The Karens Believe The Spirits Of The Dead (Sad Day, Part 1)

Around page 157 (in the later editions) of Art Magic, the author of Art Magic (TAOAM) suddenly decides to start providing citations for his quotations. The texts are a bit obscure, and not in English, but TAOAM gets around that by quoting instead from -- wonder of wonders -- Modern Spiritualist publications, and, for the most part, from The Spiritual Magazine. (Interestingly enough, from those issues of that magazine in which a young Miss Emma Hardinge figures prominently, both as subject and as author). This despite the fact that each text quoted was available in multiple English translations well prior to the publication of Art Magic.

Hmmmm...broadly traveled, deeply-versed occultist declining to cite either Hargrave Jennings or Ennemoser explicitly, quoting Eastern scriptures without attribution, but fine with explicitly citing small-circulation Modern Spiritualist publications. Odd...

Then, there's this truly signal bit:

The letters of European missionaries from India, China and other eastern lands, popular accounts of snake charmers, Indian magicians, etc., especially the writings of Messers. Salt, Lane, Wolff, Laborde, Mesdames Poole, Martineau and others...

A sudden storm of indirect references. The rhetorical gesture we recognize: I have read these; surely you have as well; say no more, and if you haven't, well, then, take my word for it...

Imagine my surprise to discover that this set of writers is dealt with, in an article by Thomas Shorter in The Spiritual Magazine for March 1, 1861, entitled "Glimpses of Spiritualism In The East".

And imagine the surprise turning to a stomach-churning disappointment, as I realize that most of the section of Art Magic on "Magic Among The Mongolians" is cribbed, more or less directly, from Shorter's article.

At some point, I'll do a parallel-column rendering of the two texts, but in the meantime the dubious reader can check my assertion by comparing Shorter's article with this section of Art Magic. That the two pieces would cite the same authorities, and the same material from the same authorities, is damning in itself, I think.

I don't know when Thomas Shorter died, and I need to figure that out.

But I think any dispassionate reader of these two texts is going to conclude that TAOAM borrowed extensively without explicit attribution from Thomas Shorter's article, and allowed the reader of Art Magic to assume that she was reading material stamped with the authenticity of "the author's residence in Tartary".

At least, I hope this is the case, since Emma -- under her own by-line -- recapitulates some of this material, attributing it explicitly to TAOAM, in her Nineteenth-Century Miracles.

In the undesirable position of making Emma a dupe, or something much worse, I'm opting for dupe at the moment.

Sad day.