The Two Worlds for 1890

A weak year, but not without its moments of interest. Now available from the Archive.

• January: More On Colonel Olcott and Theosophy; what might be another piece of fiction from EHB, "The Mystery of the Postern Gate"; hypnotised shopkeepers; J. J. Morse gets the Rostrum for his "Notes form a Worker's Diary" and for his "Theosophy and Re-Incarnation Not Proven"; a lecture from Dr. Carl du Prel; a note from William Mumler; a criticism of "The Key To Theosophy"; the psychic effects of hashish; spiritualism is communism; theological war in the United States; "Astounding Revelations Concerning The Dens Where The Poor of Manchester Herd Together" (can you say odi profanum?
• February: Stanley and Spiritualism; raging against Hell; report of the annual meeting of the board of directors of The Two Worlds including an extended address delivered by EHB (a must-read); the cremation of Baron de Palm; "the public rostrum is designed to teach the religion, philosophy and ethics of spiritualism, and is not only lowered but absolutely disgraced by making it the scene of half-developed or wholly inefficient, mediumistic experiments"; Egyptian and Persian cartomancy
• March: modern fire worshippers; suffrage for all; Alfred Kitson gets the Rostrum; the Golden Verses of Pythagoras; Proposal For A National Organization Of British Spiritualists; EHB on "The Great Pyramid of Egypt - The First Lodge of Ancient Masonry"; Captain Pfoundes on Japanese Spiritualism; Sirius on Black and White Magic referring to "the Author of Art Magic" as though TAOAM was someone else
• April: Witchcraft; "Commonwealth as a Victory to Be Won"; vicarious atonement is a "horrible teaching"; Hudson Tuttle on thought transference
• May: Spurgeon and Talmadge take a beating at the editor's hands (again); William Britten goes after Annie Besant during a lecture; the editor, contra capital punishment; Carl du Prel gets the Rostrum to discuss "the state after death"; The Missionary Number "specially designed to deal with some of those questions propounded by persons unacquainted with the subject of spiritualism"; Sirius on Spiritualism In Relation To Science And Religion; a poem by EHB from 1869; JJ Morse on "Woman: The Problem Of The Future"; vivisection is "the shame of our modern civilization"; Richard Hodgson on ghosts
• June: Emma excerpts Lydia M Childs (as did TAOAM); the agenda for the meeting of the National Conference of Spiritualists, from the leadership cadre (Morse, EHB, Tetlow, and Wallis; publication of the Roman sentence of death passed on Jesus of Nazareth;
• July: EHB defends spirit photography; EHB on her "residence at Macon, Georgia"; EHB extracts an extended section of Judge Robert Hewitt Brown's Stellar Theology and Masonic Astronomy; report from the National Conference of British Spiritualists
• August: "Things a Boy Should Learn"; Faiths, Facts & Frauds is offered "for the cost of the binding" due to the generosity of an unnamed spiritualist; "Theosophical Definitions By An Avowed Theosophist"; EHB contra Theosophy (again); mental telegraphy; EHB on "bible infallibility"; the beginning of a series by Dr. Charles W. Hidden marks the beginning of EHB's association with The Progressive Thinker; more battering of the Salvation Army
• September: JM Peebles on "Spiritualism in All Ages"; a testimonial gift to Alfred Kitson; claiming William Blake for spiritualism; EHB rejects utterly the idea of a united front between Spiritualists and Theosophists and invokes the Coulomb scandal and the New York Sun "revelations"
• October: Wallis and Morse join forces as publishers; "Is Platform Clairvoyance Beneficial Or Hurtful To The Cause Of Spiritualism?"; the son of D. D. Home on "Some Russian Superstitions"; The Second Missionary Number; >B>Summary Of Spirit Communications Concerning Creation. Received During Thirty Years Of Direct Communication From And With Spirits, By Emma Hardinge Britten"; Peary Chand Mitra; Arthur Morrison makes his first appearances - is this the Martin Hewitt Arthur Morrison?
• November: J. B. Tetlow on "Variations In Mediumship"; William James excerpted; "private correspondence" (about EHB's published works) "is totally out of the question"; "William Tell's Arrow A Solar Weapon"; all the guns trained on the Salvation Army -- "Phonographic Dolls To Convert The Universe"
• December: J. J. Morse on "Do the Facts Of Spiritualism Support The Theories Of Theosophy"; the Christmas double number, with an EHB novelette; EHB's song of Charles Dickens, to the tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic; J. N. Maskelyne made to confess his belief in ghosts; EHB excerpts Mark Twain and implies acquaintance (she had it); Flammarion describes the Martian seas; mesmerizing insects; Sirius on Witchcraft In Ireland

Signal Phrases: Art Magic, its Progenitors and its....Children

As readers of Art Magic will no doubt remember, the sources of Art Magic are obscure. Or perhaps "obscured" would be a better word.

In any case, we have to rely largely on internal textual evidence to validate the complex set of claims about this text: that its author was not EHB, that the original material was written in languages other than English, that the original material consistent largely of scattered material, which was assembled according to "a hasty and fragmentary sketch of the work" provided by the author of Art Magic (who I will refer to as TAOAM).

There are few established methods for dealing with this kind of investigation, but one technique known to work is the identification and tracing of signal phrases: sentence fragments sufficiently uncommon that their recurrence in texts other than Art Magic are at least prima facie evidence of textual affiliation: the other text is either a progenitor, or a descendent, text.

Google Books is a fantastic textual base from which to work for this kind of endeavor, not least because its collections are biased in favor of texts that are out of copyright, and in favor of texts from the large depository libraries with which Google collaborates, making the density of "spiritualist" and "occultist" texts in the Google Books database very rich.

I've started that process, and having gotten through roughly 100 pages of the text, Ithought readers might like to see some of the results thusfar.

To be clear, I am not interested in questions of "plagiarism" - the academic police forces of the world can look into that, if they like. I am interested in questions of influence -- whose work influenced TAOAM, and who was influenced by Art Magic? And since exact repurposing is the sincerest expression of "the agony of influence", I look closely at exact repurposing.

For what its worth, at this point, I believe TAOAM relied heavily on the ideas of at least two works while Art Magic was being written: G. C. Stewart's The Hierophant (1859), and Robert Taylor's The Diegesis (1834).

Stewart TAOAM quotes; Taylor is not quoted.

I also believe that TAOAM may have had access to the manuscript of a "curious and rare book", Judge Robert Hewitt Brown's Stellar Theology and Masonic Astronomy, which itself saw the light of day in 1882, less than two years before Brown's untimely death at the age of 53.

All hypotheses, but worth noting at this point, if only so I can contradict myself later...

Lao-Kiun

One of the more misfitted sections of Art Magic reads as follows:

Lao-Kiun, a cotemporary (sic) of the great Chinese Sage Confucius, founded a school, which, for the spirituality of its doctrines, far transcended the teachings of Confucius. His text of religious faith was: "Tao (meaning God) produced one; one produced two, two produced three, and three produced all things." During the lifetime of this philosopher, a book containing the names and offices of innumerable companies of spirits was found, as it was asserted, suspended on the royal gate of Pekin, placed there by no mortal hand, and supposed to be full of direct revelations from heaven. This miraculous volume is said have contained magical formulae for the evocation and control of spirits; directions how to cast out devils and heal diseases; also the profoundest secrets of alchemy, namely the composition of the philosopher's stone and the elixir vitae. To satisfy the bigotry and superstitious fears of succeeding generations, this book, together with all other magical writings, was destroyed. Still, it was asserted, that private copies had been
made and circulated of its contents. From a curious and very ancient roll of MSS., in the royal library of Pekin, the author has had the privilege of copying a fine astrological chart, and a magical evocation of elementary spirits, assumed to have been first written in the aforesaid book.

Leaving aside the annoying fact that we must now add China to the list of places visited by Louis de B_________, it shouldn't be too hard to track down the source of this interestingly specific anecdote.

L(ydia) Maria (Francis) Child tells it, substantially, in her The Progress of Religious Ideas Through Successive Ages (1855).

And, in all the books indexed by Google Books, that is the only location in which the anecdote appears.

That Emma ran into Maria Child in the anti-abolitionist, women's-rights circles of New York in the late 1850s is, really, quite plausible.

That a Prussian occultist and religious scholar would crib an anecdote -- involving a text he claims to have seen, directly, in China -- from a radical American proto-feminist is really beyond belief.

Emma and Charles

Piecing together The Two Worlds for 1890, it seems that Emma was in a name-dropping mood. The business offices of the newspaper having been moved to E. W. Wallis' address, I fancy Emma was feeling a bit...reckless as she read the writing on the wall.

I'll have more to say -- or summarize, rather -- when 1890 gets released (tonight or tomorrow), but for now, I'd like to recall readers' attention to a speculation I made at the beginning of the year, based on admittedly scant evidence, and then have you read this snippet, from the 30 May 1890 issue of The Two Worlds.

(larger version)

This is, as far as I know (and Spotlight tells me) the only direct reference Emma makes to Dickens in her own work.

Charles Dickens: mesmeric doctor; a man with a possessive sexual appetite so large it's believed he kept multiple flats in London for multiple, simultaneously-kept women; a writer for the theatre, whose Christmas play The Chimes marked Emma's debut (if my memory serves) at the Adelphi. Working hypothesis: Emma was, for some period of time, Dickens' mistress and he is our best candidate for the "baffled sensualist" who ended Emma's career on the London stage.

Sirius, de Bunsen and Louis de B_____

Having watched "Sirius" morph in his language and subject matter and rhetorical stances through several years of The Two Worlds now, I have little confidence in Emma's claim that "Sirius" was "the author of Art Magic," if by that second term we mean "Louis de B____" and (as lead contender for that role) Ernest de Bunsen.

(If of course Emma is the author of Art Magic, then the equivalency Sirius = "the author of Art Magic" is one I'm very comfortable with.)

In order to link Ernest de Bunsen to Louis de B______ in some material way, we have to find Ernest de Bunsen in the United States in the 1856-60 time frame, and again in the 1872-75 time frame, says Robert Mathiesen, and I agree with that litmus test.

No records of anyone named Bunsen with the approximate demographics of Ernest (age, etc.) is to be found in the shipping line records available to me.

Good news is that the diaries of Elizabeth Gurney de Bunsen, Ernest's wife, apparently survive amongst the papers of her son Maurice, in the Bodleian Library.

Forensic Accounting

Much is made, toward the latter half of 1889, of a 1000 pound share purchase made by one Nemo, which effectively keeps The Two Worlds afloat. It is not the first such capital infusion The Two Worlds has required by the end of 1889: there are at least another 110 pounds explicitly mentioned as "anonymous gifts".

I'm having some trouble, given Nemo's injection of 1000 pounds in mid 1889, making sense of this:

(larger image)

The 1000 pounds for share purchase appears not to be accounted for; but that's probably my lack of familiarity with late Victorian accounting methods.

What is clear is that, at a net cash burn rate of 250-odd pounds a year (call that 25,000 of today's pounds and we wouldn't be far off), Nemo's gift was essentially four years of life for The Two Worlds, all else remaining status quo.

Interesting to note, as well, the possible reason for the change of printers mid-year in 1889 -- out of cash, and max'd out with John Heywood, the editors had no choice but to print elsewhere...and hurriedly.

Cards: January 1890

I've been looking for ads for skrying crystals since I started processing The Two Worlds.

The range of services advertised, the linkages between the old, the new, and the alternative -- all fascinating.

---

Later on in 1980, the vendor changes name, and location.

This was a pretty upscale, medico-scientific, address, as this advertisement (by our crystal-maker's brother? father? husband?) from the 1891 British Homeopathic Review indicates:

What strikes me as interesting is this: the text of the ad, modulo the address to which one applies, changes not one jot.

---

And in the meaningless trivia department, 83 Grosevnor Street had in the 1840s been the home of J. B. Jarman the antiquarian, and, by the time Ian Fleming was old enough to smoke expensive cigarettes, he bought them -- Morlands, the same brand Bond smoked -- at Morland & Company, 83 Grosvenor Street.

The Two Worlds for 1889

The 1889 issues of The Two Worlds are now available on the Archive.

Call this year the year of amorphous opposition, or, to borrow from Emma herself, the year of "impassable lines of demarcation"...

The attack on Theosophy -- direct and otherwise -- intensifies, the occult linkages are further underscored (note a good few months worth of front-wrapper advertising of the works of one P. B. Randolph, and some mention of The Light of Egypt), and the red(dish) flag of small-s socialism is unfurled and waved about.

Among the highlights:

• January: Emma recycles another of the stories in The Wildfire Club (yes, in a different textual state); a letter from abroad from J.J. Morse; the return of the Sabeans; a whack at Thomas Henry Huxley; the claiming of Tennyson and Rider Haggard for the cause; TP Barkas starts a multipart series on "The History and Mystery of Mesmerism"
• February: Swinburne as control; the report of the first annual meeting of the shareholders of The Two Worlds Publishing Company Limited; Lena Loeb, the Electric Girl
• March: Hugh Junor Browne starts a multipart series called "The Grand Reality"; Emma decides against publishing letters when she does not (privately, at least) know the identity of the sender; Gerald Massey lectures on "The Origin of Christian Dogmas"; "the herb of prophecy" (!); a tribute to Amy Post; "Legal Murderers, Beware"!; J. R. Buchanan; an obituary for S. C. Hall; "On Elementals"
• April: "Tyrannical and Highhanded Legislation In America!"; a thitherto-unpublished EHB novella, called "The Light In The Tower"; the Two Worlds changes its printer (with some not-so-desirable results, but a marked increase in the number of font faces used in heads); the death of S. Govinda Sattay, "Hindoo Buddhist" Theosophist; a whack at the Seybert Commission from General Francis Lippitt; EHB and Wallis begin dividing up the turf of the newspaper in public;
• May: "A Practical View of a Hindu Fakir"; Sir John Franklin's fate and the spirits; shots fired at the Salvation Army; Victorien Sardou reprinted; Emma re-states her theory of "obsession"; Marie Gifford (who's she?); Captain Pfoundes on Buddhism; M.A. Oxon noticed; Summary report of the Spiritual Lyceum Annual Conference
• June: the return of Sirius, summarizing J. A. Froude, writing about Origen refuting Celsus; magic in Egypt; the sacred cemetery of Bombay; opium-smoking is not a good idea; "Theosophy abused and occultism mis-represented"; obituary of Laura Bridgman; Hudson Tuttle exalted;
• July: Sirius continues cutting and pasting J. A. Froude; F. M. Holland on (!!) Giordana Bruno; "The Labouring Man's House"; Molly Fancher, fasting; "a vigorous and suggestive letter from Madame Elise von Calcar" on reincarnation; reincarnation in practice; yet another recycled tale from "The Wildfire Club"; "Mrs. Besant and Theosophy"; Was Jesus A Medium?; more from Captain Pfoundes;
• August: Emma bans pro-reincarnation positions from her pages; one Arthur Edward Waite (nobody really) on "higher possibilities of alchemy," "earnestly reiterat(ing his) desire to receive communications from all students of esoteric literature who have the welfare of humanity at heart, and whose eyes turn to the light of the ancient mystics for help in their sublime purposes..."; Emma thundering on "Spiritualism, Theosophy and Reincarnation"; another letter from J.J. Morse in America; Emma wishing she'd written The Light Of Egypt, but confessing she lacks the capacity to have done so; more Marie Gifford (who she?); yet more Captain Pfoundes, on Sinnett, HPB and Olcott; J. L Mahony on "Spiritualism And The Materialistic Conditions Of Society" - "the amelioration of the social condition of the people" should be Spiritualism's objective; Emma contra capital punishment, the "murder of criminals"
• September: no, really, Ada Foye is a great test medium; no, really, it's all Egyptian solar worship; no, really, Christian Science is completely intellectually bankrupt; the International Magnetic Conference; "Sparks From The Foundries Of Progress"; Sirius, having undergone a complete personality transplant, comments on an article in the Manchester Evening News, adopts the EHBian "we", calls himself "a prophet....and the son of a prophet", and proclaims Spiritualism "the only religion of the future"; "How The Toilers Live"; whacks at George Jacob Schweinfurth
• October: transcript of a debate between Marsden Gibson and Charles Bradlaugh; Vesper asks "whether politics, reforms, strikes and subjects of that purely secular character are in harmony with spiritualism" and is politically corrected by the editor; Emma on "the celebrated Samaritan dog of San Francisco"; a letter from the Countess of Caithness to EHB; "Spiritualism in India"; E. W. Wallis takes off the gloves and batters Colonel Olcott, who won't debate EHB on an open platform - "a more immoral doctrine was never promulgated"; Emma announces she'll speak against Theosophy in public if Olcott won't debate her
• November: "Indian Ghost Charms"; more on Giordano Bruno; The Impassible Lines of Demarcation Between Spiritualism And Theosophy" ("Finding nothing of interest to reward them...they one after another quietly withdrew"); Emma's own double (re-telling of the Rose Cross stalking episode); the death of Dr. Gabriel the occulist; "A Practical Lesson in Co-Operation" for "those working men who desire to alter the social arrangements of this country"
• December: "The Communistic Employment Of Labour"; spiritualism in western India; more Fox sisters recantation dissection; "devil and ghost worsjip in western India"; a Christmas story from Emma;the second annual census of societies.

End of reel. Please rewind.

Spreading The Light

The more I see of him, the more E. W. Wallis interests me.

Or, considering the "try and sell" Americanism, is this Emma?

On The Side Of The Angels

The larger world of the late 1880s does not seem, on the whole, to make it to the pages of The Two Worlds. So this snippet sticks out like flypaper, soaking in a bowl of water.

The Maybrick Case was truly a sensation, largely for its relevation of the sexual lives of the victim and his alleged assailant, and also for its exposure of a bit of Victorian laundry that still has not gotten the airing it needs: arsenic and alkaloid addiction. Modern criminologists are inclined to agree, pretty much exactly, with E. W. Wallis' assessment of the case, and to find -- with the long (nosed) view of history to help them -- that Florence Maybrick was punished not for murder, but for her sexuality.

The misguided connection of James Maybrick with the Ripper murders muddies the significance of the case almost completely; there's plenty of speculative material on that connection out there for those who are interested.

In the issue after this snippet appears, Emma devotes two pages of the issue to her own discussion of the Maybrick case, and refers to it several times in later issues.

Another Bounty

Urgently sought, generous reward offered. Will pay carriage as well.

The Light In The Tower: 1889

Scattered across the issues of The Two Worlds for late winter and spring of 1889 is yet another serialized EHB novella: The Light In The Tower...

The Two Worlds For 1888

The Two Worlds for 1888 is now available on the Archive web site.

• J. B Tetlow kicking off a year's worth of discussion of a "school for prophets" that very much signals the beginning of "institutionalization of spiritualism" as a theme in TTW
• the best article title ever, "Christian Pugilism or Anti-Dancing Piety -- Which?"
• anti-vaccination and anti-vivisection propaganda
• excerpts from both Art Magic and Ghost Land (creating yet more textual issues for your faithful bibliographer)
• the edges of Emma recycling her "Spiritual Gifts" material from The Banner of Light two decades earlier
• "Spiritualism in India" (alas, not local material)
• Lizzie Doten poems galore (where's the Doten scholar?)
• Sirius (bless him!) on Theosphy, Occultism, Spiritualism, Rosicrucianism and FWH Myers
• letters of J.J. Morse on his American tour
• Hudson Tuttle welcomed on Emma's pages (he'll become increasingly someone whose work she'll conjure with)
• Emma slagging off Christian Science (in two editorial slots, no less)
• obituaries for Mary Howitt and Anna Kingsford
• E. W. Wallis taking the lid off the anti-Xian agenda in March with a Rostrum piece entitled "The Disestablishment of Hell"

And that only takes us through March.

Theosophy folks, take note -- the "amorphous opposition" is in full swing this year.

The newspaper changes format in February, moving advertisements to a four-page outer wrapper and running an inner banner. Pay attention to the advertisements -- E. W. Wallis is selling his space to more mainstream merchants, and beginning to take control.

A Word On The Creative Commons License For The Two Worlds

Since you asked (all of you), the Creative Commons license under which the issues of The Two Worlds are released is in no way (a) an attempt to limit what you may do with the material or (b) to establish any sort of copyright over the digital version of the newspaper. It is there for one purpose only -- to give me a basis for making a lot of trouble for the first "reprint house" who takes the material, prints it and perfect-binds it, and attempts to sell it for a ton of money to someone who cannot use Google effectively enough to find the free versions... If you want a paper copy, download it and print it ;->

Emma At Ground Level, Late 1887

Editing a weekly newspaper, and carrying a speaking schedule that boggles the mind...By 1887, Emma is clearly enmeshed in the doings of the spiritual community of the midlands.

Magic lantern, limelight -- Emma the technocrat. What I wouldn't give to see her slide set from New Zealand...which is still, today, a paradise.

For calibration - Emma is still doing the Manchester spiritualist bazaars in the year of her death.

The Two Worlds for 1887

The Two Worlds for 1887, the inaugural year of the publication, are available on the Archive web site.

Some of the interesting bits I've noted while preparing the texts for digital re-publication:

• a unique, never-to-be-reused banner image for Issue #1
• in Number 1, the famous "Occultism Defined" by "One Who Knows", which as Paul Gaunt argues, might not a "Sirius" article (depending on how you attribute significance to the point size of headings in a multicolumn article -- I read "one who knows" = "Sirius"), and which names Bulwer Lytton, Richard Morrison and "the author of 'Art Magic'" as members of what we habitually refer to, today, as the Orphic Circle
• An often-repeated advertisement offering shares in The Two Worlds Publishing Company, Limited -- it's a measure of changes that such an advertisement would today be effectively illegal
• A significantly altered version of "The Wildfire Club", Emma's possibly autobiographical short story about occult practices and a ritual marriage, renamed "The Last of the Merlinites" and published as "A Christmas Eve Narrative" in Number 6 for 23 December, 1887.
• scattered evidence that Emma is in communication with various occult practitioners and groups, all of which are anxious to obtain copies of Art Magic and Ghost Land.
• an awful lot of material on the "Cabala", which as a comment on p. 39 of the 2 December 1887 issue makes plain, is warm-up material for (surprise) excerpts from Ghost Land and Art Magic.
• James Robertson, Emma's future biographer, showing up as "J.R." as early as Number 3 with a short piece on "Spiritual Progress in Scotland"
• a refusal to let go of Slade as he becomes increasingly contaminated. The coverage of his tour through the UK as "Mister Wilson" is instructive for Slade followers.
• plenty of indications (very gratifying to me) that Emma had close connections to the large and edgy spiritualist communities in Oregon
• wonder of wonders -- a full-length article by William Britten himself, in the 16 December issue. Like Emma, William has a fondness for the exclamation point.
• almost immediate pressure (which Emma will later attribute to her channel to market, the independent news sellers) to reduce the cost of the paper from 1.5p to 1p

In general, the tone of the periodical is set by the end of 1887, as far as I can tell -- each issue a mix of new material, recycled matter from Emma's large repository of published work, a bit of engineered controversy, and really intrinsically fascinating on-the-ground views of Spiritualism in the midlands in the period. The tension between the local material and Emma's "internationalist' reliance on non-UK material for the remainder of the typical issue's matter is palpable from the outset -- and it's going to cost her the editorship, by early 1892, as the "people's penny publication" raises its political flag.

Similarly, it's clear to me that Emma is paying a tax (the local on-the-ground information) to build an anti-Theosophical platform for herself, and to try to gain control of "Occultism" as a topic. But the press of getting a weekly out must have been too much, even from the outset, for her, judging from the amount of recycled material and scissors-and-mucilage work in each issue.

I have a hankering to turn the on-the-ground data in this run into a database, so we can map speakers' circuits and analyze the census data - if anyone is of similar mind, get in touch and let's talk.

Release of EHB Primary Texts

The EH Britten Archive's bibliography of Emma's primary work has been updated, and links provided to all extant electronic texts in the Archive at present.

Spiritualism is Religion: 1889

I've remarked elsewhere on Emma's propensity to modify her messages to the situation at hand. Her uneasy relationship to organized protestant xianity is a notable case in point: confrontational, conciliatory, dismissive, deconstructive, as the situation demanded.

As I'm processing the digital version of The Two Worlds, I'm watching Emma's position against other institutional contenders harden, as Modern Spiritualism begins to organize and institutionalize itself, as Theosophy begins importing "eastern" religious notions and constructs into the spiritualist and occultist discourses, and as the pages of The Two Worlds begin to take on the "socialist" tone promised by the masthead's tagline: "The People's Popular Penny Spiritual Paper".

This snippet, from The Two Worlds of 25 January 1889, is Emma-at-home amongst her peers and following in the midlands.

The army of love, light and heaven needs alliance with none to triumph.

Through Emma Hardinge, By The Spirits

America and Her Destiny: Inspirational Discourse Given Extemporaneously At Dodsworth's Hall, New York, On Sunday Evening, August 25, 1861, a rare (but oft-referenced) political trance lecture, is now available.

Thanks, Jay, for stirring....

The Creed Of The Spirits

Two versions of what may be Emma's single most famous address, "The Creed of the Spirits": the original lecture, delivered in Cleveland Hall, London on April 20, 1871, and the Seed Corn pamphlet version, part of a series designed for distribution by Spiritualists at events and on street corners.

The advertisements in the back of the Seed Corn version illustrate nicely how open was the boundary, at the time, between Modern Spiritualism and alternative medical practice. Other open boundaries worth talking about -- between Spiritualism and the anti-vivisection and anti-vaccination movements -- are on my list for future posts.

---

A reader -- one who ought to know -- (thanks, Paul) points out that in fact the pamphlet version of the address differs materially from the prior publication of the address in The Medium and Daybreak, so we'll have a bit of collation to do when that text is recovered.

The Elfin Vesper Bell

If recovering the bits and bobs of marginal Occultist figures is a difficult proposition, imagine how much more difficult is the work of the musicologist, trying to recover the ephemeral work of the composer and songwriter: people who produce a large body of often transitory material, who -- in the nineteenth century at least -- were often working at their craft in their spare time, and who left no trace of themselves in the larger documentary record.

Tracking down Emma-the-composer has been, to say the least, tedious, and reliant on happenstance, on fortune. I have managed to find three repository libraries that, together, could supply me with the microfilm comprising a complete run of The Court Gazette, for which Emma supposedly wrote (as Ernest Reinhold), but the thought of ploughing through eight years of that periodical (even with the assistance of text retrieval)....does not motivate.

I have found, however, the traces of yet another piece of popular music attributed to Emma: a song called "Oh! I'm The Elfin Vesper Bell": music by Louise A. Denton, words by Emma Hardinge, published in Boston by Oliver Ditson & Company, for the 1859 Christmas season.

Mrs. Louise A. Denton advertises herself in the New York papers of the late 1850s as a teacher of piano forte, working from her home on Prospect Avenue, in Brooklyn. Her advertisements, and the 'new music' notices in "ladies" periodicals of the period, are the only traces of Louise A. Denton and the Elfin Vesper Bell that remain to us, but there are a couple of repository libraries that list the sheet music in their catalogs.

H. Bielfeld, Esq.

A hundred dollar bounty for a copy of this lost gem...

Henry Bielfield. Wife Anne. Artist and gentleman. Watercolourist, oil painter and painter-on-glass of some repute, whose work still fetches at auction, apparently, among specialist collectors. Author of several books on painting technique.

Emma, Hay Nisbet, David Duguid and The Glasgow Association of Spiritualists

There's a nexus here: one that matters, if we are to explain how Emma was involved with Davidson and Burgoyne, the founders of the HBofL.

Hay Nisbet, the spiritualist and publisher who brought out Davidson's book on the violin, and who was so aggressive in promoting David Duguid the spirit painter and automatic writer (in the advertising section of The Two Worlds and elsewhere), has something to do with that nexus, or may be that nexus.

Imagine my pleasure, on finding a copy of the Second Annual Report of the Glasgow Association of Spiritualists (from 1868) -- which I was interested in obtaining because it contains a version of Emma's lecture on "What is Spiritualism?" and her rules for the formation of spiritual circles -- to discover in addition to those texts, the fact that Hay Nisbet was a member of the Association's organizing committee, and was promoting Duguid (unnamed, in this document) as early as 1868.

I don't find James Robertson, the only biographer of Emma (excluding Emma herself) and the employer of David Duguid, in this document, but I expect we'll find him in the third or fourth or fifth annual report.

Reception Aesthetics: 1868

In March of 1868, a professor of elocution who called himself Artis attended Emma's lecture on Spirit Mediumship at Cambridge Hall in London, and wrote an extended precis of that address for the Brighton Observer, from whence it was plucked for use as Number 7 in a series of pamphlets entitled "Extemporaneous Speaking", published by one E. Lewis at the Electric Printing Works in Brighton.

The transcription is inexact, but the material of Emma's address is thoroughly familiar.

1866: A Second Attempt At Transition?

What to make of this advertisement?

The billing is true enough, as far as it goes, since the Winter Soiree lectures were not strictly speaking public, and since Emma did have quite a reputation in the US, by 1865, as a public (trance) speaker.

The advertisement in question forms the last page of a twelve-page pamphlet, published in late 1865 by Thomas Scott (who also published the Soiree transcripts), entitled Miss Emma Hardinge's Political Campaign In Favour Of The Union Party Of America, On The Occasion Of The Last Presidential Election of 1864. When we couple the title and contents with the names of the lecture promoters -- none of whom, as far as I can determine, were Spiritualists -- this looks, for all the world, like a pre-lecture puff piece for a secular orator with first-hand knowledge of a political contest very interesting to British audiences (who were substantially pro-Confederate).

It's hard to say whether this is one of Emma's texts, or not. It references, and substantially quotes from, a work by Emma entitled Sketches of California that I have never seen, or seen referenced, before: a text the preamble claims "was printed in the New York and California journals shortly after the occurrence of the scenes they describe." Where that text may be, we have yet to determine, but we have what purports to be a substantial chunk of that text in this pamphlet, and it is, for two different reasons, the single most interesting EHB text I've come across since I started this spelunking expedition.

• The entire text elides, almost completely, Emma's career as a test medium and trance speaker, making only a reference to her "alleged claims to sybilline gifts" and her "prevision" -- words, in my estimation, calculated to distance herself from the Modern Spiritualist controversy she was, at that very moment, engaged in elsewhere in town. In the pamphlet, she is represented as a philanthropist, on the strength of her work to establish her institution for fallen women (abortive) and her contributions to the Sanitary Fund discussed in an earlier post. No mention whatsoever of the primary means by which she earned a living for most of the decade prior to 1866. None.
• this text is assuredly the origin of the assertion -- oft-made but never referenced -- that Emma toured California speaking for Abraham Lincoln in the run-up to the 1864 presidential election. Here, Emma makes the claim explicitly -- solicited by a Mr. S_______ (if he existed, we'll run him down) of the "Union State Central Committee of California" (in other words, a Republican party apparatchik), Emma "commenced these Lectures (in support of Lincoln) some thirty-eight days before the day appointed for the polling, and during that time I delivered thirty-two lectures; each Address usually occupying two hours and a half in its delivery."

Those addresses were all in California, and go a long way toward explaining stray bits of Emma I have found in the records of backcountry California in 1863-4: including a gold mine and a famed race horse both named "Emma Hardinge".

Personally, I find this text thrilling -- it is, it seems to me, Emma's second attempt to break free from what I think she felt to be the stifling inauthenticity of her career as a trance medium.

Of course, this attempt -- like her institution for fallen women -- failed completely. Her career as a public (secular) lecturer was over, I would argue, by early 1867, and she never again attempted to foreground secular topics in her prepared lectures.

"Mystical marriage" fans -- please to note the "Miss"....I think we can safely say at this point that the mythical first marriage was fabricated after it became widely known that Emma Hardinge -- speaking in trance in one part of town, and on secular political topics in another -- was a former actress, who by her own admission had traveled unchaperoned throughout the wildest places of the United States. Of necessity, she became a widow.

Emma's Winter Soiree Addresses: 1865-6

The text of these addresses can be had in any number of forms these days, but -- like most textual inheritance trees -- later versions silently remove elements of earlier versions of the text, elements that are insignificant to editors intent on 'getting the text out there' but significant to others (like bewildered would-be bibliographers)

Now having the original pamphlet version of Emma's November 6, 1865 address (answering the question 'In what particulars are the teachings of Christianity and the facts recorded in the Gospels eludicated and confirmed by Spiritualism?') and the original pamphlet version of her November 20, 1865 address (answering the question 'It has been alleged that Modern Spiritualism is the witchcraft or necromancy referred to in the Old and New Testaments: will you be good enough to define the difference between them?'), we can recover some of what was stripped from later published forms.

The first thing worth noting is that -- and this should come as no surprise, given Benjamin Coleman's role as the promoter of Emma on her first return to England -- the pamphlets reproduce the text of Emma's trance lectures as previously published in The Spiritual Magazine, making those texts the 'first edition' of the trance lecture transcripts.

The second thing we can recover -- lost in most of the later editions of the texts -- are the names of the people who posed the questions Emma answered, during these lectures, after her initial trance speech. They include (unsurprisingly) Benjamin Coleman himself, and S. C. Hall, and, somewhat surprisingly to me at least, Dr. George Wyld, who asked Emma: 'Granting that the body of a certain man appears to pass through the substance of a closed wooden door and that the garments of other men are removed apparently through solid ropes, what is the scientific explanation of such facts? Is the operation conducted by the spirits of departed human beings or by the spirits of living men present, suspending by some force the laws of the cohesion of solid bodies?'

Emma's answer, once unwrapped from her elocution, is interesting: the action is performed by the spirits of departed human beings, whose superior understanding of chemistry and "inconceivable rapidity" of action, makes their work invisible to an observer, and since "the door offers no obstacle to the transmission of electricity...the electrical body of the medium readily passes through it...Subject then to the laws of the physical universe, neither the objects of clothing which you have alluded to nor the knots which fastened the bound form of the medium are disintegrated, but by the speedy force of mechanical action they are loosened, changed, and altered by the simplest modes."

The Third Serapis Letter, 1875

Olcott received this communication from Serapis in 1875:

It reads:

I pray thee, Brother mine, to take necessary steps to adjourn the meeting untill (sic) Saturday which will be. Sister (that is, HPB) has a labour to perform. Be friendly to the English seer Emma for she is a noble woman and her soul hath many gems hidden within it. Begin not without our Sister. Unto the regions of Light I send for thee my prayer.

I can't determine whether "Begin not without our Sister" refers to Emma, or to HPB, but the letter suggests that, in 1875 at least, HPB had a use in mind for Emma (and that Olcott was no fan of Emma's). But what were those "many gems hidden within" Emma? Did HPB see, in Emma, the propagandist HPB could not be? Did Emma's (relatively speaking) squeaky-clean history, and her reputation as a propagandist, suggest to HPB that Emma was the mouthpiece of the occult machine HPB was contemplating? If HPB had the notion that Emma was to go on the road as the advance man for the TS, at the same point in time that Emma was desperately -- and ultimately unsuccesfully -- trying to find a means of generating revenue that would allow her to stop her endless circuit-ing, it's no wonder the two ultimately parted company.

William, Again (1884)

As it becomes increasingly clear that the day-to-day operations of the Two Worlds Publishing Company were materially under the control of E. W. Wallis, one wonders what it was William spent his time doing.

Emma credits him with managing her tours -- serving as promoter and accountant and wrangler -- but after she returns to England in 1881, I am at a loss to understand what role William played in her life, or what he spent his time doing, particularly when we see (as we do, every so often), this sort of thing in the contemporary press:

This one from The Medium and Daybreak for 25 April 1884. William and Emma are returning to the US for the 1884 camp meeting season. This is Emma's first trip to the US since her (hurried?) departure in 1881, and it will be her last trip to the US. While there, she speaks at camp meetings in New York and Pennsylvania.

Marie Sinclair, Countess of Caithness

A commoner from Edinburgh marries a Sinclair of Roslyn, also lord of Caithness since the 1300s (I think), and becomes a figure of immense behind-the-scenes power in the international Spiritual network of the last few decades of the 19th century.

The Countess of Caithness seems to be a gateway node between the Emma-aligned occultist camp, and the Theosophists -- providing Emma with a home in which to recuperate after a major illness in the early 1880s, and contributing to Emma's abortive Spiritual Encyclopedia project, while simultaneously corresponding with EHB, Olcott and others, and contributing to Theosophist journals.

I can't find any contemporary scholarly work on her, but W. T. Stead did her up -- or sent her up -- in an extended obituary in Borderland in January of 1896.

There are several long pieces by third parties on Caithness in her Avenue Wagram digs, and E(mily) Katherine Bates' chapter on Caithness from her Seen and Unseen (1907) is pretty representative of the type.

According to both Emma and Olcott, Caithness knew the real identity of Louis de B____, and -- according to Emma -- Louis expressed great devotion to Caithness.

Richard Burton And His Friends

A month or so ago, I wrote a short post about the connections between Richard Burton, Philip Henry Stanhope and Frederick Hockley, particularly their shared interest in skrying.

Today, this interesting snippet from Isabel Burton's biography of her husband -- from a lecture Burton gave in 1877, which Isabel embeds in her narrative. Burton is speaking to a gathering of the British National Association of Spiritualists, on "Spiritualism in Eastern Lands", on December 13, 1878, and says in part:

The following is the modern European form of the magic mirror. I find in a well-known Masonic journal (the Rosicrucian, No. 4, April 1, 1877) an article -- 'Evenings with the Indwellers of the World of Spirits' -- by my friend, Mr. Frederick Hockley (emphasis added):...

The embedded address is well worth reading in its entirety, for a variety of reasons beyond its advocacy of "spiritualism without spirits" (very much a pure electro-occultist position), not the least of which is the way in which it sets up Lady Burton's address, delivered immediately after her husband's, in which she makes this remark:

I think we are receiving (Spiritualism) wrongly. When handled by science, and when it shall become stronger and clearer, it will rank very high. Hailed in our matter-of-fact England as a new religion by people who are not organized for it, by people who are wildly, earnestly, seeking for the truth, when they have it at home -- some on their domestic hearth, and others next-door waiting for them -- it can only act as decoy to a crowd of sensation-seekers who yearn to see a ghost as they would go to a pantomime, and this can only weaken and degrade (Spiritualism), and distract attention from its possibly true object, science. Used vulgarly, as we have all sometimes seen it used, it must fall to the ground."

Leaving aside the Bulwer-Lytton-esque trope of "disinterested scientific practitioner", I wonder whether the audience felt -- as I did, reading this passage -- patronized, or offended, when Lady Burton said that.

And I can't resist, though it is off-topic, including this interesting bit from Burton, touched off by a comment by Dr. George Wyld:

...I am sorry Dr. Wyld alluded to a book called the 'Isis Unveiled' (sic) because the book is the production of a person who evidently knows nothing of the subject....It is a collection of stories, put together without the slightest discrimination between Musselman and Hindu, and, in fact, it is one of those repositories which may be useful to take up occasionally, but which is not to be quoted as an authority."

More Reception Aesthetics: Emma and the Church of Latter-Day Saints

Emma, as I have mentioned several times, spent a good bit of time in Salt Lake City. Of her traditional stopping points, only New Philadelphia, Ohio seems to have been more frequented.

While there, as far as we can determine from contemporary newspaper accounts, she seems to have given stock lectures: including her widely-used Hades lecture and, interestingly enough, her stock lecture on Ancient and Modern Freemasonry, which seems an odd choice of lecture, given the way in which Freemasonic symbolism and ritual are imbricated with Mormon iconography and liturgy.

So when we learn from an affronted response, found in the pages of The Latter-Day Saints' Millennial Star for 1891, to one of Emma's anti-Mormon articles in The Two Worlds, that Emma spent her time in Salt Lake City in the company of de-churched ex-Mormons (associated with the Liberal Institute in SLC), things begin to clear up a bit.

The author, J.H.A, was one of the two editors of the magazine, and the title is a reference to the story of Sapphira and her husband, in Acts, I believe.

Reading this, and imagining what Emma's original piece must have contained -- real soon now, we'll be able to see for ourselves -- I am reminded of my maternal grandmother's old saw about the pot and the kettle.

Substituting Assertion For Demonstration: Reception Aesthetics

It is interesting that Emma's published work went almost entirely unnoticed by the mainstream press during her lifetime. While her lectures received reasonable coverage from dailies along her various tour routes, and she was a bete noire for some of the New York papers during the 1860s and early 1870s, her books were typically published without comment from the secular press.

How fortunate then to find a review of Emma's Faiths, Facts and Frauds of Religious History (definitely not one of her best works), in The Literary World for October 24 of 1890. The unsigned review, entitled A Lady On Religious History reads, in its entirety:

We recollect, in our student days, a certain professor of chemistry who was wont to include among the allurements of his favorite science the possibility of inhaling odours of so Stygian a sort that to have experienced them involved a kind of retrospective pleasure. Similarly, there is an abysmal description of nonsense which is positively refreshing after the monotony of the ordinary variety. For this form of mental stimulation we are indebted to the book before us. Mrs. Britten proposes -- in 128 not very closely packed pages -- 'to trace out the primal sources from whence have been derived the various systems of theology which divide up mankind into votaries of many conflicting faiths.' Some other not altogether unknown writers have, among them, devoted to the same subject more than as many volumes; but Mrs. britten simplifies procedure by substituting assertion for demonstration. The new short way with all religions is that they are, one and all, various expressions of the solar myth, nothing more than 'embodied astronomical ideas.' In the course of what we suppose is intended for the argument of this comprehensive thesis, we find some novel contributions to both history and philology. There has been of late a fashionable craze for Buddhism, but we do not recollect having, up to the present time, seen the founder of that faith described as a 'wooly-haired, thick-lipped black Boudah.' Nor is the identification of Maia, the mother of Sakya Muni, with Mary the Virgin and Mare the sea quite in accordance with received philology. A somewhat more intimate acquaintance with the ciult of Krishna as existing in its least objectionable form at Mathura and Brindaban, or as developed in the unspeakable rites of the Vallabacharyas, might have led the writer to hesitate before committing herself to the exploded identification of Krishna and Christ. But Mrs. Britten's exegesis surpasses her history and her philology. Such texts as 'For if the truth of God that more abounded through my lie, unto His glory, why yet am I also judged as a sinner?" and 'God also hath made us able ministers of the New Testament, not of the letter, but of the spirit; for the Letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life' are brought forward as instances of the disingenuousness of the Pauline dialectics; while the geographical accuracy of the Evangelists who speak of the 'coasts of Decapolis' and 'the coasts of Judea beyond Jordan' is impugned because neither of those localities borders on the sea. The religion of the future, with the solar myth eliminated, of the victory of which Mrs. Britten is so confident, will scarely owe much to advocacy of this sort.

It is worth comparing the unsigned short notice in The Freethinker for January 12, 1890, to the review in The Literary World to see the epistemological gap (or lack thereof) between the mainstream-secular press and the radical-secular fringe press:

This work represents the views of a talented Spiritist (sic) lectureress on the religions of the past. And certainly heterodox they are. Mrs. Britten holds that the Christian story is mythical, and that in substance it was borrowed from India, where she finds the origin of all religions. The value of her production is greatly lessened by the weight she places on such works as Kersey Graves' Sixteen Crucified Saviors. There are, however, many good points in the volume, but they will probably be familiar to our readers. Certainly such Spiritists as Mrs. Britten are doing something to break down the excessive claims of Christianity, though we question the worth of what they would substitute in its place.

Another Lost Text

The American Quarterly Church Review and Ecclesiastical Register for January of 1862 notes among its list of books received for review one Inspirational Discourse Through Emma Hardinge, by the spirits, at Dodsworth's Hall, New York, August 25 1861. A pamphlet surely -- another lost bit of ephemera.

---

Update: a reader (thanks, Jay) points out that this is almost certainly an incomplete reference to "America and Her Destiny", one of Emma's most well-known stock addresses.

A Camp Of Her Own

One of my feelings about Emma's work is that, by the late 1880s, she had marginalized herself almost completely. Whether it was because of her imperious temperment -- noted, for example, by the Australian spiritualists during her time there -- or because she was, intellectually, disinclined to adhere to anyone else's school, remains to be determined. But one thing seems certain -- Emma is regarded, by various factions of the spiritualist and occultist discourse, as other: related to, but not of, the cultus. A passage from Common Sense for february of 1875 (p. 466) illustrates this rhetoric nicely:

Emma Hardinge Brittain (sic) declares herself still a Spiritualist and a medium, but she is so much opposed to "social freedom" that she will neither speak from a free platform nor write for a free-thought paper. She uses other words to express this fact, but this is what she means. We do not care to defile the columns of Common Sense with the epithets some extra pure people apply to social reformers. it is quite probable that if we had the same vile thing in our minds when we speak of "social freedom" that they have, we should denounce it also, though, we trust, in gentler language; but the truth is that the very terms which to their minds seem to call up so much that is detestable, suggest to our own only ideas of purity. Words seem to have lost their meaning, of late, when applied to the relations of the sexes.

Free love was of course a particular problem for Emma, given her involvement in the Hatch scandal, and (I believe) her lifelong concern that the allegations made against her by BF Hatch during her stint as a test medium would resurface (as indeed they did in Australia) and undermine her ability to earn her living. But it was not only free love that Emma could not embrace -- we'd have to add sex magick, Christianity, Darwinism, physics, socialism, Theosophy and quite a few other disciplines to the list to begin to approach completeness. Like many an autodidact, Emma wanted the right to pick and choose her conceptual toolset -- to take what she liked from a discourse, and leave behind what she found troubling, problematic or incomprehensible. That was problematic for ideologues of all stripes. And (more troubling for a would-be biographer) Emma wanted to reserve the right -- did reserve the right -- to dial the volume on her ideological positions up and down, depending on her audience: she wanted to be the anti-Christian radical reformer, and the pious Christian spiritualist, depending on her situation. That is the hallmark of the propagandist, but it makes for trouble when one is trying to sort out -- through the distortions of texts and time -- what Emma herself actually believed.

Spiritus Mundi

In The Banner of Light for 29 July 1876, Emma published an article in her "Spiritual Gifts" series (#11, to be precise), called "Spiritus Mundi and Impressional Mediums".

In his The Way, The Truth and The Life - A Hand Book of Christian Theosophy, Healing and Psychic Culture, A New Education Based on the Ideal and Method of the Christ (1888), John Hamlin Dewey published an edited version of that article.

The text is interesting, I think, because it appears to contain a description of the domestic spiritual exercises of a family remarkably similar to the "John Cavendish Dudley" family in Ghost Land V1 as well as what we know -- from more reliable sources -- to be the domestic spiritual arrangements of the Christian von Bunsen household. It's hard not to look that phrase -- spiritus mundi -- and avoid recalling how implicated the notion of the World Soul is in the loosely-framed body of speculation we think of as Rosicrucianism and alchemy.

Her Manner Of Communicating I Had Never Seen Before

Samuel Watson, in his The Religion of Spiritualism: Its Phenomena and Philosophy (1889), describes sitting with Miss Emma Hardinge, the test medium, in New York in 1856:

Here I met Miss Emma Hardinge, now Mrs. Britten. She had but recently come over from England. Quite a number of Memphians went together to see her. She took us one at a time, and gave each one some very satisfactory tests, as to our spirit friends who were with us. Her manner of communicating I had never seen before, nor I have I ever seen it since. Her hand was extended in the air, her forefinger pointing out, making the letters, she reading them to us. (pp. 43-4)

Emma's puff for Watson's book reads:

Dear Friend: When I want to forget the transcendental moonshine and irrational radicalism with which our noble cause is too often ruined, I can find no better method than by taking up some of your well-written, rational and always pure-minded pages. You may be sure, therefore, that I highly appreciate, as I sincerely thank you, (sic) for your best (sic) valuable contribution to our Spiritual literature. (p. 416)

Inspirational Song

Origin unknown. Not particularly flattering, I think. Included in D. M. Bennet's The Truth Seeker Collection of Forms, Hymns and Recitations. Original And Selected. For the Use Of Liberals. (1877).

Emma, Performing (Yet Again)

Georgiana Houghton, in her Evenings at Home In Spiritual Seance, leaves us a nice record of Emma performing during late 1868 and early 1869:

On the 20th of November, 1868, a new work was started which I believe did an immense amount of good. It consisted of a series of weekly conferences at Lawson's Rooms in Gower Street, and were (sic) instituted by the liberality of Mr. Luxmoore, who defrayed the entire cost of the first series...The admission to those Monday conferences was absolutely free, so that there was a large concourse of spiritualists, and those who term themselves inquirers....Mrs. Emma Hardinge was the real soul of those meetings, which were carried on upon an excellent system. She began by giving a discourse (inspirationally) which was not to exceed 20 minutes; the subject for which had been decided beforehand, either by a committee or the audience, and was stated on the previous Monday, so that any one might make due preparation should they wish to speak upon it. When she had finished, any one in the assembly was at liberty to give their opinion and follow out the question, which had to be strictly adhered to, and the speaker could either speak from his own place, or come forward to the platform; but the latter plan was much the more desirable, as they could better be heard in all parts of that large room. The several speakers were limited to ten minutes of talk, but they might have a few minutes grace if they really had anything of interest to say. Even the opponents were welcome, and were permitted to give their views, or propound their questions as freely as they would; and I must say that there were very rarely any objectionable word, for even the most antagonistic felt that we spiritualists were mostly heart-whole and sincere in our belief, so that it had no right to be treated with scorn or ribaldry....At the close of the discussion, Mrs. Harding, in the most masterly manner, summed up all that had been said by the various speakers, giving any information that might be needed, unless some intervening speaker might have already done so, but even then clinching it with her own words, and vanquishing with powerful arguments whatever might have come from the adverse side. Mr Luxmoore was an admirable chairman, who knew how to keep a judicious silence, and not to interfere with Mrs. Hardinge's prerogative of answering the various interlocutors...."

What struck me, as I read this, was the extent to which Emma, in that phase of her career from say 1856 until 1881, was always under the benevolent gaze of a chairman -- a powerful, (and usually male) Spiritualist who cleared a space for her performances. Whether we think of the various figures in the New York circle at the start of her career, of Benjamin Coleman, of the Melbourne and Sydney spiritualists, of Robert Stout in New Zealand, or of the circle around the Luxmoores -- the pattern repeats for that period of her career. The names of some of these people -- for example, the people who made the area around Boston and Philadelphia and New Philadelphia, Ohio such strange attractors for Emma -- are probably lost to us forever, but I think this pattern is an essential part of the first phase of her career: the wandering propagandist, passed from circle to circle in the emerging network of the International Spiritualist movement. By contrast, after the period of....what to call it? instability from 1881 to 1884 or 1885, Emma both attempted -- with what success, we can argue about -- to operate without this kind of air cover.

May 15, 1864

We know -- from various references in her works as well as from contemporary newspaper reports -- that Emma was involved, during her first major US tour in 1863 and 1864, in raising money for sanitary hospitals by giving trance and non-trance lectures.

Turns out that a young midwestern journalist, one Samuel Clemens, was involved in raising money for the so-called Sanitary Fund. And he and Emma ran into one another, in Virginia City in the Nevada Territory, in May of 1864. Writing to relatives at home, Clemens said:

Virginia (City) is only a small town, about three times as large as Hannibal (Missouri). Silver City and Dayton are mere villages -- but you ought to see them roll out the twenty dollar pieces when their blood is up. It makes no difference what the object is, if you just get them stirred up once they are bound to respond. I think they like that Sanitary Fund because it affords them such a bully opportunity of giving away their money....[We] got the ladies of Gold Hill to give a ball, and a silver brick worth $3,000 was the result, but that wouldn't go far, you know. Then we got up a meeting in Virginia (City), and only got $1,500 or $1,800, and that made us sick. We tried it again, and almost concluded to disband the audience without trying to do anything -- but we went on, kept it up all the afternoon, and raised $3,500, and had about concluded it was no use to try to get up a sanitary excitement.

The second gathering Clemens mentions was held in the Virginia City Opera House, on May 15, 1864. Emma, who was in Virginia City to give one of her standing non-trance lectures, "Spiritualism and Kindred Sciences," was apparently imposed upon to speak -- about what, we do not know -- as part of the fund-raising effort. The meeting was covered in the Virginia City Union for May 17.

Transmission, or Percolation

A percolation network, if I understand the math of it all correctly, is a network assembled haphazardly -- that is, by chance -- that consists of links that either transmit, or do not transmit, in unpredictable ways. Unlike a real network, where assembly is purposive, and a link that does not transmit (or does not transmit reliably) is replaced with an identical link that does transmit reliably, a percolation network produces unexpected -- but not necessarily random -- behavior when inputs are applied.

In other words, a percolation network functions much like real social networks function: a meme inserted into any given location in a social network gets transmitted in unexpected -- but not necessarily random -- ways. A percolation network is not on or off, functioning or not-functioning. It is...both. I do respond when someone sends me a "pass it on" email about the latest right-wing Xian social outrage, but I do not respond when someone sends me a "pass it on" Amber alert text message. As a link (more properly, a node with links), I make uninspectable decisions about whether, when and how to act, as part of the network. Over long-ish periods of time, I suppose an observer could detect the heuristics by which I, as an node, switch or don't switch, propagate or not, garble, summarize or pass through without change the packets with which I am inundated. Or not, if in fact I am a random node in the network.

The reality of social percolation is the bane of the conspiracy theorist's existence.

Underneath every conspiracy theory is a perfectly-propagating transmission network, and all that is required to "prove" a conspiracy is to establish the reality of a specific social network: if a network exists, it must ipso facto transmit perfectly. That assumption is always at the beating heart of any conspiracy theory: if a network exists, it works perfectly (whether it transmits information, or disinformation).

(Bear with me - I am in fact headed somewhere.)

As I write this, I am looking at three major milestones in the history of the conspiracy theory as a narrative: Elizabeth Dilling's The Red Network: A Who's Who and Handbook of Radicalism for Patriots (1935), George Seldes' 1000 Americans (1947), and Alan Stang's scurrilous but profoundly influential It's Very Simple: The True Story Of Civil Rights (1965). (One might also be led -- given the general subject area of this blog -- to think of Jim Marrs' wacky and thoroughly enjoyable Rule By Secrecy, which if memory serves, claims among other whacky things that Hitler was, at some level or in some form, a Theosophist.)

The first -- a product of the proto-fascist movement in the United States prior to the second world war -- is still used as a source by right-of-center historians and propagandists; the second is a left-wing monument in the shadow of which most of the corporatist-state conspiracies of the left wing in the US operate to this day, and the last is one of the most effective propaganda vehicles of the John Birch Society, in its heyday. Conspiracy narratives cross conventional political categories.

In each of these texts, you can find numerous examples of the "if a network exists, it is a perfect transmission vehicle" fallacy. Like, say, this one, from Stang (where the fallacy is transparent because Stang's objective is so rhetorical):

So the Rev. Fred Shuttleworth and the Rev. Dr. (Martin Luther) King went about improving Montgomery. And in this they were joined by Bayard Rustin....Dr. King thinks very highly of Mr. Rustin. He describes him as a "brilliant, efficient and dedicated organizer..."...So the three of them went ahead and improved Montgomery. After they had improved Montgomery for more than a year, they held a meeting in Atlanta, in March of 1957, at which they formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The meeting probably couldn't have been called in February (of 1957) because Mr. Rustin, Dr. King's "secretary", was then attending the sixteenth national convention of the Communist Party.

If we decline to engage with the assertions in the text and look instead at the model of the network that underlies it, I think my point becomes clear: Bayard Rustin transparently and without error, omission, or selection, transmitted all that is capital-c communism from the (American) Communist Party to the Southern Leadership Conference. The two are identical: one and the same. Perfect transmission (and, since this is a Birch tract, perfect pollution).

If one looks, one can find models (metaphors, really) of this sort -- transmission, rather than percolation -- underpinning all conspiracy theories, either at critical junctures in their narratives, or throughout the narratives.

But real, social life works differently, as I said -- via percolation and not transmission per se.

So, when we're dealing with large scale social phenomena, like spiritualism or occultism, that include self-identified propagandists, like Emma (propaganda is the production of memes for percolation, after all), and narratives about hidden transmission mechanisms (which is after all the definition of the occult), we have to remind ourselves that social networks do not transmit; they percolate.

And one of the decidedly unsatisfactory things, from my perspective, about the available historical material on the Occult revival in the second half of the 19th century is its twin reliance on repetition of conspiracy narratives of one sort or another coupled with the lack of any identified percolation network through which events and ideas in say India (or more to my immediate concerns, Malta) could have percolated up in New York, or Manchester, or Glasgow. Instead, we seem to rely on the most basic of transmission models: Emma knew Hay Nisbet; Hay Nisbet published Peter Davidson; Emma is connected to the HBofL. Such transmission models often do explain things in the small (in this example, for instance); but they don't explain (for example) the ferociously effective, widespread and distorted percolation of all memes Freemasonic and Rosicrucian after, say, 1860.

Tonight, however, Paul Johnson noted something in correspondence that just smacked me in the face with its rightness: there is an astonishing set of open boundaries (shared nodes) between various occult groups and the British diplomatic corps specifically, and diplomacy more generally, during the entire period we might classify as the Occult Revival period.

Miles to go before anyone sleeps, but I thought it worth putting on record that Paul may have just identified a primary, if not the dominant, percolation network for occult memes -- at least within a certain strata of the culture -- in the second half of the nineteenth century.