Have you ever wondered, what is the connection between Technology and the fascination with things spooky and supernatural?
ALL the “Arts and Sciences” stem from the interchange between humans and the fallen Angels. The wisdom given in exchange for access to the females of the day.
Everything in this life stems from a spiritual root! There are only two options, the root of GOD – GOOD and TRUTH or SATAN – EVIL and LIES. ALL spirits are working for one of those two originators.
You are commanded to test the SPIRITS.
1 John 4
Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world. Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world.
Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them: because greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world. They are of the world: therefore speak they of the world, and the world heareth them.
We are of God: he that knoweth God heareth us; he that is not of God heareth not us. Hereby know we the spirit of truth, and the spirit of error. Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.
Remember, SATAN/THE DEVIL/THE DECEIVER is a cunning trickster. He works to DECEIVE you with lies. He plots, plans and schemes your demise. He lies in wait for you, and lays a snare to trap you and pull you down.
1 Peter 5:8
Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour:
Our world is so full of mechanisms and trickery, it gets harder and harder everyday to discern the TRUTH and recognize DECEPTION. Hard to know what is real and what is manufactured/fake/artificial/phony.
Phony… now isn’t that an interesting word in light of our topic today?
machine (n.)
late 14c., magike, “art of influencing or predicting events and producing marvels using hidden natural forces,” also “supernatural art,” especially the art of controlling the actions of spiritual or superhuman beings; from Old French magique “magic; magical,” from Late Latin magice “sorcery, magic,” from Greek magike (presumably with tekhnē “art”), fem. of magikos “magical,” from magos “one of the members of the learned and priestly class,” from Old Persian magush, which is possibly from PIE root *magh- “to be able, have power.”device – device (n.)
trick – trick (n.)
contrivance – contrivance (n.)
cunning – cunning (adj.)
fabricate. Meaning “lying, falsehood, forgery”
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1610s, “a discourse or treatise on an art or the arts,” from Latinized form of Greek tekhnologia “systematic treatment of an art, craft, or technique,” originally referring to grammar, from tekhno-, combining form of tekhnē “art, skill, craft in work; method, system, an art, a system or method of making or doing,” from PIE *teks-na- “craft” (of weaving or fabricating), from suffixed form of root *teks- “to weave,” also “to fabricate.” For ending, see -logy.
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Telecommunications and the occult
National Science and Media Museum
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the invention of new communications technologies sparked widespread interest in the possibility of supernatural contact.
This story looks at how these technologies—including the electric telegraph, the telephone and wireless radio—were used to explain and explore communication with supernatural beings, the spirits of the dead and even aliens.
Electronic telecommunications were popularly associated with the occult from the start.
The laying of the earliest working overland and submarine telegraphic cables in the late 1840s and early 1850s coincided with the birth of ‘spiritualism’—a widespread belief that the living could communicate with the spirits of the dead.
The electric telegraph ushered in a new era of long-distance communication. Its workings were popularly likened to the operation of spirit communication, which similarly relied on the transmission of messages between intelligences at a distance.
Spirit messages were even conveyed in similar ways to telegraphic ones. In séances, spirits seemed to communicate with the living by spelling out coded messages through short rapping noises, similar to the rapped pulses of Morse code used in telegraphy.
THOMAS EDISON’S SPIRIT TELEPHONE
Many of the most influential developers of electric telecommunications technologies were directly involved in the scientific investigation of spirits and other ‘psychical’ phenomena like telepathy (direct communication between minds at a distance).
Eminent British physicist and wireless pioneer Sir Oliver Lodge, for instance, was renowned for his openness to spiritualist phenomena. He served as president of the London Society for Psychical Research from 1901 to 1903, and during the First World War published a bestselling book documenting his experiences of contacting his dead son Raymond during séances.
Science Museum Group Collection More informationabout Studio photograph of Sir Oliver Lodge by F Thurston & Son, 1910–19
Science Museum Group Collection More informationabout This Branly type iron borings coherer (or radio-wave detector) from 1894 was probably made by Oliver Lodge. He used this coherer in his British Association lecture of 14 August 1894, demonstrating its potential for wireless communication.
Thomas Alva Edison—whose celebrated inventions included the phonograph, the first practical incandescent lamp, and a carbon button transmitter for telephones—announced his intention, in 1920, to create a spirit communication device, ‘an apparatus to see if it is possible for personalities which have left this earth to communicate with us’.
Science Museum Group CollectionEdison seems never to have realised his designs, but the following year the spiritualist journal Light published an account of an F.R. Melton who claimed to have succeeded in making a ‘psychical telephone’ of his own. This apparatus drew on developments in wireless telecommunications technologies, consisting of an aluminium tube or ‘trumpet’, a receiver connected to amplifying valves (allowing very low sounds to be made audible), and a ‘super-sensitive telephone’ whose receivers were attached to a headset worn by the user. A 1932 letter to Melton from psychical investigator Harry Price suggests this telephone was later tested on a medium, but was seemingly unsuccessful.
WIRELESS RADIO
The birth of wireless communication around 1900, thanks in large part to Guglielmo Marconi’s development of the long-distance wireless telegraph, meant messages could now be transmitted at great distances seemingly through thin air.
Science Museum Group Collection More informationabout This ‘Italian Navy’ detector was used by Marconi in 1901 to receive the very first transatlantic radio signals, transmitted from Cornwall to Newfoundland. This achievement ushered in the age of long-distance, wireless radio communication.
This intensified popular associations between telecommunications and invisible, apparently discarnate intelligences like spirits, or disembodied communication at a distance like telepathy.
EXTRATERRESTRIAL COMMUNICATION
Radios were also used to try make contact with extraterrestrial intelligences—especially Martians. The general public had long been fascinated with research into life on Mars, and the idea that Martian beings might exist, and that we might be able to contact them, captivated early-20th-century audiences.
Science Museum Group CollectionSpeculation about life on Mars had been sparked in 1877 by astronomer Giovanni Schiparelli’s discovery of ‘channels’ on Mars. This plate from astronomer Camille Flammarion’s bestselling Astronomie populaire (1880) illustrated his claim that Mars was ‘an earth almost similar to ours [with] water, air, showers, brooks and fountains’.
In the 1920s, some speculated that Martians were trying to contact us by radio signals. This was encouraged by claims made in 1919 by Marconi himself that he was receiving strange transmissions resembling Morse code, possibly from outer space.
Similar claims had been made at the very outset of the radio age. In 1899, engineer and inventor Nikola Tesla provocatively interpreted a series of strange, long-distance wireless signals he’d received as an outer space transmission, possibly from Mars.
In 1926, a wireless message was sent in the other direction. Solicitor H. Mansfield Robinson submitted a message to the London Central Telegraphic Office to be transmitted first to the Rugby Radio Station, then to Mars.
Science Museum Group Collection More informationabout Aerial tuning inductor from the Rugby Radio Station, constructed in 1943 to the original 1926 design, which transmitted Robinson’s message to Mars.
Robinson had been in touch with Harry Price earlier that year to explain his recent telepathic communication with Martians—in particular, a Martian woman called Oomaruru. Robinson believed the voices of Martians could be channelled by ‘spirit trumpets’ and by mediums in a semi-trance, and wished to demonstrate these effects to Price in a special sitting.
MANSFIELD ROBINSON IMAGES
In this sitting with Price, Robinson’s chosen medium produced wailing, shrieks and groans said to be a Martian love song, which Price recorded on a Dictaphone. Price was unconvinced.
For his message to Mars via Rugby, Robinson was charged the standard long distance rate of 1s 6d a word—quite a bargain for a distance of 42,000,000 miles, as an article in the New York Times observed at the time.
HOUDINI’S ‘SPIRIT TRUMPET’
It wasn’t just spiritualist believers like Robinson who were interested in the connection between wireless technology and the supernatural. The American magician Harry Houdini, a sceptic who used his experience and fame as a magician to expose spiritualist fraud, once explained the wireless-related trick behind fake mediums’ ‘spirit trumpets’ in a 1922 article for Popular Radio.
These trumpets were a common fixture of séances, where they seemingly floated around the room emitting spirit voices. Houdini claimed they worked like simple telecommunications devices. Hidden compartments in them could hide a telephone receiver and receiving coil. The voice of a secret accomplice, hidden several yards away, could be sent as a current via a transferring coil to the receiving coil in the trumpet, which the telephone receiver would then convert to sound.
FURTHER READING
- Harry Houdini, ‘Ghosts That Talk—By Radio’, Popular Radio, October 1922
- Richard Noakes, ‘Telegraphy Is an Occult Art: Cromwell Fleetwood Varley and the Diffusion of Electricity to the Other World’, The British Journal for the History of Science 32.4 (December 1999)
- Katy Price, Loving Faster than Light: Romance and Readers in Einstein’s Universe, 2012
- Efram Sera-Shriar, ‘Photographic plates and spirit fakes: remembering Harry Price’s investigation of William Hope’s spirit photography at its centenary‘, Science Museum Group Journal 17 (Spring 2022)
CONTINUE READING
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SPIRIT PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE OCCULT: MAKING THE INVISIBLE VISIBLEBelief in fairies, ghosts and other supernatural phenomena may seem to have little to do with science. But as this story shows, such beliefs—often called ‘occult’—have a long shared history with science. |
USING SCIENCE TO INVESTIGATE THE PARANORMALScience has long been used to investigate seemingly supernatural phenomena. Read about some of the most famous examples—and what they tell us about the historical relationship between science and the occult. |
THE FIRST DIGITAL PHOTOS, FROM VICTORIAN TECHNOLOGY TO THE INTERNETRead about the first experiments in digital image technology—which took place longer ago than you might spacer |
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Victorian England: Birthplace of FantasyBy Anne Besson As the first country to undergo massive industrialization, England was also the first to endure the economic and social upheaval that followed. The earliest fantasy was born in response to those radical changes.
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| FANTASY as a Genre
Fantasy is a genre of speculative fiction involving magical elements, typically set in a fictional universe and usually inspired by mythology or folklore. The term “fantasy” can also be used to describe a “work of this genre”,[1] usually literary. Its roots are in oral traditions, which became fantasy literature and drama. From the twentieth century, it has expanded further into various media, including film, television, graphic novels, manga, animations and video games. Most fantasy uses magic or other supernatural elements as a main plot element, theme, or setting.[9] Magic, magic practitioners (sorcerers, witches and so on) and magical creatures are common in many of these worlds.[6] An identifying trait of fantasy is the author’s use of narrative elements that do not have to rely on history or nature to be coherent.[10] This differs from realistic fiction in that realistic fiction has to attend to the history and natural laws of reality, where fantasy does not. In writing fantasy the author uses worldbuilding to create characters, situations, and settings that may not be possible in reality. Many fantasy authors use real-world folklore and mythology as inspiration;[11] and although another defining characteristic of the fantasy genre is the inclusion of supernatural elements, such as magic,[12] this does not have to be the case. Fantasy has often been compared to science fiction and horror because they are the major categories of speculative fiction. Fantasy is distinguished from science fiction by the plausibility of the narrative elements. A science fiction narrative is unlikely, though seemingly possible through logical scientific or technological extrapolation, where fantasy narratives do not need to be scientifically possible.[10] Authors have to rely on the readers’ suspension of disbelief, an acceptance of the unbelievable or impossible for the sake of enjoyment, in order to write effective fantasies. Despite both genres’ heavy reliance on the supernatural, fantasy and horror are distinguishable from one another. Horror primarily evokes fear through the protagonists’ weaknesses or inability to deal with the antagonists.[13] |
A Response to Realism
With its naturalist aspect, realism, the literary movement one generally associates with the nineteenth century, seems to be diametrically opposed to the reign of the imagination. Its best-known figures were Dickens in England, Balzac and Zola in France, and Stephen Crane in the United States. The role it assigned to literature was to represent reality, even at its crudest. Yet the simultaneity of fantasy and realism is no coincidence. In order for the “speculative” or “imaginative” genres (including both fantasy and science fiction) to be able to emerge and develop their portrayals of the irrational and the supernatural, the categories “reason,” “nature,” and “science,” had to be sufficiently well-anchored in people’s minds.
What’s more, whereas realism went hand in hand with urban, industrial and rationalist development, choosing an imaginary world could be seen as a form of resistance to modernity. Particularly in England, a range of diverse but convergent attempts to preserve a form of enchantment, a bit of magical irrationality in people’s relationship to the world can be observed. That was the fertile ground from which fantasy would spring.
by Charles Dickens, illustrated by John Leech (1843)The British Library
Rediscovering the Medieval Past
For one thing, England already enjoyed a rich tradition of imaginative literature, notably with the significance of the Gothic movement in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. With his Castle of Otranto (1764), Horace Walpole was the pioneer of that genre; it was followed by M. G. Lewis’s The Monk (1796) and Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). In Northanger Abbey (published posthumously, 1817), Jane Austen poked fun at that wildly popular literary trend. Her heroine reads too many best-sellers of her time, which leads her to project Gothic terrors (haunted castles and devilish pacts) onto an era that was meant to be one of enlightenment and progress for civilization. Major works in the genre would continue to be written in English throughout the nineteenth century, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) to Oscar Wilde’s Portrait of Dorian Gray (1890) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).
The renewed interest in folklore provided another wellspring of inspiration, one that distanced itself from the representation of alterity as threatening or distressing. Those folklore traditions had a strong presence in the faery of children’s literature, which was then experiencing a “golden age,” but were not limited to it. Folklore also contributed greatly to another major eighteenth-century English-language literary phenomenon, the “Celtic revival.” That movement was launched by the 1760 to 1765 publication of a series of “Gaelic” poems attributed to a bard of the Dark Ages called Ossian… They were actually the work of a Scottish poet named James McPherson, who presented himself as their translator. By the late nineteenth century, another Scot, the folklorist Andrew Lang, had published his collection of Fairy Books of Many Colours. Although J.R.R Tolkien, who was born in 1892, would not share Lang’s attitude towards fairy tales, myths and legends, that collection was nonetheless his introduction to those traditional tales.
Back to the Roots
Renewed interest in the Middle Ages, a little-studied and generally disdained era that was “rediscovered” in the late-eighteenth/early-nineteenth century, was another element of the search for national origins. It also indulged a desire for escapism – not to another place, but to the same place in another, bygone era. Walter Scott’s highly influential early-nineteenth century oeuvre offers one of the first examples. Having edited a medieval tale of Tristan, Sir Tristrem, early in his career (1804), as well as writing the book-length narrative poem “The Lady of the Lake” (1810), he was considered the father of the historical novel, a genre that would be epitomized in France by Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo. Walter Scott’s swashbuckling heroes went by the names of Ivanhoe (1819), who lived in the time of Richard the Lionheart and Prince John, and Quentin Durward (1823), who fought in France during the reign of Louis XI.
As a very successful author, he was able to have a striking mansion built in the medievalist style of his time. Gothic Revival was a popular medievalist aesthetic, particularly in architecture. Theorized by John Ruskin in England, it was also implemented by Viollet-le-Duc in France. Proust, for example, shared the movement’s fascination for cathedrals. Lastly, the “Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,” a group of artists led by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, declared in their name itself their goal of going back to a style from before the Renaissance, symbolized by the great master Raphael, to lay the foundations of a renewed sense of community.
The New Romanticism
The revival of “romances,” a term which was used as opposed to “novel” to designate adventure-filled, fanciful stories in the Romantic style – which for some included even medieval literature – was the last incarnation of the anti-modernist, anti-realist movements. This time, “elsewhere” came in the shape of the far-away lands and little-known cultures the colonial empires had introduced to Europeans. Robert Louis Stevenson, a well-travelled writer and the celebrated author of both Treasure Island (1883) and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1886), is an excellent example of that movement, as well as one of its theoreticians.
In H. Rider Haggard’s oeuvre (most notably King Solomon’s Mines, 1885; She and Allan Quatermain, 1887), exoticism is in constant contact with the supernatural, and African expeditions are a pretext to explore primitive modes of thought and lost civilizations. The adventure novel and fantasy genres were very similar, often overlapping, at that time. The same thing would also be true in the United States, with E.R. Burroughs and Robert Howard.
Fantasy’s Pioneers
William Morris, a fascinatingly multi-facetted artist, is the figurehead of a loose network of authors from both his own generation and later ones who contributed to gradually defining the genre. The pastor and theologian George MacDonald is one of his most notable predecessors. MacDonald produced a major and ground-breaking oeuvre, some of which was intended for children (The Princess and the Goblin, 1872) but much of it for adults, particularly the allegorical quest Phantastes: A Fairie Romance for Men and Women (1858), and Lilith: A Romance (1895). Both Lewis Carroll, whom he mentored, and C.S. Lewis, on whom Phantastes had made a huge impression, owe a great debt to MacDonald.
Charles Kingsley, who wrote the allegorical tale The Water-Babies (1863), is also worth mentioning, as is George Meredith, a renowned author of Victorian romances. He started his career with a humorous oriental fantasy, The Shaving of Shagpat: An Arabian Entertainment (1856).
At the turn of the century, bridging the pioneers and the Tolkien-Lewis post-war generation, Lord Dunsany wrote numerous tales composing a fragmentary cosmogony, starting with The Gods of Pegāna (1905), and the novella The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924). Eric Rücker Eddison was also very popular in his day, with his shimmering world Zimiamvia, the stage for noble struggles between Witchland and Demonland (The Worm Ouroboros, 1922). And we mustn’t forget Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who also wrote both fantasy adventures like The Lost World (1912) and a 1922 book, The Coming of the Fairies, based on an article of his defending the authenticity of the “Cottingley Fairies” photographs.
By the early twentieth century, most of the major trends that fantasy would follow had been established: the dual influence of fairy tales and myths; inspiration from ancient cultural traditions; writing styles ranging from texts intended for children to the most elevated tone; but always creatures, heroes and worlds who impose their strong thematic coherence on any definition of the genre.
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Supernatural Entertainments: Victorian Spiritualism and the rise of Modern Media Culture …
Penn State University Press
Victorian Spiritualism and the Rise of Modern Media Culture
Simone Natale
“This is an ambitious, overdue book, steeped in the period’s popular culture, and offering a fresh, insightful perspective on a topic familiar to its scholars.”
Ghost stories: why the Victorians were so spookily good at them
Curl up by the fire and I’ll tell you a ghost story. Don’t be alarmed by the creak of the floorboards, the murmurs in the basement, the shrill ululations of a distant dog. Try not to be perturbed by the flickering candle, the fleeting shadows, the horned, hairy hand that appears at your elbow. Something moved? There’s a face in the brickwork? A murderer, long ago, was buried in the cellar? Stay calm. Breathe deeply. The ghosts of Christmases past are gathering.
It was the Victorian era, of course, when ghosts proliferated most obviously in fiction – as well as on stage, in photographs and in drawing room seances. Before the start of Victoria’s reign in 1837, the health of the genre was thought to be failing. But by 1887, when Mary Louise Molesworth wrote The Story of the Rippling Train, her character Mrs Snowdon was bemoaning ghosts’ prevalence. “One hears nothing else nowadays,” she said, and in the pages that followed, she would hear yet another, about the phantom of a beautiful woman who had appeared after being terribly burnt in a fire.
What had raised all these apparitions from the dead? The most straightforward explanation is the rise of the periodical press, says Ruth Robbins, professor of English literature at Leeds Metropolitan University. Ghost stories had traditionally been an oral form, but publishers suddenly needed a mass of content, and ghost stories fitted the bill – short, cheap, generic, repetitive, able to be cut quite easily to length.
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Ever one to spot a commercial opportunity, she says, Charles Dickens produced his own highly successful ghost story, A Christmas Carol, in serial form just before Christmas 1843. This was the same year the first commercially produced Christmas card was sent, and Dickens’s story both reflected and influenced a growing trend for marking Christmas with secular celebrations. Dr Andrew Smith, author of The Ghost Story 1840-1920, says: “People like Dickens wanted to revive some notion of community invested within that idea of Christmas. What’s interesting about his version of Christmas is that it’s not particularly Christian. It’s about the family, helping the poor, a moment where you might pause and reflect on your life.” It’s about Ebenezer Scrooge realising, through the counsel of ghosts, that he must embrace his family, look after his good-natured clerk, and become the embodiment of generosity.
Christmas has long been associated with ghosts, says Roger Clarke, author of A Natural History of Ghosts: 500 Years of Hunting for Proof. Just before Christmas 1642, for instance, shepherds were said to have seen ghostly civil war soldiers battling in the skies. This connection continued in the Victorian era through Dickens’s story, and through the ghost stories he later published at Christmas in his periodical All the Year Round, with contributors including Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell. It would also continue in the tradition started by MR James, the provost of King’s College, Cambridge, who would invite a select few students and friends to his rooms each year on Christmas Eve, where he’d read one of the ghost stories he had written, which are still popular today. They include Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book (1895), in which an ancient holy book brings forth a demonic presence, first announced by a hand covered in “coarse black hairs, longer than ever grew on a human hand; nails rising from the ends of the fingers and curving sharply down and forward, grey, horny and wrinkled”.
The popularity of ghost stories was strongly related to economic changes. The industrial revolution had led people to migrate from rural villages into towns and cities, and created a new middle class. They moved into houses that often had servants, says Clarke, many taken on around October or November, when the nights were drawing in early – and new staff found themselves “in a completely foreign house, seeing things everywhere, jumping at every creak”. Robbins says servants were “expected to be seen and not heard – actually, probably not even seen, to be honest. If you go to a stately home like Harewood House, you see the concealed doorways and servant’s corridors. You would actually have people popping in and out without you really knowing they were there, which could be quite a freaky experience. You’ve got these ghostly figures who actually inhabit the house.”
Peter Lamont, author of Extraordinary Beliefs, says these gatherings started off quite simply, “and the phenomenon gets more and more impressive. There are floating tables, floating musical instruments, and at some point you get full-form materialisation of ghosts, dressed in white. Occasionally, the [apparition] would get grabbed at a seance and it was discovered that it was actually the medium.”
This interest in the supernatural might seem at odds with the growing body of scientific and technological knowledge, but many argue they were intimately connected. In the 19th century, people were increasingly able to communicate at a distance, in disembodied fashion. The telegraph allowed messages to be tapped out in code over long distances – not so unlike the Fox sisters’ purported ghost – and the ability to communicate first with other cities, then countries, eventually to transmit messages across the Atlantic, was brilliant and alarming. “If you can have people communicating from 3,000 miles away,” says Robbins, “words coming across the ocean, tapped out in Morse code, it may actually be quite a small leap of the imagination to say, ‘There’s a dead person who I used to know quite well who is talking to me through Morse code.'”
There were ghosts in the ether, under the bed, and more and more, in people’s heads. “Throughout the 19th century,” says Smith, “there is a progressive internalisation of horror, the idea that the monsters are not out there, but to be found within. That obviously culminates with Freud. With the ghost story there’s a sense that instead of being able to lock yourself away in your home, to leave the monster outside, the monster lives with you, and has a kind of intimacy.”
Merry Christmas – and sleep soundly.
Victorian Spiritualism: When Ghosts and Objects Collide
In the mid-nineteenth century there was an upswell of interest in spiritualism, in trying to contact the spirit world, on both sides of the Atlantic. “The trend started in the US, in upstate New York,” said English professor Aviva Briefel, “where, in 1848, a pair of sisters called the Fox sisters claimed to be able to communicate with the dead, who used knocking sounds to indicate their presence.”
The craze spread to Britain, where the pursuit of pursuing the deceased infected all levels of Victorian society, from Queen Victoria herself—who used mediums to try to contact her late husband Prince Albert after he died in 1861—to ordinary working class families, who flocked in great numbers to spiritualist meetings.
The reason for this explosion of interest? “I think part of it is the very high levels of mortality, especially infant mortality, that Britain was experiencing at this time, along with the incredible population growth and urbanization that came with the industrial revolution,” said Briefel.
Indeed, it is through the lens of the industrial revolution that Briefel examines the issue of Victorian spiritualism. She studies the phenomenon and asks what it tells us about the effect that the very rapid industrialization that took place in the mid-to late nineteenth century, had on the Victorian psyche.
Briefel is working on a book about material culture and spiritualism in the Victorian period, and during the fall semester she delivered the lunchtime seminar, ”The Things They Carried: The Object Lessons of Victorian Spiritualism.” Briefel entertained her faculty colleagues with stories of seances, and often funny descriptions of how objects, frequently items of furniture or food, would sometimes appear at these gatherings and fly across the room.
“I’m looking at ways in which spiritualism, a belief in the afterlife and the possibility of communicating with it, generates really interesting discussions about capitalism, labor, and consumerism. Take the issue of labor, for example,” said Briefel, “and the Marxist view of commodities, where the history of the labor practice is really embodied in the object. So the Victorians had these manufactured objects but didn’t really care about who made them or how.”
In this way, Briefel argues, spiritualism draws attention to the production of things. “It’s counter-intuitive really, because spritualism is typically thought of as other-wordly and magical, but I think it actually make us more aware of where objects come from—how they don’t, in fact, materialize out of thin air, but there’ a story behind them. There’s a rich symbolism there.”
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While many of the exponents of Victorian spiritualism, and many of the seances they organized, were exposed as fake, Briefel does not address the veracity of this phenomenon. “I’m less interested in whether these events were staged, and more concerned with the effect they had on, and the power they undoubtedly held over, many people who had these shared experiences.” And central to those shared experiences, she added, were the objects in the room, the material things through which the spirits—real or imagined—made their presence felt.