Midnight Rumblings on Mahogany ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
October 15, 2023
Unitarian and Universalist historians have always been a little bit squeamish about discussing the phenomenon of Spiritualism that swept the country in the 19th century. Spiritualism: the belief that it was possible to communicate with the dead. We UU rational seekers of truth don’t really approve of this. In a shelf full of history books, I could find scarcely a mention of the topic. The less said, apparently, the better. But here in October, during a month where we’re looking at our heritage and when we expect things to go bump in the night, it seemed to be time to dig a bit and find out what this movement, Spiritualism, that is spoken about only in whispers, was really all about.
So let’s go back in time now to the 1840’s. The country was still new, and growing. Health care was still abysmal, and sudden illness and death were everywhere. And at the same time, there was expanding scientific knowledge. So perhaps Spiritualism began with the invention of the telegraph. In 1842, Samuel Morse went before Congress to request $30,000 to build an experimental telegraph line between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. It seems that many of the congressmen had so little understanding of electricity that they were unable to understand the request. In fact, some of them thought that they might as well offer funds to conduct experiments in hypnotism. The line between science and supernatural phenomena appeared to be very blurry. Six years later, in 1848, when the telegraph was operating, people easily found parallels between the messages sent across long distances by telegraph, or by spirits. This thing they had heard about called electricity could be used for either transmission along a wire, or from a dead relative. (Radical Spirits, p. 4-5.)
Before we begin to feel too superior, let’s think about how we talk in generalities about energy.
So maybe Spiritualism emerged from confusion about science. Or, maybe Spiritualism grew out of the deep grief of people who lost loved ones. People longed to be able to communicate beyond the veil, to know that their loved ones still existed in some form, and were happy. It was a time of very high infant and child mortality: in 1840 there were still over 400 deaths of children under five years old per 1000 live births. (www.statista.com)
One young mother poured out her grief at the loss of her baby. “My darling is gone! The fond great hope of my life!” she wrote. The mother, Anne Denton Cridge, was a medium, and she reported seeing her son’s spirit leaving his tiny body and joining the spirits of his grandparents, in whose care, she saw, he recovered from his fatal illness. (Ibid., p. 1.)
The natural grief felt by bereaved spouses, parents, and siblings was intensified by the religious beliefs of the day. Although Universalism, the belief in universal salvation for all, was expanding rapidly, most Americans were still Protestant Calvinists. According to Calvinist belief, very few people were predestined to spend eternity in heaven. Everyone else would be consigned to hell. This belief terrified people. Imagine your grief, losing a beloved, and then fearing for their eternal well-being. Now imagine spirit mediums making contact with loved ones who had died, and reporting that the people said that they were happy and thriving. What would you do to try to contact your loved one? What would you be willing to believe?
Perhaps Spiritualism grew out of Transcendentalism. After all, the Transcendentalists believed that the divine was everywhere, and could be particularly close in the natural world. And because the divine, or God, could be found all around us, there was no particular need for the rituals or dogmas of established churches. Spiritualists enthusiastically absorbed the ideas first posited by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. As Emerson wrote in his essay, The Oversoul, “Let us learn the revelation of all nature and thought; that the Highest dwells within us; that the sources of nature are in our own minds…There is deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is accessible to us…”
Ironically, the Unitarians and the Transcendentalists were highly skeptical of Spiritualism. Emerson much preferred intellectual conversations about the nature of the divine to the attempts to summon the dead. He was dismissive of the practices of the spirit circles, all the rapping and knocking, and referred to them as ‘midnight rumblings over mahogany.’ (The Other Side of Salvation, p. 139.)
But the Spiritualists were an important factor in spreading the concepts of Transcendentalism. While Emerson and his colleagues disdained them, in fact what happened was that the appeal of Transcendentalist beliefs was broadened beyond the highly educated, affluent circles from which it emerged. Spiritualism helped to make Transcendentalism more accessible to the general public. Author Ann Braude wrote, “While the American public flocked to Emerson’s lectures and were inspired by what he said, few of them responded by joining communes or becoming Transcendentalists. Instead, they followed his lectures with visits to seances, where the power of Emerson’s ideas helped fuel the movement he despised.” (Radical Spirits, p. 44-45.)
Many factors converged to create Spiritualism; the longing for loved ones, the beginnings of scientific discovery, the emergence of more liberal religious beliefs. And one religion helped to spread the movement farther and faster. That religion was Universalism.
At the time, Universalism was growing and spreading very quickly. By 1850, there were twice as many Universalist churches as Unitarian, and a wider geographic spread. (Ibid., p. 45.)
Universalist ministers in particular flocked to Spiritualism. Many left the ministry altogether, but some continued to serve Universalist churches while practicing Spiritualism.
The central question for me has always been why? Why did Universalists fling themselves so enthusiastically into the pursuit of Spiritualism?
Let’s think about that. Alone among religious denominations in the first half of the 19th century, Universalists believed that people were not destined to spend all of eternity in hell. They argued amongst themselves as to whether people went immediately to heaven, or whether they had to spend some period of time of punishment or correction before being restored to heaven. Imagine their interest in finding ways of hearing from the dead themselves about their experiences. This might offer proof that they were right! And also: what was happening to all these spirits? Were they in some kind of spiritual limbo, not growing or developing, or were they able to progress in the long run toward a more enlightened state? Imagine being able to ask them!
Charles Hammond from Rochester, New York, who was influenced by the Fox sisters, was possibly the first Universalist minister to pursue Spiritualism, but by the 1870’s Reverend Olympia Brown wrote that half of all the Universalist ministers were spiritualists and ‘make no secret of it.’ (Ibid., p.46.)
Perhaps one of the best known was a man named John Murray Spear. As you might be guessing, he was named for John Murray, the founder of this congregation, as the Spear family were members of John Murray’s Boston congregation. John Spear entered the Universalist ministry and became a radical abolitionist, as well as an advocate for prison reform and the abolition of the death penalty. Over time, Spear left the ministry and became something of a wandering clairvoyant and a healer. It was only a matter of time before Spear became drawn into spiritualist circles, and began delivering lectures and sermons while in a trance. And then, he began to receive messages from John Murray.
John Murray had quite a lot to say. Through John Spear, he proclaimed that the spirits found joy and emancipation in the afterlife. Murray predicted the coming of a ‘new light’ that would reveal all truths. He charged John Spear to ‘consecrate himself to advance the new light. From there Spear followed a path of ever-increasing connections with spirits of reformers such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, who Spear told others were planning for the reformation of society, including inventions, special machines, that would be able to collect the ‘new energy’.
Spear’s visions grew ever more ambitious in fostering social reform. He was a leader of a wide circle of colleagues and followers, two of whom, Simon Hewitt and John Allen, served the Rockport Universalist Church for a time. The list of reforms attempted by these men and their associates is long and complicated. Ultimately Hewitt came to believe that a new cosmic order was emerging, with a new planet and animals. This would involve spirits coming to Earth to inseminate women. His wife divorced him.
And on it went, pursuing needed social reforms on the one hand: abolition, prison reform, and women’s rights, and fantastic inventions and fringe schemes proposed by the spirits on the other hand.
John Spear was also focusing on the elevation of the human race by reproduction through spirit contact. He and others formed a new society, called the Order of the Patriarchs, dedicated to the principles of free love and emancipation for women. Although the name of the group was somewhat ironic, the goal was to elevate women so that their minds could guide their bodies into healthier relationships. Partners referred to one another as their ‘affinity.’
I think I might have discovered the main reason why our UU historians have tried to pretend for so long that none of this really happened.
By 1880, the rush of Universalists, especially the ministers, into spiritualism declined. The movement lost followers, as the lines dividing science and parapsychology grew sharper. As I have noted, the movement became shrouded in mist, scarcely acknowledged, treated as shameful.
And yet. We continue to hold space for Unitarian Universalist mystics. And there are hints of our past, often hidden in plain sight. The words of the hymn ‘Gathered Here’ began to run through my head as I wrote this. “Gathered here, in the mystery of the hour…spirit, draw near.”
“Spirit of Life, come unto me…”
We hold space for what we struggle to understand, and what we continue to struggle to achieve. We see this in the Six Sources of our Living Tradition. The call for reform is clear: “Words and deeds which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil…”. And these sources too: “Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder…”, “Spiritual teachings of earth-centered traditions…”. It’s all there, when we look for it. And we can speak of these things. Many of us have stories, of visits from beyond the veil, of things that cannot be explained. We hold space for the stories, for the mystery.
Those who are dead have never gone away.
They are in the shadows darkening around,
They are in the shadows fading into day,
The dead are not under the ground.
They are in the trees that quiver,
They are in the woods that weep,
They are in the waters of the rivers,
They are in the waters that sleep.
They are in the crowds, they are in the homestead.
The dead are never dead. (Breath, by Birago Diop)
May we remain open to mystery.
