Abisha S. Hudson

One of the likely sources for the material on sex magic in Art Magic is a small booklet -- 70 pages in duodecimo -- by one Sha Rocco, called The Masculine Cross and Ancient Sex Worship, published in 1874 (that is, a year or more prior to the time during which AM was being assembled), in New York, by Asa K. Butts and Company, at that time operating out of their offices on Dey Street in Manhattan.

The text was available in mid-1874, and was being advertised nationwide in periodicals associated with Spiritualist, occultist and freethinker communities, as evidenced by this advertisement from June of 1874 in Common Sense, the California weekly.

The text became a staple of occult reprint libraries, more or less continuously in print through the 1920s, and a 1904 edition can be found in Google Books' digestive tract.

An anonymous librarian, in the version in Google Books -- as well as other folks -- associates "Sha Rocco" with one Abisha S. Hudson.

But here the story takes a bizarre twist -- one that could only happen in an age where amateur scholars equipped with powerful publishing technology treat the Internet like a peer-reviewed encyclopedia, rather than the rumor, speculation and disinformation mill it so often is.

In several places on the Internet, we're told that "Abisha S. Hudson" is actually a pseudonym for Hargrave Jennings.

Imagine my disappointment, on reading this, that TAOAM had -- once again -- relied on Hargrave Jennings without attribution. But when I began reading the 1909 edition of The Masculine Cross it became immediately apparent, on stylistic grounds alone, that the work could not have been written by Hargrave Jennings unless our man Hargrave got a significant linguistic deep-structure brain transplant. Hudson's prose is straightforward: his sentences are clean, simple and constructed of common English words with little or no use of tortured dependent clauses. In short, Hudson's writing is nothing like Jennings' writing (which is highly idiosyncratic, complex, and either beautiful or crapulent, depending on one's aesthetic).

Dig, dig, dig a bit, and I uncover the (nicely stated and bibliographically precise) root of the "Hudson is Jennings" myth. Because the page-maker did not see fit to give me anchors to the relevant section, I'll quote it here:

Advertisements and text in [the Nature Worship and Mystical Series] make it clear that the entire series is the work of one person. Most bibliographers attribute all nine volumes to Hargrave Jennings (q.v.), and i concur with this. The one bibliographer who believed othewrwise is Gershon Legman. He stated that "Ophiolatreia," the second volume in the set, was written by Abisha S. Hudson. Legman did not publish this theory, merely noting it on a piece of paper he slipped into his personal copy of the book in question. However, Legman's stature being what it is, his little note has entered several bibliographical databases and been published in numerous bookdealers' catalogues.

To understand why Legman reached this conclusion, it is necessary to know that the name Sha Rocco (q.v.) appears as the author of two books similar to those listed above, namely "The Masculine Cross" and "Sexual Mythology," and that Sha Rocco -- an obvious pseudonym -- is said by some bibliographers to have been the pen-name of one Abisha S. Hudson. However, no biographical data on Abisha S. Hudson has ever come to light, and it is highly likely that this was yet another pseudonym for the author of "The Masculine Cross."

Legman probably drew the conclusion that "Ophiolatreia" was written by Rocco/Hudson because (1) the writing style is the same, (2) in one edition of "Phallism" there is an advertisement for a "cream vellum binding" edition of Sha Rocco's "The Masculine Cross" which places it before "Phallism," indicating its earlier publication date, and (3) circa 1890 edition of "The Masculine Cross" is a reprint of the 1874 Sha Rocco book bound to match the "Nature Worship and Mystical Series" titles [making it #0 in the series].

No biographical data in Abisha S. Hudson?

Not the case.

First, to set the bibliographical record straight, this is not the only work published by Sha Rocco -- there are others, dealing with obscure topics, listed by Worldcat, including Abisha S. Hudson's doctoral thesis from his days at the Albany Medical College. Some of the Worldcat titles appeared after his death, and from non-US publishers, indicating (perhaps) two Sha Roccos, or (perhaps) a reprinting of Hudson's periodical work. The common;y-referenced titles published by Kessinger we have to ignore, bibliographically, as it's pretty clear those shameless creeps are doing what they often do: parting out one text and giving it different (fake) titles, to drive up their unit sales.

Now, as to Abisha S. Hudson the real historical figure and author of The Masculine Cross, here's what we know about him:

• he was born 1 May of 1819 in New York state, or Massachusetts, to Amos Hudson and Mary Fisk Hudson, the sixth of nine children
• he attended the Medical College of Albany -- his preceptor was Dr. H. Murdoch of Pulaski, NY, he was given 28 months credit for time served (presumably with Pulaski), and he was graduated with an MD after 8 months of attendance, in 1846, having written a dissertation on vision
• he participated in the founding of the Keokuk (Iowa) Medical College in 1853 (it granted degrees until 1899)
• in 1855, he married one Rose Elliott (b. 1826), and they had several children, including Harry (b. c. 1859) and May (b. c. 1861)
• he served briefly as a surgeon in the US Army's 34th Infantry division, from October 29 of 1861, until he resigned in March of 1862
• by the 1880s he was apparently maintaining a residence in the Midwest and in the San Francisco Bay area, where he and his family (including his niece Mary Parks who was the co-executor of his will) were caught in the 1880 census
• he died, either in San Francisco (his will was probated in California, and the ensuing court case was a landmark in community property law) or at Mt. Vernon, Ohio, on October 8, 1904, at the age of 86, after choking on a fig.

So, once again, just for the search engines: Sha Rocco is Abisha S. Hudson; Abisha S. Hudson is not, in any way shape or form, a pseudonym for Hargrave Jennings.

Now, why do I give a crap? Well, there's that whole setting-the-record-straight thing, but, more to my parochial concerns, Hudson is the source of the otherwise weirdly a-scholarly discussion of the Nileometer in Art Magic, and in particular the (incorrect) linking of nilometers with the Christian cross.

The Soul's Question

Another recovered EHB lecture: "The Soul's Question - Whither Am I Bound?" from The Spiritual Magazine for December of 1870, where it appears between an essay on Greatrakes by Thomas Shorter (writing as Thomas Brevoir) and a long extract from a "Baron de Bunsen" work with which I am not familiar.

I am working on the annotated version of Art Magic at present, and this essay - published five years prior to AM and delivered earlier than that - indicates pretty clearly that EHB was already familiar with, and promoting, the cosmogony that TAOAM promotes in Section II of Art Magic. Of particular note is EHB's emphasis on the condition of the group of souls she refers to in this essay as "the dwellers on the threshold" -- those that TAOAM refers to as "the souls of evil or unprogressed men". This notion of a purgatory -- for that is surely what it is -- will come to be problematic for Spiritualists, once its opponents point out the possibility -- or probability -- that spirit communication is confined to communication with these dwellers on the threshold, progressed souls having moved on to a higher sphere, as it were.

A Fragment Of Modern Scripture

Another recovered EHB piece, this one entitled A Fragment of Modern Scripture and dating from the same period as her Six Lectures, is from Frances Brown's Christmas Annual of 1860, courtesy of Google Books and the sharp eyes of a reader (thanks, Pat).

As Pat points out, what's interesting about this piece is that it appears in a periodical edited by Frances Brown -- aka Mrs. HFM Brown -- a noted midwestern Spiritualist who was also decidedly in the "free love" camp -- from the middle 1860s onward, anyway.

In the text of this short piece, Emma recounts a lecture she gave in February of 1862, in Cleveland, on Mary Magdalene (boy, what I wouldn't give for a transcript of that), to benefit "the funds of an Institutional Farm, endeavoring to found (sic) for the reclamation, refuge and instruction of fallen women," at which Mrs. H. F. M Brown apparently held the chair -- Emma refers to her as "my kind 'High Priestess'".

The nexus -- Emma, free love, her home of outcast women -- is an important one. Emma's issues with sex and sexuality, her desire to found a philanthrophic organization to rehabilitate outcast women, her strident anti-free love rhetoric -- we have to see in this confluence the ugly scab covering Emma's core psychic wound.

I can't say much about it now -- I hardly understand it myself, particularly given Emma's oblique admissions, at various points in her career, that she herself had 'fallen' in her youth, and her posthumous confession to having been a kept woman -- but there is something relevant in the fact that she first claims (with reason, as we know from other sources) a relationship with Charles Dickens in The Two Worlds only in the late 1880s, thirty years after the time during which she worked with, and corresponded with, Dickens.

Dickens spent much time in the late 1840s and 1850s working on just such a philanthropic project: Urania Cottage. And he ceased his involvement with Urania Cottage only after his own highly irregular marriage arrangements fell apart, publicly, in 1862.

The Boston Fire of 1872

The roots of Art Magic are to be found in Emma's life, in Boston, in the early 1870s, in The Western Star, her short-lived periodical of that period, and in her time there as a galvanic doctor.

As such, the Boston Fire of 1872 looms large, particularly as we have claims from both Emma (indirect, opaque) and Robert Fryar that Emma and William suffered significant property loss in the Boston Fire -- the lost material including, tantalizingly, Fryar's material on skrying, which he had apparently loaned Emma for inclusion in The Western Star.

At the time of the fire, Emma and William were living at 251 Washington Street (B), and the offices of The Western Star were a block or so away, around a corner, at 25 Bromfield Street (A) ( and how she must have loved that -- her mother's maiden name, nearly).

View Larger Map

The fire was extensive, and devastating.

Fortunately, a contemporary map-maker left us a rendition of downtown Boston at the time, showing the extent of the fire -- and more importantly, its boundaries -- and some enterprising souls have put that famous "Burnt District" map online, allowing us to see that, while Emma's home at 251 Washington (and the Banner of Light offices a bit away at 158 Washington, were at the edge of the fire, the offices of teh Western Star were a further block-and-a-half beyond the perimeter of the fire's damage.

A contemporary account of the fire-fighting in Emma's district -- from Conwell's History of the Great Fire in Boston -- is instructive (though it will tax the reader who's not also looking at a map):

As the conflagration swept onward, crossing street after street in its march, it was decided to blow up all the buildings on Milk Street on the south side from Devonshire Street, to and through Morton Place, as many of the buildings in this locality were of a very combustible nature, and would endanger the entire northern section of the city. This was between twelve and one o'clock on Sunday morning : but a sufficient quantity of powder could not be obtained in this city at that time ; and Alderman Jenks despatched a police-officer to the Navy Yard with a request to Commodore Parrott to furnish a quantity of that article. With commendable promptness, the commodore ordered five one-hundred-pound kegs of powder to be placed in a hack ; and the officer soon reported back, when the blowing-up of buildings on Washington, Devonshire, and Water Streets, was commenced. To make the corner of Milk and Washington Streets the objective point in the ravages of the fire northward, every effort was made, and fortunately proved successful. Then, to stop its crossing State Street, and sweeping the section of the city Iying beyond that point, a number of buildings were mined on the south side of that street and on Devonshire Street, between Water and State Streets ; but, before these extreme measures were required, the dreaded element was under control, and all further danger avoided.

The corner of Milk and Washington was a block from Emma's house, and two blocks from the offices of The Western Star but both were outside the perimeter, according to this account. The damage that The Banner of Light sustained - reported in numerous venues -- may well have been to its printing operation, rather than to its editorial offices, which were yet farther up Washington Street, on the fire's boundary line.

(larger version)

Lightning, Making Rain

One thing Emma -- the speaker of the Six Lectures in 1860 -- and TAOAM had in common was their (completely mistaken) belief that rain was produced by lightning.

I am not sure how I am going to determine whether that idea was prevalent or not, but it's interesting.

More interesting is the feeling of rehearsal one gets reading Six Lectures and Art Magic back-to-back or in parallel -- particularly the first lecture in Six Lectures.

The Economics of Recovering Spiritualist Journals

Now that the costs are all in, the recovery and translation of The Two Worlds for 5.3 years of its run-life is as follows:

• per-year microfilm copy costs: $125 (microfilm creation, for one year, $300)
• per-year film-to-single-page PDF conversion: $95.
• per-year PDF aggregation, cropping and indexing costs: $50
• per-year hosting costs: $5

So, recovering a single year of a 16-page weekly newspaper costs, roughly, $270 for 830-odd pages (perhaps 900 when you include special numbers, inserts and yearly indices), or (using the 900 page number) $.30 USD per page of the run.

Your mileage may vary, as the source of the film I used is notoriously expensive.

I would strongly recommend that anyone who decides they want to do this for their favorite Spiritualist publications:

• Check with me -- I am going to do others, and there's no sense in duplicating cost and effort.
• Give your film-to-PDF work to Spectrum Information Services, which (a) has equipment you'll want used (like skew correction on film images), (b) understands curatorial requirements and (c) bends over backwards to get it right for you. I can't say enough about what a great job SIS did on the film conversion.

If you have the financial wherewithal, you can do this entire process with a phone and a keyboard, and a couple trips to the post office. And, given the rate at which Spiritualist materials are being de-accessioned by libraries, it's critical in my opinion that people who know-and-care start taking these conversions into their own hands.

I am toying with the idea of building a Spiritualist Periodical Archive, so people don't have to manage their own web sites, so we get some leverage with Google in terms of search engine optimization, and so we can start maintaining central indices of people, events, places, etc. -- if that interests you, let me know.

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.

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.

John Abraham Heraud

Section VIII of Art Magic, the "Man the Microcosm of the Universe" section, is a particularly interesting part of that text, in my view. It is rife with traces of Emma -- long cribbed quotations (from Hargrave Jennings) strung together scissors-and-paste fashion, barely concealed borrowings from Eliphas Levi (the "attraction is not a force" theme, among other bits), scientific terminology borrowed and redeployed somewhat awkwardly, polemic addresses directly to the reader. And, intermingled, some not-so-Emma features, including: comma splices.

I was struck -- I don't know why -- by the phrase "ancient Theosophists," used just after the longish Hargrave Jennings borrowing, and decided to look to see how frequently that phrase occurred in the document base for the first half of the nineteenth century, in English.

Prior to 1870, the phrase "ancient Theosophists" isn't used much in printed material, if the Google Books sample is at all representative.

The texts in which the phrase is used are instructive, and include (among a half-dozen texts):

• "Alchemy, by an Alchemist", in Fraser's Magazine for 1839
• "Sketches of Theosophy and Freemasonry" in The Monthly Magazine for 1840.
• J. C. Colquhoun's An History of Magic, Witchcraft and Animal Magnetism, and Robert Mackay's The Progress of the Intellect, as Exemplified in the Religious Development of the Greeks and Hebrews, both from 1851

What's curiously suggestive about the periodical pieces, in addition to their thematic affinities for the material in Art Magic is that they are likely both the product of John Abraham Heraud, a literary jobber connected with Emma in a number of diaphanous ways. Heraud was the editor of The Monthly Magazine at the time the article on Freemasonry and Theosophy was published, having been the editor of Fraser's from 1831-33, and a contributor (signed and unsigned) thereafter -- including a longish piece on Paracelsus in 1835.

Heraud was an auto-didact; a mystical poet ("a worshipper of the vast, the remote and the terrible") who wrote among other things a verse drama linking (as texts associated with Emma would do) meso-american culture with Thebes; a drama critic associated with the Haymarket and Adelphi in any number of ways; a playwright involved in the breaking of the theatre patents.

Heraud wrote on Swedenborg, Boehme, Agrippa -- the range of reference of the author of Art Magic, really.

He was an intimate of Phelps, Wallack, Webster, Blanchard and others who touched Emma's life as an actress directly -- Heraud may well have been in the audience when Emma debuted at Sadler's Wells.

And Heraud was an accomplished mesmerist and friend of Martineau, Braid, Elliotson and Dupotet, who conducted his own mesmeric experiments, including the control of young female lucides.

I could play pile-on at this point, with gusto. Can you say "friend (and neighbor) of James Pierrepont Greaves", "friend of Francis Foster Barham, progenitor of the Al religion"? Really, deeply enmeshed in the whole Aesthetic Institution milieu -- that peculiar mix of reformism and occultism characteristic of....oh, I don't know... Emma Hardinge Britten.

A short biographical sketch, by his daughter, exists, but it is more her life than his.

Hargrave Jennings

He is the single most-often quoted source in Art Magic. But he is not named, and nearly every quotation from his The Rosicrucians is mis-quoted in some fashion...and in many instances the sense of the passages are changed, slightly or otherwise. The misquotations could imply intent. Or they could suggest the transcription of material, from notes, by an editor who did not have the text to hand -- or perhaps could not even recognize the source.

Ernest Reinhold in the Court Gazette

Report from our London researcher: the Court Gazette for the period of interest (1838-1842) did not publish indices, most of the articles are not by-lined, and there is no evidence of any work by "Ernest Reinhold" in its pages.

More as it happens....

W. E. Coleman, J. J. Morse, and EHB

One of the interesting things about chasing Emma has been the development, on my part, of a certain protective attitude about Emma. I can call her veracity or motives into question if I like, but others cannot....and I see slights against her where perhaps there are none.

With that said, I've taken a detour into the life and work of James Johnson Morse, a younger contemporary and colleague of EHB's, who will take over the editorship of The Two Worlds in the early part of the twentieth century. J. J. Morse is perhaps more neglected than EHB -- it's difficult to find most of his primary works in print or online, his addresses have not been collected, and no one's bothered, as of yet, to put together even a basic chronology of his life. Two of his works -- Leaves from My Life and Practical Occultism -- have made it into the ever-loving maw of Google Books (thankfully), and this snippet, from William Emmette Coleman's introduction to Practical Occultism, seems to me aimed directly at EHB:

One of the more conspicuous of these perversions -- especially during the last decade (the 1880s) -- has been the growing tendency, on the part of a portion of the adherents of the Spiritual Philosophy, to introduce into that philosophy sundry elements pertaining to the mysticism of ancient and modern times. Certain of the inspirational speakers, and others among the public workers for Spiritualism, together with many of its followers in the private walks of life, have been misled, to a greater or less degree, by the current idealisms, transcendentalisms, and fanciful conceits, born of crude speculations and nurtured by spurious philosophies and pseudo-science. Sound philosophy and genuine science, while in accord with the demonstrated truths of Modern Spiritualism, have neither lot nor part in any of the mutually-antagonistic and ever-conflicting forms of mysticism with which the world has been and still is cursed; including all those phases thereof with which many have sought to encumber Spiritualism. A rational, natural, healthy, progressive, scientific Spiritualism, at one with the spirit of the age, with the trend of the most advanced modern thought, must be wholly free from the degrading and soul-stultifying theses and dogmas of the mysticisms of the day; and until everything of the latter character be eliminated from the spiritual movement, it can never hope to obtain that respect and confidence of the intelligent, thoughtful men and women of our planet to which it will be justly entitled when its complete dissociation from its present perverting encumbrances becomes an accomplished fact.

As I have said before, the 1870s and 1880s are not only the boundary marker for the Occult Renaissance, but are also the decades in which Modern Spiritualism begins its (inevitable) institutitionalization, and the beginning of the "commercialization of the occult" that produced, ultimately, the New Age movement and the supermarket-of-the-spiritual that we find on the shelves of Barnes and Noble today.

Coleman's critique ought to be seen in that context,as of that moment; indeed, he demands it.

More as a note to one's self than anything else -- in the multi-party pitched battle between the scientific establishment, the guardians of cultural norms, the representatives of orthodox religion, Modern Spiritualist, and Theosophy -- who chose the wiser transformational strategy: EHB or HPB? Blavatsky's decision to break from the trappings, methods and difficulties (practical and otherwise) of Modern Spiritualism, EHB's decision to underpin the modern Awakening with (idiosyncratically selected) elements of the western Occult tradition - which strategy was more productive? The answer is, unfortunately, plain. Emma's choices forced her, increasingly, into a narrow tributary of the modern occult, and her work lives on today -- and palely, at that -- only in partial form: in her founder's status among contemporary Spiritualists, in her "historical" works (I am always amused by the uncritical way in which her work is used by orthodox historians as, itself, history rather than propaganda) and in the Church of Light. She escaped, for sure, the sort of silence in which J. J. Morse is enveloped today. But that is not much of a victory.

January 5, 1866

Miss Emma Hardinge, (secular) extemporaneous speaker. From The Times of London for January 5, 1866.

Miss Harding In Booth's Ugolino

An 1856 publication of Junius Brutus Booth's play Ugolino in French's Standard Drama series notes the cast of the play at the time it was performed at the Old Briadway Theatre in NY. Playing Diana de Lascours, one Miss Harding.

Cannot at this point verify that it's our Miss Harding we're talking about.

E. Reinhold, 1850

The search of Ernest Reinhold continues.

From The Musical World of 2 February 1850, this clue:

EHB and Adah Isaacs Menken

Adah Isaacs Menken was larger than life during hers, which was brief. She is almost certainly the original for Irene Adler in the Sherlock Holmes story -- Holmes referring to her, throughout the Canon, as "The Woman".

Menken was also -- depending on who one believes -- Swinburne's only female lover, or merely his close friend and versifying competitor.

Among spiritualists -- or historians of spiritualism anyway -- Menken is known as one of Daniel Dunglas Home's controls: a fairly risky one for him to channel, I'd have thought, even in the company of the Adare and Lindsay.

Menken and EHB met in California in late 1863 or 1864; Emma conducted a test seance for Menken, which apparently had a profound effect on Menken, who the next day sent Emma a hand-written inscribed copy of one of the poems that would later grace Menken's Swinburnian collection Infelicia: "Dreams of Beauty".

The autograph poem was in the collection of Frederick J. French for some years, apparently, and was auctioned around the turn of the century -- it now seems to have disappeared.

Menken was aggressively bi-sexual; like Emma, an actress of some experience; already through two or three husbands by the time she met Emma. I am really intrigued by their meeting.

And herewith, the Menken poem "Dreams of Beauty", which may well have be inspired by Emma herself -- either as a medium, or as a woman. The poem itself is, I think, ambivalent on that score.

Miss Emma Harding In The Puppet-Show

The Puppet-Show was an irreverent weekly commentator on politics and the theatre, published by the Vizitelly Brothers, which had a relatively short run in the late 1840s.

How nice to come across, therein, this snippet, in a review of an extravaganza called The Devil's Violin, which was paired with (or a had segment called) The Revolt of the Flowers at the Adelphi in August of 1849.

In the scene where the flowers, with Miss Emma Harding at their head, as the rose, revolt against the gardener, who comes to cut them for a bouquet, Mr. Wright, who plays the horticultural individual in question, was irresistably comic. A propos de bottes (that is, "as an aside"), if the nursery gardens around the metropolis produced such lovely plants as those which Miss Emma Harding heads, we think we may venture to give it as our opinion that young men would become remarkably fond of gardening.

The Marble Heart

Having the good fortune to have found someone willing to spend hours in the British Library on my behalf, reading through old periodicals (thanks, Rosalie), I am going over some old ground -- Miss Emma Harding, 1834-1856.

More than twenty years spent, from the death of her father, until her conversion to Spiritualism, in the theatre -- that's a quarter of her life.

As readers will know, EHB explains the year's hiatus between her last role at the Adelphi (in Waiting for an Omnibus..., a farce) in July of 1854, and her decision to join the Wallack Company's Shakespeare-in-Paris boondoggle in the summer of 1855 as a year during which she was the kept mistress of the "baffled sensualist".

In looking at her final work at the Adelphi, I realize something significant happened at the Adelphi in mid-1854: Benjamin Webster assumes management of the theatre, in April of 1854. And less than a month after he assumes management, he's putting on a new Charles Selby adaptation, The Marble Heart (Emma had acted in several Selby pieces already), casting Emma in the piece (as Mariette), and acting in it himself (as Volage).

Change in management....hmmm. Webster....hmmm. Friend of Charles Dickens....hmmm.

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.

Pipgen, Part Two

Have a look at the cover of the 1897 edition of Ghost Land: the so-called "Progressive Thinker" edition.

Based on what we've learned about the significance of the pigpen cipher on the cover of the first edition of Ghost Land, it is interesting to note that the cipher on the cover of the second edition is different.

For the curious -- the cipher is a corruption, not a new, different, Freemasonic mnemonic. It reads HQWSSQKS -- the symbol for T having been reproduced incorrectly as the symbol for Q on the 1897 cover.

This sheds more light on the bibliographical issues associated with the 1897 edition, which I've written about already. I'd say that this garble on the cover of the 1897 version can mean only one of two things: either (a) Emma was only peripherally involved in the production of the 1897 edition (as the licensee of the text, with no editorial oversight, or perhaps not even involved) or (b) the significance of the cipher was lost on Emma, and therefore the corruption went undetected in her pre-print review of the book.

And From Masonry, A Return To The Orphic Circle

Two bits of evidence for the Circle, and its members: a snippet from Hockley's testimony before the Dialectical Society Commission, clearly linking Hockley, Richard Francis Burton and Philip Henry Stanhope in a skrying circle, and Bulwer Lytton's memorandum on the practice of geomancy.

I am struck by Hockley's matter-of-fact tone in his testimony, and struck more strongly by the extent to which Bulwer Lytton's memorandum gives the lie to his testimony before that committee -- which was, in essence, that he was a scientist, investigating but reserving judgment. This memorandum is clearly that of an experienced practitioner.

Emma Hardinge Britten, Royal Arch Mason

A reader goaded me into this, and I don't know quite what -- if anything -- it actually means. And for all I know, I may be the last person on the planet to have cotton'd on to it.

Folks may have noticed that the front covesr of both the US and UK first editions of Ghost Land feature the image of a rosy cross, and an encrypted text string.

The cipher used on the cover is a pigpen cipher, so named for its superficial similarity to the layout of pigpens as seen from above.

There are various versions of the pigpen cipher, some secular and some used by the Masons, and it was quite a popular cipher, apparently, during the Civil War.

There are several versions of this cipher associated with various branches of Masonry: a York Rite version, a version for teaching boards used in mainstream Masonry, and corrupted versions used as demonstrations and often labeled "freemasons' cipher". The variation has to do, for the most part, with the order of use of the structuring element (the crosshatches).

For example, here is the third degree talking board version:

And here is another version, associated with Royal Arch Masonry:

When you use the third degree talking board variant, the code on the cover of Ghost Land decodes to HPWOOPTO.

When you use the variant of the pigpen cipher favored by Royal Arch Masons, the sequence decodes to HTWSSTKS.

It was (and perhaps is) common, in the training of Masons of all stripes, to teach initiates key portions of the ritual and liturgy by means of mnemonics, which were frequently the initial letters of a phrase or sentence. People who've read a bit in Masonic literature will recognize this (somewhat annoying, for the lay reader) feature of Masonic texts. HPWOOPTO stands for...nothing at all that I've been able to locate. But HTWSSTKS stands for "Hiram, Tyrian, Widow's Son, Sendeth To King Solomon." It appears on Masonic ephemera associated with Royal Arch (RAC) Masonry, and is associated with what I understand is a coveted degree, that of the Mark Master Mason, a degree in Royal Arch Masonry, which is itself generally held to be the highest order of "traditional" Masonry.

So, was Emma a Freemason? Or was the author of Ghost Land -- that is, someone other than Emma -- a Freemason?

I'll leave aside the loaded question -- was Emma the author of Ghost Land? -- for the moment (though that moment is being forced to its crisis, as Eliot said in a different context), and just remark that the Mark Master Mason degree's ritual is characterized, as I understand it, by the Mason earning his or her right to a personal, identifying mark: to authorship, as it were. Ironic, then, that a sign clearly intended to indicate that the author is a Mark Master Mason would be put on the front cover of a text published anonymously.

Instead, I'll remark that there is evidence of the admission of women into Masonic Lodges dating back -- in Ireland at least -- to the 1700s, even though the standard practice was and is to shunt women off into parallel orders -- sort of a "little sister program" like that practiced by many college fraternities.

And I'll point out that, even if we accept Emma's story of the genesis of Ghost Land as hand-on-heart sworn testimony, that story still places the design of the published form of the "remains" out of which she made Ghost Land solely in the hands of its "editor": Emma herself.

And I'll close with this extended snippet, which I think sums up nicely what we might be dealing with here, noting that the date of the event in question is June of 1864, during Emma's first trip to California:

As the text indicates, the piece was originally published in the Banner of Light -- this particular recapitulation is from the Freemasons’ Magazine and Masonic Mirror of 4 March 1871, p. 168.

Emma Hardinge Britten, Mark Master Mason...

---

No, wait, let's pile on a bit. It's such fun. Compare to Modern American Spiritualism (p. 413): “Besides these interesting personages, Dr. Ferguson makes high and eulogistic mention of a lady well known in Memphis, Tennessee, Mrs. Winchester by name, a person of the highest social position, wealth, and standing, and, amongst other remarkable endowments, gifted with the power to give masonic signs, and go through all the degrees of masonry, in the presence of the most accomplished of the order, whose testimony to her ʻsupernatural knowledge of their craftʼ has often been rendered with generous candor.” Or p. 354: “Thus, at one of the circles, the spirit of a Mr. Owens, formerly the proprietor of a masonic hall, gave to some masons present, through an uninstructed woman, unmistakable masonic signs.” Or p. 558: “At another time a company of ladies, with one gentleman, from New York, called to witness this phase of manifestations. A line of characters appeared upon the arm of Mary (Comstock), which none of us could decipher, until the gentleman was asked if he could tell. He replied he could; that it was the name of a masonic brother who died twenty years before, given in the masonic alphabet.”

And, just for comparative purposes, you might have a look at the references to Masonry in Art Magic, whose author is uniformly dismissive of modern Masonry, comparing "ancient masonry, both speculative and operative" with "its degraded and imbecile descendant, modern masonry" (p.68).

Is it really likely that the author of Art Magic could hold such an opinion, and then, in his next text, advertise his standing in the "degraded and imbecile descendent" in such a (to Masons, obvious, I assume) fashion?

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.

Audience Response, 1864

Isabelle Saxon, on Emma's performance of her Reverend Thomas Starr King eulogy, delivered (at least) during her first trip to California, in 1864.:

I attended several spiritualist lectures in San Francisco (in 1864). Some, as the results plainly proved, were catch-penny affairs, -- the efforts of undoubted charlatans. I remember deriving pleasure from a lecture delivered by a lady, since deceased, a woman of considerable repute in America, and deservedly so, -- Mrs. Eliza Farnham, authoress of "Woman and her Era." She was handsome, dark-haired and dark-eyed, modestly attired in a dress of black watered silk, and read her lectures in a quiet, ladylike and unobtrusive manner. More striking, if not more solid, was the impression produced by a course of lectures delivered there by an English lady, Miss Emma Hardinge, a woman of genius, apparently between thirty and forty years of age, with clear intellectual grey eyes, pleasing expression of countenance and elegant manners. She is said to be the only rival of the noted Anna Dickenson in the art of feminine oratory. Well educated, with a good command of language, she drew crowded audiences to her Lectures on Spiritualism. Not the least of her attractions was her easy and graceful gesticulation. I was told she had been on the stage eight years, which would account for the elegance of her attitudes. Her style was logical, her language flowery. The funeral oration of the Rev. Starr King, pronounced by her, affected me much more than the eloquence of any speaker I ever heard. I was sorry to learn that Miss Hardinge, capable of the sternest efforts of reason as she undoubtedly would be thought, was contented to sink her own gifts of intellect and genius from nature at the feet of a power to whose influence alone she is contented to ascribe them. Her language was too palpable to be thus filmsily veiled, however, in the eyes of any but the ignorant or credulous. The strongest argument against spiritualism I have ever known was, to me, this merging of almost peerless and positive talent in a mystical ideal.

in her Five Years Within The Golden Gate (1868), where this description of Emma occurs, Saxon was hostile to spiritualism -- she writes that "it entered many families, not to bring peace, but a sword" (echoing the attacks of the spiritualism-is-free-love camp) and claiming that "spiritualism in America present(s) a frightful aggregate of ignorance, domestic unhappiness and discord".

And she was an Englishwoman -- Ida Emma Redding, actually -- who went to California with her husband Frederick Sutherland, an attorney, and who wrote Five Years... at the request of English friends, apparently originally as a series of letters home: a quite common method of rough-drafting a book in those days. She had relatives who had converted to Mormonism during the first wave of evangelical Mormonism in England in the 1840s, and was no stranger to outlandish (at the time) cosmogonies. She also apparently published a book -- perhaps on the US Civil War -- called An Englishwoman's View Of The War.

The names -- Eliza Farnham, Thomas Starr King, Anna Dickenson -- are meaningless to the non-specialist reader these days, but were names to conjure with in the 1860s: you can read a review of one of Dickenson's lectures here -- like Emma, Dickenson was pro-Lincoln, feminist and anti-slavery. Eliza Farnham and Thomas Starr King have marginally useful Wikipedia entries for the curious. I have not yet recovered a copy of Emma's eulogy on Starr King's death.

Isabelle Saxon, an Englishwoman watching an Englishwoman perform in 1864, encapsulates the central dilemma of Emma's public life -- trance speaker or self-possessed occultist -- as neatly as anyone could, I think. As a platform-standing advertisement for Modern Spiritualism, parsing Hebrew under the control of the spirits, Emma was potent evidence of the faith: in the eyes of some folk, anyway. But, in the eyes of a smart, well-traveled Englishwoman, herself proto-feminist if FIve Years... is anything to go by, she was a palpable disappointment: the intellect and the rhetorical force attributed to a sham.

It was a problem for Emma, as well, and one she never satisfactorily resolved, in public or I think in private.

(I note in passing that this might be our best dating for the transition from Miss Emma Harding to Miss Emma Hardinge -- early 1864, in California. Again - to be a pendantic bore -- I note: Miss Hardinge.)

And I had not bothered, until I read this, to wonder about the color of Emma's eyes. Shame on me, after all the anguish about her hair color...

E. W. Wallis, Quoting Emma

Perhaps when The Two Worlds is digitally recovered, we'll find the origin of this extended quote from Emma, by E. W. Wallis, in A Guide to Mediumship and Psychic Enfoldment (1903?) (available in a hermetically-sealed online version here:

By a party of eminent occultists who held strictly private -- or, I might say, secret -- circles for investigation, I was frequently invited, with other young persons, to become a subject for the magnetic operations of inquirers. In my own case, I was never rendered wholly unconscious by the will of the magnetisers, though nearly all the rest of the subjects they experimented with were made so. I believe now that the difference between the partial and total unconsciousness of the various subjects of these occult sciences corresponded to the different degrees of entrancement which we who are platform speakers experience. I realize that on the spiritual rostrum I am two distinct persons. I can go on speaking aloud, yet thinking of quite other matters, and when I can fix my mind on what I utter I have listened with a sense of strangeness, which brings conviction, to my mind, at least, that I am not the individual who originates the thoughts expressed, although they are undoubtedly shaped by the organism and linqual capabilities through which they are transmitted. From this state of what I may call waking trace, up to the somnambulic sleep in which the spirit's ideas are expressed automatically, I have observed many gradations, ranging, as above observed, from semi-consciousness to the deep somnabulic sleep. There is one striking difference, however, between the entrancement induced by human and spiritual magnetism. The former is much stronger, more direct, and, in general, may be considered as being a much coarser, or more material, element than the latter. Human magnetic control anniliates individuality, and even identity, for the time being, and substitutes the sensuous perception of the magnetizer in place of those of the subject. "A good magnetic subject" is helplessly in the power of the magnetizer, unless that subject passes away from the human to a spiritual control, when that of the human operator is at once lost. This was constantly my own case, and thus I, and others similarly influenced, have come to the conclusion that spiritual control is more subtle, finer and -- except in the case of obsession by evil spirits -- far purer. Mediums, when once they have become such, are scarcely ever susceptible again to human magnetism. To avoid such a possibility, I have always been strictly charged by spirit friends never to submit to be magnetized by human operators, and when preparing for the spiritual rostrum to wear silk, and avoid as much as possible conversation or contract with those around me.

There is a lot in this passage -- repetition, gesturing in the direction of the Orphic Circle, and quite a few finely-drawn distinctions: the sort that are demanded when one is conjuring with the elements of an entire cosmogony. That Emma remained partly conscious during the times she acted as a clairvoyante for the Orphic Circle is new information, as far as I am concerned, as is her observation that she was nearly unique in this regard among Orphic Circle subjects. That assertion -- if actually Emma's -- would tend to undercut several other public statements of Emma's, not least of which her assertion, in the Autobiography that she had, in effect, no understanding of the spirit world before her conversion in New York in 1856. Here, toward the end of her life, she is claiming -- pretty clearly, it seems to me -- that she in fact had spirit controls (in the late 1830s or early 1840s) who kept her from becoming, as a clairvoyante for the Orphic Circle, helpless and unconscious under the control of "the sensuous perceptions of the (human) magnetiser." Hmmmmm.....

I really need to get the bottom of Emma's beliefs about silk: did she think silk was a conductor, or an insulator?

The de Bunsens And Mesmerism

This choice bit, from Caroline Fox's journal for 1851:

The Bunsens have been deep in Mesmerism. The Chevalier's theory of the mesmeric power is, that it silences the sensuous and awakens the super-sensuous part of our nature ; a sort of faint shadow of Death, which does the same work thoroughly and for ever. George de Bunsen afterwards gave me some of his own mesmeric experiences ; he is a rigid reasoner and extorter of facts. I forget the three absolute laws which he has satisfactorily established, but here is an experience of his own: When he went to college and studied Greek history, he learnt that a book of Aristotle's on the politics of his own time was lost. He mused on this fact, and pined after the missing book, which would have shed such light on his studies. It became a perpetual haunting thought, and soon his air castle was the finding of this book. He would be for ever romancing on the subject, getting into a monastery, finding it amidst immense masses of dusty books and parchments, then making plans for circumventing the monks, rescuing the treasure, &c., &c. Just after this excitement had been at its maximum, he received a letter from a friend, telling that he had been consulting a clairvoyante about him, who had seen him groping amongst dusty parchments in the dark. It seems to have established a firm faith in his mind in the communication of spirit with spirit as the real one in mesmerism. His opposite class of facts was thus illustrated : When his father was with his King and our Queen at Stolzenfels, he wanted to know something about him, and accordingly mesmerised a clairvoyante, and sent her in spirit to the castle. "Do you see my father?" "No, he is not there." "Then go and look for him." At length she announced having found him sitting with an elderly lady. George de Bunsen could not conceive him anywhere but at Stolzenfels, till the thought struck him, he may have gone to Karlsruhe to see his sister ; so he asked, " It is a very neat, regular-looking town, is it not, and the houses new ? " and asked particulars of the room in which he thought his aunt likely to be found. "No, nothing of the sort; an old town, an old house, and an old lady." She gave many details which he could make nothing of, and gave up the geographical problem in despair. In a few days a letter from his father arrived, saying that the King had taken a fancy to go somewhere in a steamer, and had asked Bunsen to accompany him. This brought him within a moderate distance of another sister, whom he had previously had no idea of visiting, and so he was actually with her at the time of the clairvoyance.

In the passage, I believe the title Chevalier refers to Christian von Bunsen, not to Ernest, who was present at the event Fox is documenting, and who sang "like a nightingale" with his brother at that event.

Recovering From Miss Wood

Judging from the contents of Light, The Medium and Daybreak, and The Psychological Review, Emma returned to England in 1881 to a community fraught with concern about various scandals and impostures associated with public test mediums -- particularly those engaged in physical manifestation work -- who had been exposed, by one means or another, and one party or another.

By September of 1882, when Miss Wood was exposed, in situ and subsequently in the pages of Light, for fraudulent practices in her 'materialization' of her guide Pocha (read Frank Podmore's version of events here, and Alex Owen's version here), the British spiritualist leadership cadre was ready to promulgate some standards and practices, to, as Stainton Moses put it, fend off the "reiterated exposures of fraud [that[ are dealing a death-blow to Spiritualism as a public and popular movement. Many who are recent investigators are coming to believe that fraud is mixed up so inextricably with all the manifestations, that it is at least questionable whether there are any free from it."

In mid-September 1882, E. Dawson Rogers (the editor of Light, and John Farmer (the editor of the Psychological Review), circularized the leadership cadre of British Spiritualism, proposing essentially that cabinet manifestations, and dark seances -- in many respects, one of the mainstays of test mediumship up to that time -- be done away, since "in view of the continued obloquy and contempt brought upon Spiritualism by "Exposures," is it wise to continue methods tending in every case, sooner or later, to such disastrous results?"

The targets of the circular were a lions' list: Stainton Moses, T. P. Barkas, W. F. Barrett, William Crookes, J. Enmore Jones, Gerald Massey and CC Massey, F. W. H. Meyers, JJ Morse, Hay Nisbet, William Oxley, Frank Podmore, James Robertson, Thomas Shorter, Miss Wood herself, and George Wyld, among others...and of course our Emma.

Emma's essay, Dark Circles And Cabinets was a direct response to this circular, calling for methods and practices standardization, but she also responded directly to the circular (available in situ here), in a somewhat more emphatic manner:

I beg to acknowledge the receipt of your circular of the 16th inst., to which I hasten to reply as fully as the present moment will permit.

You may judge how deeply I am personally interested in the subject-matter of your circular when I remind you that I have given the last twenty-three years of my life, with all I am and all I have, to the promulgation of what I Know to be the truths of Spiritualism. In thus helping to build up a noble cause I have deemed myself amply rewarded by witnessing its triumphant acceptance in many parts of the world by tens of thousands of capable thinkers. I now see this work- to me so holy and sacred—degraded by imposture, and repudiated by the most respectable portion of the community, chiefly on account of the notorious frauds practised upon it in the name of Mediumship. If I have of late forborne to take any public part in a movement justly and necessarily tabooed by the classes whose influence is most neeiled to sustain it, it is because I have felt that my single voice was insufficient to stem the tide of fanaticism and credulity which ever seemed ready to shield the imposture, but exercised no charity for the victims imposed upon; neither could I any longer, with respect to myself, subject my remonstrances to the virulent denunciations which are visited upon those who dare to ask for test conditions in the investigation of so unprecedented a subject as spirit communion. It is not that I fear these ever ready denouncers, but like many other of my most esteemed associates, however willing I have been, and still am, to debate the proven facts of Spiritualism with the enemies of the cause, I shrink with aversion from contest -with the foes of " our own- household," especially those who descend to abuse instead of argument, and mistake vituperation for logic. When I find any well-conducted movement bent on redeeming our noble cause from the vultures that seek only to devour it, I am ready with heart and effort to take my part therein; and in the anticipation that such a desirable result may grow out of your endeavour, gentlemen, I offer you the following suggestions as the fruits of my own personal observation and experience. First, however, I would kindly take exception to those passages in your circular which seem to lay the burden of the imposition practised in " form-materialisation," solely upon " Professional Mediums."

I am in possession of abundant evidence to show that in this country, as in Holland and other places, some of the grossest impositions have been practised in the simulation of the above-named phenomena by non- professional mediums, and without attempting to analyse the motives of either class, I am in a position to show that both have availed themselves of the equivocal conditions furnished by cabinets, darkness, and the credulity of those around them, for practising cruel and heartless deception.

In reference also to your fourth paragraph, wherein you plead for the exclusion of the public " in dark circles," I would ask, whom you would propose to admit but the public ? To me it has always seemed as if the chief value in holding circles was to convince the public of the truth of spirit communion. When Modern Spiritualism was first known, it found the whole world sceptical, and the millions now convinced of its truth have become converted from their scepticism chiefly by circles. I have often read with astonishment the plea put forth by spiritualists for the exclusion from the circle of all but " sympathisers," " true spiritualists." etc.; in other words, of all who would not accept whatever was presented -without question, or who might be likely to expose palpable fraud.

Now, if spirit circles are only to be held for the delectation or amusement of "true spiritualists," any attempt to redeem Spiritualism from its ill odour in public opinion is superogatory, and the movement itself must end with the " sympathising " few of this generation. If, on the contrary, the aim of those spiritualists who have realised the worth of their belief be, to convince others of the same salvatory truth, there is one of the best methods to be found in circles, and those circles which are not fit for the public may well be deemed equally unfit for private gatherings. I know the outcry that will be raised against this position, and the assertion that " sensitives" require " special conditions and special influences" around them, etc., etc. In answer to well-worn platitudes of this character, permit me to cite some of the experiences of the early mediums, with nearly all of whom I have been intimately acquainted, and associated in circles. The Misses Fox of Hydesville, Messrs. George Redman, J. B. Conklin, Henry Slade, Charles Foster, and numerous other powerful physical mediums, have sat heterogeneously for all comers in public, as well as private, circles for years. Their best tests have generally been given to sceptics, strangers, and very often to bitter opposers. J. C. Mansfield, Lizzie Keizer, E. C. Wilson, and many of the best American Seers have given their best tests in large public audiences. Mrs. Ada Foye for eight months gave public tests at the end of my lectures in San Francisco, two years ago, to over a thousand people, by rapping, writing, seeing, and clairaudience, the hall being brilliantly lighted, and multitudes of sceptics present. All through America and Australia this same lady has given the same class of tests in public and private without mistake, failure, or the shadow of suspicion during a period of twenty-five years. Miss Laura Edmonds, Mrs. Sweet, several other ladies, and I myself have sat as non-professional mediums, giving tests to all comers. I sat in this way, in the commencement of my public mediumship, for eighteen months in New York City, and, being very enthusiastic in mv work, admitted strangers of all classes ; and neither my co - workers nor myself have found that sceptical or " heterogeneous influences " marred our work, or prevented the spirits from giving tests. On the contrary; the spirits were equal to all demands; and though, now and then, some rarely exceptional person might bring with him a peculiar influence, wholly antagonistic to spirit power, and impossible to overcome or explain, the general rule with us all was, the stronger the sceptic the more striking were the evidences of spirit power and presence. Miss Kate Fox, now Mrs. Jencken, held public circles, made free to the public by the generosity of Mr. Horace Day, under the room in which my seances were held, and I have frequently seen the apartment crowded by scoffing sceptics, as well as by the strangers that sat around her, but I never heard her make one mistake, or failure, in giving correct tests, through rapping and writing. But, it may be argued, the conditions requisite for " form materialisation" differ essentially-from all other phases of phenomena, and imperatively demand cabinets, darkness, or the isolation of the medium. Once more I call experience into court, as my witness, to see if this position is irrefutably proved.

I have known Mr. D. D. Home for many years, and witnessed all his most marvellous and striking phases of mediumship. In my own house, and that of Mr. Howitt, Mr. S. C. Hall, and numerous other friends, I have seen, felt, and been caressed by hands of many sizes, and conditions of warmth, and density. I have also seen arms attached to them, and some faces, visible to all present, and apparently, to sight and touch, as human as my own; and yet I have never sat with Mr. Home on his own premises, in darkness, nor when he was isolated, in any way from every one in the room. I have sat with Mrs. Underhill (Leah Fox), and in her presence, and that of Robert Dale Owen, and William Lloyd Garrison, luminous forms, one of whom we all recognised as Mr. Underbill's father, came through the door and halted in our sight, the lights burning, by which I had been reading aloud, and the medium, Mrs. Underbill, clinging to me in terror, but neither isolated nor in a cabinet. In the presence of Messrs. Slade, Foster, Eedman, and Conklin, 1, and scores of other still living witnesses, have seen hands and feet, from the size of infants to those of giants, formed and dissolved before our eyes, and that in brilliantly lighted rooms.

I could re-duplicate examples by hundreds, if necessary, to prove that hands and portions of forms have been exhibited and made palpable to sight and touch in broad light without cabinets, and in circles of heterogeneous and sceptical sitters. Of course, we are in no position to ask why the same conditions could not suffice for the materialisation of the entire form as well as a part; but we, at least, have a right to say. when so much has been manifested, and such illimitable possibilities are predicated for future unfoldment, under conditions which admitted of no shadow of chance for deception, that neither spirit nor mortal has the right to ask investigators to accord belief to investigations differing only in degree, but not in quality, which are produceable only under the most equivocal conditions, and which place the inquirer at the mercy of those who are constantly being proved to be remorseless and unscrupulous tricksters.

Spiritualism does not depend for its proofs on form materialisation only; and however wonderful and interesting such a phenomenon might be, if it can only be given under the most equivocal and doubtful conditions, better to dispense with it altogether than throw a priceless pearl to the dogs, and that simply to gratify a few persons, who are contented to endure the pernicious and often disreputable conditions of the dark circle, and that at the risk of catering to the behoof of unprincipled impostors. I have read with sufficient attention all the attempts to excuse the base frauds that have been perpetrated, and the plea of "evil spirits," " unconscious trances," or the malign influences of heterogeneous sitters. etc., etc. To all this I have but to ask whether the medium was "unconscious," or under the influence of the wicked exposers, when they brought, made and carefully prepared, the paraphernalia by which they proposed to delude their victims ?

I have myself endured the martyrdom and borne the cross which every unpopular cause puts upon the shoulders of its propagandists. Both in public and in private I have enduredpersecution, desertion, ingratitude, and scorn, and none have ever felt or manifested more kindly than I have, all the sympathy which my fellow-labourers deserve; nay, it is in my resolve to stand by them and protest against the pharasaical raid made upon them, under the pretence that they alone of all mankind should give life, time, and service for nothing, that I have determined never to lecture even. without the fair compensation that honest labour should ensure in every department of usefulness. I would demand besides justice to mediums, kindness, courtesy, and special sympathy for special conditions of sensitiveness; but that which I demand for them, I surely have a right to demand also for the investigator. and if I feel just indignation towards those who fail to treat mediums with the utmost impartiality and justice, am I to have no pity on those who conie to the circle with bleeding hearts, and in the agonising hope to be restored to their banished dead, only to be mocked with rags, tinsel, shams, and puppets ? There is yet another and a very solemn plea to be made for pure, honest, unadulterated spirit intercourse. There are wild, monstrous, and wholly unsupported theories growing up, on the new soil of Spiritualism, like fungi, ready to eat the life out of the movement, quench its most momentous revealments, and substitute hideous ghosts and phantoms for the immortal existences with whom Spiritualism has brought us face to face. And what is the corrective to these fantastic and groundless fantasies ? Nothing under the high heavens but the Facts of spirit communion. Let a set of remorseless swindlers take our facts away, and we are at the mercy of as many wild theories as there are sects in theology.

There is much more to be said, gentlemen, in behalf of your attempted movement, and in relation to its best methods of practicalisation ; but although I can hardly feel that I have written one word too much on so important a subject, I dare not press my individual opinion further on your attention. I can only bid you God-speed, and assure you that in your attempts to purify and elevate our noble cause from the degradation which human folly and wickedness have put upon it, you may command to the fullest extent of my power.

Recovering from the Wood impostures by means of standardized methods and practices marks, I think, an important milestone in the institutionalization of modern spiritualism, and Emma's response -- fearful, it seems, of the turn inward of the Spiritualist community, and enthusiastic for strong engagement with the unbeliever -- marks, I think, one of the points of contention between her and other Spiritualists that would, eventually, lead to Emma's marginalization.

Gleaning...err...Gleanings

Another recovered text of Emma's: Gleanings In The Fields Of Spiritualism, No. II. A relatively rare informal piece: chatty, letter-to-the-editor-ish. From The Medium and Daybreak of September 18, 1885. One of a pair, this piece is a report-from-the-field on the progress of institutionalization of the movement in Emma's circuit.

William, Substitute Lecturer

Having entire years' worth of The Medium and Daybreak to troll through is a nerd's delight, let me tell you...

This bit, from November 13, 1885, can't go unremarked upon, as it both illustrates yet another aspect of Emma's on-the-ground practice, and gives us a glimpse of that most elusive of figures, William:

I have not as yet found a review of any of William's lectures, but I'm hopeful.

Emma's Stereopticon

Little by little, bits of Emma's practice as a test medium, and as a speaker -- trance and normal -- emerge.

For students of the business of spiritualism in the 1880s and after, this letter of W. J. Colville's, in the Medium and Daybreak of June 12, 1885 (a month or so after Emma's return from her last visit to the US, for the 1884-1885 camp meeting circuit), speaks of an aspect of Emma's practice -- and the tradecraft of spiritualist speakers -- that we don't often see:

What I wouldn't give to see some of those stereopticon slides now.

The equipment Emma used no doubt looked much like this 1887 model: a table-top projector that burned carbide or a mixture of gases to produce enough lumens to project a stereopticon slide that would otherwise be viewed through a hand-held viewer.

That Emma let the stereopticon go makes sense, as she was coming home, to her home circuit between Manchester and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and to a different kind of lecturing than she'd been engaged in, in the US, in 1880 and after: more Spiritualist content, the resurrection of on-demand trance lectures on topics selected by the audience, and more polemics, including public challenges to non-Spiritualists.

Not something she'd be likely to need the nineteenth-century equivalent of Powerpoint for...

The Three "Two Worlds"

Come to discover that Emma's The Two Worlds was the third of three spiritualist publications to bear that name.

The first, a US publication edited in the later 1850s by Jacob Dixon LRCP -- a London homeopathist, author of Clairvoyance, Hygienic and Medical (excerpt here) and a member of the Ashburner circle -- was apparently fairly long-lived.

The second, edited and funded by Eugene Crowell and A.E. Newton, had a short run from the fall of 1881 until the spring of 1882 before being folded: apparently the loser in a commercial war with The Banner of Light.

And Emma's makes three -- and the longest-lived thereof, seeing as how it is, nominally at least, still being published.

Whether Emma cribbed from earlier efforts -- third time's the charm -- or picked up the "two worlds" metaphor from its copious recurrence in the liteature of the period, or borrowed from Thomas Shorter's book of the same name (TS, we note, wrote for Dixon at the first Two Worlds), we may never know. But I like to think she took her title from a passage in John Brown's The Darvishes -- an early work on eastern "spiritualism" in English that has not received, I think, the attention it deserves as a source of Modern Spiritualism's ideas about the East.

Recovering The Two Worlds

I am pleased to report that the process of digitizing the entire run of The Two Worlds during the period of Emma's editorship is under way, and before Halloween (an appropriate marker) we should all be able to read the first six years' worth of The Two Worlds online.

The Key To The Occult Sciences

Forging the chain, forging the chain....another small and somewhat fragile link...

From William Gregory (MD, FRSE, Professor of Chemistry at Edinburgh), this choice morsel (to mix metaphors, and break a few teeth) about the figure who cast his cliched shadow over Emma's life, Philip Henry Stanhope:

The text itself is:

Thanks to Michael, who's always digging up something interesting and relevant.

Like Gregory, Emma certainly saw mesmerism -- and her early experiences as a clairvoyante, as the key to the occult sciences she promoted as an adult.

The Occult Magazine: 1885 and 1886

Through the generosity of Pat Deveney, the Occult Magazine for 1885 and 1886 is now available in PDF form. This is the journal of record for the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, and more generally for "the amorphous opposition" (to quote Pat) to the Theosophical Society, which had by this time adopted a stance against practical magic, and the engineering of the soul in the here-and-now.

Uncollected Essays from 1866...and 1868...and 1871

The particular pleasures of recovering uncollected material...

Tonight, three uncollected essays of Emma's from what was perhaps the most exciting -- in the positive sense -- year of her life: 1866, which she spent in London, giving both private "soiree" lectures (published as Questions Answered Extempore) and public lectures, in St. James' Hall in Regent Street, and elsewhere. The three lectures recovered were all published in The Spiritual Magazine (the work product of Benjamin Coleman, William Howitt and others), during the course of 1866: Psychology; Or, The Science Of Soul (Lecture One), Psychology; Or, The Science Of Soul (Lecture Two), and
The Discerning Of Spirits, which was reprinted in December of 1866 as The Discovery of Spirits in The Banner Of Light.

Many of the concerns and areas of interest that Emma would later unfold in her life -- the relationship between clairvoyance and somnabulism on the one hand, and spiritualism on the other, galvanic medicine, and psychometry, as well as the critique of what Peebles called "churchianity" and the search for the ur-religion -- appear prominently in these lectures, and in general they give us a good sense for Emma-the-scientist, attempting as she did throughout her life to bend the physical sciences to the will of the parascience of spiritualism.

This snippet particularly interested me:

I have attempted to shew you that magnetism and psychology are the two great columns that support the temple of Spiritualism, and I must here add that the great mission of Spiritualism is not alone to convince you of the presence of the blessed dead. I believe that its chief work is to prepare the soul for its spiritual home; to advise us on the true nature of life, inform us of its science, give us an appreciable understanding of the duties that are required of us here, and of the nature of the influences that hinder us in its performance.....I conclude, therefore, this discourse, by charging upon all who are endeavoring to investigate this occult science of soul to start from its basis stones, -- magnetism and psychology. Like physics which forms the base of the column of which metaphysics is the apex, animal magnetism is the base and spiritualism the apex of the column of this great science of the soul.

The Masonic borrowing cannot go unnoticed, but this strikes me as a very early formulation of one of Emma's life-long obsessions: the construction of a rational religion - a faith that was also a science - to replace "churchianity".

---

And, from 1868, Questions and Impromptu Answers (Series 1) and Questions and Impromptu Answers (Series 2), also from The Spiritual Magazine.

---

And, from 1871, Impromptu Answers To Questions (which we should probably normalize to Questions and Impromptu Answers (Series 3)) and What Relation Does Spiritualism Bear To Science?, from the same run of The Spiritual Magazine that contained The Scientific Investigation of Spiritualism.

Emma and the HBofL

Number 1 on the research agenda: what if any active, organizing or pollinating role did Emma play in the foundation and activities of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor?

Getting the first digital edition of The Occult Magazine for 1885/6 together today (thanks, Pat!), I came across this fortuitous juxtaposition on the back page of issue 1.

Here, in miniature, the social network we know about:

1. the Scots publisher Hay Nisbet, connected to Emma directly, and at one remove through David Duguid and others, and connected to Peter Davidson (having published Davidson's book on the violin) -- clearly the gateway node between Emma's network and the HBofL network
2. the editors of the Occult Magazine, canvassing for a copy of Ghost Land as they begin their new publishing ventures
3. and, most distant, the editor of Ghost Land, Emma herself.

. The fact that the editors felt the need to advertise for a copy of Ghost Land might tend to suggest that they had no direct connection with Emma, but, on the other hand, Emma claimed at several junctures prior to 1885 that she had no copies of Ghost Land left to hand out.

Stridency

Emma's career, as I have said elsewhere, is marked by attempts to escape from her self-chosen role as Spiritualist propagandist: first, her attempt to found an institution for "outcast women" in various east coast cities in the late 1850s and early 1860s; secondly, her brier career as a political operative for the Lincoln campaign (how connected she was to that campaign, I don't know); thirdly, her stint as a galvanic physician.

And of course, there are her various stints as editor and publisher: with the SDSK, with the Western Star, with The Two Worlds (which was really conceived of, in modern terms, as a merchandising vehicle with a house rag, rather than as a journal per se), and with The Unseen Universe.

And in every case, after a period of time spent trying to make the new venture fly, Emma returned to the road. And each time she returned, it was (as far as I can tell) to smaller audiences, more arduous traveling schedules, and lower fees.

Depressing, when you look at it from afar.

Why did Emma have an ambivalent relationship with Spiritualism? Part of the answer is, I think, because Spiritualism, as a movement, had an ambivalent relationship with Emma.

A stunningly clear example of this (thanks, Pat) is the beating Moses Hull administers to Emma in this piece from Hull's Crucible of 30 July 1874. The piece is well worth reading in its entirety, and, beyond being a clear sign that 1874 was a -- if not the -- year that the unitary facade of Modern Spiritualism collapsed into the street, it is a clear indication that the whisperings and mutterings from other parts of the planet about Emma's heavy-handed didacticism and pontification weren't just regional grumblings.

Whether Emma ever saw this piece, I don't know. Certainly, she continued to conjure with Hull's name right up to the bitter end -- she quotes him extensively in her farewell address to the readers of The Unseen World.

Of course, it may be that Hull was motivated to administer his whipping in public because he -- and others -- knew Emma was leaving Spiritualism (in fact but not in public) and turning (or returning, depending on your perspective) to occultism at this time. Nothing like smacking the splitters a few times, on their way out the door, to rally the faithful.

A. R. Wallace, Emma and the Christian Right

There is a story on the AP wire today about Alfred Russel Wallace, famously the "co-discoverer" of evolution, with Darwin, and equally famously a scientist-spiritualist, whose conversion to Spiritualism was triggered, at least in part, d by Emma's 1855-65 trance lectures in London.

The AP wire piece suggests that Wallace's Spiritualism is being leveraged, these days, by fundamentalist xians of the "intelligent design theory" bent, to reintroduce the hand of the (christian) Creator into the evolutionary mechanism.

Some battles are fought, again, and again, and again, over and with the bodies of the dead.

Henry Hardinge's Letters To His Wife

Just finished a run through Henry Hardinge's letters to his wife, Emily Jane, written between 1844 and 1847, while Hardinge was in India, and edited into a fine edition by Bawa Satinder Singh.

They are, decidedly, the cure for any Henry Hardinge-the-occultist-and-mistress-keeper illness.

The upright, right-thinking, principled, wife-children-and-rural-pile-loving nature of Sir Henry Hardinge comes through in every letter.

Since Singh spells out pretty clearly in his crisp introduction where Hardinge's papers can be found, people committed to drawing this link can go source hunting, but I'm convinced after this read of Hardinge's letters that there is no connection whatever between Henry Hardinge and Emma Hardinge Britten, and that Henry Hardinge is none of the four men whose identities Emma obscured in her own writing.

Next stop: Charles Hardinge's letters, also edited by Singh. Bless the man.

Infidel Spiritualism: Emma's Fatal Mistake

A note from a colleague (thanks, Leslie) about Timothy Larsen's Crisis of Doubt spurs me to post this interesting letter, received by J. M. Peebles while in England in 1870, and included in J. O. Barrett's biography of Peebles, Spiritual Pilgrim.

In this observation -- that Emma's strident anti-Christian rhetoric (as early as the late 1860s) was marginalizing her among those who believed Christianity and Spiritualism were reconcilable discourses -- there is something important, I think: something that may go some way to explaining why Emma failed, ultimately, to get a seat at the table when Spiritualism was institutionalized, on both sides of the Atlantic, beginning in the 1890s.

I have been thinking of Emma's biography as having the title "The Propagandist", but perhaps "Infidel Spiritualist" is more a propos.

Stanhope's Tutor

Several occult scholars (and yours truly as well) have claimed (I expect by repeating one another) that Philip Henry Stanhope was tutored by John Varley's father, Richard Varley (a man about whom we know nothing, by the way).

Ten minutes' reading in Lady Hester Stanhope's biography tonight reveals that Philip Henry was educated entirely at home, and by Charles Stanhope's secretary, Jeremiah Joyce, who was one of the men indicted for "encompassing the death of the King" in the famous treason trials of 1794, when Philip Henry was 13.

What Philip Henry did for education after Joyce went to the Tower (not for long, but he didn't return to Stanhope's menage, as far as I can determine), I don't know.

Maybe that's when Richard Varley stepped in...

Emma's Four Men

There are four men in Emma's life about whom we'd like to know a great deal more:

1. the man waiting at home, to whom Emma suggests in her Autobiography she is engaged, and with whom she breaks in 1856, encouraging him to marry a woman who has made him a proposal of marriage (which Emma has learned from her spirit guides, from remote viewing, or from astral travel - she does not say).
2. the "baffled sensualist" who ends Emma's career on the London stage, and who keeps Emma from the time of her last performance in London in mid-1854 until she bolts for Paris with the Wallack Company in 1855.
3. the "statesman" for whom Emma acts as amanuensis (as she claims in the Banner of Light in 1858)
4. her first husband (since Emma alleges an early marriage at several points in her career, and claims to be a widow at the time of her marriage to William Britten in 1870)

I've suggested elsewhere that:

1. the leading candidate for #1, based on the internal evidence of Emma's novel, The Mystery of No. 9 Stanhope Street, is Roddam Stanhope Spencer, the pre-Raphaelite painter.
2. the best guess for #2 is, at present, Charles Dickens.
3. #3 is a distortion of her relationship with Edward Bulwer Lytton.

That leaves us with #4.

I've said before that I think Emma lied about a marriage before her marriage with William. She may even have lied to William about it; certainly, she was in print, before the time of her marriage, with claims to a prior marriage; and she had herself listed herself as a widow in the registry on the day she married William in 1870.

People have wanted -- still want, I think -- to have Emma marrying a Hardinge, despite the fact that we can find her, in the historical record, as Miss Emma Harding and Miss Emma Hardinge, before she adopts the titular Missus. The prosaic, and likely explanation -- that she adopted the Mrs. because it made it easier for her to travel in American (as she did) unchaperoned -- doesn't seem....something... enough for people, I guess. E. J. Dingwall made it a fraudulent "mystical marriage" to get around the fact that no records of any real marriage could be found, and because he needed a deep psychic wound to explain Emma's obsession with "outcast women" and her apparent distaste for sex, but that's special pleading, at best.

Granted, Emma went out of her way, in my opinion, to permit people to assume associations between herself with the family of Viscount Hardinge. When she added the 'e' to Harding, she did so not merely because it made her more English, but because it suggested an association with the family of the man who'd been Governor-General of India (1844-48), Commander-in-Chief of the British armed forces (1853-56) and British Field Marshall (1855), and who was well know internationally.

But she never made the connection explicitly.

An interesting example of a story by Emma, in print, suggesting but declining to make explicit a connection between herself and English nobility, comes from a volume (thanks, Michael) entitled The Encyclopedia of Death and Life In The Spirit-World (1895), edited by J. R. Francis, the manager of the Progressive Thinker publishing operation in Chicago. The story by Emma, entitled "A Vision by Emma Hardinge Britten" is available here, but I'll quote the relevant section verbatim:

He was a man whom no description can fully represent to the inhabitants of the western continent, for he was of a class unknown in American experiences -- a peer of the British realm; the elder brother of a wealthy, noble and far-descended house, and marked actor in that peculiar drama which is only played amongst the members of the British aristocracy.

You could not follow me, my American friends, were I to attempt for you a description of the stately earl and his peculiar sphere of action; happy for you you cannot; for the sum of all is told when I translate his life in this: His birth, position, the law of primogeniture, and other specialities, had manufactured a rich nobleman and a capacious mind into a bad man, notorious for his enormous gallantries in public life, and his equally enormous tyrannies in private life. This man had lived for self, and used time, talents, wealth and station, for no other purpose than the gratification of self and selfish passions....

In my youth I had known this man. I had often read Shakespeare to him, sang and played for him; and, despite some awe with which his singularly stately presence inspired me, I returned his regard for me with perhaps more of interest than the young and innocent generally yielded to him. My full understanding of his character was a revelation of after years. Since I have been in America, the journals of home have brought the intelligence of the great man's transit into "the land of rest".

I had become a believer in Spiritualism about a year; and then, as often since, had wondered why that spirit never sought communion with the girl who remembered him kindly, and with whom dark shadows of wrong had never been associated.

Assuming Emma is dating the event accurately (in 1857 or 1858, after she had been "a believer in Spiritualism for about a year"), there are some interesting clues in this narrative:

• a wealthy, noble and far-descended house would rule out the Hardinges immediately; Viscount (not Earl) Hardinge was enobled; his father was a clergyman, and although Henry Hardinge's son Charles Stewart did inherit his father's title, it's more than a stretch to view Charles Stewart as "the elder brother" (which he was) of such a house. And Charles Stewart's younger brother, Arthur Edward, spent his entire career in the military, and was Equerry to Queen Victoria -- again, hardly a picture of licentiousness and self-indulgence.
• lived for self, and used time, talents, wealth and station, for no other purpose than the gratification of self and selfish passions would also rule out Henry Hardinge, who spent all but about four years of his life in strenuous government service. It would rule out Charles Stewart Hardinge, who was his father's secretary, an MP, under-secretary for war, and an accomplished amateur artist. It would rule out Bulwer-Lytton (who was not an eldest brother, but who otherwise fits the description fairly well), as Lytton, too, performed singularly strenuous government service, while leaving a literary legacy that, if it doesn't put him in the first rank of Victorian writers, certainly puts him in the second rank. It would rule out John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, the painter, who -- while he had done no work of consequence by the mid-1850s, was studying seriously.
• since I have been in America, the journals of home have brought the intelligence of the great man's transit into "the land of rest" could rule in Henry Hardinge, who died in 1856, but certainly rules out his son Charles Stewart (d. 1894), Bulwer Lytton (d. 1873), and Roddam Spencer Stanhope (d.1908).

On balance, there is however one figure in Emma's life -- a figure she names in other materials of roughly contemporary date -- that her vague description does fit, and that is Philip Henry Stanhope.

• a wealthy, noble and far-descended house: Philip Henry was the 4th Earl Stanhope, and was indeed an earl, jiving with Emma's description. The Stanhope family is indeed a "wealth, noble and far-descended house", stemming from the line of the Earls of Chesterfield in the late 1600s. Philip Henry was 4th Viscount Stanhope of Mahon, and 4th Baron Stanhope of Elvaston, before succeeded to his ultimate peerage on his father's death. But he was an only son, from Charles Stanhope's second marriage.
• lived for self, and used time, talents, wealth and station, for no other purpose than the gratification of self and selfish passions fits Philip Henry Stanhope, as far as we have biographical information on him, to a tee, in my estimation. Stanhope spent his life wandering, experimenting, and enjoying himself, leaving as a legacy his ambiguous role in the Caspar Hauser affair, his love of skrying, and a son, Philip Henry, who as the fifth Earl Stanhope would do some work towards redeeming his father by becoming a decent historian.
• since I have been in America, the journals of home have brought the intelligence of the great man's transit into "the land of rest". Stanhope died in March of 1855. The timing is not quite right, is it? But it's close.

Of course, this is just Emma, telling a story, late in her life, when she was telling other stories, and when she was -- as far as I can see -- marginalized within in the Spiritualism movement in England because of her position on various issues associated with institutionalization, marginalized within the Spiritualism movement in the US because she was in England, and (with very good reason) bitter about where she found herself. It proves nothing, this story -- nothing about Stanhope, and certainly nothing about Henry Hardinge, though the timing, on reflection, may help to explain a few things about that critical period from mid-1854 until mid-1855 (which I'll come back to in another post).

What's most troubling, when all is said and done, about what Emma does hint about her relationships with famous men, in this and other printed accounts, is this: there's nothing she tells us about these figures that she could not have learned from reading the Times, or having a good gossip with any well-connected figure in mid-Victorian London.

Flaxen Ringlets

Returning to an older thread...

I've had in my possession for a while a poem by Charles Hervey, about the London theatre of the 1840s, called "L'Embarras Du Choix". It includes a stanza worth quoting:

I love the Adelphi (Ned loquitur still,
There's no theatre like it - none - go where you will,
Not one house where so hearty a laugh you'll enjoy;
To which Echo replies, "I believe you, my boy."
Then the ladies, enchanting, agreeable creatures,
Most wickedly tempting in figures andf features,
Celest, who though she does assume roles celestial,
Is, notwithstanding, a beauty terrestrial,
Woolgar, from whom, when she does as a man dress,
Wright learns how to settle accounts with his laundress,
And whose pretty eyes and luxuriant hair
Have made more than one feel what Pat terms 'mighty quare.'
Emma Hardinge - a blonde - with blue eyes and small feet,
Ellen Chaplin - a brunette - and then, to complete
My selection, in Harvest Home you may discern her,
A nice little actress the play-bills call Turner.

The poem appears in Ainsworth's Magazine for 1848, amidst the materials surrounding the first publication (in serial form) of William Harrison Ainsworth's occult-influenced novel Crichton.

How Charles Hervey, a self-described "habitue" of the theatre, writer and raconteur, knew Emma has yet to be determined, but I do note in passing that Hervey was intimately familiar with Parisian theatre, having written several books on the subject (none of which, unfortunately, contain any reference to Emma), and that Hervey and Bulwer Lytton worked together at the New Monthly Magazine. No one's bothered to scribble up even a summary of Hervey's life, so that thread will have -- for the time being at least -- to remain unexplored.

I have sat on this poem, because I was unable to explain that phrase: "a blonde."

When we recovered the only known image of Emma as an actress -- from her performance as Queen of the Wilys in the Phantom Dancers in 1847 -- it did not appear, from the impressions we have, anyway -- that she was a blonde at that time.

Then, tonight, looking for something completely different, I stumble across this, in W. J. Colville's Universal Spiritualism (1906):

Another interesting experience of mine dates back to the autumn of 1899, shortly before my first visit to Australia. I had long known Mrs. Emma Harding Britten, but my first interview with her was in 1877, at a lecture delivered in Manchester, when she was a middle-aged woman, dressed in much the same style as she continued to adopt till she finally withdrew from the public platform. Since her passing to spirit life, this earnest worker has occasionally made herself distinctly known to me, both on and off the platform, and in November, 1899, I distinctly saw, in connection with a most forceful realization of her close proximity, the likeness of a radiant maiden with light golden curls, somewhat resembling the earliest pictures of Mrs. Richmond when she was Cora Hatch, but in no way suggesting Mrs. Britten to me by appearance. I cold never have understood the vision had I not visited Mrs. Wilkinson (Mrs. Britten's sister), about a month later, and, while her guest in Manchester, been show a picture taken many years ago, representing Emma Hardinge in youthful costume as "Queen of the Fairies". This picture represents the young lady who afterwards became Mrs. Britten in flaxen ringlets, and in every way precisely as she showed herself to me on the occasion of my vision.

I think this does nicely for us in two respects: it demonstrates, as far as I am concerned, that Margaret Floyd Wilkinson was in possession, prior to her death and the dispersal of her papers and Emma's papers, of a lithograph (not a photograph) of Emma as Queen of the Wilys, and that Emma was -- at the time of that performance, anyway -- sporting blonde...excuse me, flaxen....locks.

Emma, Losing Control

Emma and William founded The Two Worlds Publishing Co. Ltd. in Manchester in 1886 (I believe) and less than a year later began publishing The Two Worlds, a weekly Spiritualist paper, edited by Emma, that quickly became one of the top 5 Spiritualist papers by circulation and influence. By early 1892, Emma was out -- apparently, forced out -- of the editor's chair, under acrimonious circumstances, replaced by E. W. Wallis, a tea merchant and medium, who edits the paper until 1899, when he moves to the editorship ofLight.

Emma, being Emma, put herself immediately back in the editor's chair elsewhere, launching and conducting The Unseen Universe for a year -- herself and sister Margaret as the sole contributors -- until pressure of work, and financial distress, forced that paper's closure.

Emma offered typically self-oriented reasons for her departure from The Two Worlds: that her viewpoint was too internationalist, and specifically that she gave too much space and attention to American Spiritualist material.

But Logie Barrow, in his excellent Independent Spirits: Spiritualism and English Plebeians 1850-1910 gives us another, frankly more convincing, reason: the melding of Spiritualism, in the midlands and north of England, with ILP-style socialism. That would explain much -- Emma was not a political ideologue, and saw her revolution as spiritual and institutional in the religious sense, rather than a secular political fight. If she had a political credo, it was one deeply informed by American-style individualist democracy and the great-man theory of history.

Barrow's explanation would also go a long way to explaining how a demure Two Worlds advertisement of 1894...

could become, in 1895, this:

It leads the van (unfurl flag, begin chant). People's Popular....huh? The phrase "infantile disorder" springs to mind.

Emma, Performing (Again)

Heavy sigh. In my last post, I neglected to mention the famous spirit-designed window blind fastener delivered by the spirits via Emma to one Frank Chase, and described in Modern American Spiritualism and somewhat less glowingly in the Athenaeum magazine for August 13, 1870.

Frank Chase held three window-related patents: #13300 for a window shutter, issued in July of 1855, #34739 for an improvement in blind and shutter fastening, issued in 1862 and #671756 for a window shutter, issued in 1901. Clearly, Emma delivered him the design for the improvement and blind and shutter fastening.

Alas, there is no trace to be found in any depository library of the pamphlet he wrote about this invention, The Spiritual Invention, although other references besides Emma's can be found to that document, indicating pretty clearly that it was, at one time, known and available.

What troubles me, as I dig through this sort of material, is the hidden self-promoting edge of the thing. The patent in question issued on March 25, 1862, a Tuesday. Emma's letter, as reproduced in MAS, is dated April 5, 1862, a Saturday 11 calendar days and 8 business days later - about enough time for her to receive a letter from Chase, and post a letter to the Banner of Light. Yet she is entirely disingenuous about timing in her note (as it is reproduced in MAS), writing "A few weeks later, my correspondent informed me that the money (to produce the invention) was readily obtained, and the patent granted; that the spiritual machine is now in successful operation and great demand, and can be had of Mr. Frank Chase...." In this case, "[a] few weeks later" should actually be read as "just the other day..." This is Emma-in-miniature: accurate in the main, distorting the details to suit her purposes of the moment.

This is Emma the propagandist.

Emma, Performing

A question from a friend, a propos of the review of one of her 1860s UK trance lectures that I posted earlier this week: what did Emma do, as a medium? What did it look like?

Leaving aside Emma's own claims about the breadth of her mediumistic abilities, and focusing on the independent historical record, a brief precis of her career as a medium per se would run as follows. From her conversion in 1856 until the end of her life, Emma practiced - publicly at least -- only two sorts of mediumship: (1) a brief period, in New York, from mid-1856 to perhaps as late as the end of 1857, as a classic test medium, under the auspices of Horace Day's Society for Diffusion of Spiritual Knowledge (which folded in 1857) followed by (2) a longer period from her as-yet-not-precisely-dated Troy, NY trance lecture of 1857 until the early 1880s, as a trance lecturer. While she claimed at various times to have a wide range of mediumistic gifts -- including automatic writing and psychometry -- she practiced publicly in more limited ways, as far as I can determine. Her brief stint as a test medium was in the period prior to the rage for direct voice mediumship: as far as we know, her test medium sessions employed alphabet cards and planchettes. Contemporary reports of the test sessions held at the SDSK tend to confirm this. As I have noted in prior postings, it seems clear to me that she ceased to practice as a test medium after becoming embroiled in a local (NY) scandal that was given wider airing during the public drama surrounding the Hatch divorce case, during which Emma was accused of exerting her power over her sitter, during a session, to in effect extort an offer of marriage form the sitter. Whether this in fact happened is beyond our ability to determine. That this accusation dogged her until the late 1870s is undeniable.

Her transition to trance lecturer seems, to me, to be quite natural when we consider that her closest influence at the time was Elizabeth J. French, who was herself a practicing trance medium. While she frequently lectured, from the early 1860s onward, on pre-prepared topics that were entirely conventional addresses (in various catalogs of the day, Emma is listed as often as a "regular speaker" as she is as a trance speaker), when she gave trance lectures, these were of two sorts: (a) lectures on topics of her choosing or the choosing of her sponsors, and (b) lectures in response to questions or positions prepared by a committee formed, ad hoc, of audience members. Emma's lectures were often described as such in surviving newspaper advertisements, as in this one from the New York Herald for April of 1858 (note the "Miss").

This latter sort of trance lecture was, in effect, a kind of test mediumship, as Emma describes in her Autobiography

As this committee were stationed in a small room only separated from the antechamber I occupied by a slight partition, and they were over half-an-hour engaged in discussion, I had, what may be deemed either the pain or pleasure, as the case might be, of hearing their arguments pro and con. All I can now remember is, that a certain Mr. Hunt, whom I was subsequently informed was the "Queen's chemist," was appointed as chairman of that committee, and the last words I heard him utter prior to the committee's return to the audience were, "We'll break her down anyway, and that's all we have to do." The subject selected, I find by the newspaper reports I sent afterwards to my mother, was "The Geological Formation of the Earth and its Ultimate Destiny."

Again the lecture was listened to attentively, and loud applause, in which the committee, as I was afterwards informed, joined, greeted me at its close, but the end was not yet.

Sitting opposite the platform, in the front row, was one whom I subsequently learned was a Jewish Rabbi. On either side of him sat some twelve of his scholars, and it was he it seemed, who was expected by the oppdsition, to "break me down anyway." This gentleman, rising from his seat, asked permission of the audience to put a few consecutive questions to the speaker, and that without any interruption. A loud burst of applause being taken as acquiescence, the rabbi proceeded sternly to ask me a number of purely biblical questions.

After about seven or eight minutes' interlocution of this kind, the gentleman, turning to the audience with a profoundly sarcastic air, remarked, that "These Spirits of the lady's did not know much, as, if they did, instead of answering in orthodox biblical fashion, they would have known that such and such passages, which he repeated, were false translations. In the original Hebrew," he added, "they were so-and-so, and the translations were rendered otherwise, either to suit the opinions of the time, or on account of the translators' ignorance of the ancient Hebrew language."

I cannot now recall the passages to which my opponent referred, nor do I believe that they were indicated in the newspaper reports, but I do remember the nature of the answer which the Spirit power that held me—like a vice— impelled me to give, and it was to this effect : That the sentences quoted were inscribed after the ancient mode of of Hebrew writing, in which the vowels were omitted, and that the methods of pointing employed would render them susceptible of being translated in six different ways ; consequently it was the learned scholar who was endeavouring to impose upon an unlearned audience, and not the young woman who stood before them as the mouthpiece and messenger of those who "did know Hebrew, both ancient and modern."

The rhetoric in this passage -- suggesting as it does that Emma could only recall the subject and material of her trance lectures if newspaper accounts of them existed, since she herself had no memory of what she spoke while under control -- is common throughout her career, and a common position for trance lecturers to adopt.

In terms of the stagecraft of her lectures, reviewers were struck by Emma's physical presence throughout her career (as for example in this review from 1870) often to the exclusion of any discussion whatsoever of her actual address. She seems to have been -- particularly when silent, at the start of a lecture -- commanding.

By 1863, when she went for the first time to California, Emma was mixing her repertoire: giving traditional audience-driven trance lectures on occasion, and speaking on pre-publicized topics as well. These fixed-topic addresses may also have been cast, at the time, as inspired -- the historical record is silent on this. But it seems to me, from sampling her advertisements from the 1860s to 1880s, that it became increasingly rare, as her notoriety grew, for her to give audience-driven trance lectures -- the last of these (outside the UK, at any rate) may have been during her 1878-9 Australia and New Zealand tour.

What seems to me to be unique about Emma's mediumship (and I am no expert in this area) is that, so far as I am aware, Emma never named, during her lectures, her controls (though she did credit various spirits, including her father and Sir John Franklin, in written forums, later in her life). Critics found this maddening, as it prevented Emma from being attacked, as it were, from behind -- by impuning her inspirational sources. As late as her Sydney lectures in 1878, according to this extensive review, she was fending off demands from her audience for attribution.

Although I believe Emma continued to perform trance lectures in the UK after 1881, her public career as a trance medium ended, I think, in August of 1880, when during a lecture she opined on the role mesmeric energy played in the then-all-the-buzz 40-day fast of Dr. Henry Tanner in Clarendon Hall in New York City. Unfortunately, according to contemporary newspaper accounts, Tanner was in the audience during the lecture, and at the close of Emma's remarks, he stood and refuted her remarks in no uncertain terms. This was, for Emma, tantamount to exposure, and -- for no reason other than intuition -- I have always linked this public humiliation to her decision to leave the US almost immediately thereafter.

I think of Emma as a very circumspect medium. She chose, after her brush with exposure in 1857, to practice a type of mediumship that was both consistent with her skills as an actress, and unlikely to attract much in the way of organized debunking (relative to cabinet sessions, elongation, psychokinetics, slate-writing, etc.) and she minimized her exposure within that subgenre by participating in audience-driven trance speaking less and less as she became more and more famous (and hence, more and more of a target). This was, after all, not just her calling -- it was her livelihood, and she was carrying her mother's and her husband's economic weight, as well as her own.

Sir Charles Lennox Wyke

People who've taken a look at my notes on the Orphic Circle know that I favor Sir Charles Lennox Wyke for participation in the Orphic Circle (in no small part because he was given to bragging about his occult associations with Bulwer Lytton), and for playing a role -- how central it's impossible to determine -- in introducing Emma into the Circle.

Here's the only image of Wyke I've been able to obtain:

But, as always, what you get in the margins (in this case, his micro-bio from the issue of Vanity Fair in which the portrait was originally published), proves as interesting as the main attraction.

Turns out Wyke was the childhood schoolmate of George, Prince of Cumberland, the first cousin of Queen Victoria and eventually George V of Hanover. Thomas Gibson Bowles ("Jehu Junior") is a bit catty about Wyke in his write-up of the (by that time) elder statesman, but he does note that Wyke's German connections and Germanophilism were so pronounced in his early adult life (as a soldier) that he was commonly known as the Baron.

Yet another angle on Louis de B________....

Ernest Reinhold = Emma Hardinge, Redux

Much depends, I think, on whether or not the cryptic hint offered us in Mattheisen's article on EHB -- that she had written for periodicals in London, on music, as Ernest Reinhold -- can be verified or not.

As I have said elsewhere, attempts to communicate with Dr. Mattheisen have failed, but I believe I know where he obtained this information: from Lewis Spence's note on EHB in his Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology.

Physical artifacts of Ernest Reinhold's brief transit on this planet are exceedingly difficult to obtain, but we can triangulate Spence (and therefore Mattheisen) via a brief note I'v already mentioned, in Kitson's vast The Musical World: 1836-1865, which I now know reads:

"Voices of the Night," recitative and air; the poetry by Professor Longfellow, the music composed by Ernest Reinhold (C Jeffreys)

Again, as I've said before, this would be entirely consistent with what we know about Emma Hardinge's brief career (one piece) as a publisher of original scores: her single publication "Footsteps of Angels" was also a recitative and air, and its words were based on a poem drawn from Longfellow's first collection: Voices of the Night.

Here's what may be another trace of our Ernest Reinhold -- an artifactual one this time.

(And a full view of the title sheet here...)

The timing for all this...what to call it?....tracery is decent. Caldwells' Musical Journalwas in print perhaps as early as 1840, and edited by Robert Guylott -- a working composer with strong ties to the musical theatre generally and the Adelphi in particular in London from the 1830s onward, and a publishing operation in Blenheim Street -- for most of its life.

Jenny Lind was storming London and the provinces from 1847-1849, and that would date this piece to that period, given the role of "musical gazettes" as the means by which middle-class pianos were furnished with "the latest songs from the centers of culture." But the lack of a given name for Herr Reinhold is troubling to me, particularly because there was apparently a Martin Von Reinhold about at this time, publishing music in various places, including Caldwells' Musical Journal. The lack of closure is maddening, to say the least.

And, because I can't resist red herrings, false clues and other tantalizing cultural byways, I'll close this bit of emphemera-coloring with this snippet.

"Oh, it cannot be over!" exclaimed Edward and St. Edmunds together. "Will you not play it once more?"
"Certainly, if you wish it; or perhaps you would like to hear another by the same author?"
"More than I can say," replied St. Edmunds, "What is his name?"
"His name is Ernest Reinhold, and, if I mistake not, it will soon be well known to fame, for he feels what he composes."

This snippet can be found in a piece of (then thinly and now completely) disguised gossip-mongering called A Transport Voyage To The Mauritius and Back; Touching At the Cape Of Good Hope and St. Helena, published in Paris (as so much scandal-gin material was) in 1852. Were it not for the fact that the author is identified as "the Author of Paddiana", we might be stumped, but that identification allows us to point to the actual author: Sir William Henry Gregory, gambler, travel raconteur (writing frequently as "Adam Blenkinsop"), intimate of Trollope, MP for Dublin, Governor-General for Ceylon, and husband of the famous Lady Augusta Gregory of Irish Renaissance fame.

I'll let interested readers have a look at his Wikipedia entry, note the places (Egypt, Ceylon), and the dates (the middle east in the middle 1850s, and the US in 1859, in particular), think about his wife's predilections, and let their imaginative dogs off the lead. Did Gregory know Emma? Have we got another Louis de B______ candidate on our hands?

---

Alas, not so. A mis-attribution on my part. The text naming Ernest Reinhold as a composer is to be found in a novel called Cecile, or the Pervert by a pseudonymous Sir Charles Rockingham. Whether it refers to Emma (qua Reinhold) or Emma borrowed her pseudonym from the novel (as I think she did with Emma Harding) remains to be determined.

Emma, Reviewed

From a reader (thanks, Michael), something we don't see every day: a multi-page review of a trance lecture by Miss Emma Hardinge, from the London Saturday Review via New York Saturday Press of 17 February 1866 . Undoubtedly a review of one of Emma's London soiree lectures of early 1866, the fact that the Saturday Press felt it worthy of front page placement tells us something about Emma's notoriety on both sides of the Atlantic in the middle 1860s.

Henry Clapp, Jr., the editor of the Saturday Review, was a lapsed temperance reformer and abolitionist often called 'the King of Bohemia', who is best known today for his early promotion of Poe and Whitman. His book The Pioneer, or Leaves From An Editor's Portfolio (1846) is available from reprint houses.

Web Site Updated

The artifacts section of the EH Britten Archive is now live, as is part one of the biographical summary.

Sir John Franklin, Wella Anderson, Social Network Speed, and the Economics of Modern Spiritualism

I am not sure how often Emma refers to Sir John Franklin, but...it's often.

Preparing some of the materials for the web site tonight, I had occasion to skiffle through Google, looking for information about Emma's neighbors in Vassal Terrace, Chelsea, in 1860. The Ann Sophia menage, including William and Margaret's husband, Gilbert Wilkinson, are recorded in the 1871 UK census as living at 6 Vassal Terrace. Next door -- at number 5, I presume -- was a boarding house, with various and sundry persons of interest in residence. Isabella Burt, the author of several obscure books on the geography and urban institutions of Kensington and environs, was one of the boarding house lodgers, and another was William Duguid, listed in the census as a veterinary surgeon.

I confess Duguid attracted me initially because he shares a surname with David Duguid, the famous painting medium, and the employee of Emma's biographer, James Robertson. As I sense Emma had a substantial Scottish network that as yet I can't map -- and as her possible connections with the HBofL may be through this Scottish social network -- I dug into our man William a bit.

It turns out that William Duguid was a Member of the Royal College of Veterinary Science (entitling him to M.R.C.V.S after his name), and professor of Veterinary Physiology at the Albert Veterinary College in Bayswater: an institute above-board enough to have attracted his Grace the Duke of Newcastle to its Presidency.

It also appeared -- and here's a shred of dessicated carrion caught in my teeth this evening -- that William Duguid was an ordinary seaman who served on the Price Albert, the ship sent in 1845 to look for Sir John Franklin's expedition. Ahah, I said to myself, but ten minutes later I realized my William Duguid was six years old or so in 1845, and not likely to have been on that expedition....

Off to the genealogical databases....squirrel, squirrel....two William Duguids of my William's age in the Scots censuses, one of whom is living with a David....nope, nothing. Just a surgeon. Just a neighbor.

Context-switch to David Duguid, and do what I should have done a few months back: read the introduction Hay Nisbet wrote to Duguid's trance-delivered Hafed, Price of Persia. And there I find the payoff.

Nisbet, writing about the difficulties of disproving fraud early on in Duguid's career as a painting medium (a fairly rare manifestation of mediumship at the time), says:

Orooso is probably Owosso, a town which was then and is now somewhat off the beaten track.

You'd need to add two zeroes, I would think, at least to the figure paid for the Wella Anderson painting to get 2009 purchasing power equivalence.

But what's noteworthy about this little gem -- and Hay Nisbet's introduction to Hafed is full of little gems -- is the sheer speed and distance with which practices, tests, tips (and quite possibly, in other contexts, tricks) traveled within the social network that was Modern Spiritualism. A letter from a Spiritualist in a backwater Michigan town, and an entire practice is transported and deployed in Scotland. Innovation travels fast, even in the mid-Victorian period.

And I'd imagine we can look on Wella Anderson in a somewhat clearer light now. Tens of thousands of dollars for a spirit painting -- that'd pay your rent in Manhattan in 1870 for a good while.

By comparison, Emma at this time, in Boston, was charging between 10 cents and a quarter a head to attend her lectures on galvanic medicine, and she was failing to fill venues of a hundred seats or so. William was selling his Home Batteries for a few dollars each. It would have taken her, by my estimate, 400 lectures or so to gross $3000.

Hypotheses On The Orphic Circle

I'm posting less frequently at the moment because I'm trying to get the web site into some kind of decent shape.

Meantime, there are new documents: Hypotheses On The Orphic Circle, the narrow Orphic Circle social network diagram and its wide version.

I have also begun writing the code to perform the linguistic analysis of Emma's texts, so we can begin to get at those nagging questions of authorship. One of the by-products of this work will be a searchable database of all Emma's texts, as well as an automatic concordance generator. We'll also be able (assuming I can find the referenced sources) to confirm or reject the charges of plagiarism leveled at Emma at various times.

Keep those cards and letters coming.

The Suspension Of The Western Star

There have been enough references in the secondary press to the termination of The Western Star as a result of the Boston Fires of 1872 that I thought it would be worth publishing Emma's own notice.

While I'm curious to know whether Emma actually had shareholders, in the technical sense of that term, in The Western Star, the rhewtoric of the final paragraph is critical: resources exhausted, encomiums received but no financial recompense, suspended but not totally foreclosed. This is a stance Emma has recourse to, time and again -- not because it's convenient, but because, almost certainly, it is true. Try what she might, as she might, she led a tenuous financial existence, supporting her mother, and then her husband -- the first purely parasitic (and perhaps abusive?), the second somewhat symbiotic, the both in need of, and eventually supplied with, annuities. I wonder if any of us can imagine what Emma must have struggled with, every day, at the maslovian ground level, as she executed her mission?

Making Ends Meet

This, from the back pages of the Dcember 1872 issue of Emma's Western Star

We have seen Emma in this position before, as for example with her endorsement of Elizabeth French's galvanic medicine. In this case, Emma is endorsing -- by means of a letter, putatively published in a newspaper, a cure for opium addiction promoted by Dr. S. B. Collins of Laporte, Indiana. Collins' cure, as far as I can tell, was a patent medicine made primarily from opoids, and Collins was a masterful self-promoter, publishing a book and an house rag called Theriaki that he circulated widely to promote his cure

That Emma was periodically obliged to endorse products, either for favors or for money (in this instance, for Collins' advertisement) is not surprising, but it is also clearly something she does not do as a matter of course -- something she does as a last resort. This raises, again, the question of how Emma got her living as a spiritualist propagandist, and the question of the role of money in Emma's life - how she got it, how she spent it, why it was always, from her perspective, in short supply, and why it was that she never figured out how to make her commercial business model scale. Pat Deveney's comments to me have got me thinking a lot about this -- why it was that the second, rather than the first, generation of Spiritualists (I am thinking particularly of Emma's friend Ida Ellis) would be the ones to take on the questions of the business of spiritualism head-on, and figure out how to make money, how to do well while doing good.

Resurrectionists: Digging Up The Western Star

The six issues of The Western Star, edited by Emma, and arguably the first periodical to anneal occult themes to the chassis of the Spiritualism movement, has been recovered, digitized and will be available shortly in the Archive.

Emma, In Transition

This tiny, but significant, advertisement from the Chicago Tribune for 4 January 1859.

HARMONIAL SOCIETY | The Celebrated Trance-Medium, | MISS EMMA HARDINGE | Will speak in METROPOLITAN HALL on Thursday Evening, January 6, 1859. Miss HARDINGE speaks under the influence of a Superior Power, and generally permits the audience to choose a Committee to select the subject on which she shall speak during the evening, thus giving those present a chance to test the matter publicly. It is expected that on this occasion the custom will be observed and it is confidentally hoped that all persons who have doubts of her entrancement will be present to witness the test. The price of admission is only 10 cents. Doors open at 6 1/2 o'clock.

Still a test medium, though being tested differently. Already aware that it needs be a Superior Power and not a name, not an historical figure. Still Miss, but now Hardinge. 1200-odd seats, I believe, at 10 cents a head, with some portion of the proceeds paying for the hall, and some to the Harmonial Society no doubt.

And Emma, as we know, wrote her own copy.

The Spiritualist and the Physicist

Something to ponder:

Herein may be found a key to the fact that, with the exception of the late Dr. A. R. Wallace, who, as a young man, believed that 'electro-biology' was a supernormal phenomenon, it is mostly from physicists (and mathematicians) that Spiritualism derives its support. To cull only three examples, take Sir William Crookes, with his reiteration of his belief in Florence Cook, as a medium of the manifestation of spirits, after her detection in fraud; Sir Oliver Lodge, in his belief, after witnessing them, in the genuineness of the performances of Eusapia Palladino, and the admission afterwards that he had been befooled; and Sir W. F. Barrett asserting his conviction that the dowser discovers the presence of water by "the faculty of clairvoyance" and possession of a "supersensuous perceptive power."

This from Edward Clodd's under-rated book The Question -- If A Man Die Shall He Live Again? (1917).

Is it true, I wonder, that the scientific support Spiritualists craved and trumpeted (and Clodd does a marvelous job deconstructing the rhetoric of scientific support in the book) came mostly or even predominantly from physicists? Or was it rather that physics and mathematics, as the favored sciences of the nineteenth century, carried more cultural weight? received more attention? were more carefully cultivated?

One thing is certainly the case -- the passing of the control of science from amateurs to professionals in the course of the nineteenth century is a well-understood phenomenon. To call Sir William Crooks a physicist is fine, but one could have equally well called him a chemist, and been well within bounds. As we have already seen with our Varleys, possession of significant scientific or technological credentials and capabilities was well within the bounds of the average well-educated middle-class person in the early part of the century -- and highly unlikely to be the case with any but the professionally-degree'd by the century's end. Freud fought, and lost, the last battle in this war when he waved the white flag on the question of lay analysis. Although I take Clodd's point, and take it seriously, what strikes me in his -- and others -- examples (de Morgan being a notable outlier) is the extent to which Spiritualism captured the imagination of the amateur, the polymath and the technologist (again, I think of the Varleys, and particularly of Cromwell Varley), and failed the sniff test of the professional scientist.

There is an open boundary, for sure, between science and spiritualism in the nineteenth century: both for example are discovering the marvelous and polymorphous perversity of electromagnetism (real and animal). I think we tend to forget that electromagnetism-the-science spent a good bit of its time in the 19th century chasing the phantom of the luminiferous aether at the same time electromagnetic scientists were denying spiritualists any such convenience for propagating their particular set of phenomena. This is the classic exclusionary gesture of science; to deny to other disciplines the intellectual make-shifts on which its own theories depend.

(Here I can't help thinking of the hysteria of Dawkins in The God Delusion, and wondering whether Dawkins might have a picture of, say, E. Ray Lankester on the wall of his office. Wait...Lankester was an invertebrate zoologist, wasn't he? Well, that explains it...)

Or was it the case, as Clodd might have suggested, that physicists were particularly susceptible to the epistemological claims of spiritualism precisely because they, too, needed the aether, for their purposes?

And something else, while we're poking at the old scar of spiritualism upon science...why is it, does one suppose, that so many scientists who would, after 1880 or so, make their way in the new 'human science' of psychology, see so clearly that, at the heart of spiritualism, was something that was undeniably worthy of study?

The Call, Part Six: The Skrying Call

Here is the meaning -- Emma's meaning -- of the word call, taken from Northcote Thomas' Crystal Gazing: Its History and Practice, with a Discussion of the Evidence for Telepathic Scrying (1905):

Lest there be any doubt, among her occult-literate readers, about the reason for Emma's involvement with the members of the 'Orphic Circle', she makes it plain enough in her Autobiography -- she was a skryer, and knew the ceremonial drill.

I'm sure I'll keep returning to this topic, as it is so central to Emma's life and work, but it seems plain enough to me at this point that Emma's major claims, about people and practices, during the 1830s and 1840s are substantiated by the available evidence. Every person she names -- in her Sirius article -- as a member of the 'Orphic Circle' can be demonstrated to be involved in one or both of the two strange attractors for these sorts of practices at the time: the circle around the Mercurii, or the Gore House circle. The specific practices Emma suggests or identifies are indeed in vogue, and Emma is familiar with procedures, equipment and locales consistent with what we know about the historical figures she wants to implicate.

This is, I think, as close as we will come to proving the matter. Perhaps Morrison, like John Dee before him, left detailed notes of his skrying sessions that have not come to light, and perhaps those name Emma. But I doubt it.

The most likely ways in which Emma became involved in the 'Orphic Circle' are therefore:

1. Through Richard Morrison, whether as a skryer for his astronomical investigations, or his public performances, or
2. through a meeting with Varley, Dickens or Chauncey Hare Townshend at Gore House, where Emma would have been placed, by Thomas Welsh, as a musician.

So, no QED, unfortunately, but (in my opinion) Emma's account of matters once again proves to be substantially accurate.

The Call, Part Five: Setting The Scene for Emma

The Varleys -- John and Cornelius -- possessed the trade secrets (mechanical and occultic) and the apparatus to make skyring crystals from the late 1820s (Samuel Varley died in 1828) onward. Cornelius Varley may have made -- I think did make -- a skrying crystal for Lady Blessington, which was delivered to her by John Varley, her astrologer, and which subsequently became conflated with a crystal owned by Richard Morrison, and another, more widely viewed, crystal owned by Philip Henry Stanhope.

(Stanhope and John Varley had a complicated relationship. John Varley's father was probably one of Philip Henry's tutors, and the two men grew up together, but Philip Henry blamed Samuel Varley for encouraging his father's mechanical and scientific excesses, and depleting the Stanhope estate. It does not surprise me, based on Philip Henry's comments, at the time of his father's death, that he chose to have his crystal made by an optician other than Cornelius Varley.)

John Varley and Richard Morrison, along with Thomas Oxley, Richard Cross Smith and other practicing astrologers, were members of a loose-knit occupational-mutual-aid society, called the Mercurii, during this same period. Prosecutions of astrologers under the Vagrancy Act were still going on as late as 1844, according to the scholar Owen Davies, leading Morrison to form the British Association for the Advancement of Astral Science &c and the Protection of Astrologers. Morrison understood the value of association -- formal and otherwise -- for protection as well as advancement of what he saw as his science: occult science. And he knew members of Parliament, convincing William Ewart for example to introduce a private member's bill to have the Vagrancy Act modified to permit private (in-home) practice of astrology without legal penalty.

Morrison was using skyring and adolescent skryers, from at least 1842 onward (judging by accounts in print) to aid him in his astrological investigations, using young female skryers to obtain 'local' view of astronomical bodies.

John Varley brought both Edward Bulwer Lytton -- by 1840 an accomplished geomancer hard at work on the most famous occult novel in English history, Zanoni -- and a young Richard Francis Burton (just expelled from college) into the Mercurii circle.

These things we can rely on, as matters of historical fact.

How conveniently this maps to the darkest part of Emma Floyd's young life: the period when Thomas Welsh's school was winding down (1842 or so), and the period before the documentary record has her on stage as an actress (at Sadler's Wells, in 1844).

Unfortunately, the thread by which I tie Emma to the circle around Morrison and Varley is, I confess, thin: it is in fact a single word, here in its context, from Emma's Autobiography:

Never understood by those around me, it was only in after years and when I became called and associated with a secret society of Occultists and attended their sessions in London as one of their clairvoyant and magnetic subjects, that I myself began to comprehend why a young girl fairly educated, and blessed with many advantages, should be branded with such peculiarities of disposition as must inevitably shut her of from all companionship with children of her own age and standing.

The society of Occultists to whom I can now only allude, and who are named in " Ghost-Land " as the " Orphic Circle," obtained knowledge (by means I am not at liberty to mention) of those persons whose associations they desired.

None of the members were known as such outside their circles, the existence of the society was undreamed of, and those whom they chose to affiliate with they knew of and called. I having been thus favoured obtained a clue to my own exceptional early experiences, which the subsequent developments of Spiritualism stamped as natural Seership.

The repetition of the verbal call is deliberate -- to the point of being awkward -- in this passage. Given Emma's penchant for dropping opaque hints, what can this mean?

The Call, Part Four: The Countess of Blessington's Magician

The Countess had a skrying crystal. Subsequently, either Richard Morrison, Philip Henry Stanhope, or both men, possessed said crystal. It was made for the Countess by her magician.

Who was that?

Although procured might be a better word than made, as we shall see, the answer first: it was John Varley, the Gore House Circle's resident astrologer.

To begin, a letter from the master of skrying, Frederick Hockley, to F. G. Irwin, a military officer and practicing skryer:

I will answer (your) last note first. Mr. Chevallier's Crystal is one of Burns' egg shaped 'Glass Receptables' as they were accurately termed in contradistinction to 'Crystals' which are made of natural rock crystal and beryl. All the so-called 'Crystals' I have seen at Burns being made of common glass are sheared and are very fatiguing to the eyes and indeed if much used would seriously affect them -- even with good 'seers' I would not advise you to buy it (of course this is confidential). My two factitious Crystals are made of powered Rock Crystal with Brass, the late Earl Stanhope gave Mr. Slater the Optician 4 (grains) of brass each for them. They were made expressly for me, but tho' great lenses they are by no means comparable to the real article -- my others are Rock Crystals.

I read this passage as suggesting both that there is a distinction to be made between skrying crystals and glass receptables (for ink? water? semen?), and between species of skrying crystal: there are both man-made skyring crystals (requiring powered rock crystal, brass and the skill of a glass-making optician) and natural skyring crystals, made of pure as-found rock crystal.

Judging by the NYT's coverage of the Morrison defamation suit, Morrison's crystal was of the latter variety. We have no description I'm aware of, of Philip Henry Stanhope's skrying crystal itself, but Hockley is clear, in his letter, that Philip Henry was involved in the production of man-made crystal using opticians (who were at the time both glass-makers and lens-grinders).

It seems to me -- and it's only a hunch, informed by stray bits of evidence -- that neither Morrison nor Stanhope were in the possession of the Countess of Blessington's skrying crystal.

John Varley, as I've mentioned in prior postings, is connected with both the Countess of Blessington and with the Stanhope family, and this connection has been noted before, by researchers and scholars working on the occult network operating in England in the first half of the nineteenth century.

What has not been noted -- at least not to my knowledge -- are three salient facts, that bear on the issue at hand. To wit:

1. Samuel Varley, John Varley's uncle, was an intimate friend and co-worker of Charles Stanhope, Philip Henry Stanhope's father. Samuel Varley actually lived and worked on the Stanhope estate at Chevening, and was the recipient of one thousand pounds when Charles Stanhope's will was proved: as much as Charles Stanhope left his mother in his will. Stanhope also left Samuel Varley "all my tools, machines and instruments, mathematical and astronomical, chymical and mechanical". And, further, Charles Stanhope was intent, in his will, that the money and the apparatus stay in the Varley family, indicating that should Samuel Varley predecease him, the money and instruments were to go to Samuel Varley's children.
2. Around 1800, Charles Stanhope and Samuel Varley laid out plans -- never realized -- to construct what would have been the largest optical telescope in the world at the time: 384 feet in length, with mirrored reflecting lens six feet in diameter, requiring all the engineering ingenuity those two men had to produce. And they had world-class skills: Stanhope is credited as the inventor of the iron-bed press, named for him, that revolutionized the production of books, and changed the economics of mass publishing beginning in the middle 1810s.
3. Cornelius Varley, Samuel Varley's nephew and John Varley's brother, was frequently in the workshops at Chevening, and was trained by his uncle in optics, becoming a skilled optician (in addition to a significant painter) with one optical invention (the so-called graphic telescope) and numerous improvements to the camera lucida, microscope and camera obscura to his credit. And Cornelius Varley was the recipient of all his uncle Samuel's trade secrets, which he bled into the pubic domain in the course of his life -- there are numerous reports of Cornelius' donations of "techniques" and "recipes" to the various scientific societies of which he was a member. And some of those -- not coincidentally -- had to do with the manufacture and use of brass.
4. Cornelius' son Cromwell Varley was both a world-famous telegraphy engineer and, not coincidentally, a Spiritualist of the first water, testifying -- as did our Emma -- before the Dialectical Society committee.

Cornelius Varley was in possession of Samuel Varley's trade secrets, and of the apparatus Samuel Varley and Charles Stanhope had constructed to build, among other things, their projected giant telescope, and he was a practicing optics engineer during his own lifetime.

It's almost a certainty, to my way of thinking, that Cornelius Varley made skrying crystals for his elder brother John, and that one of those crystals was the one given to the Countess of Blessington by her court magician, John Varley.

(As a side note, I refer interested readers to the telescope-viewing scene in Emma's Ghost Land, and ask them to re-read that scene with what we know about Stanhope and Varley's designs in mind...)

The Call, Part Three: Richard Morrison Predicts...

In 1861, Richard Morrison, known in astrological circles as Zadkiel, published a prediction in Zadkiel's Almanac, suggesting that "[t]he stationary position of Saturn will be very evil for persons born on or near the 26th August."

The aforementioned persons included the much-beloved Prince Consort, Albert, who obligingly died on 23 December 1861.

The Daily Telegraph for 21 January, 1862 made much of the connection between Morrison's pronouncement and the Albert's death, concluding by asking a question designed to produce response from its readers: who is this Zadkiel?

Rear Admiral Sir Edward Belcher (who, one imagines, was a bit tired of all this occult nonsense, as he had been responsible, in 1852-1854, for the search for the remains of the Sir John Franklin Arctic expedition, that touchstone of spirit mediumship), responded, writing (in part):

Is it your impression of this day that you say Who is this Zadkiel, and are there no means of ferreting him out and handing him up to Bow street (Magistrates Court) as a rogue and a vagabond? I will aid you on the scent by informing you that he stands as a Lieutenant on the Navy list; next that he has admirers at Greenwich Hospital (for wounded and disabled seamen and their families) who fancy him a prophet A1, and that his mischievous propensities are not solely involved with that foolish publication, Zadkiel's Almanac....His name is C. J. Morrison (sic)...he is the crystal globe seer who gulled many of our nobility about the year 1852....Making use of a boy under fourteen, or a girl under twelve, he pretended, by their looking into the crystal, to hold converse with the spirits of the Apostles, and to tell what was going on in any part of the world...

(We have already seen that Morrison used adolescent skryers for other purposes.)

Morrison sued for defamation, not surprisingly, and he won his case: he was awarded 20 shillings, indicating that while the court found him within his rights, all justice's sympathies were with Belcher and the Telegraph.

During the trial (the transcript of which I am in the process of obtaining), much evidence was adduced by the plaintiff, but the case revolved around: Zadkiel's skrying crystal. The New York Times coverage of the trial reports, as follows:

(Morrison) stated that the had heard of the wonderful (crystal) ball as in the possession of Lady Blessington and sold among her effects (when she died, bankrupt, in Paris in 1849). He himself bought it in 1849 from a London dealer in curiosities. Here the ball itself was produced and put in evidence. It was a rock crystal, three or four inches in diameter, with several flaws, handled by means of a ribbon, and carefully kept in a cushioned box....The plaintiff then went on to say that his son, a lad of thirteen years of age, was the first who professed to see visions in it; the scenes described to him were laid chiefly in the Arctic seas and appeared to relate to the fate of Sir John Franklin and his crew. He had sent an account of these visions to the Athenaeum which had published it...(Plaintiff testified that) several persons of distinction had at different times desired to see the crystal, and it seems from the evidence to have been quite the rage at one time to engage Zadkiel and his crystal as an additional entertainment, at evening parties. The plaintiff ran over a long list of persons to whom, at their own request, he had exhibited the crystal. Among these figured Baron (Christian) Bunsen, (father of Ernest and Henry George de Bunsen), several countesses, a bishop, an archedeacon and a member of Parliament....

Morrison's attorney called the Earl of Wilton to the stand, who testified that he had consulted the crystal on several matters, and also called his friend Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton to the stand, where EBL copped his standard line about his occult investigations: that he was investigating these practices "to find the natural causes bu which strange and wondrous effects might be produced." Just the science, ma'am.

Zadkiel's crystal, Stanhope's crystal -- apparently not the same, and only one of them (but which one?) the possession originally of Lady Blessington, made for her by "her magician"...