaction to this incident among spiritualists was immediate and violent. Mr. Volckman, though an active spiritualist of several years’ standing, was angrily condemned … At least half of the outrage occasioned by Mr. Volckman’s escapade was directed at his supposed breach of good manners (in taking hold of a lady and impugning the reliability of his hosts) rather than at the actual truth or falsity of his charges.”19 Mediums would never allow someone to touch an entity that they had manifested because it would supposedly drain the energy of the medium and possibly cause serious illness or even death. This, of course, gave the medium some confidence that his or her fraud would go undetected by a genteel public, and it also allowed the spiritualists to enact righteous indignation when the fraud was exposed, thus turning attentions to the breach in etiquette and the endangering of a young woman, rather than the truth of the matter.

  Florence Cook would have a rather long and illustrious career working with famed scientist Sir William Crookes, who had set out to discover the truth of Spiritualism. But Cook managed to seduce the poor old fellow, and he became one of her greatest advocates, attesting to her abilities as genuine supernatural feats. Crookes, despite his impressive scientific career, was unfortunately swallowed whole by the Spiritualist movement—a testament to man’s powerful desire for immortality. Crookes had originally tested D. D. Home, one of the few mediums whose abilities actually did baffle scientists and call into question the nature of mankind. Crookes reported that he felt D. D. Home was genuine and had unexplainable abilities. However, when he turned his attentions to the young and pretty Florence Cook, nearly all the mediocre checks and methodology he had used on Home went right out the proverbial window. While his assertions of Cook’s abilities certainly made waves in the scientific and Spiritualist communities, his poor methods and obvious corrupted nature virtually ended his credibility in the science community. But he was certainly not the last of the great scientists to test the Spiritualist waters.

  It was during this time in history involving the research of spiritualism that the Society for Psychical Research or SPR began. SPR was an organization of respected scientists who devoted themselves to the study of psychic phenomena and often debunked the mediums
as frauds. However, they were open-minded enough to allow that some of the people studied did display abilities that defied explanation, though these incidents were rare exceptions. The research into the possibility of a spirit world captured the attention of many of the world’s great scientists, including Harry Sidgwick, professor of moral philosophy at Cambridge and the SPR’s first president.

  What is truly fascinating about this confluence of science and spiritualism is the dedication with which each side upheld their own belief systems; die-hard spiritualists could not be convinced of fraud even when exposed before their very eyes, while the scientists would routinely deny the reality of the phenomena that could not be explained. Their controls during experiments included holding the mediums’ arms and legs while they sat bound to a chair in a room of the scientists’ design. However, were the medium to loose a foot or hand for a moment, the scientists would discount the entire experience as somehow being controlled by a trick. Nowhere was this more evident than in the case of Eusapia Palladino, one of the most ambiguous and frustrating mediums that the SPR ever had to deal with. Eusapia was born very poor; she rejected education throughout her life, along with several other niceties such as bathing or social etiquette. Also, her séances were orgiastic in nature and were largely thought of as uncomfortably sexual. Eusapia would often flail her body and arms, which allowed plenty of opportunity for tricks and hoaxes to be played, and it was well known that, at times, Eusapia did fake some of the phenomena. However, her appeal was that a large number of her feats were completely unexplainable, and, in fact, so unbelievable that many, including scientists, did not believe they could be faked. Unlike many of the mediums during the Victorian times, Eusapia was not accepted or admired by the wealthy upper class. They regarded her as rude and crude and uncomfortable to be with. Subsequently, Eusapia spent much of her career as a medium being studied by scientists. Her phenomena were witnessed by Harry Sidgwick and his wife, and included such feats as a wicker chair and a melon levitating and moving to the center of the table, strange lights and ghost faces appearing in the darkness, musical instruments playing themselves, and extra limbs of ectoplasm that could move and push things across the table.

  Eusapia’s tests were famous but also ambiguous. When she didn’t feel like manifesting anything, she would obviously cheat, which led some of those in the SPR to conclude that she was a fraud. Moving her arms and legs was a large part of her conjuring, so the men would hold onto her limbs to be sure that she couldn’t cheat. Even her occasional freeing of an arm or leg could not account for the phenomena that she produced in a room that was set up by the scientists to control the experiments. During a performance for Marie and Pierre Curie, who monitored her with electronics, she caused one of their scientific devices to rise in the air and sail past Marie and Pierre. The SPR subsequently sent a second envoy to investigate her in 1908, during which she wowed them with her abilities. Even so, some could not get past her occasional cheating, “But was the SPR so blind to assume that a free hand or foot could account for all the things she did? Did they not see that the very clumsiness of her cheating belied her being an accomplished fraud?”20 What was probably a more startling feat was that an uneducated woman from the streets could outsmart the world’s most prominent scientists and fraud hunters with tricks. Unfortunately, she grew tired of the skepticism and experiments and was caught regularly using her tricks and no longer putting any energy into her conjuring. Following an unimpressive trip to the United States, she retired.

  Eusapia’s career presents a microcosm of the difficulties that surround scientific investigation of the paranormal. She was ambiguous—an anathema to scientific study, combining trickery with sexuality and spirituality and the unexplainable. In this sense she was similar to the ancient shamans that formed the very first religious experiences in ancient tribes. She would perform a miracle followed by a fraud. She did not fit into any category; rather, she crossed the boundaries that form the basis of science and our understanding of the world. She encompassed the trickster aspect of the paranormal, blending truth and fiction, reality with fantasy, the supernatural with trickery; and for this reason, she was probably the most genuine medium in history, fully embracing the liminal aspects of the paranormal and spiritual. She could not be categorized because she transcended the normal boundaries of human knowledge and experience. Thus, she presented the greatest challenge to science, whose understanding is limited to method and boundary. The scientists defended their beliefs that Spiritualism was a fraud as fervently as the spiritualists defended its credibility—to a fault. For both sides, it became a matter of faith; faith in the spiritual world versus faith in the not yet fully understood natural world.

  One of the more telling aspects of the relationship between the Spiritualist movement and the emerging natural sciences were the spirits with whom the mediums communicated, and the secrets of life that said spirits revealed. The Spiritualist regularly claimed to communicate with great scientists of the past—personalities who had moved on to explore the infinite reality of life in the spirit world and had returned to share their experience with humanity. However, “Several critics of the movement had pointed out that humanity had never received a single piece of useful information from the spirit world in spite of all the mediums who claimed to have communed with the great scientists and thinkers of the past.”21 Rather, Spiritualist messages from beyond appeared to be New Age platitudes—spiritual propaganda that may have passed for the teachings of a cult rather than any substantive philosophy or communication. As Spiritualist organizations formed, they began to form solidarity in a message that preached of the unity of all life, but with a decidedly Christian spin. One of the principles of the White Eagle Lodge was “That Christ, the Son of the Father-Mother God, is the Light that shines through Wisdom and Love in the human heart; and that by reason of this Divine Sonship all are brothers and sisters regardless of race, class, or creed; and that this brotherhood and sisterhood embraces life, visible and invisible.”22

  This idea of a world spiritually interconnected is not vastly different from Darwin’s theory of evolution—a theory that postulates that we are all related; plants, animals, and man have all descended from the same place, are all made of the same primordial stuff, and therefore, are all brothers and sisters. The White Eagle Lodge was created in 1936 and could possibly be a reconciliation of Spiritualism and Darwinism. Rather than emphasizing the physical relationship of man with the earth, the White Eagle Lodge emphasized the spiritual connection.

  However, even before Darwin sought to explain life on earth through natural selection and before the Fox sisters began to communicate with spirits, Andrew Jackson Davis was already exploring the beginnings of the universe through spiritual revelation. While in a spiritual trance, he dictated his work Principles, Revelations, and Voice, which was an inspired history of the universe, detailing the divine nature of man and spirit. McHargue states that the book follows an “evolutionary view of life on this planet,” but it devolves largely into scientific/spiritual nonsense, highly reminiscent of today’s New Age belief systems—that of a spiritual unity of the universe. Little did Davis know that his beliefs were being echoed by science, only instead of a spiritual unity, it was unity based on basic elements, the struggle to survive, and the continuation of life after death through reproduction. Davis’s work was extensive and very popular—a blend of infant spiritualism and dawning science. His descriptions of the birds, which inhabit his celestial spirit dwelling known as the Summer Land, invoke the same kind of wonder and exotic beauty Darwin beheld on his trips to the Galápagos and other such locales.

  However, perhaps the best example of the collision between Spiritualism and Darwinian evolution was the story of Alfred Russel Wallace. “Independently of Charles Darwin, Wallace had worked out a theory of evolution based on natural selection. But he was disturbed by his own findings. Although convinced that the theory was generally correct, he felt that the human mind was exempt from it. T
he mind, the human spirit, was a unique act of creation. So believing, Wallace found comfort in spiritualism, which seemed to confirm humanity’s spiritual singularity.”23

  Wallace’s conflict is a microcosm for the conflict that spurred the Spiritualist movement; the conflict between belief in man as a divine and spiritual being and man as a highly evolved animal. Both science and Spiritualism were trying to answer some of the basic fundamental questions of life; namely, how did we get here and what happens after we die? They both sought to understand the essence of humanity. Wallace’s findings were so at odds with what he believed about humanity that he rejected his own work and turned instead to Spiritualism. Likewise, many on both the American continent and in Europe did the same. In the face of emerging sciences that harnessed an unseen force such as electricity and postulated that man was nothing more than a highly evolved ape, the masses turned to Spiritualism to provide proof to the contrary. And the Fox sisters gave them that proof. Even science was scrambling to understand the phenomena surrounding the séances and the mediums—truly looking for the assurance of life after death, of the human soul, and perhaps most of all, God. The scientists wanted to believe, but, save for a few exceptions, they were not willing to believe for belief’s sake alone. Rather, they required proof. They hoped, once and for all, to be able to stand on fact rather than faith, that man was more than just a creature who developed down a different evolutionary path. Mankind’s belief in its own spiritual immortality had been rocked again and again throughout the past generations, and people were desperately hoping to find something that could not be shaken, that could not be explained away with mathematical equations and fossil records. What they got was Spiritualism, which proved to them that the spirit survives death. Taps on the wall, levitation, spirit hands that touched the hem of a dress, tales of Summer Lands inhabited by benevolent civilizations, a spiritual reality far removed from our own, were the proofs that the public sought and gained from Spiritualism.