Spiritualism Yesterday & Today.
SPIRITUALISM: Mediums, Guardian Angels, Celtic Christianity & Spiritual Awakening — From the Fox Sisters and Carl Jung to J R R Tolkien and Our Better Angels…
1. Spiritualism in the 19th Century.
Spiritualism — it dominated the 19th Century public fancy the way Aliens and UFO’s did the 20th Century. The top Mediums — and even their Spirit Guides — were worldwide celebrities!
In Western culture, the Church was losing followers. Materialism was winning, spirituality was fading. In an almost desperate panic, the public yearned for a new Belief.
The practice of communicating with the dead was ancient. Shamans — the “medicine men” and “wise women” who were the first priests of every culture — did it. The Oracles of ancient Greece did it. So, too, the Medieval necromancers.
But it wasn’t until the middle of the 19th Century that communication with the dead became a popular public entertainment and preoccupation: “Everybody is doing it!”
The movement, soon to be named Spiritualism, began in 1848 in Hydesville, New York State. The Fox Sisters — Leah, Margaretta and Kate — lived with their family in a tumbledown house with a history of hauntings. The Fox family began to hear knocking sounds in the walls and phantom footsteps on the stairs. Mrs. Fox’s hair went gray in a week. The three sisters were most sensitive to the knocking sounds, and began to speak of a “Mr Splitfoot.”
Believing the sounds to be made by a spirit, the girls worked out a code with “Mr Splitfoot” and were told by him that he was the ghost of an itinerant peddler who’d been murdered for his money and buried in the cellar of their house by former owners. The story was confirmed by a maid who had lived in the house when the murder took place.
When the family moved away, the sisters still still heard the knockings. The spirit-messages, they said, told them that they were chosen “to convince the skeptical of the great truth of immortality.”
Newspapers spread the story. The public was fascinated.
In just a few years Spiritualism spread throughout North America and Western Europe.
New phrases were added to the public lexicon: Mediums. The Other Side. Apports. Table-rapping. Levitation. Discarnates. Ectoplasm. Physical materializations. Seances. Automatic writing. Clairaudience and Clairvoyance. Ouija Boards. Thought forms. Controls. Spirit Guides. Spirit possession. Trance State.
Hundreds of mediums gained fame, among the most celebrated were:
DANIEL DUNGLASS HOME: Born in Scotland in 1833, Home has been called “Perhaps the most outstanding physical medium in the history of Spiritualism.” Ralph Waldo Emerson called him a “prodigious genius.”
A sickly child, Home learned early to draw on his psychic senses. As an adult, living in America and Britain, he astounded the luminaries of the day with his seances, levitation, fire immunity, strange music from nowhere, elongation of his body, phantom writing (invisible hands picking up pens to write messages), movement of furniture, and changes of room temperature (long before central heating).
Although the messages sent through his séances were “bang-on” in accuracy, it was his feats of levitation that earned him worldwide acclaim.
Newspaper editor F L Burr reported how, while attending a D D Home séance in Connecticut in the summer of 1852, Home was “taken up into the air! He palpitated from head to foot with the contending emotions of joy and fear. Again and again he was taken from the floor, and the third time he was carried to the ceiling of the apartment, with which his hands and feet came into gentle contact…”
LEONORA PIPER: The Boston-born Leonora Piper is perhaps the most critically-tested of all mediums. She is considered the most outstanding trance medium in the history of psychic research. For over 20 years, members of the American Society for Psychical Research tested her and were amazed at the constant results.
It was while recovering from a long and difficult illness that Mrs Piper decided to seek out a healer. During her second visit with him, she went into her first trance. Once having discovered how to enter a trance, she found that she could enter one whenever she wanted to. Soon she was conducting private sittings for clients.
In 1885, the psychic researcher and author William James (“The Varieties of Religious Experience”), visited Leonora. Impressed, James later said that Mrs Piper had either read his mind or was actually giving information from relatives who had “passed over.” James later wrote: “My later knowledge of her sittings and personal acquaintance with her has led me to reject the former explanation (mind reading), and to believe that she has supernormal powers.”
JOHN KING: Most mediums had a Spirit Guide (or Control) — a spiritual personality who controlled the medium during the séance and passed on messages. The spirit JOHN KING must hold the record of acting through the most mediums.
John King said that in life he was Henry Morgan, the Pirate of Port Royal, who was knighted for his heroic buccaneer activities in the Caribbean and appointed Governor of Jamaica in 1673. He first appeared to the Davenport Brothers — Ira and William — in 1850. Other mediums who claimed he was their Spirit Guide include: Mrs Mary Marshall, Mrs Samuel Guppy, Georgina Houghton, Mrs Firman, Mrs Etta Wriedt, William Eglinton, Cecil Husk, Mme Blavatsky (founder of the Theosophical Society), Eusapia Paladino and Dr Glen Hamilton.
2. Spiritualism in the 20th Century
The publication of Freud’s THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS in 1900 shook the complacency of the late Victorians. Dream Study and Dream Interpretation were suddenly the talk of the town. Dream study was soon carried to fascinating heights by Freud’s young student Carl Jung — the passionate contemplation of Myth, Religion and psychology as manifested in our own dreams was bearing fantastic results.
And there are the strange events surrounding Jung’s death. Jung had never promised any “afterlife incidents” as many others interested in the Psychic Sciences had, saying such occurrences weren’t nearly as important as the study of the Psyche.
However, Jung’s close friend, Laurens van der Post, while on a sea voyage, had a dream in which he saw Jung wave at him and say, “I’ll be seeing you.” Next day, Laurens learned that Jung had passed away, and at the exact time of the dream. He was also told that, just as Jung was “giving up the ghost,” a bolt of lightning hit Jung’s favorite tree in his Küsnacht garden. A few years later, van der Post was making a movie about Jung in that very same garden. Just as he was describing Jung’s death to the camera, a bolt of lightning struck the same tree!
In 1957, Jung had written: “As at the beginning of the Christian Era, so again today we are faced with the problem of the general moral backwardness which has failed to keep pace with our scientific, technical, and social progress. So much is at stake. Does Modern Man know that he is on the point of losing the life-preserving myth of the inner man which Christianity has treasured up for him?”
A man who echoed Jung’s sentiment was J R R Tolkien, the century’s premier mythmaker. In a letter, Tolkien wrote: “THE LORD OF THE RINGS is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. We have come from God and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed, only by myth-making, only by becoming a ‘sub-creator’ and inventing stories, can Man ascribe to the state of perfection that he knew before the fall.”
Jung’s writing on Myth and Religion gave us new ways of looking at deep spiritual experience.
Tolkien’s mythic work somehow revealed an inspired, visionary way of understanding our religious connections.
My own intense experiences as a lad in old stone churches, especially York Minster Cathedral, led to my own lifelong quest to understanding “What just happened?” (See my Life & Works of Brian Alan Burhoe).
Following Freud and Jung, various studies of dreams began — from the collecting of prophetic dreams to the interpretation of dream meaning by Freud, Jung and other dream theorists. Dream labs became common in various Universities.
Psychic research expanded. The New Age arrived.
And, by the end of the century, a renewed Celtic Spirituality was blossoming.
3. Spiritualism in the 21st Century.
So what have I discovered after all these years?
We do have Spirit Guides. The best way to describe them is “Angels.”
Angels are among us again. Guardian angels. Biblical angels and their recounted messages to Humankind. Dream angels and their individual messages to us. Our own Better Angels. Braver angels trying to reunite their fellows.
At the same time, the sudden rise of Spiritualism and Mediumship during the Covid crisis drew a sharp warning from Spiritual Warriors. And rightly so.
Reverend Jayne Irlam of the Deliverance Study Group of the Baptist Union in the UK stated, “it’s completely understandable that those desperate to say goodbye to their loved ones would be attracted by a spiritual philosophy which offers communication with the dead.”
With over 6 Million Covid deaths worldwide, so many families were unable to say their farewells to their beloved family members and some sought closure with easily available Mediums.
Rev Irlam concluded: “Communication with the dead in this way is specifically forbidden in the Bible by a loving God who wishes to keep people safe from bondage to preternatural or demonic powers. Becoming involved in activities such as Spiritualism can open up a doorway to great spiritual oppression which requires a Christian rite to set that person free.”
For more on this, see my well-received Christian Feature SPIRITUAL WARFARE: Christians, Scripture, Books, Weapons & Deliverance.
And all this amidst a renewed interest in Celtic Christianity, the rock-solid religion that was the heart and spirit of our Northern culture for centuries. Early Celtic Christianity involved a deep connection with Nature, Women and Christ’s Message. John 13:34: “A new Commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another; as I have loved you.” We’re entering a joyous time of Spiritual Awakening.
Yes, and this I believe: “Angels are among us again.”
So it is that vivid white clouds and blue, blue sky will shine above us once more — wonderfully empty except for distant ink-black, free-flying, bird-forms, arrogant, celebrating, holy.
“Live Free, Mon Ami!” SEE: The Life & Works of Brian Alan Burhoe
“Seek out our better angels in turbulent times.” – Jimmy Carter. SEE: OUR BETTER ANGELS: No Human Is Limited – Seven Virtues that Will Change Your Life & Our World
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SPIRITUALISM: Mediums, Guardian Angels, Celtic Christianity & J R R Tolkien.
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