In its day, spiritualism brought hundreds of thousands of
Americans to seance tables and trance lectures. It has
alternately been ridiculed as the apogee of fatuous
credulity and hailed as a feminist movement. Its tricks have
been exposed, its charlatans unmasked, and its heroes' names
lost to posterity. In its day, however, its leaders were
household names and politicians worried about capturing the
Spiritualist vote. Cathy Gutierrez places Spiritualism in
the context of the 19th-century American Renaissance.
Although this epithet usually signifies the sudden
blossoming of American letters, Gutierrez points to its
original meaning: a cultural imagination enraptured with the
past and the classics in particular, accompanied by a
cultural efflorescence. Spiritualism, she contends, was the
religious articulation of the American Renaissance, and the
ramifications of looking backward for advice about the
present were far-reaching. The Spiritualist movement, says
Gutierrez, was a 'renaissance of the Renaissance,' a culture
in love with history as much as it trumpeted progress and
futurity, and an expression of what constituted religious
hope among burgeoning technology and colonialism. Rejecting
Christian ideas about salvation, Spiritualists embraced
Platonic and Neoplatonic ideas. Humans were shot through
with the divine, rather than seen as helpless and inexorably
corrupt sinners in the hands of a transcendent, angry God.
Gutierrez's study of this fascinating and important movement
is organized thematically. She analyzes Spiritualist
conceptions of memory, marriage, medicine, and minds,
explores such phenomena as machines for contacting the dead,
spirit-photography, the idea of eternal spiritual affinity
(which implied the necessity for marriage reform), the
connection between health and spirituality, and mesmerism.
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