Body and Soul: A Sympathetic History of American Spiritualism

Conclusion

   of the Civil War, the spirits spoke as often as they ever had before, but their silence prevailed over words: defying both critics and historians , the half million souls that littered the landscape from Pennsylvania to New Mexico remained resolutely mute. Although fifty years later the regiments of the dead poured forth from Flanders field in such fervent response to the “neurotic” desires of “grief-stricken parents” that they left Houdini gasping for the “health and sanity” of the nation, the Civil War dead remained almost inert, unheeding of the living. For every soldier returning to describe The Gates Ajar during the s, for every black martyr returning to Henri Rey’s circle in New Orleans, untold numbers fell, and fell silent into the s, the decade of the spirit Indian.1 Surveys of the Spiritualist movement have long regarded this decade as a watershed of sorts, a point of divergence between two streams representing the rise and decline of the movement. Before, as the trance medium Nettie Colburn declared, Spiritualists waged a “stern and unyielding warfare against the world without,” seeking “to uproot old and stereotyped errors , change ancient ideas, and do battle with school-craft, ignorance and bigotry,” but after, they met with a series of setbacks “of a discouraging character which overshadowed believers.” For Colburn and many like her, this declension was a product of factors internal to the movement, to the cumulative effect of “debunkers” like the Seybert Commission, to the foibles of the Fox sisters and other alleged confessors to fraud, to the schismatic tendencies of psychic science, occultism, and orientalist Theosophy, or simply to the flaming out of a spectacular fad. But to conclude on a speculative note, I ask whether this Spiritualist watershed might signify larger Conclusion • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •  • Conclusion shifts within American culture, shifts that made the practice of sympathy less engaging, less necessary, and less effective in its scope—shifts that gutted the sympathetic cosmology.2 For over a century before Hydesville, sympathy had provided a means for conceiving social relations, bodily relations, and divine relations, and versions of sympathetic theory pulsed through antebellum reform, through discussions of political economy, medicine, psychology, and philosophy , providing a potent framework for understanding the self and society . Though now difficult to recover, the sympathetic worldview was resilient enough to endure for well over a century, thanks in part to an ability to transmute social thought into practical action. Spiritualists developed a particularly potent version of the sympathetic cosmology. Growing like the mythologies of Friedrich Max Müller by the disease of language, Spiritualist sympathy accumulated shade upon shade, sense upon sense. The concatenation of physiological, occult, and social registers, the admixture of the ecstatic practices of Shakers, the visions of Swedenborg, and the empiricist ethic of natural science helped antebellum Spiritualists to translate sympathy into a social practice that was at once idealist and applied, socially prescriptive and socially poetic. They tapped into the pathologies of walking and preaching in sleep, into mesmeric therapeutics , and into the economies of exchange of Adam Smith, and by hybridizing feeling on several levels, as sensation, sentiment, and social engagement , the sympathetic cosmology drew its practitioners into a laissez-faire of emotion, into the active propagation of sympathetic networks and the promotion of unfettered affective exchange. Sympathy, in short, offered a flexible instrument for healing a wide range of social abrasions , for transcending the separations of life, and for catalyzing the adjustment to the red-shift dislocations of modernity. But in the watershed of the s, the conjunction of the silence of the Civil War dead and the rise of spirit Indians suggests a continuity that calls for attention. For all their mechanistic, theoretical, and political diversity, during the post–Civil War years white Spiritualists aligned like the magnetic needle of a compass to point toward a single pole: in America, race became ineradicable and eternal, bred into bone and soul, and the heavens themselves cleaved along the biological lines of descent. The shifting content of messages received by whites and Spiritualists of mixed race, the shift Conclusion •  away from spirit communion based upon familial and friendly ties and away from a conception of heavenly union toward an eternity of racial segregation , etherealized and essentialized, all point in a common direction. In white Spiritualism and black, the practice and products of spirit communion reinforced the increasing incommensurability of race in American life, shoring up the racial status quo...