"The fact that
nineteenth-century America was rife with mesmerists, faith healers, and
prophets of course doesn't excuse their dissembling. But the Fox sisters certainly
fall within the American tradition of selfinvented
characters in literature and life." Barbara Weisberg,Talking
to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism, 2004, p. 271.
"At the core of
Spiritualism as a popular movement lay the blending of the belief in spirits of
the dead with the ideas and practices of animal magnetism," writes Ann
Taves.43
Although many of the
phenomena associated with Spiritualism are quite ancient, modern Spiritualism represents the
nineteenth-century convergence of several earlier occult strands. One of these
strands is the career of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), a Swedish mining
engineer and parliamentarian who published on such varied subjects as
mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, physiology, mechanics, economics,
and foreign policy. Covered in detail by us in an earlier Case Study in 1744,
Swedenborg began recording (in Latin) a series of theological works based on
visions which had initially come to him during a lengthy coma. These describe
the inhabitants of heaven, hell, and the spirit world: set forth an allegorical
interpretation of the Bible: and give a detailed system of correspondences
between the physical and spiritual realms. Swedenborg's revelations won him a
following not so much within the Swedish Lutheran church (whose authorities
were generally unreceptive) but in the Netherlands. England and the United
States. The Church of the New Jerusalem, founded after Swedenborg's death, is
based on his teachings. His influence is much wider than that- however, and
extends not only to a long list of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century luminaries
(e.g. Blake, Coleridge, Kant, Emerson, Henry James, Sr.) but essentially
permeated the whole of the Mesmerist and Spiritualist movements. For example. Swedenborgianism appears to have been the most immediate
inspiration for the central Spiritualist idea of peering into "the other
side" and relaying information about it to people in this world.
Another strand was
the work of Austrian physician Franz Anton Mesmer (17334-1815), whose theory of
magnetisme animale
("animating magnetism," but usually translated as "animal
magnetism") led to the first experiments with hypnosis, hence the term
"mesmerism." According to Mesmer, there exists a sort of subtle fluid
or ether which permeates all space, and which serves as a medium for psychic
communication. Through manipulation of this ether, it is possible to heal
diseases or place a subject in a trance state. Mesmer accomplished this by use
of hands or a special wand, with which he would make "magnetic
passes" over the patient's supine body. Later he discovered that the
technique could be used to make his subjects involuntarily dance or perform
other amusing stunts while somnambulistic. Mesmer's patron, the Marquis de Puysegur, found that a young shepherd named Victor, when
"magnetized," was capable of speaking with a vastly greater
intelligence than he possessed while awake. On being roused from the trance,
however, Victor remembered nothing. Even more intriguingly, while entranced
Victor could also respond to unspoken mental commands. After a halt in research
necessitated by the French Revolution, nineteenth-century magnetists
turned their attention to the "higher phenomena" made possible by
their art- including telepathy, clairvoyance, telekinesis, stigmata, apportation, and prophecy. In an early case study we
researched how Mesmer in a separate way, also influenced
modern psychology.
The theory of animal
magnetism initially stated that all bodies exert an influence over one another
by the action of animal magnetic fluid. With this concept however, Mesmer,
built a strong social component into his theory with as we have noted, direct
implications for psychology.
Mesmer described his
treatment as producing a kind of hypnotic trance, and while initially he used
mirrors metal rods and water, he soon found that he could produce the same
results “by just passing his hands over the patients’ body.” (Ludy T. Benjamin, A Brief History of Modern Psychology,
forthcoming, p.9.)
The mutual influence
of magnetist and patient involved a kind of sympathy
which Mesmer called the "sixth sense." But it was in particular
Amand Marie Jacques de Chastenet,
Marquis de Puysegur-whom Robel Fuller calls Mesmer's
"most capable disciple" – who made magnetism synonym with hypnosis as
artificial sleep. Influenced furthermore by mystical Freemason, Louis-Claude de
Saint-Martin, Puysegur moved toward a view in which
thought became primary.
Two years after de Puysegur’s first book was published, Count Lutzelbourg in 1786 when wrote one of the earliest
accounts, of psychotherapy with a homosexual patient:
The greatest obstacles
opposing the cure of patients come either from a temperament worn by the abuse
of remedies or from painful secrets that make the physical treatment
insufficient. A lucid somnambulist had been obliged by me to confide a sorrow
of a most singular kind. He had had an intimate liaison with a person of the
same sex whom he loved to the point of folly in his ordinary state and in whom
he had complete confidence, never concealing anything from him. In the state of
crisis [magnetic somnambulism] he saw clearly that his so-called friend abused
his confidence, betrayed his secrets, thwarted his projects, and even destroyed
his reputation. He revealed to me the means for procuring proofs of this and
prescribed what I ought to do to clarify things, while recommending
circumspection and caution in using these means. Everything turned out exactly
that way, but after a long period of time. I had the great good fortune of
overcoming the obstacle that had made all my efforts useless and the cure
impossible. And at the same time I had the pleasure of dealing with two
different and opposed individuals, of whom the one was timid, pliable, and even
credulous to an excess; while the other was clairvoyant, firm, and judged men
and things according to their just value. (Comte de Lutzelbourg, Curesfaites par M. le Cte de L ...
sindic de la Societe de Bienfaisance etablie a Strasbourg ... avec des notes
sur les crises magnetiques appellees improprement somnambulisme.,1786,
Strasbourg: Lorenz & Schouler, p. 47)
In the above Lutzelbourg presented a clear outline of the
psychotherapeutic process. He declared that sometimes it is necessary to deal
with psychological matters to obtain a physical cure; that this involves
uncovering hidden, painful secrets; that these secrets, unknown in the ordinary
state, can be revealed in the somnambulistic state; that the contrast between
the two states is like that between two different persons; and that once the
hidden material is dealt with, the cure is possible.
Another promoter of
animal magnetism and hypnosis was Baron Denis Jules Dupotet
de Sennevoy (1796-1881). Dupotet
was born in 1796 and, from the time he first heard of mesmerism in 1815 until
his death in 1881, he devoted his life to its study. And while Mesmer emphasis
was among others on mirrors as transmitting magnetic forces, Dupotet's mirrors consisted of a spot drawn with
charcoal on a wall or on a metal plate, in order to collect the universal
fluid and to entrance the subject.
Dupotet published his discoveries in his Journal du Magnitisme, but he reserved his teachings on the real scope
of magnetism to an inner group and distributed his ultimate teachings to these
adepts only under seal of secrecy. The book by, J. Dupotet
where these secrets were published is titled, La Magie
Devoilee, ou Principes de Science Occulte, and
until recently was still in print. (Paris: Editions Pygmalion, 1977.)
Primary among his
ideas was the equation of the light reached by the somnambule at the finest
level of the magnetic trance with the light and life of the Gospels and the
light or fire described by the entire magical and mystical tradition,
including Hermes Trismegistus, Melchizedek, Zoroaster and the Guebres, those mysterious Persian priests of fire so dear
to the fantasies of the nineteenth century. (La Magie
Devoilee, 170ff.)
Unlike the
occultist Eliphas Levi, who was to teach that the
mesmeric subject reached only his own mental projections, Dupotet
was convinced that "magic is founded on the existence of a mixed world,
located outside ourselves, and with which we can enter into communication by
the use of certain methods and practices." (La Magie
Devoilee, p. 182.) In the magnetic slumber it was
thus possible to contact the dead (or at least some imprint left by them on the
magnetic fluid) and also to contact never embodied beings---celestial spirits.
(La Magie Devoilee, 271ff.
(spirits); 128, 279ff. (dead).
Dupotet compared the subject's entering the magnetic light to
a person placed "at the entrance to the invisible world, [whose] body is
like a lyre whose strings vibrate, exposed to the wind." (Ibid., 246.)
Entrance to this world was to be gained through the concentration of vital
force, usually in a magic mirror.
Eliphas Levi's views are clear in his comment on Dupotet's magic mirrors in his History of Magic, 340:
"M. Dupotet establishes triumphantly the
existence of that universal light wherein lucids
perceive all images and all reflections of thought. He assists the vital
projection of this light by means of an absorbent apparatus which he calls the
magic mirror; it is simply a circle or square covered with powdered charcoal,
finely sifted. In this negative space the combined light projected by the
magnetic subject and the operator soon tinges and realizes the forms
corresponding to their nervous impressions. The somnambulist sees manifested
therein all dreams of opium and hasheesh, and if he
were not distracted from the spectacle convulsions would follow."
Thus Mesmer's efforts
to disassociate animal magnetism from occult traditions were doomed from the
start, for animal magnetism stood in clear continuity with the various
scientific-occult systems dating back to Paracelsus. Mesmer and to a lesser degree Swedenborg, where
those who provoked the manifestations of what was to become a tidal wave
of somnambulists, ecstatic, visionaries, healers, and miracle workers who
overran Europe by mid-century.
Frank Podmore and others have shown the roots of Mesmer's system
in the generally accepted theory of the "sympathies" that pervade the
universe, and these, of course, are the foundation of much of western hermetic
and magical thought. As compared with his later disciples, however, Mesmer
wanted to be scientific. (Podmore, From Mesmer to
Christian Science, especially chapter 2, 26ff.)
As seen above
however, the great discovery of Magnetism was the hypnotic trance state, or
what they called "somnambulism", the state of consciousness, they
thought was attended by strange powers and visions of the other world, into
which their subjects could be cast.
Puysegur furthermore mentioned with appreciation the masonic Martinists at Lyon, the work of Cagliostro in Paris and
Rome, and the alliance of Freemasonry with the followers of Swedenborg in
Germany and Sweden. He clearly felt a kinship with these metaphysical systems
and believed them to be quite compatible with his version of Mesmer's animal
magnetism. (Puysegur, Du magnhisme animal considere
dans ses rapports avec diverses branches de la physique generale. 2d ed. Paris: J. G. Dentu,
1820, p. 101).
In fact it was
Cagliostro who not unlike the Fox sisters later in Rochester New York would do,
experimented first with spiritualism as a (slide of hand magic-) stage art.
Already by 1790, a
small proto-spiritualist circle in Copenhagen was by the brother-in-law of the
Danish king Christian VII. And Freemason Jean-Baptiste Willermoz, around the same time, conducted sessions
with a talented somnambule, asking her questions to which, with the aid of the
spirit world, she was able to give authoritative answers which were recorded in
detail.
And the fact the
first documented afterlife beliefs of the mesmerist milieu are notes dating
from 1785, which are infused with Christian mythology: the dead go to heaven, hell
or purgatory; or alternatively, their destiny will be decided on the day of
judgement. (N. Edelman Voyantes, guerisseuses et
visionnaires en France 1765-1914, 1995, p. 23. ff)
Willermoz a strong defender against the opposition that
developed among certain local physicians. The magnetizers formed a harmonic
society, La Concorde, which had many members in common with a masonic group
directed by Willermoz, Les Freres de la Bienfaisance. This group, whose members were principally of
the aristocracy, had been formed to make available to the poor the benefits
deriving from its research into healing and other philanthropic activities.
Under Swedenborgian
influence but especially that of his students, magnetists
made contact with disembodied spirits, both human and nonhuman, through their
trance subjects. Mesmerism even came to be successfully employed in surgery, in
lieu of anesthesia. It was at this point, around the 1830's, that Mesmerism
gained a following in the United States through the lectures and demonstrations
of Charles Poyen and his subject, Cynthia Gleason, in
New England. Whereas in Europe. Mesmerism had been approached primarily as a
scientific phenomenon. in the United States Poyen's
showmanship transformed Mesmerism into a means of popular entertainment.
Although the theoretical basis for Mesmer’s work came to be superseded by
psychological explanations by the turn of the century, magnetism and hypnosis
remained connected in the popular understanding well after the demise of
Mesmerism per se.
Later, Theodore
Flournoy would gain notoriety for publishing his case history of the
medium Helene Smith in "From India to Planet Mars," theorizing that
she exhibited alternating subliminal personalities. See:
Given the popularity
of such notions like it is not surprising that there was also a
transition from spiritualism to UFO’s, especially the abduction craze which
came to be popularized by no later than 1928 with W.D. Pelley’s, “Seven
Minutes To Eternity.” Here the latter describes that while leaving his body he
was ying naked on a marble slab, with two men in
white uniforms attending to him. they told Pelley to neither be afraid nor try
to see everything in the first "seven minutes."
However one could
just as well say that also in this case the beliefs of UFO contactees
like Witley Striber
ultimately owe a debt to the same Emanuel Swedenborg as we just quoted. The
sweep of Swedenborg's vision and its influence is clear even from the title of
one of his books: The Earths in Our Solar System Which Are Called Planets: and
the Earths in the Starry Heavens; with an Account of their Inhabitants, and
also of the Spirits and Angels there: From What Has Been Seen and Heard (1787).
Swedenborg explained
how each of the planets and others "innumerable" have spirits and
angels inhabiting them. Swedenborg depicted a universe imbued with meaning:
"He who believes, as everyone ought to believe, that the Deity created the
universe for no other end, than that mankind, and thereby heaven, might have
existence, (for mankind is the seminary of heaven,) must needs believe also,
that wheresoever’s there is any earth, there are
likewise men-inhabitants." See:
Occultist writers of
the turn of the twentieth century followed Swedenborg's tradition of depicting
spiritual voyages to other planets. In 1880, Henry A. Gaston published his Mars
Revealed: Or, Seven Days in the Spirit World, “which in fact is not impossible
that is served also an inspiration for W.D. Pelley’s, “Seven Minutes To
Eternity.” In his book “Why I Believe the Dead Are Alive” Pelley also admits to
communicating to his deceased brother-in-law through a ouija
board in 1925 and reading a work on reincarnation by Sir Oliver Lodge. See:
But the origins of
the American Spiritualist craze are usually traced to the 1846
poltergeist style "rapping’s" associated with the sisters Margaretta
and Kate Fox of Hydesville. New York (near Newark).
At the time the noises started. the sisters were fifteen and twelve,
respectively. The Fox family began to hear mysterious pounding or knocking,
whereupon the sisters contrived to communicate with the invisible source by
means of a simple code. It then surfaced that their visitor was the unnamed
spirit of a peddler who had supposedly been murdered by a previous occupant of
the house. a blacksmith named John C. Bell. As more and more living humans
turned up at the Fox household to observe the rapping’s (including Bell, who
came to protest his innocence). the Foxes decided to separate their daughters.
Kate was sent to live with a third sister. Leah. who was between marriages at
the time. The rapping’s then shifted to Leah's house, with more and more
spirits clamoring to speak to their living friends and relatives through the
new "spiritual telegraph" (this only a few years after Morse had
invented the real telegraph). The reunited Fox sisters--organized by
Leah--began charging money for their séances, and even went on tour (so to
speak) to other parts of New York. Repeated efforts to expose the phenomena as
fraudulent were unsuccessful, until the girls themselves finally broke down and
confessed to having made the mysterious noises themselves by snapping their toe
joints.
On October 21, 1888,
Maggie Fox, one half of the team that introduced public mediumship to the
United States, took the stage at the New York Academy of Music in order to
publicly denounce spiritualism and everything it had spawned, including,
ironically, her own claims to supernatural power. By all accounts, the place
was packed, thanks to heavy publicity in the city's newspapers. (The New York
World had even run a full-page story that morning about the Fox sisters in
anticipation of the Academy of Music event.) "Ministers, physicians and
lawyers, scholarly men and women" rubbed shoulders with "men of
repute in legitimate scientific research, [and] others notorious in the walks
of humbug." The Academy of Music was also crawling with newspaper
reporters. And Kate, the other half of the Fox duo, was there too; she had just
returned from England, perhaps to lend moral support to her sister. Together
the Fox sisters seemed bent on debunking the very movement that had led them to
breakout fame forty years earlier.
Since 1848, Maggie
Fox had been through an emotional wringer, a fact that may help explain, at
least to some extent, her seemingly rash willingness to turn on the
spiritualist movement with a viciousness that must have surprised many who had
supported her earlier in her career as a medium. Her romance in the 1850s with
explorer and world traveler Elisha Kent Kane had been a bumpy one; Kane never
seemed entirely enthusiastic about her notorious career or his relationship
with her. He appeared to treat her badly, adopting, in the words of one author,
a style of "accusatory seduction." Yet, Kane genuinely seemed to want
to marry Fox, and eventually gave her what she took to be an engagement ring.
When he died in 1857, Fox referred to him cryptically as her
"husband." It is unclear as to whether Kane and Fox actually married,
but it may have been that at least some of what propelled Fox onto the Academy
of Music stage was the memory of Kane's disapproval of her mediumship.1
Added to that was the
fact that Fox was also forced to deal with her overbearing sister, Leah, who,
in her mind, was an inveterate liar and fraud, and the originator of all her
troubles. It was Leah, Fox told a reporter for the New York Herald in
September, who had masterminded the entire idea of having her younger sisters
pose as mediums and trick the public into thinking they were actually able to
communicate with the dead. By 1888, it seems Fox had grown tired both of her
topsy-turvy life and of being one of Leah's. "tools." The appearance
at the Academy of Music must have seemed like the first step toward
liberation.2
It should come as no
surprise that one of the key promoters of the Academy of Music performance was
a magician-Cassius M. Richmond-who specialized in exposing mediums. Over the
years, the nation's illusionists had succeeded in creating a virtual cottage
industry of anti-medium campaigning. It also is not terribly surprising
that journalists had flocked to the Academy of Music like moths to a
flame. The opportunity of being at the event where one of spiritualism's two
"founding mothers" promised to dismantle and ultimately destroy the
practice of mediumship was too good to pass up.
Besides, Fox had
already begun to unravel her sordid tale for the papers in the months leading
up to the expose, whetting newspapermen's appetites for more. When the
erstwhile medium finally mounted the stage, the reporters in the audience must
have moistened the nibs on their pens in eager anticipation. One reporter would
later say that Fox had categorically "dealt a death blow to spiritualism,
that huge world-wide fraud which she and her sisters founded in 1848." 3
Fox, it seems,
delivered exactly what spiritualism's enemies had been hoping for. In addition
to reading a terse written statement thoroughly denouncing spiritualist
phenomena and taking responsibility for helping perpetrate a lie, she
demonstrated how she had produced her famous "spirit raps": standing
before a nondescript wooden bench, she removed one of her shoes, plunked her
foot down, and then began loudly cracking her toe joints. Her toe, observed the
Herald, possessed "a devil's gift in a kind of rapping ventriloquism."
We can surmise that many spiritualists were not amused at the thought of seeing
"the originator of their faith destroy" their belief by cracking her
toe. But now that the genie was out of the bottle, they could not force it back
in. The irony would have been thick for spiritualists in the audience:
the same toe that supposedly had "rapped" spiritualism to life was
now "rapping" it to death."
Maggie Fox's
renunciation both of spiritualism and her role as a medium illustrates well the
sorry state of public mediumship in the final two decades of the nineteenth
century. By the 1880s and 1890s, the practice of spirit materialization had
fallen so far into disrepute that fev,,- (if any)
mediums were willing to embrace it. The spiritualist movement had descended
into a bitter internecine squabble between those who believed physical
phenomena such as table-tipping and spirit materialization best embodied
spiritualism and those who abhorred what they believed was mediumship's descent
into base "phenomenalism." Andrew Jackson Davis, an advocate of this
latter view and an influential spiritualist thinker, spoke out publicly against
the "phenomenalists" and stated that by taking on the trappings of
entertainment they had degraded the religious value of spiritualism. (He was so
hard on "phenomenalism" in one of his books that some people believed
he had actually renounced spiritualism.)
Materializers also
had to contend with attacks from other public mediums, particularly those who
refused to jettison the practice of trance speaking. By tapping into the
nineteenth-century American taste for oddities, trance speakers argued,
materialization mediums knowingly mocked the sacredness of spiritualist
ceremony. Ironically, when the country's spiritualists finally chose to
organize in 1893 around the banner of the National Association of
Spiritualists, they had very little left to offer ajaded
public.5
Eccentricities may
have played well on stage, but in the eyes of many spiritualist believers at
century's end mediums had no business bringing questionable or weird practices
into the seance. By the 1890s, former spiritualists fed up with sensational
mediumship had already abandoned spiritualism in droves, and had chosen to
convert to other, more satisfying belief systems. Henry Steel Olcott, who had
accepted spiritualism after visiting the Eddy homestead in Vermont on
assignment for the New York World, stuck with his fellow spiritualists for a
time, but he eventually left spiritualism to found the Theosophical Society with
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (who he first
met at an Eddy seance). Theosophy allowed Olcott to maintain his faith in a
spirit world, while jettisoning what he believed to be some of the more
dangerous or immoral elements of spiritualist mediumship. See also. Later,
in the wake of growing disagreements with Blavatsky, Olcott made another religious
transition, trading theosophy for Buddhism Similarly, early spiritualist
authors Paschal Beverly Randolph and Thomas Low Nichols walked away from
spiritualism, ironically after they both had published glowing biographies of
Ira and William Davenport; Randolph ended up converting first to a
non-denominational brand of Christianity and then switching to Rosicrucianism,
while Nichols, accompanied by his wife Mary, turned to Catholicism. After his
early break with spiritualism, Randolph began to declare that most trance
states were not what they purported to be. In a so-called trance, the former
spiritualist wrote, mediums are actually "able to pursue the thread of an
argument, trace a principle, and follow an idea." 7
Reporters and
magicians also continued to plague public mediums by systematically exposing
deceptions in their performances. Of those people that refused to give up on
the idea that mediumship was essentially fraudulent, no one was more dogged
than Harry Houdini. Into the 1920s, Houdini was a virtual one-man anti-medium
campaign, single-mindedly pursuing his prey until he was sure he had unmasked
their deceptions. He would tantalize them with a promise of a cash bounty if
they could produce phenomena he could not copy, and then he would pounce when
they flocked to him. What is more, he inserted a spy named Rose Mackenberg into spiritualist seances and local circles,
where she masqueraded as a believer and ferreted out fraud.
Mackenberg even allowed herself to be "developed" as a
"medium" under the tutelage of a man named Charles Gunsolas who claimed to be a spiritualist adept. When
Houdini finally exposed him, Gunsolas saw which way
the wind of publicity was blowing and retreated from the public stage.8
Predictably, journalists ate this up. But they were also finding the story on
their own, without the help of illusionists. One need only revisit Maggie Fox's
expose of mediumship to discover the truth in this observation: all three of
New York City's most influential papers-the Times, the Herald, and the
World-were well represented at the 1888 performance, and reportage from all
three ended up being highly critical of spiritualism.9
As we will point out,
mediums were as much at fault as anyone for the deterioration of public
mediumship through the end of the nineteenth century into the early twentieth
century. Vigilant journalists, magicians, and spectators had widely
demonstrated that mediums were complicit in plans to defraud the public and
pass themselves off as special conduits between the spirits and mortals. Some
mediums, like Maggie Fox, even admitted their connivance in public. With this
evidence in mind, it would be easy to conclude that public mediumship suffered
certain death at the end of the nineteenth century-or if not then, then
certainly by the first few decades of the twentieth. Evidence shows, however,
that public mediumship persisted, surviving on the fringes of American culture
until it was repackaged and resurrected in the 1970s and 1980s in the form of
New Age channeling. Today, we are able to witness a new character on the
contemporary cultural scene descended from nineteenth-century channelers: the
television psychic or medium. Responding to Americans' yearnings to stay
connected with the dead, modern mediums are building on the foundations laid by
their cultural progenitors. Indeed, there are numerous parallels between the
careers of modem-day psychics and the public mediums of yesteryear. Of course,
there are characteristics of nineteenth-century public mediumship that are no
longer or only rarely practiced, but there are other elements of modern-day
medium phenomena that seem oddly familiar to anyone who has studied
pre-twentieth-century spiritualism. Like their nineteenth-century predecessors,
contemporary mediums are first-rate marketers of their work, skillfully
promoting themselves in print and electronic media. They are fully embedded in
the entertainment culture of the twenty-first century, and thoroughly at home
on talk shows and daytime syndicated television. Modern audiences clamor for
their supposedly supernatural intervention much like spectators begged the help
of mediums more than a century ago.10
Performances like the
ones contemporary mediums enact on television replicate significant
characteristics of pre-twentieth-century seances. It is not an overstatement to
say that the genealogy of the current television psychic phenomenon, its
audience, and the debates that surround it include women and men like Cora
Hatch, Emma Hardinge Britten, Achsa
Sprague, Henry Gordon, and Abraham Pierce. True, due to the influence of
general New Age ideas on mediumship, talk about "energy" and
"auras" has replaced some references to "the spirits" in
the way mediums characterize their work, but a close reading of medium
autobiography and some careful observation of mass-mediated séance performances
reveals that the concept of "the spirit world" remains at the center
of how cucrent-day mediums understand themselves,
that the need for promotion and marketing remains as important as ever, and
that the visual realm is a very powerful arena for producing public seance
phenomena.
Of course, major
transformations in the technologies of entertainment since the nineteenth
century have changed the way modem mediums both perform and market themselves.
Nearly every well-known medium has hung out a virtual shingle on the Internet.
The two most popular "mass-media mediums" in America today-John
Edward and James Van Praagh-have developed strong
"web presences." Van Praagh's website hosts
a discussion board where fans can chat and post inspirational messages and
prayers for each other. The site also provides visitors with a list of upcoming
events, including workshops with Van Praagh and a
link to the medium's blog. The "official John Edward website
worldwide" is equally impressive. In addition to touting the medium's
newsletter, the site points visitors to Edward's upcoming television and radio
appearances.11 As interesting as the Internet is, however, television has
arguably been more instrumental in providing contemporary mediums with the
means both to expand their audience beyond the people who fill the seats on
their fabricated sets and to market themselves and their shows in new ways to
the American public. Indeed, television that most visual form of electronic
media-seems almost tailor-made for exploitation by twenty-first-century
mediums. Consider the performances of John Edward, whose syndicated television
talk show program-Crossing Over-used to air weekly on the popular Sci-Fi cable
channel. The show was a work of mass-mediated art. Advertised heavily on
television each week, the program attracted an audience of apparently eager
spectators ready to share their stories of personal loss and hope regarding the
spirit world.
One could watch Edward,
surrounded by these emotionally-primed people, pace back and forth across the
studio stage, allegedly receiving messages from the afterlife. Those were
moments thick with visual drama. As the medium carefully unfolded his psychic
revelations on air, the television viewer was treated to a few close-ups of
crying or wide eyed spectators, apparently overcome by Edward's supernatural
prowess. Conscious of the central place television has assumed in his meteoric
career, Edward confesses that he is a "media medium who not long ago had
stage fright on the radio." Early on, he did readings in his house, you
had to be pretty plugged into the psychic world to know who I was. Two years
later, I'm on TV five nights a week, and reading about myself in newspaper and
magazine stories with headlines like, 'My Next Guest is Dead.'12
Edward recently had a
new show called John Edward: Cross Country that plays weekly on Women's Entenainment (WE), another cable channel. According to the
show's website, Edward tries to help people "ease the grieving process
with his unique gift." The website goes on to encourage viewers to
"watch as homes, hearts and families begin the emotional journey towards
coping and acceptance, and take a look at the lives John touches." What is
interesting about Edward's transition to a cable channel that appeals
exclusively to women is that he seems to have found his audience. It turns out
female viewers are the primary audience for daytime medium shows. The show's
"core audience," claimed one source on American media culture in
200l, was women ages 25 to 54, "the biggest demographic group in daytime
syndication." One journalist even put the percentage of women in the
television audience for Crossing Over at 60%.13 That makes Edward's move to the
Women's Entertainment channel, after Crossing Over was cancelled in 2004, all
the more understandable: he was simply following his audience.14
How do we explain
this phenomenon? Is it possible that the connection between Edward (and perhaps
other high-profile male mediums) and a sizeable female audience can be
explained as the flip-side of what happened between female trance speakers and
male spectators in the nineteenth century? Is it possible that the choice to
put a relatively attractive male medium on daytime television in the first
place was a strategic one, much like the decision some female mediums made to
flaunt their sexuality on the nineteenth century stage? It is likely, though we
have no way of knowing just how female spectators have responded to men like
Edward because we do not have access to the kind of evidence that could help us
answer this question. It is tantalizing to think, though, that today's male
mediums have received florid love letters from more than a few
romantically-inclined women who may have never seen the men in person, but know
their television persona well.
Some television
mediums are even branching out into the world of television drama. Van Praagh, who also had his own syndicated television show
(appropriately called Beyond, With James Van Praagh),
is co-executive producer on a new primetime drama called Ghost Whisperer.
Supposedly inspired by the experiences of "an actual psychic," the
show follows the experiences of Melinda Gordon who has "the ability to
communicate with Earthbound spirits. She uses her gifts to pass along messages
and vital information to the living." It is hard to believe that as a
piece of filmed fiction ostensibly "inspired by" real events and
experiences Ghost Whisperer is not functioning as yet another node of creative
publicity for James Van Praagh.15
Not surprisingly,
spirit materialization has not found its way onto television despite maybe
because of-the visual nature of that technology. In this era of highly
sophisticated special effects technology, any attempt to
"materialize" spirits on-air likely would be dismissed as the work of
a talented computer wizard. Itis hard, after all, to know in this day and age
where people end and pixels begin on the television screen.
Instead, modem
television mediums claim to receive messages from the spirit world through
their consciousnesses. Spirit communiques, they claim, usually come as thoughts
or impressions, rather than as visions or ethereal apparitions. That does not
mean, however, that the practice of materializing spirits is dead. Indeed,
despite the best efforts of magicians, journalists, and audiences at the end of
the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, there are those who
still claim they have the power to conjure spirit bodies. What is more, the
alleged power to materialize spirits has gone global. Van Praagh
recounts seeing a Brazilian medium produce a supposed spirit body in a Rio de
Janeiro seance. In many ways, the details of Van Praagh's
narrative could have been lifted from a written account of a nineteenth-century
materialization show.
According to the
celebrity medium, the spirit he saw was that of a doctor named Fritz who
allegedly heals mortals. Materializing from a "wispy cloud," the
supposed spirit, doctor took a "rod that looked like a conductor's baton
and began moving from bed to bed" working on the sick children who had
been brought to the seance in order to be cured. He pointed the rod,
"which emitted colored lights," at each disease-ravaged body.
Then Van Praagh was invited up on stage, where he lay down on one of
the beds vacated by a supposedly healed child. "After a few moments the
masked spirit... appeared next to me," writes the medium. "He pointed
the lighted baton at my abdomen. Lying there I knew that I was seeing a
physical manifestation of a spirit, and I would not have forgiven myself if I
didn't at least attempt to touch it. So I brushed my arm on the side of Dr.Fritz's leg, and I felt his solid physical fonn." Materialization, it seems, is still around, just
not on television. Perhaps mediums see the benefits associated with producing
supposedly visible (and tangible) spirit bodies in a seance as strongly
outweighing the disadvantage of potentially being unmasked as a fraud. 16
With modern mediums'
reliance on electronic technologies for promotion and audience development, it
is important to point out that print culture is also a well-utilized form of
publicity among contemporary mediums. A wizard of merchandising, John Edward
has a line of books that tie into his work on television. Other mediums have
also had success in the world of publishing. Autobiography, in particular, has
become popular among modern psychics and other self-identified adepts.
Borrowing on rhetorical foundations initially established by their
nineteenth-century counterparts, modern-day mediums seem almost eager to pay
homage to historical patterns of self-representation laid down more than a
hundred years ago by mediums such as Emma Hardinge,
Abraham Pierce, and John Brown. Like the supposed supernatural virtuosos who
came before them, current-day mediums lend greater authority to their
supernatural abilities by "establishing" themselves as adepts early
on in life. Consider Van Praagh's partly
autobiographical book Talking to Heaven: A Medium's Message of Life After Death
(1997). "I am often asked in was born a medium or if I was transformed
into one by a horrible illness, or a freak accident that caused some sort of
head trauma, or a near-death experience," Van Praagh
writes. No, he notes, "as hair-raising as these possibilities may be, I
cannot claim anyone of them as the dramatic moment that introduced me to my
life's work." Rather, as he puts it, he simply began to "know"
unknowable things as a child-things he says he could not have known without
supernatural help. Where he was once a quiet, normal Catholic schoolboy with a
"Yogi Bear lunchbox," Van Praagh is now a
modern-day celebrity medium who has reassured his adoring fans that he is
"not unlike anyone else. We are all born with some level of psychic
ability. The question is: Do we recognize our psychic abilities and act upon
them?"17
Similarly, Alison
Dubois' autobiography titled Don't Kiss Them Good-bye (2004) works on the idea
of the child adept. Dubois, whose life is the inspiration for the hit
television drama Medium, purports to offer readers a better understanding of
"where psychics and mediums come from" and states that she wants to
share her "own experiences" as a nascent medium "in order to
connect and relate. to young mediums who have questions and doubts about their
gifts." It is her hope that her "experiences can help show how a
child with the gift [of mediumship] might feel or view things." 18
Contemporary mediums'
indebtedness to the patterns of nineteenth-century medium autobiography is also
apparent in the way they talk about the process of becoming a medium. In
Talking to Heaven, Van Praagh recounts a supposed
revelatory experience, uncannily similar to the "conversion" event in
early spiritualist medium, Abraham Pierce's account, when an older clairvoyant
reveals that Van Praagh is destined to be a medium.
His response is reminiscent of the way many mediums responded to similar
experiences in the nineteenth century: first questioning the spirits' call,
perhaps even toying with the possibility of rejecting it outright, but in the
end accepting it. "I wasn't sure how to respond to this
pronouncement," he recalls saying. "After all, my goals were in a
completely different direction. I wasn't ready for my life to take a 180-degree
turn.
With some
nervousness, I replied, 'I have enough trouble understanding the living. Why
would I want to start talking to the dead?'" As Van Praagh
tells the story, the clairvoyant's predictions "haunted" him, but as
the newly-minted medium worked to develop his supposed supernatural
capabilities, he came to embrace his new career. 19
As popular and
sophisticated as modern mediums have become, however, they have not been able
to shake the legacy of fraud begun by public mediums in the nineteenth century.
Fraud remains a key part of the public discourse about mediumship. Contemporary
evidence shows that modern mediums are as complicit in exploiting peoples'
belief in life after death as nineteenth-century mediums were. Part of this
problem is evident in the way mediums market themselves, but it is also obvious
in the way they perform before audiences. Mediums and television producers
together have
made some important
strategic decisions about where to "place" mass-mediated supernatural
performances on television, as well as how to promote them. Medium shows play
better with women, they say, so we should contract with a network that appeals
to women. People want answers to life's difficult questions-especially about
the death of loved ones-from experts, so modern mediums saturate the book
market with autobiographies that tout their supposedly long experience with the
spirit world and their uncanny abilities to understand death. Even a single viewing
of one of their shows reveals that their method of understanding a spectator's
spiritual questions, and then answering those questions, seems more like an
exercise in educated guesswork than spirit-driven guidance. As one skeptical
critic has noted, James Van Praagh's "hit
rate" (or the percentage of times his predictions prove to be accurate)
hovers between 20 and 30 percent. The figure is even lower for John
Edward-somewhere between 10 and 20 percent. But, the critic continues,
"what Edward lacks in accuracy ... he makes up for in sheer volume of
guesses." Another critic of Edward contends that it is the medium's verbal
alacrity that gives him an edge over Van Praagh:
"Van Praagh is Ferrari fast, but Edward is
driving an Indy-500 racer." In one minute "Edward riffles through 60 names,dates, colors, diseases, conditions, situations,
relatives, and the like.“20
Predictably, the idea
that certain people can communicate with spirits continues to be assailed by
journalists, much like it was in the nineteenth century, but with some new
twists. In the case of Amy Davis, a reporter for WOAI- TV in San Antonio,
television, which had been the very mode of communication contemporary mediums
were turning to in order to carry their performances to a mass audience, became
a powerful tool for fighting medium deception. In February 2003, Davis got a
call at her station's news desk from a pair of concerned parents whose
twenty-one-year-old daughter had spent $25,000 on psychic readings done by a
self-proclaimed "psychic spiritualist" named "Miss Brooks."
(The daughter had maxed out a number of credit cards to pay the medium.)
Davis was originally
apathetic about the story; it had, she said, about the same "zing" as
a story about a pickpocket lifting someone's wallet. But as she interviewed the
daughter, Shante Smith, she realized the story was much bigger than a single
swindled individual Brooks (later identified as Jennifer Evans) had made a
practice of smooth-talking clients into paying astronomical sums for her
services. Evans even tried to create an ironclad supernatural pedigree for
herself by "concoct[ing] tall tales" of her
origins and travels. In the end, Davis was able to amass enough evidence to get
the police involved. After Evans had been arrested, other victims started
coming out of the woodwork, including a school teacher who had given Evans
$50,000, another women who had lost $15,000 and a new kitchen stove, and a
number of other people who, together, mailed Evans nearly $80,000. Evans was
quite effective in bamboozling what Davis called those "who have the least
to give" a dishonest psychic: "widowers, the terminally ill, people
who've hit rock bottom and exhausted all the traditional sources of help."
Unfortunately, however, Jennifer Evans's scam is hardly unique. Every year
psychics and mediums across the nation rake in thousands of dollars at the
expense of desperate people.21
Other journalists
like Tom Jicha stick to print in attacking modem mediums.Jicha went a step further, though, and lampooned the
seance audience as well. In an article published in the South Florida
Sun-Sentinel in 2002, Jicha embodied the glee some
reporters take in picking apart the supernatural claims of contemporary
television mediums. Jicha wrote acerbically that
"common sense--which, of course, the brain dead who watch these shows
lack-would tell you" that the television medium phenomena is "all one
big carnival act." "If these people could really plug into the
beyond," continued Jicha, "interest in
top-rated 'ER' and 'CS!' would be as dead as the people the mediums claim to
contact. Instead, TV would build theme weeks around dead presidents, dead rock
stars and dead Kennedys. Elvis could be an entire week by himself (assuming he
is indeed dead)." The "credibility that TV is affording them makes
their viewers... easy targets for con artists, who prey on the weak-minded.
There is no one more weak-minded than someone who takes this nonsense
seriously.“22
Modern magicians have
also kept up the heat on twenty-fIrst-century mediums,
using tactics have become increasingly more sophisticated and creative than
those used by anti-medium illusionists in the nineteenth century. Often the law
becomes an important tool for exposing contemporary mediums. A self-described
Australian "mind illusionist" named Mark Mayer, for example, lodged a
formal complaint against John Edward in the eve of what was supposed to be the
medium's whirlwind 2004 tour Down Under. Mayer filed his claim with an
Australian state consumer affairs agency and invoked an obscure section of a
fair trade act, which requires any person promoting goods or services to
provide evidence substantiating his promotional claims. In Edward's case, Mayer
asserted, the law would require the medium to prove that he talks with dead
people.23 Other magicians go after mediums much as their nineteenth-century
counterparts did: using the techniques of secular magic to show how mediumistic
phenomena can be produced simply by using sleight of hand and misdirection.
Magic and debunking, famous illusionist and skeptic James Randi declares, are
essentially the same thing.24
Many of the issues
highlighted by the behavior and attitudes of contemporary and
nineteenth-century mediums actually transcend mediumship and spiritualism to
point up the continuing affinity religion and entertainment have for each other
in the twenty-first century. For many whether they attend Robert Schuller's
Crystal Cathedral or a storefront Pentecostal church-the nexus between religion
and entertainment has become an accepted part of religious life. A wide variety
of churches now maintain dynamic websites, hire popular preachers, and utilize
advertising boards that use clever quips and sayings just to get people in the
door. They also hire live bands for worship services and host radio programs in
order to intensify their public appeal. The auditorium-like qualities of the
modem "megachurch" make it possible to reach extremely large
audiences with dramatic preaching, while television allows churches to break
the physical bounds of four walls and steeple. Such strategies of publicity and
performance have boosted the careers of new religious leaders and breathed new
life into flagging congregations.
There is, however, a
dark side to the religion-entertainment nexus. Across time, religious
entertainment has contained within itself the potential for exploitation and
abuse, meaning that success for churches and religious leaders sometimes comes
at the expense of the ordinary people. To function well, religious
organizations, like other social and cultural institutions, rely on trust,
though trust and
credibility, even in the religious sphere, can be elusive. Indeed, wrote one
researcher of religious culture, the problem of trust in religion is both
"enduring"
"devilishly
recurrent.“25 As in the nineteenth century, modern-day Americans must grapple
with who is tmstworthy and who is not in all facets
of their lives, including religion. Consider, for example, the case of what
some scholars have begun to call the "electronic church." Through
radio and television broadcasts, preachers in the "electronic church"
are able to reach out each week to hundreds, if not thousands, of Americans,
and communicate a religious message.26 Yet, stories culled from the history of
this "church of the airwaves" point up how dishonesty coupled to a
style of religious performance informed by modes of modern popular
entertainment can lead to disastrous consequences for religious believers.
Someone like Pat Robertson, who founded his Christian Broadcasting Network in
1960, might rightly be seen as both preacher and "professional in the
business of entertainment. " Yet, in the hands of the "electronic
preacher" the business of entertainment with its emphasis on marketing and
fundraising all too often ends up becoming the church's raison d'etre.27
One example was the
saga of Jim Bakker. In 1974, Bakker, along with his heavily made-up wife Tammy
Faye, founded a television program called the "PTL Club"
("Praise the Lord" or "People That Love") to serve as a
platform for dramatic evangelizing. For the preacher, television turned out to
be an extraordinarily convenient way to connect with his flock. What is more,
the medium of television was a fundraising tool second to none. By the
mid-1980s, donations to the non-profit PTL had helped build a new, state
of-the-art television studio, an amphitheater, a shopping mall, and youth
center. It turns . out, however, that Bakker was skimming money off the top and
spending it on himself.
When the truth came
out, he was defrocked, lost control of PTL, and the Internal Revenue Service
began pursuing him. The added media attention focused on Bakker as a result of
his financial crimes also brought to light an adulterous relationship between
the televangelist and a church secretary named Jessica Hahn.28
Before his empire
came crashing down around him, Bakker discovered just how effective mass media
could be for developing an audience and raising funds. As one researcher
put it, "through television, radio, mail, and public speaking" televangelists
like Bakker are able to "craft tales about their ministries that depict a
world of good and bad characters centered around God's role in building the
media organization." Ironically, however, the same sorts of stories are
essentially told on secular television shows. So thin is the boundary between
the religious and secular genres that sometimes it is hard tell the difference:
in the minds of many viewers, they both function as popular entertainment. This
crossover, of course, is precisely what televangelists actively pursue.
No doubt they figure
that the more successful they are in exploiting secular culture and popwar entertainment, the more they will succeed in raising
money for their cause and drawing people into their "fold." As a
general rule, their approach has proven effective.
Ordinary people are
susceptible to this kind of exploitation, as evidenced by the large sums of
money Bakker was able to collect from television viewers and that ended up
lining his own pockets. Of course, people can deploy their agency in resisting
unscrupulous uses of religious entertainment. In the case of Bakker and PTL,
though, resistance was minimal (at least at first); people believed they were
donating money to a righteous cause.
After Bakker was
finally exposed, some people no doubt continued to believe in the religious
message of PTL, but for all practical purposes Bakker's marketing had hollowed
it out. He lived like a Hollywood celebrity with mwtiple
homes, luxury cars, and a 55-foot houseboat, but he had lost his followers'
trust.29
That many are willing
to risk believing the claims of unprincipled religious figures is a clear
demonstration of journalist Jerry Adler's statement that "if there is
anything stronger than belief itself, it is the desire to believe.“30 Wherever
the desire to believe exists, however, the dark side of religion always lurks.
Those who have "the desire to believe" in today's religious
marketplace face many of the same challenges seancegoers
in the nineteenth century faced, though much of current religious and cultural
landscape has changed in radical ways since spiritualism got its start (having
been reconfigured by new technologies like television).
We next will explain
how public spiritualist mediums operating in the nineteenth century were able
to continually fill seats at their performances and make money at the expense
of ordinary people using deliberatively deceptive tactics drawn from the world
of religion--and, perhaps more significantly--the world of entertainment. By
carefully exploiting methods of mass persuasion that seemed most useful to them
at the time, and by developing a working knowledge of stagecraft, public
mediums were able to convince audiences they could communicate with spirits.
They were careerists who actively took advantage of new forms of technology,
promotion, self-representation, and aesthetics to make a public case for
themselves and their alleged spiritual power.
This is not to say
that public mediums were willing to acknowledge publicly their indebtedness
either to religious culture or the world of popular entertainment, despite the
fact that the strategies mediums deployed were drawn from those very sources.
Nevertheless, the new cultural and technological opportunities of the
nineteenth century had given rise to new strategies of public persuasion.
Mediums turned to religious autobiography, modern systems of management and
promotion, sexual appeal, and visual spectacle in the hopes of bridging the gap
between themselves and their audience. But the mediums who utilized these
strategies did so even as they denied they were doing it. The public séance was
a type of cultural performance that was heavily informed by the entertainment
industry, though mediums refused to admit that fact, just as they also tended
to deny their reliance on the promotional strategies of the secular market. All
of their protests to the contrary, however, cannot reverse the reality that in
order to understand public spiritualist mediumship one must examine it through
the prism of popular entertainment.
1 Earl Wesley Fornell, The Unhappy Medium: Spiritualism and the Life of
Margaret Fox (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964),177-181; Barbara
Weisberg, Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism
(New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 154-184,244-249; and David Chapin,
Exploring Other Worlds: Margaret Fox, Elisha Kent Kane, and the Antebellum
Culture of Curiosity (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,
2004),122-131,190-191,214-216.
2 New York Herald, 24
September 1888.
3 New York Tribune, 22
October 1888; Farnell, Unhappy Medium, 179; Weisberg, Talking to the Dead,
244-245; Chapin, Other World~, 214-215; and ,Vew York
Herald, 22 October 1888.
4 New York Herald, 22
October 1888.
5 R. Laurence Moore,
In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture
(New York, Oxford University Press, 1977),66-67; and Bret E, Carroll,
Spiritualism and Antebellum America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1997), 178-179.
6 Howard Murphet, Yankee Beacon of Buddhist Light (Wheaton,
Illinois: Theosophical Publishing House, 1988),54-68, 135; Peter Washington,
Madame Blavatsky's Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who
Brought Spiritualism to America (New York: Schocken
Books, 1996), 27-29, 53-56; and Stephen Prothero, The White Buddhist: The Asian
Odyssey of Henry Steel Olcott (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996),
41-44, 116-133.
7 John Patrick Deveny, Paschal Beverly Randolph: A Nineteenth-Century
Black American Spiritualist, Rosicrucian, and Sex Alagician
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997),92-93, ] 74-] 75; and
Carroll, Spiritualism, 156. Randolph's statement on self-induced trance comes
from New York Daily Tribune, 25 November 1858, quoted in Deveny,
Randolph, 96.
8 Kenneth Silverman,
Houdini!!!: The Career of Ehrich Weiss (New York: HarperPerennial, 1996), 359-369; and Ruth Brandon, The Life
and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini (New York: Random House, 2003), 259.
9 Fornell,
Unhappy Medium, 174-181.
10 On the revival of
mediums hip and spirit channeling in the late twentieth century, see Michael F.
Brown, The Channeling Zone: American Spirituality in an Anxious Age (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999).
11 James Van Praagh's website can be found at http://www.vanpraagh.com.
while John Edward's website can be found at http://www.johnedward.net. Both
websites were accessed 19 April 2007.
12 John Edward,
Crossing Over: The Stories Behind the Stories (New York: Princess Books, 2001),
xv.
13 Susanne Ault,
"Can a Psychic Connect In Daytime?" Broadcasting and Cable, 27 August
2001, 25; and Ivy Brown, "Hearing from Dearly Departed Proves a Hit on
Sci-Fi Channel," Los Angeles Times, 5 March 2001.
14 Mark Lasswell, "WE Talks ESP," Broadcasting and Cable,
29 August 2005, 7.
15 Cleveland Plain
Dealer, 3 June 2005.
16 James Van Praagh, Heaven and Earth: Making the Psychic Connection
(New York: Simon and Schuster Source, 2001), 95.
17 James Van Praagh, Talking to Heaven: A Medium's Message of Life After
Death (New York: Dutton, 1997), 3.
18 Allison Dubois,
Don't Kiss Them Good-bye (New York: Fireside, 2004), xx. Char Margolis also
makes the case that mediums tend to develop early. See Char Margolis, Questions
from Earth, Answers from Heaven: A Psychic Intuitive's
Discussion of Life, Death, and What Awaits Us Beyond (New York: St. Martin's
Press, 1999), 12-20.
19 Van Praagh, Talking to Heaven, 22.
20 Matt Nisbet,
"Talking to Heaven Through Television: How the Mass Media Package and Sell
Psychic Medium John Edward," (Amherst, New York: Committee of Skeptical
Inquiry, n.d.), available at http://www.csicop.orglgenxledward (accessed April
18, 2007); Michael Shermer, "Deconstructing the Dead: Cross Over One Last
Time to Expose Medium John Edward," (Veracruz, Mexico: Metareligion,
n.d.), available at
http://www.meta-religion.comIParanormale/Skeptics/deconstructin!Lthe_dead.htm
(accessed April 19,2007).
21 Amy Davis,
"Psychic Swindlers," Skeptical Inquirer 29 (May/June 2005): 38-43.
22 South Florida
Sun-Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale), 26 April 2002.
23 Age (Melbourne,
Australia), 23 February 2004.
24 Philip Yam, itA Skeptically Inquiring Mind," Scientific American
273 (July 1995): 34-35.
25 Leigh Eric
Schmidt, "Trust and Confidence in American Religious History," in
Perspectives on American Religion and Culture, ed. Peter W. Williams (Malden,
Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 1999),367.
26 On the
"electronic church" see George H. Hill, Airwaves to the Soul: The
Influence and Growth of Religious Broadcasting in America (Saratoga, California:
R & E Publishers, 1983); Razelle Frankl,
Televangelism: The Marketing of Popular Religion (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1987); Stewart Hoover, Mass Media Religion: The Social
Sources of the Electronic Church (Newbury Park, California: Sage Publications,
1988); Steve Bruce, Pray TV: Televangelism in America (New York: Routledge,
1990); and Janice Peck, The Gods of Televangelism: The Crisis of Meaning and
The Appeal of Religious Television (CresskilI, New
Jersey: Hampton Press, 1992).
27 R. Laurence Moore,
Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1994), 248.
28 Charles E.
Shepard, Forgiven: The Rise andfall of Jim Bakker and
the PTL Ministry (New Yoric Atlantic Monthly Press,
1989); passim; Quentin J. Shultze, Televangelism and
American Culture: The Business of Popular Religion (Grand Rapids, Michigan:
Baker House Books, 1991), 113-114; and Hunter James, Smile Pretty and Say
Jesus: The Last Great Days of PTL (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993),
passim.
29 Schultze,
Televangelism, 113.
30 Jerry Adler,
"Unlocking Minds," Newsweek, 19 March 2007, 50.
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