Spectral Bodies of Evidence: The Body as Medium in American Spiritualism (original) (raw)

Borrowed Emanations: Spiritualism, Theosophy, and the Kabbalistic Body

In the wake of renewed interest in Theosophical theurgy, the authors explore the precedent set by its forerunner Spiritualism. Grounded in Neoplatonic emanational theology, Spiritualism set the stage for a theurgical understanding of the divine with the interdependence and interpenetration of the living and the dead. Spiritualists, following Swedenborg's Grand Man concept, posited that the image of the cosmos was replicated in the individual body, which fostered a theur-gical relationship humans and the semi-divine spirits of the heavens. Articulated in terms of sexuality, medicine, and even technology, this Spiritualist theurgy paved the way for clearer Kabbalistic influence on Theosophy, with both movements claiming an ancient and universal truism in emanational theology that was played out in different cultures across the centuries. In 1852, a crowd gathered in Lynn, Massachusetts, in order to build a new savior. A gift to the living from the spirit world, this would be a machine that was to be brought to life, quickened by an unnamed woman called the Mary of the New Dispensa-tion. This event among several others in the history of Spiritualism relied on two interrelated concepts of an emanational view of the cosmos in which the earthbound, as the stepping stone to the seven-tiered heavens, interacted with and influenced the ladder of the divine. We will argue that this theological disposition constituted an overlooked form of American theurgy. Amid the growing interest in the influence of Kabba-lah on Theosophy (Chajes and Huss, 2016; Huss et al 2010), we will examine Spiritualism as it shaped and was shaped by early Theosophy. We will argue that Spiritualism's insistence on the centrality of the body and a Neoplatonic schema of heaven ad

"She must be a pure vessel": An examination of a spirit medium persona

2019

Rosemary Brown (1916-2001) is certainly a highly unusual case in music history. In the 1960s, she started to notate hundreds of musical pieces that she attributed to the spirits of several great concert music composers with whom she claimed to be in touch as a spirit medium. Brown also furnishes a promising persona case study. In order to convince the public that her music had a spiritual origin, she described herself (and was described) as a simple housewife and mother with no profound musical knowledge, therefore hardly capable of writing original musical pieces in the styles of acclaimed composers. The purpose of this paper is first, to provide an examination of Rosemary Brown's public persona; second, to relate it to the spiritualist tradition, in order to demonstrate that the constituent elements of Rosemary Brown's persona were available in the spiritualist cultural repertoire; and third, to relate this same persona to the implications of gender in the understanding of mediumship among spiritualists.

Religion and the Paranormal: Redefining the Sacred Human

De Natura Fidei: Rethinking Religion across Disciplinary Boundaries edited by Jibu George. (New Delhi, India: Authors Press), 2021

This chapter addresses the impact of paranormal research on the study of comparative religions and demonstrates how this research offers new perspectives on the conceptualization of the human person. It reviews paranormal research over the last fifty years, discusses major theoretical issues therein and links these issues to religious conceptions of the person in ways that challenge older models of human identity. The chapter engages the ontological and metaphysical implications stemming from paranormal research, including theory from transpersonal studies, as a strategic base for the formulation of a more nuanced, paradigmatic portrait of the sacred human. Primary ideas discussed include cosmological pan-sentience, process philosophy, near death experience, mediumship, clairvoyance, precognition, telepathy, super-psi, survival theory, and reincarnation. These concepts will be shown to be crucial in any meaningful construction of the person and intrinsic to general religious theories of self, soul, and personhood.