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Evelyn
Engel Graduate Student, History San Francisco State University |
What is Spiritualism?
| "Spiritualism" - according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, is the belief, or practices based upon the belief, that departed souls hold intercourse with mortals, usually through a medium by means of physical phenomena or during abnormal mental states, such as trances. |
Spiritualists believed that it all began with events in the small village of Hydesville, New York, in 1848. Two young girls, Margaret, age 14, and Catherine, age 11, had been able to communicate with a spirit that had been frightening the family for months with nocturnal raps.
When the girls went to live in nearby Rochester with their older sister Leah, she too developed mediumistic talents.
The year before the first raps, Andrew Jackson Davis, a clairvoyant prophet from New England, had just published the right book at the right time, a massive tome dictated by the spirit of Emanuel Swedenborg, the 18th-century mystic, while Davis was in a mesmeric trance.
In The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind, Davis rejected the truth of the Bible and prescribed a system of socialism. Significantly, the book also predicted that spirits would soon commune with men and “this truth will ere long present itself in the form of a living demonstration."
Davis provided the philosophy, and Leah, Margaret, and Kate Fox, the phenomena, of "Modern Spiritualism."
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Additional Links about the Origins of Spiritualism
Hamlet
of Hydesville - Intersting article about the Fox family by the Arcadia Town
Historian (Newark, NY Home Page).
The
Fox Sisters: The Rise & Fall of Spiritualism's Founders - From the
Haunted Museum.
