[70] Sidis has a résumé of Social Epidemics in part three of his work on the "Psychology of Suggestion."
It Crosses to England and the Continent
The American interest in Spiritualism from 1848 to 1852 belongs distinctly to this region. The Fox sisters have been generally discredited, but what they began carried on. In 1852 a Mrs. Hayden and a little later a Mrs. Roberts introduced raps and table turnings to England. There, and more particularly on the Continent, Spiritualism met and merged with a second line of development which in turn reacted upon American Spiritualism, and, in America, released movements on the surface wholly unrelated to Spiritism. In France to a degree and in Germany strongly Mesmerism lent itself to spiritistic interpretations. I quote Podmore, who is commenting upon the trance utterances of a Mrs. Lindquist: "It is to be noted that the ascription of these somnambulic utterances to spirit intelligences was in the circumstances not merely easy but almost inevitable. The entranced person was in a state obviously differing very widely from either normal sleep or normal wakefulness; in the waking state she herself retained no recollection of what happened in the trance; in the trance she habitually spoke of her waking self in the third person, as of some one else; the intelligence which manifested in the trance obviously possessed powers of expression and intellectual resources in some directions far greater than any displayed by the waking subject. Add to this that the trance intelligence habitually reflected the ideas in general and especially the religious orthodoxy of her interlocutors; that on occasion she showed knowledge of their thoughts and intentions which could not apparently have been acquired by normal means; that she was, in particular, extraordinarily skillful in diagnosing, prescribing for, and occasionally foretelling the course of diseases in herself and others—the proof must have seemed to the bystanders complete."[71]
[71] "Modern Spiritualism," Podmore, Vol. I, p. 77.
The Beginnings of Trance-Mediumship
We have here plainly enough the beginnings of trance mediumship. It needed only unstable personalities, capable of self-induced trance states, so to widen all this as to supply the bases of spiritistic faith and the material for the immensely laborious investigation of the Society for Psychical Research. In the main, however, French interest in Mesmerism and animal magnetism took a more scientific turn and issued in the brilliant French studies in hypnotism. Spiritualism has made little headway in Catholic countries. The authority of the Church is thrown so strongly against it as to prohibit the interest of the credulous and the penetrating minds of the southern European scientists have been more concerned with the problems of abnormal personality than the continued existence of the discarnate.
The interest in Germany took another line. There was less scientific investigation of hypnotism and trance states as abnormal modifications of personality and far more interest in clairvoyance and spirit existence. Men whose names carried weight accepted the spiritistic explanation of phenomena ranging from broken flower pots to ghosts. Very likely the German tendency toward mysticism and speculation explains this. Jung followed Swedenborg and the mystics generally in affirming a psychic body, but was a pioneer in associating it with the luminiferous ether in a range of speculation which in our time supplies an hypothetical scientific basis for the environment of the discarnate. (So Sir Oliver Lodge.) Podmore concludes that the foundations of modern Spiritualism were laid by the German magnetists of the first half of the nineteenth century.
The movement developed along these lines till 1875. Once broadly in action it touches at one point or another the whole region of the occult. Many spiritualists found in Theosophy, for which existence is the endless turning of a wheel, a cycle of death and rebirth, a pseudo-philosophic support for their belief. Spiritualism appealed naturally to the lovers of the mystic and the unusual and it associated itself, to a degree, with extreme liberalism in the general development of religion. (On the whole, however, as far as religion goes, Spiritualism has created a religion of its own.) Its advocates were likely to be interested in phrenology, advanced social experiments, or modification of the marriage laws. Spiritualistic phenomena themselves became more varied and complex; trance mediumship became a profession with a great increase of performers; slate writing was introduced and finally materialization was achieved. All this might mean that the spirits were growing more adept in "getting through," the mediums more adept in technique, or else, which is more likely, that latent abnormal aspects of personality were being brought to light through suggestion, imitation and exercise. But no concerted effort was made by trained and impartial observers to eliminate fraud, collect data and reach dependable conclusions. This has been finally attempted by the Society for Psychical Research and the results of their laborious investigations are now at the service of the student of the occult.
The Society for Psychical Research Begins Its Work
The weight which attaches to the names of many English and some American members of the Society, the carefully guarded admission of some of them that there is in the whole region a possible residue of phenomena which indicate communication between the living and the discarnate and the profoundly unsettling influence of the war, really account for the renewed interest in Spiritualism in our own time. In 1875 a few Englishmen, one of them a famous medium—Stainton Moses—formed a Psychological Society for the investigation of supernormal phenomena. (In general all this account of the history of Spiritualism is greatly condensed from Podmore and Hill and the reader is referred to their works without specific reference.)