Spiritualism and Psychical Research

Spiritualism and Psychical Research Cathy Gutierrez Introduction Spiritualism as a religious movement self-consciously sought an alliance with science that would eventually lead to its own downfall. Despite Spiritualism’s resemblances to many prior instances of mystical experience or ghostly contact, the movement is traditionally dated to 1848, when two young sisters, Kate and Margaret Fox, attempted to communicate with a poltergeist in their home in Hydesville, New York. Using a home-spun version of Morse code called “alphabet raps”, the girls inaugurated what would become a trans-Atlantic phenomenon of séances and table tippings, making international sensations of some and endorsing domestic attempts for all (Braude 1989, pp. 10-12; Cox 2003, pp. 6-7). Spiritualism posited that the dead continued to exist on an advanced plane—usually a graduated seven tiers of heaven—where they could be contacted for advice and solace. Progress was the hallmark of heaven: not instantly perfected at death, spirits continued to grow in knowledge and morality. Moreover, Spiritualism proposed that everyone went to heaven—all religions, races, and temperaments were destined for the same afterlife. One’s deceased kin and the sages of history were all available to help the living. The desire to talk to the dead caught the imagination of the era, and the desire to prove scientifically that this was possible followed immediately in its wake. From the outset the practitioners of Spiritualism wished for this new form of communication to be embraced by the scientific community. Spiritualism came to life in an era when the daily implications for new technology were very apparent but their causes were not: steam could make trains run and forces like electricity and magnetism were clearly present but not at all clearly understood. Only four years before the Fox sisters’ rappings, Samuel Morse had sent the first transmission, “What hath God wrought?” across an electrical telegraph from Washington, D. C. to Baltimore, Maryland. Ushering in a century of revolutionary communications, the telegraph allowed instantaneous international news for the first time and was the first wide-spread, practical use of electricity. The ability to create instant and invisible communication across space was the cutting edge of technology: the ability to do so across the threshold of death seemed for many simply a logical next step. In this case, however, it was a human who functioned as a telegraph between the lands of the living and those of the dead. The new quasi-religious position of medium was well-suited for the young republic: eschewing credentials and training, Spiritualists believed that in theory anyone could become a medium between the worlds. This, too, was predicated on vague notions about electricity. Women were thought to be especially apt for the mediumship because they were believed to be negatively charged, and as the spirits were positively charged, women were generally more attractive vessels of communication. Alphabet raps proved too laborious to sustain—and probably too boring to watch—and new methods of communication developed wherein the medium would enter a trance state and arise with the spirit of the dead speaking through her. Heaven functioned as a model for earth, and although the dead were not perfect they were still culturally superior and provided guidance on all aspects of living. Spiritualists fervently believed that their endeavour would be allied with science and staked claims to a number of scientific and pseudo-scientific pursuits. The body and its discontents, technology to prove or perfect communication with the dead, and the rise of psychology all provided fertile ground for Spiritualist explorations. Mesmerism and Medicine Franz Anton Mesmer, a German doctor, in the eighteenth century developed a theory called “animal magnetism” that he desperately wished to be accepted by the medical establishment of his day. Mesmer argued that a magnetic fluid ran throughout the universe, accounting for the rotation of planets in their orbits as well as the pull of the ocean’s tides. According to the theory, this fluid also flowed in human beings and ill health could be attributed to it becoming blocked in the body. Mesmer repeatedly sought the imprimatur of the Parisian Academy, with his method undergoing sustained testing by commissions that included Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier. Despite the fact that Mesmer had literally hundreds of cures to his credit, the commission concluded that animal magnetism amounted to the combined effects of touch and imagination (Crabtree 1993, pp. 23-32). Mesmer was by no means alone in his search for a single cause and it attendant single cure. According to John Harley Warner, specificity in describing diseases and locating their aetiologies comprised the primary medical innovation of the nineteenth century. Prior to that, “The systems of medical practice . . . embodied the remnants of the Enlightenment hope that some unifying medical principle would be found, a law of disease and treatment that would prove as fertile for medicine as the law of gravity had for the physical sciences. A unified, rationalistic explanation of pathology characterized such systems, which often distilled the apparent diversity of disease phenomena into a single pathogenic process” (Warner 1997, p. 40). Mesmer’s search for a solitary panacea, however, would be eclipsed by a proto-psychological development that erroneously bore his name and completely overshadowed his hopes for scientific acceptance. Both Mesmer and his early pupils had noticed an occasional trance state that occurred while ministering animal magnetism; akin to sleep walking, the patient in this state could move and speak but would have no recollection of the episode when returned to his waking state. While Mesmer ascribed these occurrences to strictly natural phenomena, many of his students and competitors would embrace “magnetic somnambulism” as the therapeutic instrument rather than as merely a by-product of animal magnetism. Moreover, and much to Mesmer’s chagrin, many were intrigued by the paranormal implications of this second state, and magnetic somnambulism became popular among Swedenborgians, Freemasons, and other mystically-minded groups in France and Germany (Crabtree 1993, pp. 67-72; Monroe 2008, pp. 67-72). Unlike many post-Freudian constructions of the unconscious as antisocial, earlier experimenters with magnetic sleep found the second state to be more refined and morally apt than the waking one. The marquis de Puységur, an early student of Mesmer’s and a later rival, noticed among his patients that not only did inducing magnetic sleep help their physical and emotional problems, it also brought out a more perspicacious and even articulate self. Puységur recognized a special relationship between the magnetizer and the patient under magnetic sleep that he called being “en rapport”. A predecessor to hypnotic suggestibility, rapport required upstanding morals on the part of the magnetizer. The Spiritualists relied upon the trance state for mediums to enter into contact with the denizens of heaven. However, Spiritualists dispensed with the need for a magnetizer, inducing these states without external aid or authority. The second self was also understood by Spiritualists differently from Mesmer and his generation: trance states produced not an alternative consciousness of the subject but rather the portal for the spirits of the dead. Many voices travelled through the instrument of the entranced body but none were intrinsic to the medium’s core self. Spiritualists were so adamant that the voices were not epiphenomena of the waking subject that they often used speech acts as a litmus test of the medium. If a medium were understood to be too young or too uneducated to discuss science and politics, then surely this was the spirit world talking through her. The popular medium Cora Hatch would submit to external testing of this ilk. A committee asked her questions about the divinity of Jesus and the functioning of gyroscopes. The judges’ incredulity that a young woman could answer such questions lent the air of objectivity to Spiritualist claims (Fornell 1964, p. 81). Spiritualists routinely supported animal magnetism as a psychical cure well through the American Civil War and extended their interest in medicine to a host of emergent and alternative practices. Hydropathy and homeopathy were championed by believers and Spiritualist newspapers frequently serialized new books on the topics. Andrew Jackson Davis, one of the foremost leaders of Spiritualism and arguably its most cogent theologian, wrote columns and books on health and served his final years as a country doctor. Davis forwarded a single-cause theory himself, this one explicitly tied to mystical endeavours: the health of the body was exclusively dependent on the spiritual knowledge of the subject (Davis 1909, pp. 48-54). While Christian Science turned to a faith-based model for health, Spiritualism proposed a knowledge-based system: moderation, physical exercise, and the harmony of the soul and body would produce a long and plentiful life. Machines Spiritualists ardently believed that science would prove the truth of their claims. As the telegraph revolutionized communication across the nation and then the Atlantic, so too did photography provide a new and apparently miraculous way to communicate across time and space. Spiritualism conscripted both of these new technologies and tried their hand at developing their own. While mediumship was modelled originally on the telegraph and that metaphor retained currency for decades, the use of people as the instrument of communication was still subject to human error. Spiritualists sought out and built machines designed to eliminate that margin, often with the help of the spirit world which they believed contained both the finest minds of history and was itself temporally ahead of the mundane world in the march of progress. In 1855 the most prestigious chemist in America converted to Spiritualism. Dr. Robert Hare, professor of chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, was attempting to disprove the claims of Spiritualists when he was accidentally convinced of their veracity. Unfortunately Hare’s conversion ultimately cost him his reputation as a scientist but the initial event and the 1856 publication of his book, Experimental Investigations of the Spirit Manifestations, gave the scientific community and the general public pause. Hare began building machines to test the objectivity of mediumship: using a treadle like a sewing machine attached by pulleys to a circular plate with the alphabet printed on it, the medium would spin the wheel in a complicated version of a Ouija board. Hare would also quiz the spirit world about erudite matters and expect a high level of knowledge from certain spirits. The alleged spirit of his father, for example, was able to spell out Latin phrases from Vergil as he would have in life (Hare 1856, p. 53). The quest for scientific verification of spiritual claims seemed to come to complete fulfilment with the advent of spirit photography. Photography seemed to most people to be the perfect objective medium: a photograph reproduced reality, and when ghosts started appearing in photographs, Spiritualists were delighted to claim them as proof of the continued existence of the dead. Spirits, they argued, existed just outside of the light spectrum the human eye could see. Cameras were depicted as mechanized eyes, the perfected technology of seeing. People’s inability to see ghosts was eclipsed by the camera’s supposed ability to capture them. In 1861 William H. Mumler stumbled into history by accidentally creating the first ghost photograph. Mumler was learning the process of wet-plate photography when he developed a self-portrait with another figure in it. Attributing the event to his own inexperience, Mumler showed a Spiritualist friend the photo as a joke. Shortly thereafter he found himself and his “discovery” being extolled in Spiritualist newspapers up and down the eastern seaboard. Mumler converted to the cause and became a specialist in spirit photography, charging the then-exorbitant rate of ten dollars a sitting. In 1869, Mumler was also the first to be brought up on charges of fraud for his spirit photographs. Despite the prosecution bringing out P. T. Barnum to declare spirit photography humbug and demonstrating ten different ways the photographs could be altered with wet-plate photography, Mumler was acquitted on all counts. In addition to Mumler, the trial raked Spiritualism over the coals, with the real battle being whether the movement was a threat to the tenets of Christianity (Cloutier 2004, p. 22). Photography shifted the ground of Spiritualist communication with the afterlife. Mediumship, dominated by women and requiring no formal training, became accompanied by a masculine profession that played to the wealthy and their love of novelty. As Mumler had set the terms, he served the dead, and did not control them. Trance mediumship implied that the spirits of the dead wished to be in constant contact with their living kin and to offer advice and solace to the living. In spirit photography, one was not assured of even getting a ghost one knew: in fact, in some of its more embarrassing lapses, sometimes one would not get a ghost at all but an identifiable living person. In photographs, the dead were silenced and the domestic bonds that séances continued were not guaranteed. The apparent objectivity provided by the camera came at the cost of an on-going and reciprocal relationship with the dead. Not all Spiritualist machines were designed by humans; heaven, being both benevolent and more advanced technologically, sometimes sent ideas for machines to Spiritualists. The most famous case was that of the Reverend John Murray Spear, a colourful figure who fought for progressive politics on every front. Known as the Prisoner’s Friend for his work on prison reform, Spear was a Universalist minister who converted to Spiritualism after reading Andrew Jackson Davis’s work. In 1853, Spear undertook the construction of the New Motive Power near Lynn, Massachusetts. This machine was to be a gift from the spirit world for the betterment of humankind. Following the instructions given to him by a spirit association called the “Electrizers”, whose spokesman was the spirit of Benjamin Franklin, Spear endeavoured to build a machine 170 feet tall with copper and zinc costing an astonishing two thousand dollars. The New Motive Power had body parts that related to human ones and was designed to be brought to life. As recounted in the Spiritualist weekly paper the New Era, an unnamed woman performed ministrations to the machine and underwent pains similar to labour. This “Mary of the New Dispensation” was to give birth to a mechanical messiah at the intersection of the spiritual and the technological. Some at the scene even claimed to see the machine move a little on its own. However, since full vivification was not accomplished and reports of the birthing process cast it in unsavoury and even salacious light, the machine never brought forth the expected benefits it and was eventually destroyed by an alleged band of unbelieving Spiritualists (Hardinge 1870, pp. 227-228; Buescher 2006, pp. 120-127). Other machines sent from the spirit world included perpetual motion machines, weather machines, and even weapons designed to end war because no one would wish to go up against them. Spear spent his final years attempting to sell a magical sewing machine, and in one of the more successful collaborations in 1873 the spirit world taught Amanda Theodocia Jones a canning process that revolutionized the field. From the whimsical to the extraordinary, however, Spiritualist machines spoke to believers’ fervent desire to ally science and religion in the pursuit of progress. With the wisdom of heaven at their service and with the wonders of magnetism and electricity changing their daily lives in myriad ways, Spiritualists were convinced that technology was the natural partner of spirituality and that the two would march into the future together. Consciousness Debates Mesmerism was resurrected for scientific investigation largely by the Scottish doctor James Braid who coined the term “hypnosis” and used it to distinguish a therapeutic trance state from Mesmer’s claims that animal magnetism could cure any disease. In his 1843 work, Neurypnology; or, the Rationale of Nervous Sleep, Braid carefully disentangles the universalist claims as well as the mystical overtones of Mesmerism from hypnosis; he personally attributes a number of cures to his new method and was largely responsible for getting the scientific community to reconsider magnetic sleep in its new guise. Spiritualism had always flirted with diagnoses of madness. When women in particular fell into dissociative states and had multiple voices speaking through them, such run-ins were inevitable. Moreover, when those voices declared a final judgment null, the non-existence of hell, and the salvation of all races and religions, the ground was fertile for conflict. For most of the nineteenth century women could be summarily institutionalized by their husbands with no legal recourse. Letters snuck out of asylums to relatives or the press were frequently the sole form of hope to have a patient’s case reconsidered. Furthermore, a new nosological entity called “monomania” appeared in the first half of the century, a diagnosis whereby a patient could be declared mad in one respect only—she could be fully functioning in all other manners but have a single symptom of madness. In America, monomania was diagnosed almost exclusively with religious beliefs: if a woman disagreed with her husband on religious tenets or embraced the Shakers, Millerites, or Spiritualists, she ran a serious risk of being institutionalized against her will. Spiritualists understood the threat of nascent psychology to its movement and launched a counter attack against claims of madness. Altered states of consciousness offer an interpretive battleground for determining whether religious phenomena imply possession, insanity, or mysticism. Spiritualists fervently argued against early constructions of an unconscious, claiming that belief in a “subliminal mind” would hamper mediumship and even court insanity. Some even agreed that hysteria and mediumship came from the same source, but insisted on a theological rather than pathological understanding of that—the hysteric was a thwarted medium. Ian Hacking has noted that psychological diagnoses require cultural “hosts,” and that the designation of schizophrenia (here meant as the nineteenth-century version of dissociative identity disorder rather than its current diagnostic definition) died out with Spiritualism (Hacking 1995, pp. 135-136). Certainly the pioneers in psychology understood trance states to be the root and the cure for many pathologies. Jean-Martin Charcot, in charge of a wing of hysterics at the Salpêtrière asylum, could both induce and relieve the symptoms of hysteria in his patients using hypnosis. His students included Pierre Janet, who would become major player in discussions of hysteria and multiple personalities, as well as a young Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer. All three would continue to employ their teacher’s use of therapeutic hypnosis and Janet would forward the theory that a traumatic memory stuck in the “subliminal mind” caused hysterical symptoms. Freud and Breuer’s famous Studies on Hysteria in 1895 would add that the affect associated with the traumatic event were also repressed; all agreed that hypnosis could help unseat the memory and Freud and Breuer went as far as to define hysteria as unwilling hypnosis. While Janet asserted that hysterical symptoms referred only back to the self, he does still bear traces of the esoteric legacy of Mesmerism when he argues that crystal gazing, talking in one’s sleep, and automatic writing can affect the repressed memory. Freud would eventually abandon hypnotism in favour of the talking cure, a phrase provided to Breuer during their explorations into hysteria by one of his patients. Dreams, slips of the tongue, and primarily free association would become Freud’s replacement for hypnosis—the embedded memory and its attendant emotions could be pushed into consciousness by language. The return of the memory would itself cure the hysteria, dislodging the problem that had taken hold of the body and delivering it back to the mind. In all of these cases, however, the early psychotherapists maintained that phenomena like hysteria and hypnosis referred to a part of the psyche that was not otherwise accessible to consciousness but pertained solely to the subject. Janet’s subliminal mind would compete with Freud’s unconscious that was teeming with antisocial drives and sexual impulses, but both located alternative states firmly within the self. While Spiritualism’s claims that experiences during trance states referred to beings outside of the self—contact with the dead—Freud’s construct of the unconscious as their source would hold sway for the better part of a century. Freud himself, a confirmed atheist, mentions the Spiritualists in passing in The Future of an Illusion, that while still deluded by religion, he did admire them for attempting to empirically verify their claims. The moment, however, was not yet over for science entirely eclipsing Spiritualist and related claims about religious explanations for altered consciousness. The first American reviewer of Studies on Hysteria was fairly unimpressed by the book, writing that it was largely a rehash of Janet’s earlier work and that sexuality was improbable as the centrepiece of the psyche. He and his British counterparts would provide a critical bridge into the twentieth century, before science and mysticism were critically exclusive discourses and before discussion of the brain overtook explorations of the mind. Enter William James According to Christopher White in his book, Unsettled Minds, mid-century Americans were undergoing a crisis of faith that made many amenable to the language of psychology in spiritual pursuits. While more traditional, Calvinist-influenced Protestantism focused on the total depravity of all sinners, more liberal Protestantism emerged in response to this constant state of spiritual anxiety. Characterized by a belief in universal salvation (or at least the denial of exclusive claims of salvation), a positive evaluation of human nature, and a hope for the mutual efforts of science and religion, these groups broke the ground for psychology to coexist with spiritual articulations. Spiritualists, Universalists, Swedenborgians, and other liberal strains contributed to this transition. White writes, “Psychological sciences were becoming the alembic transforming older, theological formulas, the methodology that uncovered the original essence of religious truth. The natural world and human nature were revealing new things, tearing down and building up. If properly understood and used, our mental faculties in particular could produce certainty about God and spiritual matters” (White 2009, p. 37). William James was born into a privileged and erudite family that allowed him to experience first-hand the confluence of science and religion in Europe and America. Widely known for his spiritual bent, the elder Henry James espoused a Swedenborgian mysticism that flourished alongside Romanticism. Individual conscience rather than imposed morality and a utopian vision of the future marked James senior’s religious perspective and influenced his son. Science was still expected to uphold the claims of religion, and when William James was considering his educational options both he and his father assumed a complicity between the two endeavours. As William experimented with a number of vocations ranging from art to medicine, he found himself torn between the purely materialistic explanations he wished to reject and the lure of religion for which he could find little empirical evidence. The seriousness that he applied to this quandary resulted in existential despair and a depression that lasted two years. The breaking point arrived with Charles Darwin’s 1859 publication of On the Origin of the Species. According to Paul Croce, in Science and Religion in the Era of William James, Darwin’s work rent the father and son on the subject of religiosity and caused William to forever give up on the quest for certainty in either scientific or spiritual matters. Coming out two years before William entered Harvard to study chemistry, Darwin’s watershed theory disturbed more than the harmony of the James family: it drove science and religion into opposing corners. The prospect that humans evolved rather than were created whole by a divine being rattled many to the core as well as the implications the work had for ethics. Croce writes: Darwin’s account of the origin of species was also disturbing to religious believers because it seemed to deny morality. The means for species change, Darwin argued, was the “struggle for life,” the amoral and sometime ruthless way living things survive and reproduce by controlling limited resources and adapting to gain a dominant position in their environment. (Croce 1995, p.104) James would embrace a fundamental uncertainty as his stance in negotiating the new science of psychology at the crossroads of physiology and consciousness. Initially housed in the Philosophy Department at Harvard, James worked diligently to create acceptance for this new hybrid psychology against the protests of the theologians and the natural scientists. Employing laboratory experimentation and empirical data, James navigated between mechanistic and material explanations for states of the mind and human agency. He found among his colleagues similar endeavours abroad. Psychical Research Spiritualism had arrived early in England when the American medium Mrs. Hayden impressed Lord Dunraven in 1852. Subsequent investigations of the phenomena associated with Spiritualism generated positive responses and attracted the attention of Charles Darwin’s son George—a Fellow of the Royal Society—and noted psychologist Frederic W. H. Myers. This atmosphere in which the aristocratic and the learned fostered the scientific examination of spiritual claims made for a very different atmosphere than the Spiritualism that flourished in America. In 1882, scientists and philosophers from Trinity College in Cambridge founded the Society for Psychical Research. Professor Henry Sidgwick, England’s foremost philosopher of utilitarianism, founded the society with the earliest members including Alfred Tennyson, John Ruskin, Mark Twain, and Lewis Carroll. William James would become its first American president in 1894 and would found the American SPR in 1885. Later presidents would include Sir Oliver Lodge and the philosopher Henri Bergson. The publication of the Proceedings of the SPR began in 1883 followed by a Journal the following year. The first circular asked for members to aid with collecting information on clairvoyance, haunted houses, dreams, and spectres; it also suggested methods to test transference, or mind reading, by using cards with different colours and shapes on them. From the outset the SPR was leery of paying mediums, thinking that the use of professionals would compromise whatever evidence they found. The significant overlap between psychical research and psychology, at least in terms of those interested in the fields, illustrates several decades of fruitful converse between them. In 1889, Frederic Myers and Henry Sidgwick attended the first International Congress of Experimental Psychology in Paris, of which Charles Richet was the secretary, Charcot the president, and attendees included Francis Galton, father of eugenics, and William James. The SPR asked to conduct a Census of Hallucinations, a series of questions about sensations that did not have a physical cause to explain them. They collected the results of these questionnaires for three years and from all corners of the world. The results indicate that psychology was not yet disjunct from its religious predecessors. According to Renée Haynes in her history of the SPR: Nevertheless the authors conclude that ‘between deaths and the apparitions of dying persons a connexion [sic] exists which is not due to chance alone’; and very cautiously hazard the suggestion that if telepathic communication with the living has a non-physical cause, this shows that the mind is independent of the brain, and thus makes more probably the idea of communication with the dead (Haynes 1982, p. 43). The SPR began investigating Spiritualist claims and brought mediums in to be tested. In 1885, the society hired Mrs. Leonora Piper to be is test subject. For William James, Mrs. Piper became his “white crow”, the evidence he required to confirm the possibility of Spiritualism’s claims: not all crows need to be white in order for a white crow to exist, but at least one must be shown to exist. Mrs. Piper’s consistent results and above-reproach reputation made her an ideal candidate for study. The proper test subject made the issue much more palatable to many SPR members but questions remained about the referent of trance communication. Both Myers and Sir Oliver Lodge enjoyed the respectability conferred by Mrs. Piper and came to consider Spiritualism as an appropriate object of inquiry, but whether the contact came from spirits, a subaltern self, or interpersonal psychic communication were still speculations. In 1890, William James’s Principles of Psychology was published, adding America to the fray for defining the parameters of psychology and consciousness. James was obviously open to many of the claims made by Spiritualists and sponsored the printings of some of their works. He also recognized that Spiritualism was able to achieve real psychological healing. However, his theories of the unconscious were closer to twentieth-century psychology than to theology. Eugene Taylor writes: James’s conjecture was that this altered state was somehow related to sleep and dreaming. Hypnotism, he thought, evoked and enlarged upon the hypnagogic state… [in which] all abstract thought becomes highly pictorial; mental images rather than ideas are the rule; dream sequences, colorful visions, and constantly transforming pictures related more by association than logic dominate the field of attention (Taylor 1996, p. 38). Debates about the construction of consciousness and the aetiology and uses of alternative states continued at the juncture of psychology and psychical research. Charcot and his school continued to proffer that the hypnotized state was pathological in its onset and needed curing, some through therapeutic hypnosis and others, like Freud, through linguistic associations. Myers, however, was willing to consider that dissociative states may be not only “natural” but even beneficial. His theory of the subliminal self incorporated many of the same tenets as Charcot, Richet, and the French school, but the dissociative state included for Myers that possibility that the second self could be preferable to the waking state. The dissociative state was by no means necessarily pathological: Myers incorporated into his theory the possibility that supernormal cognition may be inferred, and he theorized that multiple selves, none of which should claim primacy as the “normal” self, were possible. Echoing his predecessor Puységur, Myers conjectured that a dissociative state with higher intellectual and moral aptitude was entirely possible. For his template, he alighted upon the daemonian of Socrates: surely the father of science and metaphysics would not fall into a base state but rather ascend to an enlightened one. And Myers was willing to argue for the applicability of his theory not just in the historical record but in therapeutic reality. Regarding a very famous case of a double personality, Félida X., whose waking sense was morose, physically troubled, and fractious, Myers argued that she should be allowed to stay in her alter, a cheerful personality that did not exhibit any of the unpleasant aspects of her first one. Myers takes umbrage with the concept of “normal” here, insisting that what is usual is not necessarily what is better. In advocating multiple possible selves with no necessary core personality as well as dissociative states referring to higher, not lower, instincts, Myers attempted to medicalize and legitimate many of the theological claims that Spiritualism and its related currents had articulated (Gutierrez 2009, pp. 169-171). Freudian constructs of the psyche, devoid entirely of theological content and pointing toward baser impulses, would dominate much of the twentieth-century understanding of the unconscious. However, dynamic psychology itself—wherein the act of therapy took place between patient and doctor—was also soon to be eclipsed. For the Spiritualists and the fin-de-siècle SPR members, therapeutic psychoanalysis would have looked bleakly materialistic: with no referent greater than the self, and nothing found there other than “common unhappiness”, psychology was a disenchantment of the mind. By the late twentieth century, the idea of a mind became disenchanted, replaced by neurophysiology and even higher order of strict materialism centred on the brain and advances in pharmaceutical cures to mental discomfort. The Society for Psychical Research continues today and many of their current publications are aimed directly at the meta-materialism of the brain. A 1988 pamphlet published by the SPR articulates the new directions for this conversation and points toward a new scientific landscape for explanations—physics. John Beloff writes, Thus, from the physicalist standpoint, mind is an epiphenomenon; brain alone is what actually determines everything we do, say, think or feel. … psychical research alone attempted to challenge the physicalist position on strictly scientific and empirical grounds. … Some [parapsychologists] maintain that, when physics has attained a yet more advanced stage, psi phenomena will be understood as physical phenomena of a special sort. Some of the bolder theorists have even suggested the direction which this development might take, making quantum theory their point of departure” (Beloff 1988, pp. 2-3). The hope for new answers to be found in theoretical physics is a direction taken by many contemporary theorists and believers interested in paranormal phenomena and supra-material explanations for extraordinary experiences. As science turned toward making religion an object of investigation, many still maintain that science will ultimately corroborate their claims. For a detailed exploration of the SPR and its legacy, see Asprem, this volume. The Paranormal Today Popular culture was not far behind in the pursuit of consciousness. The sixties’ counter culture was open to explorations of alternate states, the possibility of the paranormal, and the expansion of consciousness through the use of hallucinogens. A landmark of that coalition, the Esalen Institute, was founded in 1962 with a mission to explore parapsychology, mind-expanding drugs, and creativity. Michael Murphy, co-founder along with Richard Price, had long been enamoured of Frederic Myers and the SPR as well as some of Freud’s writings on telepathy. The possibility that the frontiers of consciousness could be explored best on an experiential and recreational basis shifted the discussion again to the religiously minded who expected eventual scientific confirmation of their claims about the paranormal. In 1968, Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder published Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, in which they made the sensational argument that the Soviet Union and the Eastern Block had been avidly testing the use of extrasensory perception for the purposes of espionage. The claim that the Soviets were heavily immersed in the paranormal stoked the Cold War flames in America and psi investigations took on a new cast as a necessary branch of military defence. In 1972, the Central Intelligence Agency launched its first foray into developing ESP as a tool for spying. While the CIS had long been interested in paranormal claims, it took the initiative of Doctors Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ of Stanford Research Institute to secure a working relationship between psychical research and the American military. This collaboration would come to focus most heavily on remote viewing, a phrase coined by the psychic Ingo Swann while he was working at the American branch of the SPR. Remote viewing refers to when the subject’s consciousness moves outside of its body and observes distant geographical locations (later some would add that one could remotely view the future as well but initial investigations were centred on space, not time). Swann convinced Puthoff of the possible efficacy of psychic seeing with his own ability to identify objects in boxes or otherwise obscured from his physical sight. Puthoff enlisted Targ, a fellow physicist who had been interested in the paranormal, and they devoted a then-sizable grant from the CIA to examine psychic espionage. Two methods were developed for remote viewing: first was the use of a “beacon”, or a person in the field looking directly at the object in question with the remote viewer describing it back in the lab. Then Swann suggested “coordinate” remote viewing, in which the viewer was supplied the longitude and latitude of the object. While this latter method obviously had more potential as an espionage tool, it also had more potential for chicanery as maps and photography could be employed to fake results. However, the Scanate Project—scanning by coordinates—was put into place with Swann and another psychic, Pat Price, as the primary research subjects. Project Stargate, as the CIA had dubbed the paranormal investigations, achieved mixed results until he untimely death of Price in 1975 which largely ended the CIA’s sponsorship of remote viewing experiments. Various other government agencies continued paranormal investigations in one guise or another until Project Stargate was officially closed in 1995 when the CIA declassified the work done at Stanford and the information was made available through the Freedom of Information Act. Since then both Puthoff and Targ have published histories of the Scanate Project as well as their recollections of the participants and the experiments. Both remain convinced of the existence of psi abilities and the efficacy of remote viewing. In 1979 and 1980 Michael Murphy and a cadre from the Esalen Institute travelled to the Soviet Union to examine first-hand the situation of the paranormal explorations in the U.S.S.R. According to the foremost historian of Esalen, Jeffry Kripal, “What the Esalen associates discovered on their trips in 1979 and 1980 was certainly less grandiose than what Ostrander and Schroeder had claimed to find in the late 1960s, but they found something real nonetheless. They found that the Russians were steeped in the supernormal, and that these interests often pushed them to combine their Marxist materialist doctrines and their mystical convictions in strange, and often humorous, ways” (Kripal 2007, p. 330). The paranormal allowed metaphysics to flourish inside the closed Communist rhetoric of being opposed to formal religion. At the time of this writing, a recent experiment has been conducted by Richard Wiseman, a psychology professor at the University of Hertfordshire, employing the social networking tool, Twitter, to test remote viewing using random volunteers from the internet. In June of 2009, Professor Wiseman went to four different locations and asked participants on Twitter to describe what he was seeing. He then issued a photograph of the location as well as four decoy photographs and asked them to vote on which was the real site. According to the Wall Street Journal on June 10, 2009, over seven thousand Twitter volunteers participated in the experiment. Professor Wiseman notes that the results were not promising for remote viewing—the vast majority of participants failed to correctly identify the location. The results for the use of technology and social networking for global, real-time experiments, however, was extremely promising. Religious beliefs and spirituality have recently come under the scrutiny of science as an object of study. New branches of evolutionary psychology, among others, now question the purpose of religious ideas in the development of contemporary humanity with answers ranging from religion is an outmoded understanding of the world to a necessary step in ethics and social cohesion. Believers in the paranormal continue to invest hope, mostly in quantum physics, that science will one day verify what they have claimed all along—that the ways of the world and human experience exceed what can be captured in the limits of rationality. References Buescher, John Benedict. The Remarkable Life of John Murray Spear: Agitator for the Spirit Land. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006. Cloutier, Crista. “Mumler’s Ghosts.” Pp. 20-28 in The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult, edited by Clément Chéroux et al. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Crabtree, Adam. From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. Croce, Paul Jerome. Science and Religion in the Era of William James vol. 1. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Davis, Andrew Jackson. The Harbinger of Health; Containing Medical Prescriptions for the Human Body and Mind. Rochester: Austin Publishing Company 1909 [1861]. Fornell, Earl Wesley. The Unhappy Medium: Spiritualism and the Life of Margaret Fox. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964. Gutierrez, Cathy. Plato’s Ghost: Spiritualism in the American Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Hacking, Ian. Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory. Princeton: Princeton University press, 1995. Hare, Robert. Experimental Investigation of the Spirit Manifestations. New York: Partridge & Brittan, 1856. Hardinge, Emma [Britten]. Modern American Spiritualism. New York: Published by the author, 1870. Haynes, Renée. The Society for Psychical Research, 1882-1982: A History. London: Macdonald & Co., 1982. Kripal. Jeffery J. Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Monroe, John Warne. Laboratories of Faith: Mesmerism, Spiritism, and Occultism in Modern France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. Moore, R. Laurence. In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Taylor, Eugene. William James on Consciousness beyond the Margin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Warner, John Harley. The Therapeutic Perspective: Medical Practice, Knowledge, and Identity in America, 1820-1885. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. White, Christopher G. Unsettled Minds: Psychology and the American Search for Spiritual Assurance, 1830-1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. PAGE 18