Calling the Spirits: A History of Seances

353 Pages·2020·12.308 MB·English

by  Lisa Morton

calling the spirits
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a h i s t o r y o f
s e a n c e s
lisa morton
Reaktion Books
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This book is dedicated, with gratitude and undying respect,
to all the librarians (with a particular nod to my friend
Becky Spratford) who help to ensure that we are not forever
condemned to repeat the past
Published by
Reaktion Books Ltd
Unit 32, Waterside
44–48 Wharf Road
London n1 7ux, uk
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2020
Copyright © Lisa Morton 2020
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the
prior permission of the publishers
Printed and bound in Great Britain
by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
isbn 978 1 78914 280 8
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contents
introduction
9
1 summoning the old spirits
19
2 early necromancy
49
3 darkness across the enlightenment
and the romantic gothic
77
4 the victorians and spiritualism; or,
the seance is born
106
5 wars and ouija: spiritualism in
the twentieth century
211
6 how universal is the seance?
261
7 the modern seance
269
8 (why) do we need the seance?
298
References 306
Select Bibliography 332
Acknowledgements 335
Photo Acknowledgements 336
Index 338
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glendower
I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
hotspur
Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?
Shakespeare, Henry iv, Part i (Act iii, Scene i)
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A seance in 1910.
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introduction
A
group of London’s nineteenth-century elite gather in an
ornate drawing room to participate in a seance. The medium,
Madame Kali, directs the guests to be seated around a large glass-
topped table and to place their hands, all touching, on the tabletop.
The gas in the room is turned down as the medium asks them to
join her in suspending disbelief and to ‘imagine your minds float-
ing in the darkness of time’. She summons the dead, and abruptly
convulses; when she speaks again, her voice is altered, deeper and
heavily accented. Soon, mayhem erupts as spirits possess a woman
in the circle, who re-enacts the excruciating death of another sitter’s
daughter. Gusts of wind blow out the remaining candles, doors slam,
the glass tabletop shatters and the possessed woman is wrenched
into impossible positions as the other guests scream in horror.
This scene, from the second episode of the television series
Penny Dreadful, epitomizes what many of us might think of when
asked to imagine a seance. Or we might, perhaps, imagine that
moment at a Halloween party when someone pulled out a Ouija
board, placed the planchette on the lettered surface and watched
it glide beneath the fingers positioned atop it.
The common perception of a seance has been indelibly shaped
by decades of popular culture. Horror novels and movies have
imprinted the seance with images of terror, while the Ouija board
has moved from an innocent game to a piece of occult equipment
9
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