The use of technology to document spiritual phenomena was of interest not only to believers but also to skeptics, who pored over images looking for cheesecloth passing as ectoplasm, overexposures masquerading as ghostly apparitions, and wires or pulleys that could account for rappings and table-turnings. In one of the most publicized attempts to test the claims of Spiritualists, Scientific American offered five thousand dollars in prize money to anyone who could produce psychic phenomena sufficient to convince a committee that consisted of academics from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, psychic experts, and also Harry Houdini, who knew something about illusions and developed a sideline in exposing those which hucksters were trying to pass off as real.
The backlash against Spiritualism, which came partly from the clergy, stemmed not only from its challenge to orthodox ideas about Heaven and Hell but also from its scandalous exhibitionism. Houdini prevented Crandon from winning the Scientific American prize, but her fame only grew, and her case later splintered another group of researchers.
The American Society for Psychical Research, founded in , a few years after its British equivalent, was devoted to the investigation of spiritual phenomena, which the society considered as worthy of careful study as fossils or electricity. For the most part, those investigations only ever succeeded in disproving the phenomena they studied, but it was James, a founding member, who best articulated why they nonetheless continued their work.
On one occasion, Piper impressed the James family by making contact with an aunt of theirs. Unlike Crandon, Piper was not fully discredited, though many people doubted her abilities, noting her failed readings and prophecies and offering convincing psychological explanations of those predictions and telepathic readings which seemed accurate. Her feats as a medium were not particular to the James family; in the course of her career, she claimed to channel, among others, Martin Luther and George Washington.
As such efforts suggest, the allure of Spiritualism was not limited to consolation for the bereft: plenty of mediums worked as much in the tradition of the carnival barker as in that of the cleric, and Spiritualism was popular in part because it was entertaining. Its practitioners, some of them true connoisseurs of spectacle, promised not only reassurances about the well-being of the dearly departed but also new lines from Shakespeare and fresh wisdom from Plato.
Even more strikingly, from the perspective of the present day, early mediums offered encounters with the culturally dispossessed as well as with the culturally heralded. Piper, for instance, claimed to channel not only Washington and Luther but also a young Native American girl named Chlorine. And she was not alone in allegedly relaying the posthumous testimony of marginalized people.
Enslaved African-Americans and displaced Native Americans were routinely channelled by mediums in New England and around the country.
Conant became associated with a young Piegan Blackfoot girl she called Vashti. Mediums with abolitionist sympathies passed on the stories of tortured slaves, while pro-slavery Spiritualists delivered messages of forgiveness from the same population and relayed visions of an afterlife where racial hierarchies were preserved.
For white mediums, communicating with spirits of other races could be a form of expiation, a way to confront violent histories and make cultural amends—or merely crude appropriation, garish performance art that was good for business. But Spiritualism was not only a white phenomenon. There were plenty of Black Spiritualists—including Sojourner Truth, who lived for a decade in the Spiritualist utopia of Harmonia before settling in Battle Creek, Michigan—and many Black mediums, including Paschal Beverly Randolph and Rebecca Cox Jackson, both of whom wrote books that included their work with spirits.
Harriet E. The lines between syncretism and appropriation were often fuzzy. If the initial Victorian wave of Spiritualism had a distinctly American character, later iterations took on global influences, as when the theosophists incorporated elements of Eastern religions, including belief in reincarnation and past lives.
Immigration and translation brought sacred literatures into renewed contact with one another—the Bardo Thodol handed to readers of the Zohar, the Vedas and the Upanishads circulating alongside Julian of Norwich and Meister Eckhart.
Occult practices melded with culturally blurry techniques of meditating and altering consciousness, and the roots of the esotericism that would eventually be known as New Age took hold. As a belief system, Spiritualism was largely free of the legal and moral strictures of orthodox religion. Our fascination with words from beyond the grave is nothing new. In the mid- 19 th century, the growing spiritualist movement had begun to experiment with ghostly messages transcribed by table-turning , a precursor to the modern Ouija board.
In table turning, the alphabet was inscribed on a table, upon which all participants laid their hands. Seemingly ethereal whisperings would soon appear from the void as the table tilted towards the imprinted letters. Such demonstrations of spiritualism convinced many in high society that a new force, perhaps a mystical one, was behind the haunting messages.
Yet not everyone was so easily convinced: Michael Faraday, the prominent British scientist, was incredibly dubious on the claims of the spiritualists. To test the phenomenon, he set about eliminating variables and alternative explanations. Chevreul was steadfastly opposed to charlatanism. In his paper on the subject , he turned his attention to table-turning, divining rods and magic pendulums, demonstrating how involuntary and subconscious muscle reactions are the cause of ostensibly magic movements.
More than this, Chevreul discovered that once the person holding the rod was made aware of this reaction, the movements ceased and could not be reproduced. Houdini had something of a passion for debunking frauds, and took a delight in exposing trickery using his expertise in the subject to detect bogus claims.
This made him highly unpopular with spiritualists of the era, some of whom —such as Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle — believed that Houdini himself had spiritual powers, a claim which irked the proud professional Houdini no end.
Another individual not taken in by the passion for spiritualism was Charles Arthur Mercier , a psychiatrist with precious little time for nonsense. Mercier had spent a great deal of time debunking trance mediums, painstakingly dismantling their claims. This should have spelt the end for everything from dowsing to Ouija boards, yet to this day they remain devoutly held beliefs for many.
And despite the existence of ideomotor effect being known for almost two centuries, the infinite human capacity for re-invention and our seeming inability to learn from our mistakes means that we can still fall prey to the same illusions under different packaging.
In , businessman Jim McCormick was convicted of selling useless bomb dowsing kits to the Iraqi army: a modern twist on the divining rod.
Yet perhaps the most prominent — and damaging - modern offshoot of the ideomotor effect is the phenomenon of Facilitated Communication FC. In this process, a facilitator helps move the arm of a patient to a screen or keyboard so that they may apparently communicate — an interaction heralded by believers as a breakthrough, allowing those with severe communication issues to express themselves.
In the late s, FC was at the zenith of its popularity, For parents and family of the non-verbal autistic and the severely intellectually disabled, it offered incredible promise.
He then placed the cards on a table and asked volunteers to put their hands on the cards and let the spirits move the table to the left. This experiment allowed Faraday to see what was moving the table.
If it was spirits, the table top would slide out the cards from the bottom up. But if the participants were doing it, the top cards would be the first to move. By examining the position of the pencil marks Faraday showed that people, not spirits, moved the table.
He had demonstrated the ideomotor response, the movement of muscles independent of deliberate thought. This also explains table tipping's sophisticated big brother, the Ouija board. In a Ouija seance participants place fingers on a glass on a table surrounded by letters and watch as it eerily moves — and occasionally spells out words. Psychologist Susan Blackmore is best known as the proponent of memes, but early in her career she was a parapsychologist.
At Oxford she ran the student Psychical Research Society, carrying out experiments using Ouija boards. Time and again the glass spelled words and sentences. Her confidence began to be shaken when she modified the board.
It cannot work unless all the people can see what is going on. The ideomotor effect is also at play with the glass. To start with it moves hesitantly, but after a while as soon as it starts moving everyone's hand follows. But what about the glass's ability to spell? That was investigated by the American psychologist Joseph Jastrow in the s. He used a device called the automatograph made of two glass plates separated by brass balls. Any involuntary movement of hands placed on the top plate causes it to move.
The movement is recorded by a pencil attached to the device. When Jastrow asked volunteers to imagine looking at an object in the room the automatograph revealed that their hands involuntarily moved in that direction. Just visualising the door was enough for the hands to drift towards it.
And that's what's happening with a Ouija board. If the participants look at a particular letter — because they expect it to follow next — they unwittingly nudge the glass towards it. If the Ouija board has shed light on unwitting movement, then another technique, channelling of spirits, has questioned free will. Harvard psychologist Dan Wegner, who died this year, is best known for his work on the rebound effect. Tell someone not to think about white bears and they immediately think about white bears.
The more we try to actively suppress a thought, the less likely we are to succeed. But he also investigated automatic writing, where people claim to write without being aware what they are doing.
The most famous automatic writer was Pearl Curran, an American who knocked out more than 5, poems, novels and plays while claiming to be channelling the spirit of Patience Worth, a 17th-century Englishwoman. Automatic writing has traditionally been explained as the action of the subconscious mind. But Wegner argued that the reason lay in the illusion of free will. Most people have a sense of their inner you — the conscious self that makes decisions about day-to-day life. According to Wegner this sense is an illusion.
There's evidence to back up this seemingly unlikely idea. In the s, neurophysiologist William Grey Walter got volunteers to operate a slide projector while their brain was monitored with electrodes. The participants were told to press a button to change slides. But the button was a fake — the projector was controlled by electrical activity in the brain. The startled volunteers found that the slide machine was predicting their decisions.
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