ABSTRACT
Modern spiritualism is usually dated from March 1848 when the teenage sisters Margaret and Kate Fox claimed to be receiving intelligent messages in strange rapping noises that occurred in their cottage in Hydesville, New York.1 Within two years they, and a third sister, were giving public demonstrations of the rappings. Their manifestations joined the older tradition of displays of animal magnetism and mesmerism that had frequently involved clairvoyance and extrasensory vision, as well as mixing with the teachings of the eighteenth-century Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg and his Church of the New Jerusalem. To this bewildering mixture was added the findings of the Austrian chemist Karl von Reichenbach that certain sensitive people could detect magnets and crystals hidden in a room. The explanation of this in terms of muscular twitches and signals from those who knew where the objects were lay in the future; instead Reichenbach believed that he had discovered the existence of a new imponderable force that he called ‘odyle’, or the ‘odic force’.2 (When Reichenbach died in 1869, Crookes was to comment that the ‘supposed new odylic force’ was a remarkable example of ‘philosophic enquiry applied to subjects scarcely yet within the grasp of scientific reasoning.’3) From this pot-pourri emerged a movement that offered the hope of immortality and an antidote to what was seen as the increasing materialism of the age. Quite apart from offering a panacea to the bereaved it can therefore be seen as a response to a perceived intellectual crisis as Christianity’s credibility seemed to wane in the face of growing scientific materialism.
