Handbook of Spiritualism and Channeling

521 Pages·2015·5.446 MB·English

by  Cathy Guttierez

Handbook of Spiritualism and Channeling
Brill Handbooks on
Contemporary Religion
Series Editors
Carole M. Cusack (University of Sydney)
James R. Lewis (University of Tromsø)
Editorial Board
Olav Hammer (University of Southern Denmark)
Charlotte Hardman (University of Durham)
Titus Hjelm (University College London)
Adam Possamai (University of Western Sydney)
Inken Prohl (University of Heidelberg)
VOLUME 9
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/bhcr
Handbook of Spiritualism
and Channeling
Edited by
Cathy Gutierrez
LEIDEN | BOSTON
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Handbook of spiritualism and channeling / edited by Cathy Gutierrez.
  pages cm. -- (Brill handbooks on contemporary religion, ISSN 1874-6691 ; volume 9)
 Includes index.
 ISBN 978-90-04-26377-2 (hardback : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-90-04-26408-3 (e-book) 1. Spiritualism.
2. Channeling (Spiritualism) I. Gutierrez, Cathy, 1967- editor.
 BF1261.2.H36 2015
 133.9--dc23
2014045279
This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering
Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities.
For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface.
issn 1874-6691
isbn 978-90-04-26377-2 (hardback)
isbn 978-90-04-26408-3 (e-book)
Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands.
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This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Contents
Introduction 1
Cathy Gutierrez
Part 1
Locating Spiritualism
1 Mesmerism and the Psychological Dimension of Mediumship 9
Adam Crabtree
2 Spiritualism and the American Swedenborgian Current 32
Arthur Versluis
3 Dead Reckonings
 Spirits and Corpses at the Crossroads  48
Cathy Gutierrez
4 Spirit Possession 66
Mary Keller
5 Queering the Séance
 Bodies, Bondage, and Touching in Victorian Spiritualism 87
Marlene Tromp
Part 2
In Conversation
6 Man is a Spirit Here and Now
  The Two Faces of Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the
Creation of the Magical Occult Theosophical Spiritualist
New Thought Amalgam 119
John Patrick Deveney
7 Pinkie at Play
  Postcolonialism, Politics, and Performance in Nettie Colburn Maynard’s
Was Abraham Lincoln a Spiritualist? 152
Elizabeth Lowry
vi Contents
8 Criticising the Dead
 Spiritualism and the Oneida Community 171
Christa Shusko
9 The Nature of Reality
 Christian Science and Spiritualism 199
Jeremy Rapport
Part 3
New Directions
10 Reincarnation
 The Path to Progress 221
Lynn L. Sharp
11 Crossing Over
  Allan Kardec and the Transnationalisation of Modern
Spiritualism 248
John Warne Monroe
12 Spiritism in Brazil
 From Religious to Therapeutic Practice 275
Waleska de Araújo Aureliano and Vânia Zikán Cardoso
13 Between Two Worlds
 Transformations of Spiritualism in Contemporary Lily Dale 294
Darryl V. Caterine
Part 4
Channeling
14 “The Medium is the Message in the Spacious Present”
 Channeling, Television, and the New Age 319
Hugh Urban
15 Channeling—The Cinderella of the New Age?
  A Course in Miracles, the Seth Texts, and Definition in New Age
Spiritualities 340
Ruth Bradby
Contents vii
16 Individual Power, Cultural Constraints
 Israeli Channeling in Global Context 362
Adam Klin-Oron
17 Channeling Extraterrestrials
 Theosophical Discourse in the Space Age 390
Christopher Partridge
Part 5
The Next Move
18 Secret Lives of the Superpowers
 The Remote Viewing Literature and the Imaginal  421
Jeffrey Kripal
19 Psychics, Skeptics, and Popular Culture  444
Douglas E. Cowan
20 The Occultists and the Spaceman
 The Metamorphosis of Dorothy Martin  464
Michael Barkun
21 Historical Imagination and Channeled Theology
 Or, Learning the Law of Attraction 480
Catherine L. Albanese
Index 503

Introduction
Cathy Gutierrez
Spirit possession ranks, along with myth-making and mysticism, as one of the
truly global religious phenomena. Through time and across space, all cultures
have manifested some form of spirit possession, whether ritualised and central
to religious authority, like indigenous shamans or the Pythia of Greece, or
understood as an intrusion of chaos into religious order, like the travails of
Salem or even the current outbreak of interest in zombies. An external, super-
natural force occupying a living, material body can be an omen or a curse, a
prophecy or a sign of end times. The fate of the possessed—and the role of
possession—is always in the hands of its interpreters, who bring culturally-
crafted conditions and conceptions to the moment and determine whether
the event is demonic, divine, or somewhere in between.
The contributors to this volume have come together to examine two related
models of interaction with spirits in the modern world. Spiritualism, the move-
ment that is generally dated to 1848 with the Fox sisters, inaugurated wide-
spread attempts to contact the dead through the use of mediums. Modeled on
the new technology of telegraphy, mediums served as conduits between this
world and the next, where trance lecturers expounded on politics and philoso-
phy while home séances contacted the dead for the bereaved. In the course of
these communications, the living learned the landscape of heaven and that it
was the destination for all of humankind. Indebted to the Neo-Platonic ladder
of progress and predicated on Emanuel Swedenborg’s visions of a lively and
active heaven, Spiritualists understood death to be the next step on a journey
of never-ending progress.
Born in California in the 1970s, channeling relied on new technologies of
television and talk shows to become an international New Age phenomenon.
Much as with Spiritualist mediums, channelers initially came from the ranks
of middle-class white women who would enter some alternative state and let
spirits speak through them. Unlike those in Spiritualism, these spirits were not
familiar ones, famous dead people or lost loved ones, but rather ancient wise
men from mythical places like Atlantis or Lemuria. Speaking with the author-
ity of tens of thousands of years of knowledge, these channeled spirits held
forth on all matters of theology and history. As time went on, the beings chan-
neled by the living expanded to include aliens, elemental spirits, and even
nature itself.
While the basic structures of Spiritualism and channeling share remarkable
family resemblances with religious communication transhistorically and
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004264083_002
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