tag:theconversation.com,2011:/fr/topics/seance-29057/articles
seance – The Conversation
2021-12-22T13:09:13Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/172836
2021-12-22T13:09:13Z
2021-12-22T13:09:13Z
As spiritualism’s popularity grows, photographer Shannon Taggart takes viewers inside the world of séances, mediums and orbs
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/435879/original/file-20211206-13-zj3lkx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=3%2C6%2C2243%2C1488&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Table-tipping workshop with mediums Jane and Chris Howarth in Erie, Pennsylvania, in 2014.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Shannon Taggart. Courtesy of the Artist.</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The word séance conjures images of darkened rooms, entranced mediums, strange occurrences and spirit voices. For many contemporary audiences, these visions might seem like something out of the past, or perhaps a movie, rather than a living belief system.</p>
<p>For the past 20 years, American photographer Shannon Taggart has explored <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/spiritualism-religion">modern spiritualism</a>, a religion whose adherents believe in communication with the dead.</p>
<p>Her photographic series “<a href="https://www.shannontaggart.com/">Séance</a>,” which was recently on view at the <a href="https://library.umbc.edu/">Albin O. Kuhn Gallery</a> at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, provides a window into this often misunderstood religion.</p>
<p>As a curator and art historian who has researched <a href="https://www.mqup.ca/iconoclasm-products-9780773557376.php">apparition photographs</a> and <a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9781588396594/everything-connected">the art of conspiracy theory</a>, I was drawn to Taggart’s images because they offer a lens through which to examine the role of spirituality in modern life.</p>
<p>In an era defined by a global pandemic, heightened political division and the planetary threat of climate change, I wonder: Is spiritualism due for a major resurgence?</p>
<h2>Spiritualism comes knocking</h2>
<p>Spiritualism emerged near Rochester, New York, in 1848 when two sisters, <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-fox-sisters-and-the-rap-on-spiritualism-99663697/">Kate and Margaret Fox, claimed to hear a mysterious rapping at their bedroom wall</a>. The adolescents claimed to communicate through a system of knocks with the spirit of a man who had died in the house years earlier. News of the phenomenon traveled quickly, and the girls appeared before crowds demonstrating their purported abilities.</p>
<p>Soon, reports of similar phenomena occurring across the United States appeared in the press, and the <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/31/why-did-so-many-victorians-try-to-speak-with-the-dead">possibility of speaking with the deceased fueled the popular imagination</a>.</p>
<p>Spiritualism first grew in private. People who channeled communication with the dead, called mediums, operated out of their homes, where they would organize séance circles, gatherings in which a small group attempted to make contact with the spirit world.</p>
<p>Over time, spiritualists started appearing publicly at conventions and outdoor summer camp meetings. By the 1870s, they began to put down roots, founding like-minded communities and centers of study, such as the spiritualist colony of <a href="https://www.lilydaleassembly.org/">Lily Dale, New York</a>, established in 1879.</p>
<p>In addition to holding séances, spiritualists practice healings and believe in the gift of prophecy. Mediums say they convey messages from the dead to the living, including reports about the future.</p>
<p>Many spiritualists hoped to make utopian visions of the future a reality in the present by supporting progressive <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520274532/ghosts-of-futures-past">political causes such as abolitionism, women’s rights and Indigenous rights</a>. </p>
<p>Notably, spiritualism gave women an unprecedented role in religion, providing an audience and a platform to deliver messages both personal and political. Suffragists Marion H. Skidmore, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony all spoke at Lily Dale. The views of spiritualists thus represented a <a href="https://iupress.org/9780253215024/radical-spirits-second-edition/">radical break from traditional religious and political authority</a>. </p>
<h2>Ghosts in the machine</h2>
<p>The Fox sisters’ purported ability to communicate with the dead became known as “<a href="https://narratively.com/the-sisters-who-spoke-to-spirits/">the spiritual telegraph</a>,” referencing the then-recent invention by Samuel B. Morse. As spiritualism developed, adherents embraced technology as tools for spirit communication and to prove the existence of spirits.</p>
<p>Photography became “<a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300111361/perfect-medium">the perfect medium</a>” with which to create an iconography of spiritualism. Whether it was through astronomical, microscopic or X-ray photography, cameras could render the unseen visible. Despite the proliferation of <a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300185010/faking-it">altered photographs in the 19th century</a>, the photograph’s status as a truthful representation of reality remained – and, one might argue, continues to remain – largely intact.</p>
<p>Photography also played a leading role in the 19th century’s memorial culture, since the camera could freeze time and render absent loved ones present, if only as a visual trace.</p>
<p>The American Civil War brought death at an unprecedented scale into people’s living rooms through the pages of the illustrated press. Black attire, mourning jewelry and the genre of <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-36389581">post-mortem photography</a> were commonplace in a culture of grieving.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/437858/original/file-20211215-27-1ib8a4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Woman holds photo album with two black and white portraits." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/437858/original/file-20211215-27-1ib8a4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/437858/original/file-20211215-27-1ib8a4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/437858/original/file-20211215-27-1ib8a4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/437858/original/file-20211215-27-1ib8a4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/437858/original/file-20211215-27-1ib8a4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/437858/original/file-20211215-27-1ib8a4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/437858/original/file-20211215-27-1ib8a4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Sandy Candy Eppinger’s family spirit photographs, which show her brother Eugene Candy with the spirits of their grandmother Ethel Philips and great aunt Helen Thompson, at Lily Dale, New York, in 2015.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Shannon Taggart. Courtesy of the Artist</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the 1860s, New York portrait photographer William Mumler and his wife, Hannah Mumler, a medium, offered portrait sessions in which spirits of the sitters’ loved ones appeared to manifest in the resulting photographs.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-strange-case-of-william-mumler-spirit">Mumler’s spectacular portraits also raised the specter of hucksterism</a>. The photographer was charged with fraud by claimants who argued he faked the photographs, and none other than showman P.T. Barnum gave evidence for the prosecution.</p>
<p>In the early 20th century, Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle <a href="https://martynjolly.com/2013/10/03/photographing-the-dead/">famously rallied to defend British medium Ada Emma Deane</a>, who was also accused of faking spirit photographs.</p>
<p>The double-sided coin of belief and skepticism haunts these historical examples; nonetheless, the psychological impact of these images among the grieving remained powerful.</p>
<h2>Spiritualist revivals</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.ft.com/content/82f99df5-b74b-4938-8a21-f0d32f5d28f0">History seems to suggest</a> that catastrophic loss of life can spur renewed interest in spiritualist beliefs. </p>
<p>Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the Mumlers’ portraits became all the rage amid the devastation of the U.S. Civil War, while Deane’s popularity peaked in the wake of World War I and the flu pandemic. </p>
<p>Has the pervading sense of uncertainty induced by the COVID-19 pandemic triggered another spiritualist revival?</p>
<p>Alternative belief structures, including <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/28/astrology-in-the-age-of-uncertainty">astrology</a> and <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/c4afbc05-a715-4b83-9323-44e4c4f95ca5">tarot</a>, seem to have experienced a resurgence, reaching new audiences through the internet and social media.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/437860/original/file-20211215-6487-15tzjhq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Trumpets with faces painted on them." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/437860/original/file-20211215-6487-15tzjhq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/437860/original/file-20211215-6487-15tzjhq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/437860/original/file-20211215-6487-15tzjhq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/437860/original/file-20211215-6487-15tzjhq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/437860/original/file-20211215-6487-15tzjhq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/437860/original/file-20211215-6487-15tzjhq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/437860/original/file-20211215-6487-15tzjhq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Séance trumpets featuring celebrity spirit guides, including Michael Jackson and Freddie Mercury, hand-painted by medium Sylvia Howarth, in England in 2013.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Shannon Taggart. Courtesy of the Artist.</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Recently, a number of mediums have become famous thanks to their endorsements by <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/26/style/carissa-schumacher-flamingo-estate-los-angeles.html?smid=em-share">celebrity clientele</a>. Some mediums claim to be able to channel stars from the grave, from Louis Armstrong to Elvis Presley.</p>
<p>While modern mediums <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/26/magazine/psychics-skeptics-facebook.html">have their detractors</a>, their eager adoption of television and the internet is a logical step for a religion that has always embraced new technologies.</p>
<p>What was once seen as a niche subculture or the domain of late-night 1-900 call-in shows has gone mainstream: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/26/magazine/psychics-skeptics-facebook.html">Psychic businesses were a US$2 billion industry in 2018</a>. </p>
<h2>Shannon Taggart’s ‘Séance’</h2>
<p>This new spirituality has influenced pop culture as well as high art; the Guggenheim’s 2019 retrospective of Swedish artist and mystic Hilma af Klint was the <a href="https://www.guggenheim.org/press-release/hilma-af-klint-paintings-for-the-future-most-visited-exhibition-in-solomon-r-guggenheim-museums-history">most-visited exhibition</a> in the museum’s history, drawing over 600,000 viewers.</p>
<p>New York Times art critic Roberta Smith argued that the exhibition’s impact amounted to a “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/arts/design/hilma-af-klint-guggenheim.html">psychic and historical shift</a>” in the art world. Smith’s use of the word “psychic” is apt; the exhibition was a watershed not only for restoring to primacy women’s role in the development of abstract painting, but also for re-centering the spiritual within art.</p>
<p>Taggart’s photographs, meanwhile, explore present-day practices, sites and objects of spiritualism. </p>
<p>Allowing chance and automation to guide camera experiments, she reveals processes of transformation and altered states through blurred effects, halos of light and doubling in images that reference historical spirit photographs.</p>
<p>In one image, for example, a grieving mother raises her arms into a darkened sky dotted with circles of light known as orbs. Orb photography is a recent innovation within spirit photography in which practitioners call upon spirits to manifest orbs, which are then captured by digital cameras. <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/782092656">Orb photography</a> is another example of the ambiguity of spirit photographs: Does it channel the supernatural, or simply capture reflections of dust on the camera lens? </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/437859/original/file-20211215-15-1twibw0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Woman stands before American flag with arms outstretched." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/437859/original/file-20211215-15-1twibw0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/437859/original/file-20211215-15-1twibw0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/437859/original/file-20211215-15-1twibw0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/437859/original/file-20211215-15-1twibw0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/437859/original/file-20211215-15-1twibw0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/437859/original/file-20211215-15-1twibw0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/437859/original/file-20211215-15-1twibw0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Kim Kitchen calls to her deceased daughter Casey and asks her for orbs in Lily Dale, New York, in 2014.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Shannon Taggart. Courtesy of the Artist</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
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<p>For Taggart, that question is largely beside the point. Her aim is to remain truthful to the psychological experience of spiritualism, to make visible what is ineffable.</p>
<p>Taggart’s photographs recover the marginalized history of spiritualism at a moment when the religion feels once again on the verge of a resurgence.</p>
<p>As Taggart <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZKhTXn3bl4">is fond of saying</a>, “You don’t have to take spiritualism literally to take it seriously.”</p>
<p>[<em>Get the best of The Conversation, every weekend.</em> <a href="https://memberservices.theconversation.com/newsletters/?nl=weekly&source=inline-weeklybest">Sign up for our weekly newsletter</a>.]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/172836/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Beth Saunders does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Alternative beliefs like spiritualism seem to experience resurgences in times of crisis. Taggart has spent the past 20 years exploring the oft-misunderstood religion.
Beth Saunders, Curator and Head of Special Collections and Gallery, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/154646
2021-02-25T19:03:10Z
2021-02-25T19:03:10Z
Friday essay: how can the dead send us emails? The ethical dilemma of digital souls
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/385478/original/file-20210222-23-158tywl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=40%2C24%2C5398%2C3596&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1503642551022-c011aafb3c88?ixid=MXwxMjA3fDB8MHxwaG90by1wYWdlfHx8fGVufDB8fHw%3D&ixlib=rb-1.2.1&auto=format&fit=crop&w=3150&q=80">Denys Nevozhai/Unsplash</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Tim Hart was sitting on his couch one evening in November 2011 when he got an email with the subject line: “I’m watching”. The message that followed was short and to the point …</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Did you hear me? I’m at your house. Clean your fucking attic!!!
— Jack Froese</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Jack Froese had been a close friend of Hart’s since their teens. A few months earlier Froese and Hart had been up in Hart’s attic at his home in Dunmore, Pennsylvania. Jack had teased him then about how messy it was; now, it seemed, he was doing it again.</p>
<p>Except Jack was dead.</p>
<p>That June, Froese had died suddenly of a heart arrhythmia, at the obscenely young age of 32. Months later, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/av/magazine-17348635">he started emailing people</a>. Those who replied to these emails never got a response, and the messages stopped as abruptly as they began.</p>
<p>Not long after Froese’s death, a group of philosophers gathered in a seminar room on the other side of the Atlantic to hear David Oderberg, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading, <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-011-0051-6">offer a curious thought experiment</a>: what if you received an anonymous email, containing information that you and you alone were privy to? </p>
<p>In Oderberg’s example, the email might say, “I know you felt like killing Mr Watson for failing you on your A-level English exam,” — something you’d never told anyone at all — “but you deserved to fail”.</p>
<p>Who could this message come from: God? Your future self? A spambot whose random message just happened, by mind-boggling coincidence, to describe your early life? The late Mr Watson, now posthumously aware of how you felt that day and eager to set the record straight?</p>
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<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://media.bloomsbury.com/rep/f/9781350139145.jpg">Bloomsbury Academic</a></span>
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<p>For the specific purpose of the interaction, says Oderberg, it doesn’t really matter, just as when a soldier receives an order on the battlefield it doesn’t matter whether the order comes from the colonel or the general.</p>
<p>Both options have what Oderberg dubs “telic possibility”. Something is telically possible if it might as well have been true. The purpose of the order is to command an action. It might as well have come from the colonel as from the general: an order’s an order.</p>
<p>Not infrequently, according to Oderberg, electronic communication is just like this. If all you want is to know how to drive to the nearest supermarket, GPS navigation with synthesised speech is just as effective as a human sitting next to you with a roadmap.</p>
<p>Someone under the misapprehension there is a flesh-and-blood person on the other end of the SatNav reading out driving instructions to them in real time will get to their destination just as quickly as someone who understands they’re listening to a computer. The voice might as well be a person as a piece of software. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/struggling-with-the-uncertainty-of-life-under-coronavirus-how-kierkegaards-philosophy-can-help-144671">Struggling with the uncertainty of life under coronavirus? How Kierkegaard's philosophy can help</a>
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<h2>Planned or spammed?</h2>
<p>There are other plausible, earthly explanations for Jack’s emails, though not all of them check out. You can send an email after you die, if you’ve done a bit of planning. There are online services specifically <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/digital-services-send-messages-your-loved-ones-after-you-die-n708871">designed to send pre-prepared messages</a> on your behalf after your death. </p>
<p>Some rely on a next of kin contacting the service to let them know the user has died. Others require the user to log in at set intervals or reply to periodic emails, and will assume the user has died if they don’t respond. (So if you’re keen to use such a service to tell people how much you secretly hated, cheated on, or lusted after them, just make sure you don’t fall into a long coma and then wake up. Things could get awkward.) </p>
<p>That would be a very neat explanation for Froese’s emails — except that an email his cousin received mentions an injury that happened long after Froese had died.</p>
<p>But what’s really interesting here is not how the emails came about, but the responses of the people who got them. Hart’s attitude was that, even if someone other than Jack wrote the emails, it ultimately didn’t matter: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>… we spoke to his mother, and she told us, you know, ‘Think what you want about it, or just accept it as a gift’.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In other words, to use Oderberg’s language, Froese’s friends and family treated it as telically possible that the emails were from Jack. For the purpose of the communication, it didn’t really matter. They had the emails, and felt comforted by a sense of Jack’s persistence, whatever their origin.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/385488/original/file-20210222-15-1os1blh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="black keyboard with glowing keys" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/385488/original/file-20210222-15-1os1blh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/385488/original/file-20210222-15-1os1blh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=361&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385488/original/file-20210222-15-1os1blh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=361&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385488/original/file-20210222-15-1os1blh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=361&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385488/original/file-20210222-15-1os1blh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=454&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385488/original/file-20210222-15-1os1blh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=454&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385488/original/file-20210222-15-1os1blh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=454&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jack’s mother told his friends they could accept each posthumous email as ‘a gift’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1555532538-dcdbd01d373d?ixid=MXwxMjA3fDB8MHxwaG90by1wYWdlfHx8fGVufDB8fHw%3D&ixlib=rb-1.2.1&auto=format&fit=crop&w=3231&q=80">Unsplash/Florian Krumm</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Ghosts in the machines</h2>
<p>The dead persist everywhere and nowhere, from the solidity of corpses to wispy traces in dreams, writing, building, and even in the faces of their descendants. </p>
<p>From the <a href="https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Joukowsky_Institute/courses/romanartandarch2011/14159.html">ancestor mask processions of the Romans</a> through to the <a href="https://www.biography.com/news/famous-death-masks">death masks of the royal and famous</a> that began to be produced during the late Middle Ages, from the earliest portraiture to photography and video, humans have found ways to preserve the phenomenality of the dead, the distinctive way they appear and sound.</p>
<p>New technologies allow the dead to persist among us in enhanced ways, yet risk turning the dead into <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/oct/30/robert-kardashian-resurrected-as-a-hologram-for-kim-kardashian-wests-birthday">mere fodder for the living</a>. Danger lies in the very thing that makes electronic communication so powerful: the transparency of the medium, the frictionless ease with which others appear to us, unburdened by distance and delay. </p>
<p>As the internet folds itself into the sinews of our everyday existence, as our flesh becomes increasingly digitised, the gap between electronic and face-to-face communication is closing. That makes it far easier for the dead to remain among the living. But it can also change our relationship to the dead in ethically troubling ways. </p>
<p>With every day that passes, the internet <a href="https://splinternews.com/we-calculated-the-year-dead-people-on-facebook-could-ou-1793855143">fills up more and more with dead people</a>, while our <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-tech-privacy-trfn-idUSKBN21Z0NF">ability to reanimate them</a> becomes ever more powerful. </p>
<p>The dead are both more robust and more vulnerable — and we’re not ready for any of this. We need, urgently, to understand what the internet era means for our relationship to the dead, and what new demands this makes of us.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/everything-dies-and-its-best-we-learn-to-live-with-that-59384">Everything dies and it's best we learn to live with that</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Talking to Edison</h2>
<p>It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that electric communication is now in its third century, reckoning from <a href="http://www.sirfrancisronalds.co.uk/tele.html">Francis Ronalds’ first working telegraph</a> of 1816, two decades before Samuel Morse. What’s perhaps even more remarkable is that, as the cultural historian Jeffrey Sconce demonstrates in his book <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/haunted-media">Haunted Media</a>, the idea of communicating with the dead became conceptually entangled with electric communication right from the start. </p>
<p>Commercial telegraph services began to appear at roughly the same moment as the table-turning craze, which began with the rapping “spirits” that <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-fox-sisters-and-the-rap-on-spiritualism-99663697/">plagued the Fox Sisters in Hydesville, New York in 1848</a>. The uncanny new technology of communication-at-a-distance provided a helpful structuring metaphor: the electric telegraph allowed the living to speak to each other across vast distances, while the “spiritual telegraph” of the séance room bridged the gulf between the living and the dead.</p>
<p>That association of the dead with electric communication, as Sconce notes, lingered right throughout the 20th century. Near the end of his life, Thomas Edison was speculating to reporters about the possibility of building a machine so sensitive it could <a href="https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/dial-a-ghost-on-thomas-edisons-least-successful-invention-the-spirit-phone">communicate with the dead</a>. Both Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, experimented with telepathy by winding wires around people’s heads. (It didn’t work.) </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/385480/original/file-20210222-17-10k7p8o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="telephone lines against the sky" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/385480/original/file-20210222-17-10k7p8o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/385480/original/file-20210222-17-10k7p8o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385480/original/file-20210222-17-10k7p8o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385480/original/file-20210222-17-10k7p8o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385480/original/file-20210222-17-10k7p8o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385480/original/file-20210222-17-10k7p8o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385480/original/file-20210222-17-10k7p8o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘Oh, oh, telephone line, give me some time, I’m living in twilight.’ ELO (1976)</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1611522116876-40c1215cceec?ixid=MXwxMjA3fDB8MHxwaG90by1wYWdlfHx8fGVufDB8fHw%3D&ixlib=rb-1.2.1&auto=format&fit=crop&w=1575&q=80">Levan Badzgaradze/Unsplash</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Many people found the telephone unsettling and even creepy the first time they heard it, reminiscent of the mysterious disembodied voices of the séance room. In particular, the entirely new phenomenon of white noise unnerved early telephone users; some came to interpret sounds within the phone line static as somehow connected to or even communications from the afterlife.</p>
<p>Electronic media collapses time and space, removes the tyranny of distance and absence; understandable, then, that overcoming the ultimate distance and the final absence, the chasm that separates us from the dead, would come to figure in the cultural imagination of the first generations of humans to live with this new technology. </p>
<p>But the dead do not just appear to us in terrifying visions or mysterious ciphers, but in the very real material and mental traces they leave behind. </p>
<p>Haunting is an everyday event, not an anomalous one. And with the digital age, the dead have found new ways to haunt us more comprehensively than ever before.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/a-month-at-sea-with-no-technology-taught-me-how-to-steal-my-life-back-from-my-phone-127501">A month at sea with no technology taught me how to steal my life back from my phone</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Digital grief</h2>
<p>Ancient questions about the metaphysical and ethical status of the dead collide with new ones about our relationship to our information and our ownership of digital property. </p>
<p>Anxieties about whether <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/wellness/grief-ginsburg-celebrity-famous/2020/09/22/0674c1fe-fd08-11ea-9ceb-061d646d9c67_story.html">public grief</a> is “real” and who has the right to grieve are amplified when mourning is instantaneous and global. Crucially, this is not just an academic concern, but an urgent practical one. How are we to meet the conceptual and ethical challenges of the world that is coming into view? Can people really survive death online? Should we let them?</p>
<p>In 2017, Australian journalist Mark Colvin died, aged 65. A universally admired broadcaster and author, Colvin was also an avid and highly responsive Twitter user. The news broke around 11:40am, and Twitter was immediately flooded with tributes. Then, at 1:18pm, Colvin’s account <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-05-11/mark-colvin-has-last-word-on-twitter/8517670">posted a single tweet</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It’s all been bloody marvellous.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Had it been sent by a family member on his behalf? Had he, knowing the end was near, scheduled the tweet? Was the ghost of Mark Colvin somehow using his iPhone?</p>
<p>Nobody, it seemed, felt like asking. They all just wanted to say goodbye and explain what Colvin meant to them. It was what it was. “Think what you want about it, or just accept it as a gift”.</p>
<p><em>This is an edited extract from <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/digital-souls-9781350139145/">Digital Souls: A Philosophy of Online Death</a>, by Patrick Stokes (Bloomsbury).</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/154646/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Patrick Stokes does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Every day, the internet fills up with more and more dead people while our ability to reanimate them grows. The dead are more robust and more vulnerable — and we’re not ready for any of this.
Patrick Stokes, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Deakin University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/126153
2019-10-31T14:31:37Z
2019-10-31T14:31:37Z
Victorian scientists thought they’d found an explanation for ghosts – but the public didn’t want to hear it
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/299669/original/file-20191031-187898-rmntn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C1284%2C1781&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Ebenezer Scrooge is confronted by the apparition of his dead business partner, Jacob Marley.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Christmas_Carol#/media/File:Marley's_Ghost_-_A_Christmas_Carol_(1843),_opposite_25_-_BL.jpg">John Leech/Wikipedia</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>As the film Ghostbusters showed, true believers in the supernatural rarely prosper in the scientific establishment. Throughout history, scientists who entertained theories on ghosts, magic and the afterlife were discredited by their peers and condemned for tarnishing the rational foundations of the discipline. Even Isaac Newton carefully <a href="https://riviste.fupress.net/index.php/subs/article/view/12">downplayed his interest in alchemy</a> to preserve his reputation as the father of modern science.</p>
<p>Victorian Britain experienced the <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/9741666-the-ghost-story-1840-1920">golden age of the literary ghost story</a> – when imaginations ran wild at the very thought of the supernatural. But at the same time, there seemed no dark corner that a rational, scientific mind couldn’t illuminate. Researchers such as John Ferriar and Samuel Hibbert were keen to clear up all the talk of phantoms. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/299657/original/file-20191031-187938-1kajcwt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/299657/original/file-20191031-187938-1kajcwt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299657/original/file-20191031-187938-1kajcwt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299657/original/file-20191031-187938-1kajcwt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299657/original/file-20191031-187938-1kajcwt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299657/original/file-20191031-187938-1kajcwt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299657/original/file-20191031-187938-1kajcwt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">With their scientific remedy to hauntings and apparitions, the Ghostbusters may have found a favourable audience in Victorian Britain.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ExpoSYFY_-_Ghostbusters_(10773003456).jpg">Urko Dorronsoro/Wikipedia</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>These pioneering physicians interpreted sightings of ghosts not as external entities, but as the product of glitches in the brain or “afterimages” from overstimulated optical nerves. For such theorists, the supernatural originated in the darkest recesses of the mind, with all its self delusions.</p>
<p>Apparitions weren’t the dead appearing to the living, but fleeting illusions thrown up by an unpredictable psyche, often provoked by ailments and poor health. As <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/113-you-may-be-an-undigested-bit-of-beef-a-blot">Ebenezer Scrooge said</a> to the ghost of his late business partner Jacob Marley in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you …!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But many people enjoyed entertaining these self delusions. From its origins in upstate New York in 1848, spiritualism – the belief that spirits of the dead could communicate with the living – spread to Britain in the 1850s. One of its appeals was that it seemed to offer observable, empirical evidence of the influence of the spirit world upon our material surroundings.</p>
<p>During seances – meetings in which people tried to contact the deceased through a medium – spirits could supposedly cause furniture to lift and move. The eminent physicist Michael Faraday set out to clear up these strange happenings.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/299654/original/file-20191031-187934-yfnwt2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/299654/original/file-20191031-187934-yfnwt2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=515&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299654/original/file-20191031-187934-yfnwt2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=515&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299654/original/file-20191031-187934-yfnwt2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=515&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299654/original/file-20191031-187934-yfnwt2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=647&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299654/original/file-20191031-187934-yfnwt2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=647&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299654/original/file-20191031-187934-yfnwt2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=647&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Seances were a hit in Victorian Britain.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Table_tournante_-_1.png">Louis Le Breton/Wikipedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Debunking the bump in the night</h2>
<p>A keen experimenter, Faraday devised <a href="https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20130729-what-makes-the-ouija-board-move">the ideomotor effect</a> to prove that the phenomena had nothing to do with ghosts. Instead, it was the product of the unconscious muscle movements of those participating in the seance.</p>
<p>Scientists from various fields were engaged in “the march of the intellect” – an attempt to diminish the reality of a person’s experiences with ghosts to “tricks of the mind”, or other quirks of human perception. But many Victorians weren’t satisfied. As my <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7722/j.ctt1x7393%5D(https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7722/j.ctt1x7393">own research</a> has found, ghost stories and supernatural folklore continued to circulate widely among urban and rural communities in Victorian Britain.</p>
<p>Even some scientists were curious. The Society for Psychical Research, established in 1882, believed nothing should be beyond the realm of scientific enquiry, including the supernatural. Led by respected scholars such as Henry and Eleanor Sidgwick and physicist William Barrett, members of the society were willing to stake their reputations on their findings. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/299659/original/file-20191031-187925-9sxdpk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/299659/original/file-20191031-187925-9sxdpk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299659/original/file-20191031-187925-9sxdpk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299659/original/file-20191031-187925-9sxdpk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299659/original/file-20191031-187925-9sxdpk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=516&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299659/original/file-20191031-187925-9sxdpk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=516&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299659/original/file-20191031-187925-9sxdpk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=516&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Michael Faraday was a celebrated theorist of electromagnetism – and even dabbled in the paranormal.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Michael_Faraday#/media/File:Faraday_xmas_detail.jpg">Alexander Blaikley/London Illustrated News</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Various subcommittees investigated <a href="https://www.spr.ac.uk/about/our-history%5D(https://www.spr.ac.uk/about/our-history">hypnotism, telepathy, seances and hauntings</a>). Their work helped expose frauds and they were careful to apply scientific controls to their investigations. But critics complained that their willingness to give credence to such ideas would have a corrupting influence that could only revive a credible belief in ghosts. </p>
<p>As the Pall Mall Gazette put it on October 21, 1882: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The scientific attitude is so new and unfixed a possession that it can only be preserved by careful abstention from dangerous trains of thought. Even the ablest and most scientific observers, when they have taken the first step by “inquiring”, may sink to the very bottom of the pond before they finish.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Despite the efforts of 19th century scientists, ghosts have never been convincingly drawn into the realm of scientific explanation. Even so, it’s not uncommon to find TV ghost hunters reading words in the squawks and crackles of static on high-tech recording equipment in supposedly haunted houses – the modern equivalent of moving furniture in candlelit drawing rooms. The enchanting appeal of the unknown seems certain to ensure that ghosts live on forever.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/126153/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Karl Bell has previously received AHRC funding for research into British Spiritualism on the Home Front during the First World War.</span></em></p>
Sometimes the unknown is more appealing than the truth – and it has kept ghost hunters in business for generations.
Karl Bell, Reader in Cultural History, University of Portsmouth
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/85129
2017-10-31T10:53:51Z
2017-10-31T10:53:51Z
Northern lights to death rays: how electromagnetism haunts our everyday life
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/192498/original/file-20171030-18738-b5bc8r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Pink lightning</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://pixabay.com/en/lightning-storm-spark-weather-sky-2822445/">Oranfireblade/Pixabay</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Electromagnetism has haunted the human imagination for thousands of years. From the ghostly Northern Lights of ancient aurora mythology to the evil electromagnetic forces in the popular TV show <a href="http://www.sho.com/twin-peaks">Twin Peaks</a>, electromagnetic energy continues to endure as a source of spooky speculation. Its mystical fields and mysterious frequencies have inspired spiritualists, New Agers, paranormal investigators and conspiracy theorists alike. </p>
<p>Electromagnetism was first discovered in the 19th century, when scientists recognised that the interaction of electrical currents and magnets could make objects move without touching. This suggested that the apparently distinct forces of electricity and magnetism were actually intimately related. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Christian_%C3%98rsted">Hans Christian Ørsted</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Faraday">Michael Faraday</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Clerk_Maxwell">James Clerk Maxwell</a> proposed that invisible electromagnetic “fields” and “waves” were behind this spooky action at a distance. Their experiments marked the beginning of the Electromagnetic Age and paved the way for a radical new understanding of the dynamics of the universe. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/192084/original/file-20171026-13327-17zl3je.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/192084/original/file-20171026-13327-17zl3je.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/192084/original/file-20171026-13327-17zl3je.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/192084/original/file-20171026-13327-17zl3je.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/192084/original/file-20171026-13327-17zl3je.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=563&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/192084/original/file-20171026-13327-17zl3je.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=563&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/192084/original/file-20171026-13327-17zl3je.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=563&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Danish physicist Hans Christian Ørsted discovers electromagnetism in 1820.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Victorians suddenly found themselves living in a world newly conceived as awash with unseen electromagnetic entities. And these dynamic forces, fields and fluxes provided a logic and a language for occult occurrences.</p>
<h2>Physical to psychical</h2>
<p>New technologies were developed to visualise, access and unlock the mysteries of this previously unseen and inaccessible energy-world. The telegraph and, later, the radio, tapped into unseen regions of electromagnetic radiation. These technologies allowed for a form of disembodied communication that opened up imaginative possibilities for contacting the dead. Media historian <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/haunted-media">Jeffrey Sconce</a> has explored the role of the electromagnetic imagination in the spiritualist movement, for whom the mysterious force offered a vital link between physical and psychical realms. </p>
<p>Electromagnetism continued to figure prominently in 20th-century explorations of the supernatural. UFO, poltergeist and other paranormal encounters were often accompanied by a disturbance of the local electromagnetic environment – white noise on radios, static on television sets, car engines switching off or domestic appliances acting strangely (tropes that persistently feature in horror and sci-fi TV shows from <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106179/">The X-Files</a> to <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4574334/?ref_=nv_sr_1">Stranger Things</a>). Electromagnetic wavelength filters and field meters were deployed to register these energetic presences. For some, however, the real spooks were not the ghosts or aliens but the electromagnetic fields themselves, generated by the <a href="http://www.jerryesmith.com/index.php/4">transmission towers</a> of the military-industrial complex.</p>
<p>Electromagnetism proved a wellspring for conspiracy theories related to energy weapons, mind control and weather warfare. Early experiments with wireless transmissions had led to many inventors, including <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla">Nikola Tesla</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guglielmo_Marconi">Guglielmo Marconi</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Grindell_Matthews">Harry Grindell Matthews</a>, claiming they had built a “death-ray” that could direct a powerful blast of electromagnetic energy. The mysterious <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/earth/story/20160706-in-siberia-in-1908-a-huge-explosion-came-out-of-nowhere">Tunguska Event</a> of 1908 in Siberia – the largest impact event on Earth in recorded history – may be linked to Tesla’s electromagnetic energy beam experiments.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/192088/original/file-20171026-13327-awjmyg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/192088/original/file-20171026-13327-awjmyg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/192088/original/file-20171026-13327-awjmyg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/192088/original/file-20171026-13327-awjmyg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/192088/original/file-20171026-13327-awjmyg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=570&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/192088/original/file-20171026-13327-awjmyg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=570&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/192088/original/file-20171026-13327-awjmyg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=570&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Nikola Tesla circa 1899, next to his high-voltage ‘magnifying transmitter’</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Dickenson V. Alley/Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Soviet Union’s <a href="http://www.30-years-later.com/duga-radar-the-russian-woodpecker/">Duga Radar System</a> (that released the famous Russian Woodpecker signal around the world) and the US government’s <a href="https://www.livescience.com/45829-haarp-shutdown.html">High Frequency Active Auroral Research Programme (HAARP)</a> instigated “tin-foil hat” fears of radio frequency brainwashing. There is speculation that the recent “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/14/mystery-of-sonic-weapon-attacks-at-us-embassy-in-cuba-deepens">health attacks</a>” on American diplomats at the US embassy in Cuba were carried out with some sort of directed electromagnetic energy weapon. </p>
<h2>Everyday electromagnetism</h2>
<p>Often <a href="http://www.bioinitiative.org">dismissed</a> as pseudoscientific paranoia, these fringe theories nevertheless expressed a growing concern about the health risks of living within an increasingly electromagnetic environment. Alongside the natural electromagnetic activity of lightning storms, auroras and space weather, an accelerating array of man-made electromagnetic fields were being generated by modern electrical appliances and the power grids, radio antennae and mobile phone masts of the industrial landscape.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/192308/original/file-20171028-13367-1yi3vng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/192308/original/file-20171028-13367-1yi3vng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/192308/original/file-20171028-13367-1yi3vng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/192308/original/file-20171028-13367-1yi3vng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/192308/original/file-20171028-13367-1yi3vng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/192308/original/file-20171028-13367-1yi3vng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/192308/original/file-20171028-13367-1yi3vng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The ghostly incandescence of the Northern Lights.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">MattHPhotos/Pixabay</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Cultural anxieties surrounding this electromagnetic “pollution” were succinctly articulated by Don DeLillo in his 1985 novel <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Noise_(novel)">White Noise</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The real issue is the kind of radiation that surrounds us every day. Your radio, your TV, your microwave oven, your power lines… Forget spills, fallouts, leakages. It’s the things right around you in your own house that’ll get you sooner or later. It’s the electrical and magnetic fields. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>More recently, in Mark Frost and David Lynch’s 2017 revival of <a href="http://www.sho.com/twin-peaks">Twin Peaks</a>, the ambient electromagnetism that forms the background of our technology-driven daily lives becomes an omnipotent sinister force. The mundane landscape of electromagnetic infrastructure – the pylons, telegraph poles and plug sockets we’ve trained ourselves not to see – take on supernatural significance as portal-generators to extradimensional negative spaces. </p>
<p>Lynch’s films often work to reveal the horrifying forces beneath the mundane surface of everyday life – <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwuzI8Y0uW0">take a look</a> at the palpitating insects swarming amid the manicured suburban lawns of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090756/">Blue Velvet</a>: </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/TwuzI8Y0uW0?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>For Lynch, it seems, the really scary thing about electromagnetism is how such a mysterious force can appear so utterly mundane – the way this strange energy is permanently present yet never noticed; the way the monolithic infrastructure goes by completely unseen; the way we seem too anaesthetised and technology-dependent for the possibility of fear or fascination to even arise. Here, the truly disturbing thing about electromagnetism is not that it reveals a weird new world, but that it reveals how blind we are to the everyday weirdness of the world.</p>
<p>Today, in our world of ubiquitous WiFi, smartphones, data streams and contactless emanations, it is the data ghosts of our digital lives that we increasingly imagine to haunt the electromagnetic realm. </p>
<p>Mysterious yet mundane, palpable yet immaterial and existing at the edges of perceptible experience, the energies, forces and fluxes of electromagnetism continue to power and perturb everyday life.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/85129/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>A.R.E. Taylor does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
A look at the spooky side of electromagnetism in our culture.
A.R.E. Taylor, PhD Candidate in Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62647
2016-07-22T10:09:52Z
2016-07-22T10:09:52Z
How the Victorians brought famous artists back from the dead in seances
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/131373/original/image-20160721-32600-eawjhd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Georgiana Houghton, The Eye of God (c.1862), watercolour. Victorian Spiritualists' Union, Melbourne, Australia / Courtauld Gallery, London.</span> </figcaption></figure><p>In the 19th century, in a dim gas-lit seance parlour, the spirits of Titian and Correggio returned to the mortal world to guide the hand of a medium artist, Georgiana Houghton. Claiming to be under the direction of her spirit guides, Houghton drew extraordinarily vibrant and colourful expressions of spiritual abstraction unlike anything seen before in art. As Houghton herself declared, her work was “without parallel in the world”.</p>
<p><a href="http://courtauld.ac.uk/gallery/what-on/exhibitions-displays/georgiana-houghton-spirit-drawings">Georgiana Houghton’s spirit drawings</a> are pioneering examples of abstract art and a selection of these are now on display at the <a href="http://courtauld.ac.uk">Courtauld Institute</a> in London. The exhibition contributes to an emerging area of art historical re-evaluation of this period, which intends to change our understanding of 19th-century art.</p>
<h2>A new spiritualism</h2>
<p><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/spiritualism/">Modern Spiritualism</a> began as a movement in America in the 1840s, and its origin is often attributed to the Fox sisters of Hydesville. Spiritualists believed that the human spirit survives death and continues to take an active interest in the mortal world. Central to this movement were spirit mediums. A medium was someone who was perceived to have a special sensitivity to spirit communication, and through whom it was believed such communication across the two worlds was possible. Spiritualism arrived in Britain in the early 1850s where it gained widespread popularity and caused a considerable cultural impact. This included a form of creative mediumship in which drawings and paintings were produced during seances. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/may/05/spiritualist-artist-georgiana-houghton-uk-exhibition-courtauld">Georgiana Houghton (1814–1884)</a> was one of many artistic British mediums. At the age of 45, she first became interested in spiritualism after the death of her younger sister and began attending seances. In 1861, she developed her skills as an artistic medium and throughout the 1860s and 1870s produced hundreds of symbolic artworks. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/131381/original/image-20160721-32615-100uroc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/131381/original/image-20160721-32615-100uroc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=898&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/131381/original/image-20160721-32615-100uroc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=898&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/131381/original/image-20160721-32615-100uroc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=898&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/131381/original/image-20160721-32615-100uroc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1128&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/131381/original/image-20160721-32615-100uroc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1128&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/131381/original/image-20160721-32615-100uroc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1128&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Georgiana Houghton, Evenings at Home in Spiritual Seance, 1882.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Only 40 of these now survive and a vibrant sample have been chosen for display at the Courtauld exhibition. In 1871, Houghton also chose to exhibit her work and she rented a gallery in Old Bond Street to present her spirit drawings to a London audience. This indicated that Houghton wanted her seance work to gain merit as art in itself, but she also used the exhibition to expose spiritualist ideas to the general public. </p>
<p>Among other British mediums who painted or drew in trance-states or during seances, reportedly under the influence of spirits, were Anna Mary Howitt, Barbara Honywood, Catherine Berry, David Duguid, Jane Stewart Smith, and William and Elizabeth Wilkinson. Importantly, these medium artists were significant contributors to a major 19th-century movement – Modern Spiritualism – which spanned across the globe from America to Australia, from Scotland to South Africa. Their work ranged from abstract shapes to figurative forms, yet while their styles differed they were unified by the same goal, which was to use artistic mediumship to convince the viewer of the “truth”: that the spirit world existed and that spirits could interact with the living. </p>
<h2>Life after death</h2>
<p>Seance drawings and paintings were deemed to be spirit artefacts by fellow spiritualists. In order to understand both the visual language and the spiritual status of such artworks there was an emphasis on the way in which they were created. The medium would often go into a trance, during which it was believed that he or she would channel the spirit who would then author the artwork. </p>
<p>Experiencing the seance and watching the creation of spirit art was to allegedly witness the engagement of spirits with the mortal world, and was often deemed as evidence of life after death. Therefore, the artworks produced during seances were also thought to be evidence of spiritual interactions with mortals. These mediums’ works were intended to be understood by spiritualists who had sacred knowledge of the spirit world, and for those who did not have such an insight, the medium was necessary to further mediate the artwork’s meaning to the viewer. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/131374/original/image-20160721-32619-xempfj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/131374/original/image-20160721-32619-xempfj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/131374/original/image-20160721-32619-xempfj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/131374/original/image-20160721-32619-xempfj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/131374/original/image-20160721-32619-xempfj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=518&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/131374/original/image-20160721-32619-xempfj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=518&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/131374/original/image-20160721-32619-xempfj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=518&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Georgiana Houghton, Glory be to God (1864), watercolour. Victorian Spiritualists’ Union, Melbourne, Australia/Courtauld Gallery, London.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>An inscription on the back of one of Houghton’s drawings explicitly makes this point. On the reverse of The Eyes of the Lord (c.1866) her caption explains the concept of her symbolism: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Trinity is represented throughout by my having always drawn three Eyes conjoined, but that will not be perceptible to those who have not seen the drawings in progress.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Houghton was aware that viewers who attended seances gained an advantage in understanding the sacred message. The verso explanations on many of Houghton’s works and her daily attendance at the exhibition in 1871 were practical measures to help the viewer access the meaning of the drawings. It also ensured that the sacred knowledge of the spirit world was imparted to a wider audience, an audience whom Houghton hoped would become convinced of the teachings of spiritualism. </p>
<h2>A forgotten art form</h2>
<p>The collective work by medium artists is an overlooked area of 19th-century artistic output. It was forgotten by the mainstream mainly due to a lasting scepticism of the practices that produced the “spiritual” oeuvre. Fraudulence was often rife among mediums, and most of the British medium artists listed above attracted their share of suspicion and scandal. </p>
<p>The curators of the current exhibition draw attention to a 19th-century critic’s response to Houghton’s 1871 exhibition. From a position of distrust toward spiritualism, the critic stated: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>We should not have called attention to this exhibition at all, did we not believe that it will disgust all sober people with the follies which it is intended to advance and promote.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Subsequently, such sceptical views contributed to the rejection of spirit art as a subject unworthy of consideration. Instead, this genre of outsider art faded into obscurity. This was irrespective of its legacy on automatic drawings practised by French symbolists, Dadaists and Surrealists.</p>
<p>Despite this, there have been recent attempts to re-examine the importance of these spiritualist works as innovative and pioneering for their time. One approach is to introduce new audiences to this different type of art in gallery exhibitions, including both the current exhibition of Houghton’s drawings at the Courtauld Gallery and the recent exhibition on <a href="http://www.serpentinegalleries.org/exhibitions-events/hilma-af-klint-painting-unseen">Hilma af Klimt: Painting the Unseen</a> at the Serpentine Gallery, also in London. </p>
<p>Three decades after Houghton produced her spirit drawings, Hilma af Klimt, a Swedish spiritualist and theosophist, produced large abstract paintings also allegedly under the influence of spiritual forces. These recent exhibitions in London have given new consideration to the colourful and abstract art forms of these medium artists, which precede Mondrian and Kandinsky. </p>
<p>A review of Houghton’s exhibition in 1871 pronounced it to be “the most astonishing exhibition in London at the present moment”. If the 2016 exhibition at the Courtauld can convincingly redefine our assumptions of 19th-century art, which it is sure to do, that review is as relevant today as it was 145 years ago.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/62647/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michelle Foot does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Many of their extraordinary artworks are now on show in a new exhibition.
Michelle Foot, Doctoral Researcher in History of Art, University of Aberdeen
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62026
2016-07-07T07:53:59Z
2016-07-07T07:53:59Z
Ghostbusters and why we like to laugh at things that go bump in the night
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/129419/original/image-20160705-823-44kt1w.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Who you gonna call? </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sony Pictures</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The imminent release of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3ugHP-yZXw">Ghostbusters</a>, a reboot of the 1984 cult movie of the same name, has been accompanied <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/may/10/ghostbusters-reboot-hollywood-paul-feig-bill-murray">by fears</a> that the new film might not be as good as the first. While we wait to see if the new outing will stand the comparison, old and new fans can at least be sure that the movie replicates the same recipe that proved successful in the previous films of the series: combining ghosts and comedy. </p>
<p>This was probably the most original aspect of Ghostbusters. Despite <a href="http://www.thehauntedinternet.com/movies_comedy.html">meaningful exceptions</a>, ghosts are more often represented on the screen as fearful presences. From classics such as <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057129/">The Haunting</a> (1963) to the more recent <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0178868/?ref_=nv_sr_1">Ringu</a> (1998) and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1457767/?ref_=nv_sr_2">The Conjuring</a> (2013), the cinematic screen usually summons ghosts to terrorise the audience, rather than to amuse them. </p>
<p>How come, then, was a movie about funny ghosts so successful? While this might seem an unlikely choice in the fictional world of film, from the perspective of religious traditions and folklore it might make much sense. In spiritualist seances, for instance, amusement and mirth are often part of the ritual – and the appearance of fearful ghosts is very rare. In such a context, the funny ghosts of Ghostbusters would feel perfectly at ease. </p>
<p>Spiritualism emerged in the middle of the 19th century in the United States, and then around the world, as a new religion based on the belief that it is possible to communicate with the dead. This communication is performed with the help of sensitive individuals, or mediums, who create a channel between the living and the spirits of the dead. Throughout the second half of the 19th century, spiritualism attracted much attention in the popular press and a <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-5906.2010.01515.x/full">large number of believers</a>.</p>
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<span class="caption">Something freaky this way comes.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sony Pictures</span></span>
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<p>If belief in spiritualism is today less widespread than in the Victorian era (<a href="http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/spiritualism_in_brazil_alive_and_kicking">at least in most countries</a>), contemporary notions of the ghost in Western cultures are informed by the spiritualist tradition. Not differently from Victorian spiritualists, we imagine ghosts as evanescent traces of the dead, transparent beings that are between our and the “other” world.</p>
<p>There is, however, a marked difference between spiritualism’s and popular representations of ghosts, such as in horror films. This has to do with the fact that believers in spiritualism tend to consider ghosts as benevolent, rather than fearful, presences. </p>
<p>Spiritualists, in fact, frequently emphasised the good temperament of spirits. They underlined the sense of communion felt by both the living and the dead, and offered it as evidence of the uplifting character of spiritualism. As a well-known British medium, Emma Hardinge, <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=g_tZAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA41&dq=%22tender,+loving,+wonderful+presence%22&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=%22tender%2C%20loving%2C%20wonderful%20presence%22&f=false">once put it</a>, ghosts are a “tender, loving, wonderful presence” – certainly not the terrorising, vengeful entities depicted in horror films.</p>
<h2>Spectacular spirits</h2>
<p>Not only spiritualists conceived ghosts as benign. Very much like fans of Ghostbusters, they were entertained, rather than frightened, by their appearance.</p>
<p>As I show in my book <a href="http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-07104-6.html">Supernatural Entertainments</a>, Victorian spiritualism fully participated in a growing market for spectacular entertainments, where a wide range of curiosities and attractions were offered to the public. Mediums performed on the stage of theatres and public halls, often before paying audiences. Like performers in the entertainment sector, they had managers and advertised their public seances and demonstrations in the popular press. </p>
<p>In spiritualist sittings conducted in domestic households, entertainment played an important role, too. Seances created opportunities for leisure and social gatherings, stimulating amusement rather than fear. Reports of these events describe playful rituals, in which mediums welcome manifestations of happiness and delight – and both living participants and the spirits declare to be having “fun”. </p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/w3ugHP-yZXw?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
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<p>The hilarious ghosts of the Ghostbusters franchise, in this sense, are the truest descendants of spirits summoned in Victorian seances. </p>
<h2>Ghostbusters – or the hilarity of ghosts</h2>
<p>Canadian actor Dan Aykroyd, who co-wrote and starred in the first two movies of the Ghostbusters franchise, posted <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/may/31/dan-aykroyd-new-ghostbusters">enthusiastic comments</a> about the new film. Interestingly, Aykroyd has personal and familiar connections to spiritualism. His family were involved in spiritualist activities for at least four generations before him, as documented by his father, Peter Aykroyd, in his recent book <a href="http://www.ghosttheory.com/2009/10/13/book-review-a-history-of-ghosts-the-true-story-of-seances-mediums-ghosts-and-ghostbusters">A History of Ghosts</a>. </p>
<p>One might ask, in this sense, if Aykroyd’s knowledge of spiritualism led to Ghostbusters being one of the few films to have fully exploited the comical potential of ghosts. Maybe it was this knowledge, or his personal experiences at the seance table, that made him realise how funny the spectacle of ghosts can be – whether it on the big screen or in the dark environment of a Victorian spiritual gathering.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/62026/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Simone Natale does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The idea of phantoms being comical is as old as ghouls.
Simone Natale, Lecturer in Communication and Media Studies, Loughborough University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.