Enchanted Spaces: The Séance, Affect, and Geographies of Religion

Abstract

This article calls for the geographies of religion and belief to attend to the sensuous, vitalistic, and affectual forces through which spaces of the religious, spiritual, and the sacred are performed. Not only do we need to recognize and explore these forces themselves, but our analyses of how religious-sacred spaces (re)produce or challenge societal and cultural discourses can also be enhanced if we focus on affect and embodiment. Through the case study of nineteenth-century spiritualism and the key space of the séance, these points are exemplified and substantiated. Finally, I explore some of the implications of recognizing these sensations for the study of geographies of religion and belief through Bennett's (2001) nonreductionist and nonteleological notion of enchantment.

Key Words:

• affect
• embodiment
• enchantment
• séance
• spiritualism

Notes

1. One must recognize other significant antecedents and influences on spiritualism's development—for example, those of the Swedish scientist Emanuel Swedenborg and his communication with spirits and angels between 1743 and 1745, as well as those of Andrew Jackson Davies and his prophecies, beginning in 1844, based on contact with different spirits (Barrow 1986). Beyond these influences the development of nineteenth-century spiritualism has much in common with a variety of forms of Christian mysticism and a more general Western occult tradition (of which Dr. John Dee's “scrying” with Angels in the Elizabethan period comes to mind), as well as the craze for mesmerism that developed from the late eighteenth century into the nineteenth century (Gibbons 2001). Mesmerism was developed in the eighteenth century by Franz Anton Mesmer, a Viennese physician, and its practitioners asserted that people could be cured of ailments through the manipulation of a certain fluid that permeated reality, binding the physical and spiritual together. Spiritualists argued that this fluid or spiritual force was tapped into when mediums communicated with the dead (Winter 1998).

2. Thus in London, spiritualism began as a parlor game, but séances soon became a site for curious or sometimes serious investigation of psychic phenomena and supernaturalism among the urban middle classes. To this end a whole series of nineteenth-century figures flirted with or became full-fledged advocates of spiritualism, including the Trollopes, Thackeray, and Dickens (and in the early twentieth century Arthur Conan Doyle was both a believer and historian of spiritualism).

3. Despite the heterogeneous ideological content, and indeed interpretation, of spirit communications, spiritualism in the United Kingdom was generally of a progressive, egalitarian, and often socialist focus, sharing many concerns with women's rights, antislavery, temperance, and vegetarianism.

4. It is precisely this occupation of the middle ground that caused much consternation for spiritualists and ultimately, according to some commentators, led to spiritualism never becoming a coherent religious movement.

5. Not least because in its early incarnations spiritualism had been associated with the immoral acts of “free love.”

6. The eroticism of the séance was further explored through the apparently scientific need to peruse and investigate the corporeality of both the materialized spirit and the medium.