Introducing Emma Hardinge Britten

And her no-nonsense Victorian era guide to holding séances with your friends

“A ghost seeress, somnambulist, improvisatrice in music, and a prophetess, the strange weird child Emma Floyd was the terror of her nursery attendants, and the problem of all who knew her.”

-excerpt from an article on Emma from The Medium, a popular spiritualist newspaper

Emma Hardinge Britten, born Emma Floyd (2 May 1823 – 2 October 1899), was a spiritualist medium, writer, propagandist, actress, musician and public speaker.

Her 1870 pamphlet, “Rules To Be Observed When Forming Spiritual Circles” gives simple instructions for holding séances at home.

My latest publication is a re-edit of this pamphlet. I teased it earlier, way back here. I’m delighted with how it’s turned out since then. I’m real excited because I’m publishing it as a pamphlet, just like the original was.

In addition to writing for Spiritualist journals and publishing companies, Emma was a successful self-publisher who started several of her own periodicals. It feels right to follow in her footsteps just a little.

I’ve added a lot of commentary to the original. There are loads of my own footnotes and three new appendices added to Britten’s text. I also cleaned it up, added artwork and gave it a much more readable layout. I think it looks great:

I shared the full text of the appendices I wrote on my patreon last night. Currently they’re all available to my patrons. Patrons got early access to them all, but “Appendix A: The Importance of Maintaining Spiritual Control” goes public over there on Saturday to coordinate with my appearance at the inaugural West Philly Zine fest. If you read this after 5/6/23, you can click here to read the essay.

Check out the West Philly Zine fest flier:

There’s so much common ground between zine culture and the Victorian spiritualist culture of upstart lady mediums printing & distributing their own work, like Emma did. If you’re in town I’d love to see you Saturday.

And if you’re far-flung, the print zines will appear in my webshop next week.

The bones of what Emma wrote back then are fantastic and actionable. My additional perspective comes from my experiences in Umbanda and Mesa Blanca spiritist circles, as well as plenty of my own research.

The techniques the early spiritualists pioneered have been developed and improved on for hundreds of years now, so I wanted to make some notes based on what I’ve seen. With some luck, the bibliography I added will also help lead new mediums in fruitful directions.

I dream of a world where magicians, witches, occultists, rootworkers, ATR devotees, chaos kids, and the spiritually curious might all gather to work mediumship together. I feel that occulture is missing a common meeting place. It’s a real lofty goal, but I hope that by presenting this pamphlet anew I might encourage on-the-ground experimentation.

Unlike many other spiritualists, Emma was acquainted with both the performing arts and with full-on occultism. I find that combination particularly inspiring. A synergistic mix that speaks to my own interests.

Emma performed onstage in London, Paris, and on Broadway. She was involved in a secret London society she refers to as “the Orphic Circle”, she present at the founding of the Theosophical Society (she left due to differences with Madame Blavatsky), and she wrote a book called Art Magic about occult technique which proved influential on the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light, an organization that laid the groundwork for the modern O.T.O.

Do note that I side more with Emma’s direct mediumship approach than with anything based in hierachical magical orders. I’ve got friends who are ceremonial magicians, I cast no shade there.

But I’m something more direct and hands-on. Pound for pound, minute for minute, Emma was that way too. She did a lot more séance work than anything masonic. Yet it’s fascinating to see an example of a prominent spiritualist medium who also considered herself a magician. She quotes Agrippa in her autobiography.

Spiritualism is interesting to me. I find that it’s generally dismissed in occult circles today. But in its time it was radical - highlighting abolitionist and suffragist politics.

It was grassroots - being a movement of common people, housewives and plucky lady upstarts. It was massively influential - even making appearances at the White House and Buckingham Palace.

For a brief time before modernism clamped down its brutalist jaws, Spiritualism and Science were flirting. Even Marie Curie and her partner got involved.

Its true that there were also highly publicized frauds in the movement. But then, there’s sadly plenty of fradulent occultists, witches, and energy healers out there today. Fraud comes with the territory of any spiritual work. Sad but true. It happens especially when something has mass appeal, as Spiritualism did in the Victorian era.

Recently in the occult there’s been a renaissance of ancestor work and necromancy. Great. As the late great Jake Stratton-Kent pointed out, it was stuffy aristocrat-wannabe gentleman occultists who excised the dead from magic in the west. Of course they were only finishing the work that the Church began. But before they stamped it out, Spritiualism was a vibrant DIY pick up and play culture of living room séances, table tipping, even physical mediumship.

The late great Jake Stratton-Kent. To whom we give thanks for the centrality of the dead in today’s occult conversation.

Best of luck with the eclipse on the 5th. At the last eclipse I wrote a newsletter about eclipses and magical ideas for surviving them with grace. Here’s the link if you missed it.

And as ever, some food for the soul:


-It’s all in the name really, but I recently discovered a fantastic blog: https://cemeterytravel.com/

-I was fascinated by this lecture from scholar Simone Chess. At the intersection of pop culture, weird queer representation, and early modern history, the talk is entitled “Broadside Ballad Woodcuts: Premodern Visual Culture, Popular Media, and Queer Coding”.

Lip service is often given to the idea that queerness has always existed, but it was illuminating to see some real examples from a time period that is important in my magical practice.

-If you’re feeling a bit unraveled by all this eclipse/mercury retro/pluto action… Or if you just need some incredibly stripped down minimal blues, here’s Son House performing “Grinning in Your Face” with just handclaps and his voice. Such power.