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Primitive Spiritualism and Origin Stories

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Second Sight in the Nineteenth Century

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine ((PLSM))

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Abstract

Examining the rise of spiritualism alongside the beginnings of modern anthropology, Richardson reveals the similarities and continuities between these seemingly distinct discourses. This chapter considers how second sight was pressed as a kind of inheritance: whether written into the biographies of famous mediums, as an example of where civilisation has progressed from or alternatively might journey to, or as a part of an archaeology record uncovered in the remote regions of Britain, second sight was written into a common evolutionary narrative. Key to this chapter are the figures of Edward B. Tylor, the founder of comparative anthropology and a vocal opponent of spiritualism, and William Howitt, a Quaker reformer and early convert to the new religion.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    William Howitt quoted by his daughter Anna Marie Howitt in her Pioneers of the Spiritual Reformation: Biographical Sketches (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2010), pp. 235–236. (Howitt 2010)

  2. 2.

    Pioneers of the Spiritual Reformation, pp. 235–236

  3. 3.

    ‘Howitt’s Journal of Literature and Popular Progress (1847–1848)’, in Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland, eds. Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor (Gent and London: Academia Press and British Library, 2009), pp. 293–294. (‘Howitt’s Journal of…’ 2009).

  4. 4.

    Peter Mandler, ‘Howitt, William (1792–1879)’ and Susan Drain ‘Howitt, Mary (1799–1888)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). (Mandler 2004)

  5. 5.

    Howitt, A Boy’s Adventure in the Wilds of Australia; or, Herbert’s Notebook (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1855), p. 157. (Howitt 1855).

  6. 6.

    Howitt, Colonisation and Christianity: A Popular History of the Treatment of Natives by Europeans in all Their Colonies (London: Longman, 1838), p. 508. (Howitt 1838).

  7. 7.

    Howitt, Tallangetta, the Squatter’s Home: A Story of Australian Life 2 Vols. (London: Longman, Brown, Green & Roberts, 1857), vol. 1 p. iv. (Howitt 1857).

  8. 8.

    ‘Summerland’ being the afterlife, or rather, as was popularised by Andrew Jackson Davis’s The Great Harmonia (1850–1861) and A Stellar Key to the Summerland (1868) a realm that represents the pinnacle of human spiritual achievement.

  9. 9.

    Ruth Brandon’s The Spiritualists: The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1983). (Brandon 1983) and Roland Pearsall’s The Table-Rappers: The Victorians and the Occult (Stroud: Michael Joseph, 1972). (Pearsall 1972) provide detailed overviews of the movement’s Victorian history.

  10. 10.

    Tallangetta, vol. 2, p. 26

  11. 11.

    Ibid., p. 27

  12. 12.

    Owen Davies, The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 71. (Davies 2007).

  13. 13.

    Tallangetta, vol. 1, pp. v–iv

  14. 14.

    Ibid., pp. v–iv

  15. 15.

    Ibid., p. iii

  16. 16.

    Richard J. Noakes, ‘Telegraphy Is an Occult Art: Cromwell Fleetwood Varley and the Diffusion of Electricity to the Other World’, The British Journal for the History of Science 32.4 (Dec. 1999), 421–459 (422). (Noakes 1999). See also Pamela Thurschwell, Literature, Technology, and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). (Thurschwell 2001).

  17. 17.

    See Daniel Cotton’s Abyss of Reason: Cultural Movements, Revelations and Betrayals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). (Cotton 1991) and Logie Barrow’s Independent Spirits: Spiritualism and English Plebeians, 1850–1910 (London: Routledge, 1986). (Barrow 1986).

  18. 18.

    Christine Ferguson, ‘Eugenics and the Afterlife: Lombroso, Doyle, and the Spiritualist Purification of the Race’, Journal of Victorian Culture 12.1 (Spring, 2007) 68–85. (Ferguson 2007) and Determined Spirits: Eugenics, Heredity and Racial Regeneration in Anglo-American Spiritualist Writing, 1848–1930 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012). (‘Determined Spirits: Eugenics…’ 2012)

  19. 19.

    Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 70. (Owen 1989).

  20. 20.

    Alfred Russel Wallace to Thomas Huxley, November 1866 quoted in Malcolm Jay Kittler, ‘Alfred Russel Wallace, the Origin of Man, and Spiritualism’, Isis 65.2 (June, 1974) 144–192 (169). (Kittler 1974).

  21. 21.

    Light: A Journal devoted to Highest Interests of Humanity, both Here and Hereafter 29 July 1881, 354.

  22. 22.

    William Howitt, The History of Discovery in Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand 2 Vols. (London: Longman, Green and Roberts, 1865), vol. 2 p. 202. (Howitt 1865).

  23. 23.

    Edward Burnett Tylor, ‘Notes on “Spiritualism”, Tylor Papers Pitt Rivers, 3/12 2009.148.1 (Tylor 2009).

  24. 24.

    Georgiana Houghton, Chronicles of the Photographs of Spiritual Beings and Phenomena Invisible to the Material Eye: Interblended with Personal Narratives (London: E.W. Allen, 1882), pp. 39–40. (Houghton 1882).

  25. 25.

    George W. Stocking Jr., ‘Animism in Theory and Practice: E.B. Tylor’s Unpublished Notes on “Spiritualism”’, Man 6. 1 (Mar. 1971), 88–104. (Stocking 1971) and Victorian Anthropology (London: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 191–192.

  26. 26.

    ‘Report on Spiritualism, of the Committee of the London Dialectical Society’, (London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1871). (‘Report on Spiritualism…’ 1871)

  27. 27.

    Pam Hirsch, ‘Howitt [Watts], Anna Mary (1824–1884)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). (Hirsch 2004).

  28. 28.

    Frank Podmore, Modern Spiritualism: A History and Criticism, vol. 2 (London: Methuen and Co., 1902), p. 163. (Podmore 1902).

  29. 29.

    Rachel Oberter provides an account of her life and her mediumistic abilities in ‘The Sublimation of Matter into Spirit: Anna Mary Howitt’s Automatic Drawings’, Ashgate Research Companion to 19th Century Spiritualism and the Occult, eds. Tatiana Kontou and Sarah A. Wilburn (Surrey and Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2012). (Oberter 2012).

  30. 30.

    See Alison Twells, ‘The Innate Yearnings of Our Souls’: Subjectivity, Religiosity and Outward Testimony in Mary Howitt’s Autobiography (1889)’, Journal of Victorian Culture 17.3 (2012), 309–328. (Twells 2012).

  31. 31.

    Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art and Custom 2 Vols. (London: John Murray, 1871), vol. 1 p. 1. (Tylor 1871).

  32. 32.

    C. Holdsworth, ‘Tylor, Edward Burnett’ (1832–1917), Anthropologist’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Holdsworth 2004).

  33. 33.

    Primitive Culture, vol. 1, p. 15

  34. 34.

    Edward Burnett Tylor, On the Survival of Savage Thought in Modern Civilisation’, Proceedings of the Royal Institute 5 (1869), 522–535 (528). (Tylor 1869).

  35. 35.

    J.W. Burrow, Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966) pp. 240–241. (Burrow 1966).

  36. 36.

    Tylor, ‘The Religion of Savages’, Fortnightly Review 15.8 (1866), 71–86 (83). (Tylor 1866).

  37. 37.

    Primitive Culture, v. 1 p. 141

  38. 38.

    Ibid., p. 130

  39. 39.

    Malcolm Jay Kittler, ‘Alfred Russel Wallace, the Origin of Man, and Spiritualism’, Isis 65.2 (Jun. 1974), 144–192. (Kittler 1974).

  40. 40.

    Ibid. 93

  41. 41.

    For a discussion of the Victorian ‘armchair’ anthropologist see Henrika Kuklick, ‘After Ishmael: The Fieldwork Tradition and its Future’, in Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Site (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 47–65. (Kuklick 1997)

  42. 42.

    Primitive Culture, vol. 1, p. 405

  43. 43.

    ‘Visions in Connection with the Rebellion of 1745, and the Battlefield of Culloden’, Light 16 June 1884, 277, ‘Excessive Lamentation for the Dead painful for the Departed’, Light 23 August 1883, 382–383 (383), Light 11 October 1884, 415–416 and Howitt’s ‘Remarkable Instances of Second Sight’, Light January 1881 published posthumously

  44. 44.

    History of the Supernatural, vol. 2, p. 442. See Chapter 1 for a discussion of Theophilus Insulanus,Treaties on Second Sight, Dreams and Apparitions (Edinburgh: Ruddiman, Auld and Company, 1763) (Insulanus 1763).

  45. 45.

    Ibid., p. 443

  46. 46.

    History of the Supernatural, vol. 1, p. 18

  47. 47.

    Edward B. Tylor to Alfred R. Wallace 26 November 1886, BL Tylor Papers, Adel 46339 ff. 6

  48. 48.

    Alfred Russel Wallace, ‘Are the Phenomena of Spiritualism in Harmony with Science?’, Light 30 May 30 1885, 1. (Wallace 1885).

  49. 49.

    The History of the Supernatural, p. 442

  50. 50.

    ‘Table Turning and Spirit Rapping’, Bentley’s Miscellany 48 (July 1860), 568–578 (572).

  51. 51.

    Ibid., 573

  52. 52.

    History of the Supernatural, vol. 2, pp. 395, 390, 402

  53. 53.

    Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett and Pamela Thurshwell, The Victorian Supernatural (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) p. 8. (Bown et al. 2004).

  54. 54.

    George W. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York and London: Macmillan Press, 1987), p. 192. (Stocking 1987).

  55. 55.

    Alfred Russel Wallace, Defence of Modern Spiritualism (Boston: Colby and Rich, 1874), p. 53. (Wallace 1874).

  56. 56.

    See Krisztina Fenyo, Contempt, Sympathy and Romance: Lowland Perceptions of the Highlands and the Clearances During the Famine Years, 1845–1855 (Edinburgh: Tuckwell Press, 2000). (Fenyo 2000).

  57. 57.

    Primitive Culture, p. 2

  58. 58.

    Johannes Fabien, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (Chicago: Columbia University Press, 1983), 11–12. (Fabien 1983).

  59. 59.

    John Ferguson McLennan, Studies in Ancient History: Comprising an Inquiry into the Origin of Exogamy, ed. Arthur Platt (London: Macmillan and Co., 1896), p. 14. (McLennan 1896).

  60. 60.

    Alfred Nutt, ‘Folk-Lore Terminology’, The Folk-Lore Journal 2.10 (1884), 311. (Nutt 1884).

  61. 61.

    Richard Dodson, The British Folklorists: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 392–393. (Dodson 1968).

  62. 62.

    Malcolm Chapman, The Gaelic Vision in Scottish Culture (London: Croon Helm, 1978), p. 123. (Chapman 1978).

  63. 63.

    W. R. S. Ralston, ‘Notes on Folk-Tales’, The Folk-Lore Record 1 (1878), 71–98 (72). (Ralston 1878).

  64. 64.

    Malcolm Chapman, The Celts: The Construction of a Myth (London: MacMillan, 1992), p. 117. (Chapman 1992).

  65. 65.

    Matthew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1867), p. 40. (Arnold 1867).

  66. 66.

    On the Study of Celtic Literature, p. 15

  67. 67.

    M. Martin, A Description of the Western Isles of Scotland, 2nd edition (London: A. Bell, 1716), p. 312. (Martin 1716), James Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson (1775) ed. Mary Lascelles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), p. 103. (Boswell 1775) and Tylor, On the Survival of Savage Thought in Modern Civilisation’, 524

  68. 68.

    Roger Smith provides a useful account of the development of willpower as an emotional ideal from the Enlightenment onwards, Inhibition: History and Meaning in the Sciences of Mind and Brain (California: University of California Press, 1992). (Smith 1992).

  69. 69.

    Herbert Spencer, ‘Emotions in Primitive Man’, Popular Science Monthly 6 (January 1875) 331–339 (332). (Spencer 1875).

  70. 70.

    Ibid.

  71. 71.

    Ibid., p. 406

  72. 72.

    Alfred Nutt, ‘The Critical Study of Gaelic Literature Indispensable for the History of the Gaelic Race’, The Celtic Review 1 (1904), 49. (Nutt 1904), this is echoed by Arnold who insists that the Celtic culture expressed ‘What it has been, what it has done, let is ask to attend to that, as a matter of science and history; not what it will be, or will do, as a matter of modern politics’, On the Study of Celtic Literature, p. 22–23

  73. 73.

    Mrs. Elizabeth Sweet, The Future Life: as Described and Portrayed by Spirits through Mrs. Elizabeth Sweet with intro. Judge J.W. Edmonds, 6th edn. (Boston: Colby & Rich, 1878), p. 359. (Sweet 18787).

  74. 74.

    ‘Science and Spiritualism’, The Anthropological Review 5 (1867) 242–243 (242). (‘Science and Spiritualism’…1867).

  75. 75.

    Tylor, ‘On the Tasmanians as Representatives of Palaeolithic Man’, The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 23 (1894) 141–152 (152). (Tylor 1894).

  76. 76.

    Peter Pels, ‘Alfred Wallace, Edward Tylor, and the Visual Politics of Fact’ in Magic and Modernity: Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment eds. Peter Pels and Birgit Meyer (California: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 241–271. (Pels 2003).

  77. 77.

    Sarah Wilburn, Possessed Victorians: Extra Spheres in Nineteenth-Century Mystical Writings (Aldershot and Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2006), p. 131. (Wilburn 2006).

  78. 78.

    History of the Supernatural, vol. 1, p. 444

  79. 79.

    Ibid., p. 12

  80. 80.

    John Page Hopps, The Future Life (London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1884), p. 12. (Hopps 1884).

  81. 81.

    Andrew Jackson Davis, A Stellar Key to the Summerland Vol. I (Boston: William White & Co., 1867), p. 1. (Davis 1867).

  82. 82.

    Francis Galton, The Anthropometric Laboratory (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1884). (Galton 1884).

  83. 83.

    See James Urry, ‘Englishmen, Celts and Iberians: The Ethnographic Survey of the United Kingdom, 1892–1899’, in Functionalism Historicized: Essays on British Social Anthropology ed. George Stocking (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984) 83–105. (Urry 1984).

  84. 84.

    Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1870), pp. 1–4. (Galton 1870).

  85. 85.

    Ibid., pp. 1–4

  86. 86.

    Ibid., pp. 336–350

  87. 87.

    Ibid., p. 340

  88. 88.

    Douglas Lorimer, ‘Theoretical Racism in Late-Victorian Anthropology 1870–1900’, Victorian Studies, 31, 1988, 405–432. (Lorimer 1988).

  89. 89.

    John Beddoe, The Races of Britain: A Contribution to the Anthropology of Western Europe (London: Trubner and Co., 1885), pp. 9–11. (Beddoe 1885).

  90. 90.

    Beddoe represents an extreme, but similar sentiments were expressed elsewhere. Thomas Huxley, for instance, despite adhering to a monogenist view of descent, still divided Anglo-Saxon from Celt (Xanthochroi from Melanchroi) in ‘On the Geographical Distributions of the Chief Modifications of Man’, Journal of the Ethnographical Society 2 (1869–1870). (Huxley 1869–1870)

  91. 91.

    Determined Spirits, p. 10

  92. 92.

    ‘The Problem of Individual Life’, Light 27 May 1882, 248–249 (248).

  93. 93.

    Ibid., p. 248

  94. 94.

    Alfred Russell Wallace, Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection (London, 1870), p. 351. (Wallace 1870).

  95. 95.

    ‘An Hours Communion with the Dead’, Light 5 March 1881, 71

  96. 96.

    The Spiritual Magazine (December 1867), 545

  97. 97.

    Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Psychology (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1885), p. 581. (Spencer 1885).

  98. 98.

    See Peter Lamont, The First Psychic: The Peculiar Mystery of a Notorious Victorian Wizard (Preston: Abacus Press, 2005). (Lamont 2005).

  99. 99.

    ‘Defence of Spiritualism’ Scots Observer 5 January 1889, 194–195 (194)

  100. 100.

    Daniel Dunglas Home, Incidents in My Life, intro. Judge Edmonds (New York: A.J. Davis & Co., 1864), pp. 107–108. (Home 1864).

  101. 101.

    Incidents in My Life, pp. 20–22

  102. 102.

    Andrew Jackson Davis, The Magic Staff: An Autobiography of Andrew Jackson Davis (1857). (Davis 1857), Howitt History of the Supernatural Vol. II, p. 189, Benjamin Coleman, ‘Spiritualism in America—IV’, Spiritual Magazine (October 1861) 433–439 (Coleman 1861).

  103. 103.

    William Howitt, Tallangetta, the Squatter’s Home, vol. 1, pp. iii

  104. 104.

    Lord Reay to Pepys, 24 October 1699, quoted in Michael Hunter, The Occult Laboratory: Magic, Science and Second Sight in Late 17th Century Scotland (Boydell Press: Woodbridge, 2001) pp. 161–165 (163). (Hunter 2001).

  105. 105.

    P. Hately Waddell, ‘The State of the Ossianic Controversy’, The Celtic Magazine 3 (January 1, 1876) 67–71 (67). (Waddell 1876).

  106. 106.

    Modern American Spiritualism, p. 482

  107. 107.

    Brian Inglis, Natural and Supernatural: A History of the Paranormal for the Earliest Times to 1914 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1977), p. 207. (Inglis 1977).

  108. 108.

    Thomas Brevoir, ‘Mysteries of Nature and of Spirit Prevision’, Spiritual Magazine (December, 1865) 566–571 (570). (Brevoir 1865) and Emma Hardinge Britten, Modern American Spiritualism: A Twenty Years’ Record of the Communication Between Earth and the World of Spirits (New York: Banner of Light, 1870), p. 482. (Britten 1870).

  109. 109.

    See Rene L. Bergland, The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (Hanover and London: Dartmouth, 2000). (Bergland 2000).

  110. 110.

    Stocking, ‘Animism in Theory and Practice’, 97

  111. 111.

    Ibid., p. 94

  112. 112.

    Margaret S. Cooper to Daniel Dunglas Home 24 Monday 1876, SPR.MS 28/7 (ii), Cambridge MS

  113. 113.

    History of the Supernatural, vol. 1 p. 56 and Modern American Spiritualism, p. 482

  114. 114.

    Charles Dickens, ‘The Lost Arctic Voyagers’, Household Words 10 (2 December 1854) 361–365 (362). (Dickens 1854).

  115. 115.

    Sarah Moss, Scott’s Last Biscuit: The Literature of Polar Travel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 143. (Moss 2005)

  116. 116.

    Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, The Frozen Deep (1856), quoted in Heather Davis-Fisch, Loss and Cultural Remains in Performance: The Ghosts of the Franklin Expedition (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) p. 54

  117. 117.

    Lillian Nayder, Unequal Partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Victorian Authorship (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 70. (Nayder 2002).

  118. 118.

    Alexandre Brierre de Boismont, History of Dreams, Visions, Apparitions, Magnetism and Somnambulism (Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1855), p. 243. (De Boismont 1855). The author proposes that these similarities may be explained by ‘the effect of cold’ in bringing about certain ‘nervous states’ and thus ecstatic visions’ (26)

  119. 119.

    Wilkie Collins, The Frozen Deep (London: Richard Bentley, 1874), p. 10. (Collins 1874).

  120. 120.

    Collins, p. 12

  121. 121.

    Marlene Tromp, Altered States: Sex, Nation, Drugs and Self-Transformation in Victorian Spiritualism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), p. 81. (Tromp 2006).

  122. 122.

    Jeffrey D. Lavoie, The Theosophical Society: The History of a Spiritualist Movement (Florida: BrownWalker Press, 2012). (Lavoie 2012).

  123. 123.

    Gauri Viswanathan, ‘The Ordinary Business of Occultism’, Critical Inquiry, 27.1 (Autumn, 2000) 1–20. (Viswanathan 2000).

  124. 124.

    See Molly McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth Century (California: University of California Press, 2008). (McGarry 2008).

  125. 125.

    The History of the Supernatural, vol. 1, p. 56 and Modern American Spiritualism, p. 482

  126. 126.

    Edward B. Tylor, Exhibition of Charms and Amulets’, Transactions of the International Folk-Lore Congress 1891 (London: D. Nutt, 1892) Tylor Papers Pitt Rivers, Box 4 4/12 387–394 (390). (Tylor 1892).

  127. 127.

    History of the Supernatural, vol. 1, p. 18

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    Elsa Richardson

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Richardson, E. (2017). Primitive Spiritualism and Origin Stories. In: Second Sight in the Nineteenth Century. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51970-2_4

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