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Spirits, Seers & Séances
Spiritualism in the Age of Sherlock Holmes and Edgar Allan Poe A woman wearing a black veil convenes a séance. A magician puts a volunteer into a trance. A fortune-teller leans over a crystal ball. Everyone knows what Victorian mysticism looks like because our modern imagery, language, and practice of magic borrows heavily from the Victorians. But we have little understanding of its spiritual, cultural, and historical foundations. What made the Victorians turn to mediumship, hypnotism, and fortune-telling? What were they afraid of? What were they seeking? This book explores the history of automatic writing, cartomancy, clairvoyance, and more. It reveals how Victorian belief in ghosts, fairies, and nature spirits shaped our celebrations of Halloween and Christmas. With historic examples and hands-on exercises, you will discover how spiritualism in the time of Jack the Ripper, Jane Eyre, "A Christmas Carol," and Dracula left such a profound impact on both the past and present.
Text Technologies
This coursebook examines the material history of human communication, allowing students and teachers to examine how communication's production, form, materiality, and reception are crucial to our interpretations of culture, history, and society.
Victorian Women and the Theatre of Trance
Spiritualists in the nineteenth century spoke of the "Borderland," a shadowy threshold where the living communed with the dead, and where those in the material realm could receive comfort or advice from another world. The skilled performances of mostly female actors and performers made the "Borderland" a theatre, of sorts, in which dramas of revelation and recognition were produced in the forms of seances, trances, and spiritualist lectures. This book examines some of the most fascinating American and British actresses of the Victorian era, whose performances fairly mesmerized their audiences of amused skeptics and ardent believers. It also focuses on the transformative possibilities of the spiritualist theatre, revealing how the performances allowed Victorian women to speak, act, and create outside the boundaries of their restricted social and psychological roles.
Calling the Spirits
From Halloween expert Morton, a level-headed and entertaining history of our desire and attempts to hold conversations with the dead. Calling the Spirits investigates the eerie history of our conversations with the dead, from necromancy in Homer’s Odyssey to the emergence of Spiritualism—when Victorians were entranced by mediums and the seance was born. Among our cast are the Fox sisters, teenagers surrounded by “spirit rappings”; Daniel Dunglas Home, the “greatest medium of all time”; Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose unlikely friendship was forged, then riven, by the afterlife; and Helen Duncan, the medium whose trial in 1944 for witchcraft proved more popular to the public than news about the war. The book also considers Ouija boards, modern psychics, and paranormal investigations, and is illustrated with engravings, fine art (from beyond), and photographs. Hugely entertaining, it begs the question: is anybody there . . . ?
Table-rappers
Dealing with all aspects of the Victorian fascination for the occult, this title identifies issues such as the credulity of the believers, unexplained phenomena such as levitation and manifestations and the intense rivalry between professional mediums, who were not above sabotaging each other's seances.
Talking to the Dead
Barbara Weisberg’s Talking to the Dead blends biography and social history in this revelatory story of the family responsible for the rise of Spiritualism. A fascinating story of spirits and conjurors, skeptics and converts in the second half of nineteenth century America viewed through the lives of Kate and Maggie Fox, the sisters whose purported communication with the dead gave rise to the Spiritualism movement—and whose recanting forty years later is still shrouded in mystery. In March of 1848, Kate and Maggie Fox—sisters aged eleven and fourteen—anxiously reported to a neighbor that they had been hearing strange, unidentified sounds in their house. From a sequence of knocks and r...
The Victorian Supernatural
Publisher Description
Strange Powers
Three case studies in the paranormal shed light on the limits of human potential. During his research for his major study The Occult, Colin Wilson became fascinated by three people whom he interviewed extensively. Strange Powers compiles and analyzes the compelling stories of Robert Leftwich, a retired sales manager in Sussex with proven powers as a dowser who also is able to take journeys out of his physical body; Mrs. Eunice Beattie, a hospital nurse, who has written hundreds of pages of predictions dictated to her by “spirits”; and Dr. Arthur Guirdham, a respected British physician, who is convinced that he is a reincarnated member of a thirteenth-century religious sect, about which he has written voluminously and accurately. All three consider their powers to be perfectly normal. If this is so, are the rest of us abnormal? Or subnormal? Colin Wilson challenges us to consider these questions, as well as the problem of how to gain scientific recognition for those vistas of reality that lie outside the experience of most of us, but that almost certainly exist.
Pendulum Dowsing and the Spirit Connection
Pendulum Dowsing and the Spirit Connection is a story of one woman’s adventures in both dowsing and the spirit world. Leila Oliver White likes to investigate new ideas and learn new talents every day of her life. When the excitement of dowsing for water, gold or lost items led to an ability to communicate with the spirits who abound in her life, Leila soon became adept at this practice and wanted to share what she learned with others. She believes the world is full of concepts people just don’t understand, but those concepts are as real to her as they will be to you when you make the Spirit Connection!
