Emma's Science

Part of the difficulty one has reading Modern Spiritualist texts these days is: the bad science.

Art Magic is hard for a modern reader to follow, I think, in part for this reason -- that the science is, these days, so patently wrong. Since the history of science is not something one usually gets taught, except in the "Eureka" sense, it's hard for the lay reader to know what Emma knew, did not know, and knew incorrectly about the literally dozens of sciences on which her texts touched.

Her discussion of carbonic acid and the "weight" of it in Six Lectures gets much easier to digest once we understand that the noble gases were 30 or so years from discovery at the time she spoke, and the truly wacky science of Art Magic becomes similarly more palatable -- and the text itself less strange -- once we've had a look at something like Zachariah Allen's Philosophy of the Mechanics of Nature, And The Source and Modes of Action of Natural Motive-Power (1851). This is just the sort of text I'd imagine Emma kept around -- if not before her days as a galvanic doctor, certainly during and after.