A Mahatma, At Home

This, from Weatherly and Maskelyne's The Supernatural? (c. 1891):

(Larger, high-resolution image here)

One of the things I have yet to do is assemble a representative sample of "spiritualist and occultist cartoons" from the mainstream media between 1850 and the first world war. The fluency and range of reference of these cartoons, after all, tells us a great deal more about the extent to which spiritualist or occultist tropes penetrated the mainstream culture that the movement(s) both depended upon and opposed than, say, a review of the single-subject literature on either side of the "spiritualist question" would.

I'm not sure we could call The Supernatural? mainstream, though. Lionel Weatherly was a sanitorium and private mental asylum keeper, who published a great deal on the management of the clinically insane, and his portions of The Supernatural? are predictably mechanistic: that which passes for the supernatural is, under it all, delusion and sensory deception. Maskelyne's contributions to the text, which appear to be welded in, consist of a rather banal set of essays on Oriental Jugglery (people misunderstood it), Spiritualism (all mediums debunked, no genuine phenomenon) and Theosophy (Blavatsky a blatant fraud, and the conversion of Annie Besant inexplicable).

Judging from Weatherly's introduction, he and Maskelyne (father and son) were chums and collaborators, and Weatherly was certainly trading in Maskelyne's reputation as a debunker, as he freely admits in his introduction:

Who is there, in this England of ours -- who is there, I may say, at all known to men, who has the right, from practical experience, to speak with such authority on Magic, on Spiritualism, or on the so-called Miracles of Theosophy, as Mr. Maskelyne? Who was it exposed the Davenport Brothers? Who was it who threw many a bombshell into the Spiritualism Camp? Who was it who fearlessly cautions those at the bottom of these latter-day miracles, abd bids them Beware?

The 'spirit photograph' that forms part of the front matter for the book gives us a good view of the two men, as well as an interesting example of a deliberately faked 'spirit photograph'.

The Mahatma illustration, which I think is quite humorous, and is rich in allusions suggesting that the details of the Coulombs' revelations were common knowledge among readers likely to purchase an Arrowsmith's three-and-sixpence train station stall book. The illustration is I believe by one T. C. Nunn.