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Tuesday evening Bill and I went to a lecture at Tradwell's on "Victorians and the Supernatural" by Dr. Rhodri Hayward. We hadn't been before but it was a nice friendly occult bookstore full of interesting books, a couch, and they were serving wine. What more could you ask for. We browsed for a bit, met up with some ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
bibliogoth friends and headed downstairs for the lecture. I took quite a few notes and so thought I would try and summarise them here.
The lecture identified two main types of belief in the Supernatural in Victorian times, Spiritualism, and psychical research. (Though personally I believe there were a few more than that).The focus of the lecture was to look at how the Victorian belief in the supernatural, specifically spiritualism led to a belief in the unconscious. Unfortunately due to time constraints the end of the lecture was rather rushed and so the conclusion felt a bit forced.
The first question that Hayward asked was why did the Victorians have such a need to contact the dead? It was a belief that spread across social boundaries uniting the elite and the plebeian. Hayward said that the idea of contacting the dead was looking at the boundaries of self, where do we begin, and more importantly in this case, where do we end. In the early 19th century people had a more porous idea of self. They saw themselves as something that was influenced by all sorts of forces, divine, diabolical, and even friendships and relationships, writers wrote about passions that ruled you rather than emotions you had. A personality was a mixture of body, soul and spirit. Sleep was seen as a time when you went out of your own personality and mixed with the dead the divine the diabolical and the fairy. This idea of mutability led to the rise of mesmerism when people were subject to outside rays, forces and fluids between magnetisers.
These models of self were seen as having political implications. If a person is not responsible for their actions, how can they be held responsible for their crimes. It undoes conventional identity and was used to challenge governments. This was seen in religious uprisings where leaders " were inspired by God". Hayward argued that the rise of spiritualism was in direct response to the implicit threat of Victorian spiritualism. To justify this he started by giving a brief background on the spiritualist movement itself, starting with America and moving to the UK. He made the argument, which I had not heard before but found rather interesting, that like the scientific discoveries of the time Spiritualism was itself a "method stumbled upon" it wasn't something that was done intentionally, rather by questioning rappings the people were trying out their own empirical study of the validity of what they were experiencing. This was not ritual occult magic rather natural science, a spiritual telegraph between this world and the dead rather than esoteric ritual. He claimed that it was both "scientific and empirical" in it's approach. And that many people saw it as a religion that rested not on faith but on works tested. I would like to say here that I was a little disappointed that Hayward did not mention any of the self admitted frauds of the movement, or those who refused to allow any testing of their powers, and also those who said if there was a doubter present then it wouldn't work. I think his view of the movement focused only on the positive, as he saw it, aspects of it. When someone mentioned the Fox sister who later said she made it up, he refused to consider that evidence, however was perfectly willing to accept as fact the same person's statements on the events of the night of the 31st of March 1848.
One interesting thing mentioned was the radical sociological explanations behind spiritualism. I did not know that Robert Owen became a spiritualist. Or that it was used to further the causes of class justice and equality, apparently it was very big in the suffragette movement. What was interesting was that several mediums would give lectures or addresses in their possessed forms addressing these issues, and bringing hope to the people that in the next world all would be better and everyone would be equal. I found this almost identical with many of the radical Christian groups teaching popular earlier in the 19th century that won over converts with the same message of hope in the afterlife. The spirit mediums also allowed for ritualised transgressions where men and women could interact more freely and the disempowered could speak against ills with power and authority. Mediums were most often women, the Victorian values of "weak sprits" and "hysteria" became positive values that led them to have easier contact with those beyond. Frequently servant girls became mediums turning the whole social structure of the family upside-down.
It was however in the response to this perceived threat that Hayward's arguments seemed the weakest to me, this could partly be because he was out of time so didn't have time to support his claims. His argument was that the Society of Psychical Research was a response to what they perceived as "the masses doing uncontrolled science". The argument that the Society saw spiritualism as science was not supported in anyway, and I personally don't see it. The argument that the Society didn't want lay people practising science, also was unsupported and didn't seem correct. If they were anti-popular science, why did they not choose to go after some of the more direct forms of popular science common in the Victorian era, geology and botany being prime examples as well as public science lectures. I think the argument that would have made sense was that the society developed the idea of the unconscious as their explanation for what they were seeing and testing when allowed by the spiritualists.
All in all it was quite an interesting and informative lecture, though I felt that the evidence given at the end was rather weak, and the conclusions drawn questionable. Still I did learn a bit and got several book titles for Victorian books about spiritualism that I very much would like to track down. So all in all it was an evening well spent, and afterwards it was nice to chat with people we like and don't normally get to see enough of. So a good evening all round.
bibliogoth friends and headed downstairs for the lecture. I took quite a few notes and so thought I would try and summarise them here.The lecture identified two main types of belief in the Supernatural in Victorian times, Spiritualism, and psychical research. (Though personally I believe there were a few more than that).The focus of the lecture was to look at how the Victorian belief in the supernatural, specifically spiritualism led to a belief in the unconscious. Unfortunately due to time constraints the end of the lecture was rather rushed and so the conclusion felt a bit forced.
The first question that Hayward asked was why did the Victorians have such a need to contact the dead? It was a belief that spread across social boundaries uniting the elite and the plebeian. Hayward said that the idea of contacting the dead was looking at the boundaries of self, where do we begin, and more importantly in this case, where do we end. In the early 19th century people had a more porous idea of self. They saw themselves as something that was influenced by all sorts of forces, divine, diabolical, and even friendships and relationships, writers wrote about passions that ruled you rather than emotions you had. A personality was a mixture of body, soul and spirit. Sleep was seen as a time when you went out of your own personality and mixed with the dead the divine the diabolical and the fairy. This idea of mutability led to the rise of mesmerism when people were subject to outside rays, forces and fluids between magnetisers.
These models of self were seen as having political implications. If a person is not responsible for their actions, how can they be held responsible for their crimes. It undoes conventional identity and was used to challenge governments. This was seen in religious uprisings where leaders " were inspired by God". Hayward argued that the rise of spiritualism was in direct response to the implicit threat of Victorian spiritualism. To justify this he started by giving a brief background on the spiritualist movement itself, starting with America and moving to the UK. He made the argument, which I had not heard before but found rather interesting, that like the scientific discoveries of the time Spiritualism was itself a "method stumbled upon" it wasn't something that was done intentionally, rather by questioning rappings the people were trying out their own empirical study of the validity of what they were experiencing. This was not ritual occult magic rather natural science, a spiritual telegraph between this world and the dead rather than esoteric ritual. He claimed that it was both "scientific and empirical" in it's approach. And that many people saw it as a religion that rested not on faith but on works tested. I would like to say here that I was a little disappointed that Hayward did not mention any of the self admitted frauds of the movement, or those who refused to allow any testing of their powers, and also those who said if there was a doubter present then it wouldn't work. I think his view of the movement focused only on the positive, as he saw it, aspects of it. When someone mentioned the Fox sister who later said she made it up, he refused to consider that evidence, however was perfectly willing to accept as fact the same person's statements on the events of the night of the 31st of March 1848.
One interesting thing mentioned was the radical sociological explanations behind spiritualism. I did not know that Robert Owen became a spiritualist. Or that it was used to further the causes of class justice and equality, apparently it was very big in the suffragette movement. What was interesting was that several mediums would give lectures or addresses in their possessed forms addressing these issues, and bringing hope to the people that in the next world all would be better and everyone would be equal. I found this almost identical with many of the radical Christian groups teaching popular earlier in the 19th century that won over converts with the same message of hope in the afterlife. The spirit mediums also allowed for ritualised transgressions where men and women could interact more freely and the disempowered could speak against ills with power and authority. Mediums were most often women, the Victorian values of "weak sprits" and "hysteria" became positive values that led them to have easier contact with those beyond. Frequently servant girls became mediums turning the whole social structure of the family upside-down.
It was however in the response to this perceived threat that Hayward's arguments seemed the weakest to me, this could partly be because he was out of time so didn't have time to support his claims. His argument was that the Society of Psychical Research was a response to what they perceived as "the masses doing uncontrolled science". The argument that the Society saw spiritualism as science was not supported in anyway, and I personally don't see it. The argument that the Society didn't want lay people practising science, also was unsupported and didn't seem correct. If they were anti-popular science, why did they not choose to go after some of the more direct forms of popular science common in the Victorian era, geology and botany being prime examples as well as public science lectures. I think the argument that would have made sense was that the society developed the idea of the unconscious as their explanation for what they were seeing and testing when allowed by the spiritualists.
All in all it was quite an interesting and informative lecture, though I felt that the evidence given at the end was rather weak, and the conclusions drawn questionable. Still I did learn a bit and got several book titles for Victorian books about spiritualism that I very much would like to track down. So all in all it was an evening well spent, and afterwards it was nice to chat with people we like and don't normally get to see enough of. So a good evening all round.