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In the 1920s and ’30s, people gathered in darkened rooms to explore the paranormal through seances. They were motivated by grief, spiritual devotion, or a desire to be entertained. Beth A. Robertson resurrects the story of a small transnational group and their quest for objective knowledge of the supernatural, casting new light on how science, metaphysics, and the senses collided to inform gendered norms in this era. Robertson draws back the curtain to reveal a world inhabited by researchers, spirits, and spiritual mediums. Representing themselves as masters of the senses, untainted by the effeminized subjectivity of the body, psychical researchers in Canada, the UK, and the US believed that they could use machines and empirical methods to transform the seance into a laboratory of the spirits and a transnational empirical project. However, mediums and ghostly subjects could and did challenge their claims to scientific expertise and authority.
MacKenzie King did it, so did Susanna Moody. In fact, many Canadians consulted the spirits as part of a religious experience, to seek guidance for themselves and others, and to attempt to learn what lies beyond the grave. Some came to the seance room to hear ancient wisdom while others came to understand the nature of psychic phenomena. Like the mechanisms that produced the flashing lights, cool breezes, and whirling trumpets that materialized in the presence of the medium, their beliefs and experiences have been mostly hidden, until now. In this first full-length study of Canadian spirit communication, Stan McMullin has drawn upon seance notes, letters, diaries, and special collections to create a fascinating picture of how educated people were drawn to spiritualism and psychic research. Anatomy of a Seance shows that for many Canadians attempting to sort out their religious beliefs and find an acceptable marriage between religion and science the seance room provided an alternative to formal religious dogma. Despite the opposition of mainline churches, spiritualism offered the possibility of a "scientific" religion that could prove the existence of heaven.
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This book is intended to round out the picture of American psychology's past, adding the history of psychological practice to the story of psychological science. Written by two well-recognised authorities in the field, this book covers the profession and practice of psychology in America from the late nineteenth century to the present. From Séance to Science tells the story of psychologists who sought to apply the knowledge of their science to the practical problems of the world, whether those problems lay in businesses, schools, families, or in the thoughts, emotions, and behaviours of individuals. Engagingly written and full of interesting examples, this book includes figures and photos from the Archives of the History of American Psychology. This is the story of individuals, trained in psychology, who function as school psychologists, counselling psychologists, clinical psychologists, and industrial psychologists. These are psychology's practitioners; they take the knowledge base of psychology and use it for practical purposes outside of the classroom and outside of the laboratory.
American photographer Shannon Taggart (born 1977) became aware of spiritualism as a teenager when her cousin received a message from a medium that revealed details about her grandfather's death. In 2001, while working as a photojournalist, she began photographing where that message was received--Lily Dale, New York, home to the world's largest spiritualist community, proceeding to other communities in, for example, Arthur Findlay College in the UK. Taggart expected to spend one summer figuring out the tricks of the spiritualist trade. Instead, spiritualism's mysterious processes, earnest practitioners and neglected photographic history became an inspiration. Her project evolved into an 18-year journey that has taken her around the world in search of "ectoplasm"-- the elusive substance that is said to be both spiritual and material. With Séance, Taggart offers a series of haunting photographs exploring spiritualist practices in the US, England and Europe. Supported with a commentary on her experiences, a foreword by Dan Aykroyd, creator of Ghostbusters and fourth-generation spiritualist, and illustrated essays from Andreas Fischer and Tony Oursler, Séance examines spiritualism's relationship with human celebrity and its connections with technology, and concludes with the debate over ectoplasm and how spiritualism can move forward in the 21st century.
Constance takes her grieving mother to a séance which leads to tragic consequences and a legacy that will blight her life.
"The Spirit of Dr. Bindelof" focuses on one little known episode of physical mediumship, which is characterized by the movement and levitation of tables and other objects, ectoplasmic apparitions, direct voices and knocking sounds or raps, among other phenomena. This episode is Gilbert Roller's utterly charming and disarming autobiographical account of a group of teenage boys who experimented with seance phenomena and contacted an alleged spirit named Dr. Bindelof in the 1930s. Author Rosemarie Pilkington follows up with the history of these extraordinary physical mediums and the remarkable feats they perform, placing the Bindelof case within this wider framework and bringing it up to date with a review of contemporary "secular" mediums. Physical mediumship has been maligned to the point that most people think all physical mediums are fakes because of the frauds who sought to capitalize on the success of real mediums and because of arch skeptics who refuse to accept what they don't understand. This book demonstrates that these mind-boggling feats are indeed real. Their existence illustrates just how little science knows, and shows us that we need to revise our under- standing of reality in order to explain these phenomena."
If you can write letters to Santa Claus c/o the North Pole, you ought to be able to write a letter to Jack Kerouac or Albert Einstein. As it turns out, you can. People have been trying to communicate with the dead for aeons, but it took renowned author and illustrator Henrik Drescher to break through the eternal barrier. Postal Seance is the result of his bizarre and ambitious experiment, in which the afterlife meets the epistolary impulse in the form of elaborately decorated letters to the dead. By sending out 52 ornately designed cards and letters to deceased luminaries throughout history -- including James Joyce, Dolly the Sheep (in two letters), Chairman Mao, Saul Steinberg, and others -- Drescher puts his faith in the efficacy of the international postal network. In some cases, the letter is returned, bearing evidence of its lengthy journey in the form of international postmarks as it bounced from Singapore to Manchester, Sydney to Kentucky, or Madrid to Moscow, at last surrendering to the ultimate defeat, the "Return to Sender" stamp. Of those not returned, it is deduced that the letter was successfully delivered. With a foldout map showing the post-life postal system and custom stamps for the reader's own far-reaching missives, Postal Seance is a uniquely imaginative presentation, and perhaps the closest we humans have ever come to contact with the dead.
Poetry. "Townsley has a restless imagination--he conjures ghosts from the past, and out of fragmented memories he melds animal fables, parables, liturgies, dream visions, political debates, and a seance or two."--Ron Block "Reading him is a 'dark pleasure.'"--Brooks Haxton
Beth A. Robertson resurrects the story of a group of men and women who sought to transform the seance into a laboratory of the spirits and a transnational empirical project. Her findings cast new light on how science, metaphysics, and the senses collided to inform gendered norms in the 1920s and ’30s. She reveals a world inhabited, on one side, by psychical researchers who represented themselves as masters of the senses, untainted by the effeminized subjectivity of the body and, on the other, by mediums and ghostly subjects who could and did challenge the researchers’ exclusive claims to scientific expertise and authority.