Introduction to Spiritualism

Throughout the mid 19th century and into the early 20th century, the Spiritualist religion formed and grew rapidly around the writings of two earlier figures, each to whom we owe a central tenet of the movement.

First, we have Emanuel Swedenborg, a 17th-18th century engineer, scientist and we can also credit him as being the mystic who popularised a blend of Christian theology and the idea that spirits inhabit a world which interacts with our everyday life.

Swedenborg’s father, Jesper, had been a Professor of Theology at the University of Uppsala, Sweden, and also the Bishop of Skala. Jesper had been immensely interested in the Pietist movement of the 18th century, which eventually moved through Europe and formed the basis of what we now know as Evangelicalism. I like to imagine that he conducted all of his lectures and sermons in a glittering tuxedo, under a giant diamanté crucifix, but that perhaps characterises his influence a little strongly.

Interestingly, it was not his mystical beliefs that got him into trouble with the Church, but Jesper was eventually charged with being a heretic by the Lutherans for rejecting their principle of absolute, unquestionable faith in God (sola fide), daring to suggest instead that believers should try to achieve communion with God. Proof, after all, personal or otherwise should always be off the table in religious discourse prior to the success of the Enlightenment.

Jesper’s controversial ideas were to have lasting impact on his son’s outlook and Emanuel would often try to use his scientific training to explain spiritual phenomena empirically - a noble approach.

To be sure, Emanuel was a finely skilled scientist - certainly not of the same ilk of so-called spiritual investigators or quantum-spiritualists we see today. In fact, he can also be credited with one of my other favourite scientific anticipations in modern history: he is known to have sketched the earliest proposal for a neuron which, we now know as common knowledge, is the electrochemical cell that forms the basis of the central nervous system.

Nevertheless, Swedenborg maintained that, during a quiet meal on a lonely night in London in 1743, a figure appeared in his private room apparently from thin air warning him not to eat too much. Later that night, the same man appeared before him in his bleary-eyed fever (possibly because he’d failed to heed the warning and gone for the blue cheese). The (possible) cheese-hallucination professed to be the Lord who went on to communicate the ultimate spiritual truth to Swedenborg.

After a few years, Swedenborg quit his job and began a project to re-interpret the Christian Bible in spiritualist terms, re-framing the concept of the Second Coming as an internal spiritual revelation. After all, as we know, Jesus enjoyed a hearty meal, so why wouldn’t he invade a cracking supper and intricately implant the True Word inside the minds of its diners?

Swedenborg went on to publish widely on this topic, and the idea took hold throughout the rest of the 19th and 20th centuries as the basis for the spiritualist belief that there is a living-world and spirit-world which interact with each other quite well.

Our second figure is, perhaps paradoxically given his profession, much better remembered. Franz Mesmer was an 18th-19th century German doctor, who popularised a concept known as “animal magnetism”. Animal magnetism, Mesmer believed, could be explained as an invisible force innate in all living things and could have effects on those things if the force was correctly stimulated.

He first stumbled upon this "force" through the use of magnets. He administered one of his patients, suffering with hysteria, a dosage of iron filings and then began to try to manipulate them with magnets. The patient reported feeling strange sensations and brief relief from her symptoms.

Mesmer, however, decided that the magnets had very little to do with the symptom respite, but everything to do with his proposed force of animal magnetism. He must have, he reasoned, transferred his own animal magnetism, via the magnets, through to her.

This idea led Mesmer to form the basis of hypnosis or, by his namesake, Mesmerism.

Perhaps being a little later into the post-Galilean revolution than Swedenborg, Mesmer tried frantically to get his ideas taken seriously, and incorporated into the body of scientific knowledge, but to little avail.

This was due at least partially to the fact that his proposed method of provoking the animal-magnetic force (mesmeric force) could actually be traced back to earlier ages, and many critics believed that Mesmer was simply attempting to dress-up witchcraft-like hokum as a scientifically credible theory in order to gain notoriety.

In either case, Mesmer did not directly contribute to the religious element of Spiritualism, but rather supplied the notion that a trance-like state might be induced, which caused some subjects to report contact with non-human entities. This, combined with Swedenborg’s notion of an open spirit-world, paved the way for ideas such as spirit mediums - conduits that facilitate communication between the two worlds - and spiritual healing.

One common factor shared by both Mesmer and Swedenborg which you might have found interesting is that they were both immersed in the natural sciences in their own way.

Aside from his spiritualist beliefs, Swedenborg made early contributions to the fields of anatomy and physiology, including proposals on the function of the central nervous system and the pituitary gland. In his capacity as an engineering theorist, like Da Vinci almost 200 years prior, he also devised a model for an early flying machine over a century before the Wright Brothers. He was, as described in earlier sections, a true polymath of his day.

Mesmer, although scientifically more controversial, was also much better qualified than you might expect, given his esoteric-sounding beliefs.

What does this tell us? Put simply, the scientific method wasn’t well-developed enough to help even well-equipped minds sort out good ideas from bad ones. In fact, as quickly as progression up the information bell-curve was occurring in the presence of good scientific ideas, it was also aiding in the supply highly detailed nonsense.

It was only around the 20th century, when Galileo’s original proposal had not only long been accepted, but also widely deployed, that we were able to retrospectively turn this project into an effective enterprise.

One reason contributing to this problem came from Moses Mendelssohn. He was a friend of German philosopher Immanuel Kant, and a contemporary of both he and Swedenborg. He posed it well in his criticism of Swedenborg’s spiritualist ideas when he quipped that he wasn’t sure if Swedenborg’s work was meant to make, “metaphysics laughable or spirit-seeking credible”. In other words, does Swedenborg’s empirical and rational approach serve to add credibility to ghost-hunting, or simply make the metaphysical approach to investigating claims look a bit flimsy?

Medelsshon’s is an important problem to identify: how are we supposed to make sense of which theory is correct when more than one interpretation or explanation of the data seems to work? A quick tour of these historical spiritualist practices and some of their modern incarnations will help us to understand this problem, and how the post-Galilean approach to scientific investigation helps to remedy it.

That tour will be my thought for next week.