That the spirits of the universe may breathe through her lips
Agitating for grassroots spiritualist revolution, also ectoplasm and UPG
“The only religious sect in the world… that has recognized the equality of woman is the Spiritualists. They have always assumed that woman may be a medium of communication from Heaven to Earth… that the spirits of the universe may breathe through her lips.”
-History of Woman Suffrage, edited by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, 1881
”[Spiritualism] held two attractions that proved irresistible to thousands of Americans: rebellion against death and rebellion against authority.”
-Anne Braude, Radical Spirits, 1989
Hello Hello!
I’ve been making a lot of noise lately about Victorian Spiritualism. I even made this brand-spanking new zine about it.
If you’re a baby witch, a new occultist, or an old hand who’s looking for some new life in your work, mayhap you would consider looking in this most-neglected of places for a long-forgotten treasure. It comes replete with handmade lace, corsets, and ectoplasm…
Spiritualism was a homegrown, woman-led, socialist, abolitionist American mystical tradition that rose to become a hugely popular form of living-room-necromancy before Organized Christianity and Modern Science killed it.
Why look to exotic lands or long-forgotten deities to power your magic when the Spiritualist traditions are right at hand, so stylish in their Victorian languor, and yet so obviously applicable regardless of your magical, religious, or anti-religious sentiments!
I wanted to take a moment to distill what it is that feels so vital about raw, original, unorganized and non-dogmatic spiritualism.
So here we go:
𝕊𝕚𝕩 ℝ𝕖𝕒𝕤𝕠𝕟𝕤 𝕨𝕙𝕪 𝕋𝕙𝕖 𝕆𝕔𝕔𝕦𝕝𝕥 ℕ𝕖𝕖𝕕𝕤 𝕊𝕡𝕚𝕣𝕚𝕥𝕦𝕒𝕝𝕚𝕤𝕞 ℕ𝕠𝕨
1. It’s Grassroots
-The results can range from deeply healing to wonderfully terrifying, but regardless, seances are not expensive to run. They don’t require any expensive ritual tools, elite astrological timing, or long periods of fasting and austerity. This was and is a peoples’ magic, both in the Victorian era and in the many Spiritist offshoots popular throughout the world today.
2. It’s Open to People of Any or No Faith
-The basic technology of summoning the dead with your friends is eminently applicable to any spiritual framework. This is made abundantly clear by the wide panoply of Spiritist offshoot traditions in the world today. From María Lionza to the Orixás, it’s clear from the variety of Spiritist groups that the core tech of Spiritualism works with any religious or non-religious framework. And ancestors from any lineages you may be a part of can easily be accommodated.
You love Hekate? Cool, she’s famous for connecting the living with the world of ghosts and the ancestors.
Hail Satan? No one at your seance needs to tell you any different. (Black Table seances have historically been performed for demons specifically. But then, that’s at your own risk, don’t say I didn’t warn you.)
Jesus Christ Superstar? You’ll find loads of Christian Spiritualists past and present to work with you, and the saints are also well-attested.
You take refuge until complete enlightenment in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha? Ancestral Veneration and Ghost feeding are, of course, widely practiced throughout the Buddhist world. The dead need merit too. There’s nothing here that need contradict the teachings, though it’s up to you and your tradition to discern what is and is not a skillful approach.
3. It’s Collaborative
-Group magic just hits different. In this case, the combination of different affinities and backgrounds in your seance group is likely to make for a richer and more interesting experience. Magic is more fun with your friends, and if you’re new or in need of a thrill, it’s always more meaningful when extraordinary phenomena are glimpsed with others. Makes it more difficult for your inner skeptic to deny or write off later too.
Furthermore, this type of practice lends itself to becoming a common ground for people who work in vastly different types of magic. Look at the way Spiritism is used in the world of the African Traditional Religions today, as a meeting place of initiates in many divergent paths. There is great potential for cultural exchange here, and not just among the living either.
4. It’s Non-Hierarchical
There’s no order to join, no dues to pay, and no one to submit to in this kind of practice. In Emma Hardinge Britten’s pamphlet she advises that seance groups limit the amount of senior and experienced mediums involved. I don’t fully agree with this point, but it’s clear that there’s no need for any kind of special or qualified leader to get this done. Seances were performed in ordinary people’s parlors.
5. It’s Scalable
The application of these simple seance techniques regularly gives birth to new spiritual movements. Victorian spiritualism was the first, but many more have followed, from Umbanda in Brazil to Cao Đài in Vietnam and beyond.
I’m inherently skeptical of any orthodoxy, but it’s also entirely possible that the adoption of these simple and presently unfashionable techniques by magical upstarts could lead to all kinds of decentralized yet spiritually rich movements.
In any case, once regular transmissions are being received from the spirits, magic becomes more interesting and more likely to work well. Provided that the mediums are discerning in their selection of spirit collaborators there is a great potential for personal and collective growth through these practices.
Most Importantly — It’s all about Direct Experience
These techniques involve direct and unadulterated communion with the other. There is no priest standing between individual mediums and the world of spirits. The developing witch, the beginning occultist stands to gain a great deal of meaningful experience here. Observing others and their direct engagement with spirits can be profoundly useful as well.
Ideas about the spiritual world may be tested and proven to the satisfaction of all present. There is little room to hide behind dogma or mystical excuses in this kind of practice. It is an excellent opportunity to hone one’s magical skills and potentially to form spirit relationships that can deeply shape one’s practice both in and out of the seance circle.
Implications for the Wider Magical World
This last point, about direct experience, is the most crucial. I spoke with a friend earlier today about the absolute dire NEED for mystics, witches, occultists to share more of their experiences with each other.
How on earth did we in magic end up here, in a time of great networked communication and less persecution than ever before… and we’re all afraid to talk to each other about what we actually do????
Occulture can seem like a real judgmental echo chamber sometimes as everyone clamors to seem more initiated, more connected to a secret craft lineage or authentic magical culture or hidden evil manuscript than you are. And the truth is, I am some of those things.
And yes, in some cases we do need to keep secrets for our magic to work efficiently. But beyond the areas where my practice demands secrecy to be effective, I feel so strongly that we improve our craft by comparing notes. We’re all experimenting here, magic is an art that we continually practice.
I understand that many are drawn to magic because society doesn’t provide the answers they need. Or they’re born with a gift that makes ordinary life extraordinarily difficult yet simultaneously beautiful. But oh, my dear sweet outcasts, we have got to learn to band together and share our knowledge! We’re eating our young as a community and I’m tired of it. The rest of the world does that to us enough.
Dear reader, have you heard the term “UPG”? It stands for “Unverified Personal Gnosis” and it’s an idea that’s truly holding back today’s magical revival.
With this whole notion of “UPG” we have actually created a taboo against sharing our magical experiences. We, the people who are insane or brave enough to publicly admit that this stuff works, have created a subculture where we LOSE credibility by sharing the details of our practices.
Science, magic’s better paid and better respected sibling in the search for truth, has none of this hangup. It’s normal over there to share experimental protocol, to repeat and run variations on models that work. When a scientist makes a great discovery they make sure everyone in the field knows about it. When occultists make a great discovery, they hide it and try to profit off it. We need a better model if our traditions are going to flower into something more meaningful.
Don’t forget that magic and science arose from the same cultural impulse - to dare to probe the strange universe in which we live, move, and have our being! To alter the stories our lives are telling, to invent possibilities where there were none! If we follow the notions of science to their root we find a point, strange to the contemporary eye, where magic and science were very literally one field of human endeavor. This reality is demonstrated in the very title to Lynn Thorndike’s multi-volume scholarly treatise, A History of Magic and Experimental Science.
This is also why in some of the old grimoires you’ll see phrases like, “If you wish to test experiments…” or “It is proved.” Chemistry, Necromancy, It was all experimentation back then… to find out how all this worked, to see what pieces of reality we could move to our liking.
Turns out if you’re regularly practicing magic, calling on spirits, working spells or even just meditating often enough, you’re going to have experiences of Personal Gnosis. It’s okay! Just because Agrippa didn’t write about it in De Occulta Philosophia doesn’t mean it’s not meaningful for our lives today.
If you do this right you will discover new things. If we as a community can trust ourselves, each other, and our magic more, maybe we can learn to share instead of being so silo’ed off in silly little cliques. It would do magic a lot of good for us to respectfully compare notes in more public forums.
Links and Resources
-If you’re enjoying my work on Emma Hardinge Britten and want to know more you can access lots of her original writing here. This is an archive of her periodical The Two Worlds: A Journal Devoted to Spiritualism, Occult Science, Ethics, Religion and Reform.
-As far as sharing personal experiences of magic goes, I recommend the aptly titled Modern Fairy Sightings Podcast. They’ve just put out an episode with the excellent Ronald Hutton on!
-I’ve followed his work for awhile at this point, and I so enjoyed this interview with alchemist and magical blacksmith Marcus McCoy of Troll Cunning Forge. His points on “becoming a chef” when working with the grimoires are right in line with where I hope to see occulture develop in the coming years.
“I fancy that I was never young, joyous, or happy, like other children; my joy was to steal away alone and seek the solitude of woods and fields, but above all to wander in churchyards, cathedral cloisters, and old monastic ruins.
Here strange sounds would ring in my ears, sometimes in the form of exquisite music… sometimes in voices uttering dim prophecies of future events…
At times forms of fair beauty or appalling ugliness flitted across my path, wearing the human form, and conveying impressions of identity with those who had once lived on earth."
-Emma Hardinge Britten