Body and Soul: A Sympathetic History of American Spiritualism

4: Angels’ Language

   daguerreotypes were the “angels’ language of types & symbols.” With an ineffable ability to replicate nature in minute detail and to portray even the most elusive nuances of character, the daguerreotype resounded with a spiritual and moral authority, idolized as the potent spawn of art mated with science and revered for the mechanical ease with which it discerned the hidden essence of its subjects. For Lydia Maria Child, in a moment of Swedenborgian rapture, the daguerreotype imaginatively bared the mind and heart, transcribing thoughts and affections with spontaneous ease that rivaled phrenology as a diagnostic for psychology and morality. For Spiritualists this technology of the transparent emerged as a key site for sympathetic practice. For over twenty years spirit photographs—images of spirits of the dead—enjoyed an unusual currency among Spiritualists, circulating widely within the emotional economy , salving the wounds of “materialism,” of spiritual and social isolation, and the divisions of race, class, gender, and “sect” that tore through American society.1 Angels’ Language Oh, for that land of spiritual Daguerreotype, where thoughts and affections write themselves spontaneously in the angels’ language of types & symbols! Yet to most, if not all of us, such spiritual Daguerreotype were one the of the fearfullest things! . . . Is not the idea of this present age written in the fact that any man can have his likeness taken in a minute, by machinery? —   to Convers Francis, Oct. ,   • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Angels’ Language •  For its most ardent admirers, the daguerreotype emerged as a recording angel, maintaining a cosmic ledger of all acts, good and evil, and providing a guide to behavior and a guard against the errors of modern life. In  a recently departed spirit of a Methodist clergyman claimed through the medium James V. Mansfield that when he saw his past life “daguerreotyped on the broad canopy of the eternal spheres,” he felt compelled to return to earth and, in his words, “undeceive where I had deceived many” with his orthodox sermons. Although the clergyman’s errors were unintentional, even unconscious, the daguerreian image demanded restitution. The spirit of arctic explorer Elisha Kent Kane magnified the power of the photograph , informing Francis H. Smith that “every thing which exists in the smallest form on earth is faithfully daguerreotyped in the spirit-land,” adding that in the afterlife there are “separate departments for all the planets, and for all articles used therein,” even “minute copies of the planets themselves .” Photography was a spiritual medium, an aspect of the spiritual nervous system, according J. O. Barrett. “Wherever a nerve is,” he wrote, “is spirit. . . . Rays of light are the undulating carriers of the image of an object to the optic nerve, and then, by a beautiful chemistry, analogous with photographing, it is impressed where the mind catches it up into living consciousness.”2 The geologist and Spiritualist William Denton cast his net still further, expanding the photograph to the scale of the cosmos itself. In a studio, he noted, a daguerreotype is produced when light from the subject’s body is cast onto a cleanly polished silver plate, creating an image where none had previously existed, but to become visible, this image requires proper development . Because the great authority on light Sir David Brewster had demonstrated that all objects in nature “throw off emanations in greater or less size and with greater or less velocities” and had suggested that these emanations “enter more or less into the pores of solid and fluid bodies, sometimes resting upon their surface, and sometimes permeating them altogether,” Denton theorized that if properly developed through the use of psychometry —mental science—all surfaces would display photographic images, catalogs of their entire histories and of all acts to which they were mute witness.3 The implications were vast: the world is an all-recording camera, a moral apparatus with divine overtones:  • Angels’ Language In the world around us radiant forces are passing from all objects to all objects in their vicinity, and during every moment of the day and night are daguerreotyping the appearances of each upon the other; the images thus made, not merely resting upon the surface, but sinking into the interior of them; there held with astonishing tenacity, and only waiting for a suitable application to reveal themselves to the inquiring gaze. . . . Not a leaf waves, not an insect crawls, not a ripple moves, but each motion is recorded by a thousand faithful scribes in infallible and indelible scripture.4 The...