Abstract
In this chapter, I explore the life and work of Eileen Garrett (1893–1970) an Irish medium who later emigrated to the United States. Garrett was coming of age and discovering her alleged gifts as a medium in the early twentieth century—a time at which Spiritualism had been steadily waning in popularity. However, Spiritualism did see a resurgence post World War I, a resurgence that likely served Garrett well. I argue that Garrett made her mark within both Spiritualist and Scientific communities by challenging the status quo in that she collapsed the gendered binaries between the (primarily male) psychical researcher and the (usually female) object of research, the psychic medium. Garrett was distinct from other mediums of that era in that she insisted that her abilities were supernormal rather than abnormal and submitted herself to experimentation while resisting objectification. She became a parapsychologist herself, starting the Parapsychology Foundation in New York, which became a research facility and library. Thus, she interrupted the power dynamic between masculinist scientism and more feminized “other” ways of knowing.
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Notes
- 1.
Eileen Garrett, quoted in the Los Angeles Sunday Times (Los Angeles, CA) August 14, 1932; Allan Angoff, Eileen Garrett and the World Beyond the Senses (New York: Helix Press, 2009), 98.
- 2.
A nineteenth-century New Religious Movement, proponents of which believed that the living could communicate with spirits of the dead.
- 3.
The term supernormal “was coined by F. W. H. Myers and was applied to phenomena which are beyond what usually happens—beyond, that is, in the sense of suggesting unknown physical laws. While supernormal phenomena point to new powers, abnormal phenomena indicate the degeneration of powers already acquired” from Nandor Fodor, Encyclopaedia of Psychic Science (New York: University Books, 1966).
- 4.
Fodor, Encyclopaedia of Psychic Science, 151.
- 5.
This term originated with J. B. Rhine himself.
- 6.
Angoff, Eileen Garrett, 200.
- 7.
Parapsychological Association, “What is Parapsychology?,” last modified November 24, 2015, https://parapsych.org/articles/36/76/what_is_parapsychology.aspx.
- 8.
Deborah J. Coons, “Testing the Limits of Sense and Science: American Experimental Psychologists Combat Spiritualism, 1880-1920,” in Evolving Perspectives on the History of Psychology, eds. Wade E. Pickren and Donald A. Dewsbury (Washington D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2002), 126.
- 9.
Eileen J. Garrett, Adventures in the Supernormal (New York: Helix Press, 2002), 173.
- 10.
Joscelyn Godwin, Upstate Cauldron: Eccentric Spiritual Movements in Early New York State (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015), 134.
- 11.
Godwin, Upstate Cauldron, 135.
- 12.
Apports are material gifts from the spirit world, usually flowers and fruit.
- 13.
Cecil E. Cook, The Voice Triumphant: The Revelations of a Medium (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931), 31.
- 14.
Cook, Voice Triumphant, 61–62.
- 15.
Angoff, Eileen Garrett, 1299.
- 16.
Garrett, Adventures, 173.
- 17.
Angoff, Eileen Garrett, 3095.
- 18.
Angoff, Eileen Garrett, 3021.
- 19.
By this, Garrett meant that researchers were too often operating under the assumption that she was communicating with spirits rather than questioning her alleged abilities.
- 20.
Garrett, Adventures, 11.
- 21.
The term “mediomania” was coined by the physician Frederic Rowland Marvin in the 1870s, and became a way in which to pathologize women who claimed to have psychic abilities. Parapsychologists Carlos S, Alvarado and Nancy K, Zingrone offer additional context in their excellent work on Rowland in the History of Psychiatry; Carlos S. Alvarado and Nancy L. Zingrone, “Classic Text No. 90. ‘The Pathology and Treatment of Mediomania,’ by Frederic Rowland Marvin (1874),” History of Psychiatry 23, no. 2 (2012): 229–244.
- 22.
Angoff, Eileen Garrett, 1048.
- 23.
Garrett, Adventures, 57.
- 24.
Garrett, Adventures, 58.
- 25.
For more information on the concept of the Victorian Ideal Woman see: Barbara Welter, Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976).
- 26.
Garrett, Adventures, 58.
- 27.
Ibid., 87.
- 28.
Ibid., 65.
- 29.
Eileen Garrett, quoted in Angoff, Eileen Garrett, 90.
- 30.
Elizabeth Schleber Lowry, The Seybert Report: Rhetoric, Rationale, and the Problem of Psi Research (Cham, CH: Palgrave Pivot, 2017), 59–60.
- 31.
Lowry, 60.
- 32.
Ibid.
- 33.
Ibid., 61.
- 34.
The Rhine, “What is Parapsychology,” accessed March 27, 2020, https://www.rhineonline.org/what-is-parapsychology. The Rhine Research Center defines parapsychology as “the scientific study of intersections between living organisms and their external environment that seem to transcend the known physical laws of nature.”
- 35.
Angoff, Eileen Garrett, 2816.
- 36.
Angoff, Eileen Garrett, 2842.
- 37.
People who believe in the survival of the spirit after death.
- 38.
Angoff, Eileen Garrett, 2842.
- 39.
Garrett, Adventures, 115–117.
- 40.
Lowry, Seybert Report, 62.
- 41.
The Parapsychological Association, “History of the Parapsychological Association,” August 25, 2010, https://www.parapsych.org/articles/1/14/history_of_the_parapsychological.aspx.
- 42.
Carlos Alvarado, quoted in Garrett, Adventures, 181–182.
- 43.
Angoff, Eileen Garrett, 3297.
- 44.
Ibid., 3333.
- 45.
Angoff, Eileen Garrett, 3335.
- 46.
Ibid., 3393.
- 47.
Ibid., 3394.
- 48.
Ibid., 3376.
- 49.
Angoff, Eileen Garrett, 3123.
- 50.
Angoff, Eileen Garrett, 2590.
- 51.
Ibid., 90.
- 52.
She speaks of “seeing” thus: “more easily and clearly through my fingertips and the nape of my neck than through my eyes; and hearing and knowing, for instance, came through my feet and knees,” Garrett, Adventures. Traditionally, embodied ways of knowing are linked to the archetypal medium being female because women were associated with the body and men were associated with the brain. That is such embodied ways of knowing were widely dismissed by scientists as being invalid—and intuition was feminized.
- 53.
Garrett, Adventures, 193.
- 54.
“Jan,” quoted in Garrett, Adventures, 202.
- 55.
Garrett, Adventures, 175.
- 56.
Garrett, Adventures.
- 57.
Ibid.
Bibliography
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———. 2002. Adventures in the Supernormal. New York: Helix Press.
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———. 2015. What Is Parapsychology?. Last modified November 24. https://parapsych.org/articles/36/76/what_is_parapsychology.aspx.
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Lowry, E. (2021). “Telling the World’s Fortune”: Eileen Garrett, Psychic Medium and Pioneer Parapsychologist. In: Hale, A. (eds) Essays on Women in Western Esotericism. Palgrave Studies in New Religions and Alternative Spiritualities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76889-8_13
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