WEBVTT - S2 – INTERVIEW 1: Ann Braude 0:00:01.000 --> 0:00:04.240 Welcomed Unobscured, a production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Minkey. 0:00:08.400 --> 0:00:11.440 We begin the interview series for Unobscured season two with 0:00:11.560 --> 0:00:15.960 the phenomenal historian Dr Anne Browdie. She is Senior lecturer 0:00:16.040 --> 0:00:19.480 on American religious history at Harvard Divinity School, where she 0:00:19.520 --> 0:00:23.080 directs the Women's Studies in Religion program. Dr Browdy has 0:00:23.079 --> 0:00:27.120 published widely on women in American religious life, exploring everything 0:00:27.240 --> 0:00:32.040 from spiritualism to Judaism, Christian science, and Native American religions. 0:00:32.040 --> 0:00:34.840 She's an amazing scholar and we're so glad she joined 0:00:34.920 --> 0:00:38.879 us to talk about spiritualism. The research team found her 0:00:38.880 --> 0:00:41.720 book Radical Spirits while they were working on episodes for 0:00:41.880 --> 0:00:44.839 my other podcast Lore. Needless to say, it was one 0:00:44.880 --> 0:00:49.000 of the inspirations for this season of Unobscured. Researcher Carl 0:00:49.040 --> 0:00:52.400 Nellis started each historian interview by asking our guests what 0:00:52.440 --> 0:00:55.440 it meant to be a spiritualist in the nineteenth century America. 0:00:55.800 --> 0:00:59.040 So Dr Browdie's answer to that question is where we'll begin. 0:01:00.280 --> 0:01:04.400 This is the Unobscured Interview series for season two. I'm 0:01:04.440 --> 0:01:27.440 Aaron Maggey. What I would say it meant to be 0:01:27.560 --> 0:01:31.039 a spiritualist in the nineteenth century was to be part 0:01:31.080 --> 0:01:34.600 of a movement that was seeking empirical evidence for the 0:01:34.680 --> 0:01:39.399 immortality of the soul by communicating with the spirits of 0:01:39.440 --> 0:01:44.440 the dead, and in general that meant communicating with the 0:01:44.480 --> 0:01:49.600 spirits of the dead through the intervention of a human medium. Really, 0:01:50.160 --> 0:01:56.520 what spiritualists believed they accessed through the medium of a 0:01:56.720 --> 0:02:00.880 human being who was being used for communication and were 0:02:00.920 --> 0:02:06.120 the spirits of the dead and uh Those spirits might 0:02:06.240 --> 0:02:11.400 be the spirits of deceased relatives or loved ones or 0:02:11.560 --> 0:02:15.639 friends who had passed to the world beyond. They might 0:02:15.760 --> 0:02:20.760 be public figures or historical figures. They could be figures 0:02:20.800 --> 0:02:29.120 from religious history or political history. They could be um 0:02:29.120 --> 0:02:34.160 other cultures, other civilizations. They could be what we're understood 0:02:34.200 --> 0:02:38.320 to be the spirits of dead Indians, the indigenous inhabitants 0:02:38.360 --> 0:02:43.400 of the America's um, but they were understood to be 0:02:43.480 --> 0:02:47.720 the spirits of individuals in general that they were seeking 0:02:47.760 --> 0:02:51.359 to communicate with. When people came to these seances, what 0:02:51.400 --> 0:02:56.240 were they looking for? Many people were looking for consolation. 0:02:56.600 --> 0:03:01.160 They were looking to be reunited with a loved one 0:03:01.440 --> 0:03:05.280 who had been ripped away from them by death and 0:03:06.240 --> 0:03:11.400 one often thinks that the appeal of spiritualism would be 0:03:11.480 --> 0:03:17.560 limited to times when death is very present, to times 0:03:17.600 --> 0:03:22.279 of epidemic or of war, And indeed, wars in particular 0:03:22.360 --> 0:03:27.359 give rise to a lot of interest in spiritualism because 0:03:28.600 --> 0:03:35.400 young people are ripped away suddenly. The fabric of reality 0:03:35.560 --> 0:03:40.520 is really rent by the loss of those we expected 0:03:40.560 --> 0:03:45.640 to be with us, particularly children, UM, young men in war, 0:03:46.400 --> 0:03:52.040 loved ones, people very near and dear who's lost made 0:03:52.240 --> 0:04:04.800 reality um unbearable, understandable, incomprehensible um. And the attempt to 0:04:05.280 --> 0:04:11.840 reconnect with those lost loved ones is also an attempt 0:04:12.160 --> 0:04:17.120 to heal the fabric of reality. And you notice I 0:04:17.240 --> 0:04:21.920 used the present tense there. Communication with the dead is ubiquitous. 0:04:21.960 --> 0:04:25.680 Everyone does it. It occurs in all times and places, 0:04:26.440 --> 0:04:32.960 at certain periods. It takes a kind of form that 0:04:34.440 --> 0:04:38.159 more than one person experiences, and that gives rise to 0:04:38.279 --> 0:04:42.880 a community of communication with the dead, a community of 0:04:43.000 --> 0:04:46.200 people who understand this as a goal that they can 0:04:46.200 --> 0:04:51.960 seek together. And that's what spiritualism is in nineteenth century America. 0:04:52.200 --> 0:04:57.440 It's a new religious movement of people who believe that 0:04:57.480 --> 0:05:02.040 they can find scientific evidence for the immortality of the soul. 0:05:02.760 --> 0:05:06.680 By communicating with the spirits of the debt. And you 0:05:06.720 --> 0:05:09.719 mentioned that some of those spirits they are both kind 0:05:09.720 --> 0:05:12.520 of the lost loved ones, but some of those spirits 0:05:12.560 --> 0:05:17.640 are figures like Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, William Penn, Daniel Webster, 0:05:18.240 --> 0:05:21.040 even more recent at that time, you know Henry clay 0:05:21.160 --> 0:05:27.360 Um or after his death, Theodore Parker. Sometimes they were 0:05:27.360 --> 0:05:29.680 addressing just one or two people in a in a 0:05:29.720 --> 0:05:32.760 small science, but sometimes they're addressing large crowds through a 0:05:33.040 --> 0:05:36.880 trans lecturer like Corre scott Um. Just tell us about 0:05:36.960 --> 0:05:41.920 spiritualist relationship to history, kind of written large. Mm hmmm. Well, 0:05:41.960 --> 0:05:45.040 I'm glad you brought up trans lecturers because I had 0:05:45.080 --> 0:05:50.640 really only spoken about family seances, where people are seeking 0:05:50.720 --> 0:05:54.960 communication with an individual from their own life and their 0:05:54.960 --> 0:06:01.440 own circle. And trans mediums were public lecturers who gave 0:06:01.640 --> 0:06:06.599 lectures guided by usually though not always a particular spirit. 0:06:07.080 --> 0:06:11.000 Sometimes they went into trance and were guided by a 0:06:11.040 --> 0:06:15.440 more generalized sense of spirit presence, but usually it was 0:06:15.480 --> 0:06:23.279 an identifiable external intelligence with a specific identity who spoke 0:06:23.560 --> 0:06:27.800 through the medium in a public setting. And the trans 0:06:27.920 --> 0:06:32.760 lecturers are a very important development in American history because 0:06:33.360 --> 0:06:37.640 they are the first large group of American women to 0:06:37.880 --> 0:06:41.640 mount the podium and speak in public. There certainly had 0:06:41.720 --> 0:06:45.360 been other instances of women who had did had done this, 0:06:46.000 --> 0:06:49.880 most of them under some kind of spirit guidance, whether 0:06:49.920 --> 0:06:56.120 it be the Holy Spirit um uh or spiritual inspiration 0:06:56.640 --> 0:07:02.119 connected to the Bible. But trance speaker is who saw 0:07:02.160 --> 0:07:09.000 themselves as communicating messages from spirits, were the first significant 0:07:09.080 --> 0:07:14.120 group of American women to go on tour as public lecturers, 0:07:16.280 --> 0:07:21.120 and you asked about the spirits who spoke through them. Um. 0:07:21.160 --> 0:07:27.200 In general, trance speakers had particular relationships with particular spirits, 0:07:27.400 --> 0:07:33.280 so that um while a public a public figure might 0:07:33.760 --> 0:07:38.560 deliver a message through a spirit, they usually were figures 0:07:38.560 --> 0:07:42.360 who came back repeatedly to speak through a specific spirit. 0:07:42.480 --> 0:07:49.880 When public spirits inspired trans lectures, they often delivered communications 0:07:50.000 --> 0:07:54.480 on subjects that they were concerned about during their own lifetime. 0:07:54.600 --> 0:07:59.240 So in the case of Benjamin Franklin, he was a 0:07:59.320 --> 0:08:05.840 favorite medium for the communication of scientific information, and the 0:08:05.920 --> 0:08:14.400 notion that spirit mediums could communicate scientific information was understood 0:08:14.400 --> 0:08:22.160 as another kind of evidence of spirit presence. Because um 0:08:22.200 --> 0:08:25.920 most of the mediums were people who did not have education. 0:08:26.120 --> 0:08:30.679 The ideal medium was the fourteen year old girl, someone 0:08:30.800 --> 0:08:37.440 who was understood as being innocent, naive, um, and therefore 0:08:37.960 --> 0:08:44.199 incapable of duplicity, incapable of making up a trans lecture 0:08:44.720 --> 0:08:50.160 that came through her during in a in a public setting. 0:08:51.800 --> 0:08:54.640 Of course, that issue that you just pointed at played 0:08:54.679 --> 0:08:57.920 a large role in our first season of Unobscured, because 0:08:57.920 --> 0:08:59.800 we were looking at the same on which trials and 0:09:00.160 --> 0:09:03.640 question of whether the young girls who were claiming afflictions 0:09:03.679 --> 0:09:07.719 could be witnesses against established church members and leaders in 0:09:07.760 --> 0:09:10.200 the community as well as kind of outsiders or each other. 0:09:10.760 --> 0:09:15.720 Um And I'm thinking about uh. In addition to Radical Spirits, 0:09:15.800 --> 0:09:18.040 you've written Sisters and Saints and edited a number of 0:09:18.040 --> 0:09:21.600 other projects on the religious history of American women. How 0:09:21.640 --> 0:09:25.960 significant is spiritualism as a chapter in American women's history. 0:09:26.000 --> 0:09:30.160 You just kind of pointed at the public stage. But 0:09:30.160 --> 0:09:31.880 do you have some more reflections on kind of what's 0:09:31.880 --> 0:09:34.680 the significance of spiritualism in this kind of long history 0:09:34.880 --> 0:09:40.800 of American women and religion. Well, that's a great question. 0:09:40.840 --> 0:09:43.760 I don't think anybody has ever asked me that question, really, 0:09:44.120 --> 0:09:46.360 um and I could talk about it for a long time. 0:09:46.440 --> 0:09:51.920 So you cut me off if I've said enough. But 0:09:52.120 --> 0:09:57.800 in some ways the spirit medium is like a mirror 0:09:57.840 --> 0:10:03.840 image of the ideal Christian woman at the same time 0:10:03.920 --> 0:10:09.000 that she pushes the characteristics of the ideal nineteenth century 0:10:09.080 --> 0:10:14.160 Christian woman to its extreme. So you know, what's sometimes 0:10:14.160 --> 0:10:16.920 referred to as the cult of true womanhood in the 0:10:17.000 --> 0:10:26.760 nine century posits the notion that women by nature are pure, passive, 0:10:28.200 --> 0:10:36.560 and pious. And the understanding there is that women um 0:10:36.600 --> 0:10:41.960 in some ways reflect the qualities of a perfect Christian 0:10:42.280 --> 0:10:48.000 better than men do. That they are untainted by the 0:10:48.000 --> 0:10:52.680 the competitive values of the marketplace and of the economic sphere, 0:10:53.520 --> 0:10:59.719 and therefore they reflect the values of the home, the 0:10:59.800 --> 0:11:05.000 domestic values of Christianity, a place of charity, of nurture, 0:11:06.120 --> 0:11:11.360 of retreat from the marketplace, the world of politics where 0:11:11.360 --> 0:11:18.400 men get dirty through competition, um, And that women rather 0:11:18.520 --> 0:11:24.880 reflect a place of purity where Christianity can blossom. So 0:11:26.200 --> 0:11:32.120 spirit mediums push this idea to its radical extreme, that 0:11:32.200 --> 0:11:36.079 if women have these spiritual qualities more than men do, 0:11:36.960 --> 0:11:42.400 then they can send spirits that they are are perfectly 0:11:42.559 --> 0:11:47.160 suited to be vehicles for divine knowledge. Now that's, of course, 0:11:47.200 --> 0:11:51.680 the opposite of what the Christian churches are teaching, particularly 0:11:51.720 --> 0:11:56.800 the established churches that recognize the authority of education, the 0:11:56.840 --> 0:12:02.800 authority of scripture, the authority of apples, stalic succession, the 0:12:02.880 --> 0:12:09.240 notion that priesthood in the Catholic or Episcopal Church, for example, 0:12:09.400 --> 0:12:13.360 is passed from man to man through the laying on 0:12:13.559 --> 0:12:19.560 of hands back to Christ. And it's this uninterrupted lineage 0:12:19.640 --> 0:12:24.760 of male religious authority into which no women have ever intervened. 0:12:27.320 --> 0:12:29.960 The idea of the spirit medium presents us with a 0:12:30.120 --> 0:12:36.840 very different possibility of religious authority if women could convey 0:12:37.000 --> 0:12:43.040 spirituality because of their innocence. You know, I've met mediums 0:12:44.600 --> 0:12:49.960 who are alive today who give this same feeling of 0:12:50.160 --> 0:12:55.440 personalities where there's space for other things to pass through. 0:12:56.080 --> 0:12:59.520 And we have many other psychological terms that we might 0:12:59.640 --> 0:13:02.800 use to describe that in this day and age. But 0:13:02.920 --> 0:13:07.800 it's very close to the idea of a young girl 0:13:08.360 --> 0:13:13.559 who doesn't present impediments to an external intelligence that wants 0:13:13.600 --> 0:13:19.000 to use her as a vehicle for communication. Spiritualism uses 0:13:21.200 --> 0:13:26.679 concepts and experiences that derive from the history of Christianity 0:13:26.720 --> 0:13:32.840 and from Christian experience that are related to gender, and 0:13:33.120 --> 0:13:36.720 it kind of just pushes them a little too far. 0:13:36.800 --> 0:13:41.160 In this direction or that direction until they no longer 0:13:41.320 --> 0:13:47.240 qualify as orthodox Christianity. And so spiritualism in some sense 0:13:47.679 --> 0:13:51.559 tells us where the limits are of orthodoxy, the limits 0:13:51.600 --> 0:13:57.120 of what's acceptable for Christians, because, after all, Christians are 0:13:57.200 --> 0:14:03.559 taught in many contexts that they should try to communicate 0:14:03.679 --> 0:14:07.200 with benevolent spirits who are looking after them, who are 0:14:07.240 --> 0:14:11.720 looking down from heaven to lead them in positive directions. 0:14:12.360 --> 0:14:17.240 And whether they're formal theological doctrines of their religions teach 0:14:17.320 --> 0:14:21.920 that or not, popular culture teaches that, and it abus 0:14:22.160 --> 0:14:29.240 Christianity very broadly in practical settings, in in the personal 0:14:29.280 --> 0:14:35.040 experience of popular Christianity. So the ideas of spiritualism should 0:14:35.080 --> 0:14:40.640 not be so foreign to Christians, and in many cases 0:14:40.840 --> 0:14:45.000 they're not. In many cases, people who are church members, 0:14:45.520 --> 0:14:50.040 um even members of other religions are also participating in 0:14:50.120 --> 0:14:58.080 communication with spirits, even though it formerly formally contradicts the 0:14:58.280 --> 0:15:01.160 doctrines of their faith. The are a number of traditions 0:15:01.240 --> 0:15:05.480 within Christianity that address the communion of saints in some way, 0:15:05.600 --> 0:15:11.640 right or um, that's right, yeah, yeah. You mentioned the 0:15:11.680 --> 0:15:15.560 way that spiritualism kind of explores or pushes the boundaries 0:15:15.560 --> 0:15:20.720 of orthodoxy sometimes leaps over them. Um. In the decades 0:15:20.760 --> 0:15:24.480 before UM, there was the kind of formalization of what 0:15:24.680 --> 0:15:28.200 is modern spiritualism in the late eighteen forties. UM. There 0:15:28.200 --> 0:15:31.640 are some other pressures on American Christianity and American religion. Uh. 0:15:31.720 --> 0:15:35.520 Some historians talk about the significance of Jacksonian democracy for 0:15:35.560 --> 0:15:39.520 American life in the decades before spiritualism arrived. UM. Can 0:15:39.600 --> 0:15:43.040 you address maybe what we mean by Jacksonian democracy and 0:15:43.080 --> 0:15:45.800 what influence it had on American religion and kind of 0:15:45.800 --> 0:15:49.920 the twenties and thirties. UM. Well, I won't address Jacksonian 0:15:49.960 --> 0:15:53.880 democracy because I will not tread into political history for 0:15:54.160 --> 0:16:00.480 here of going outside my expertise. However, the period of 0:16:00.520 --> 0:16:03.840 the eighteen twenties and thirties is known as the Second 0:16:03.840 --> 0:16:09.040 Greade Awakening, and it's sometimes referred to as the period 0:16:09.040 --> 0:16:15.000 of the democratization of American religion. When we see religious 0:16:15.040 --> 0:16:21.520 authority and experience sweeping the country through revivals, and we 0:16:21.680 --> 0:16:28.479 see a declining emphasis on an educated clergy, on religious hierarchies, 0:16:28.960 --> 0:16:35.840 on religious education, and an increasing emphasis on religious experience 0:16:35.920 --> 0:16:42.080 that is accessible to any individual. Anyone who accepts Christ, 0:16:42.360 --> 0:16:48.240 accepts their sinfulness and their need of Christ's salvation. UM. 0:16:48.280 --> 0:16:51.960 So the Second Greade Awakening is a period of mass 0:16:52.040 --> 0:16:57.480 revivals and UM that's also a kind of preparation for 0:16:57.520 --> 0:17:07.359 spiritualism because of it, it's a religiously democratizing impulse that's fantastic. UM. 0:17:07.480 --> 0:17:12.679 There were also movements in science and in thinking about 0:17:12.680 --> 0:17:16.760 the human person and the human mind through mesmerism and 0:17:16.800 --> 0:17:20.520 animal magnetism, some of those things that laid the groundwork 0:17:20.640 --> 0:17:25.879 for magnetic trances and clairvoyance UM. But there were also 0:17:25.960 --> 0:17:30.640 influences in communications technology that we're changing the way people 0:17:30.680 --> 0:17:34.760 were thinking about communicating across distances. And you talk about uh, 0:17:34.880 --> 0:17:37.480 women being attuned to the spirits in a way that 0:17:37.520 --> 0:17:40.840 men weren't. Can you talk a little bit about maybe 0:17:41.400 --> 0:17:43.720 the way that changes in thinking about the human mind 0:17:43.880 --> 0:17:48.320 and what was possible with technology also laid the groundwork 0:17:48.400 --> 0:17:53.480 for spiritualist thinking and practice. Well, you have to remember 0:17:54.080 --> 0:18:00.840 the shock of technological advance, Electricity, the telegram of these 0:18:00.840 --> 0:18:04.800 things were like magic for a society in which they 0:18:04.800 --> 0:18:08.400 had not previously been existed or known, and they were 0:18:08.440 --> 0:18:13.640 poorly understood and um as they came to be introduced 0:18:14.240 --> 0:18:19.280 as ideas before people witnessed them personally, it was as 0:18:19.359 --> 0:18:23.520 plausible that there could be a spiritual telegraph that would 0:18:23.560 --> 0:18:29.359 connect communication through human mediums with the spirits of the 0:18:29.440 --> 0:18:33.760 dead as that there could be a telegraph that would 0:18:33.800 --> 0:18:38.199 send communications across the country without anybody being able to 0:18:38.760 --> 0:18:42.240 hear them or see them. And I don't think it's 0:18:42.240 --> 0:18:47.320 any coincidence that the first spirit messages that were communicated 0:18:47.359 --> 0:18:52.040 through the Fox Sisters were communicated by raps wraps on 0:18:52.080 --> 0:18:55.439 the table, on the furniture, on the wall, on the floor, 0:18:56.040 --> 0:18:59.480 which if you think about that, it sounds like UH 0:18:59.760 --> 0:19:04.280 tell leograph tapping out Morse code. And the the first 0:19:04.680 --> 0:19:10.119 UH seances were conducted by writing the alphabet out on 0:19:10.160 --> 0:19:15.240 a piece of paper and the person UH who was 0:19:15.880 --> 0:19:20.520 running the seance would pass their hands over the alphabet 0:19:20.720 --> 0:19:24.680 until raps were heard, and then stop on that letter 0:19:25.480 --> 0:19:28.040 and write that letter down. And during some of the 0:19:28.080 --> 0:19:32.879 first communications, they had a hard time separating these letters 0:19:32.920 --> 0:19:36.520 that they received in this way into words. It wasn't 0:19:36.560 --> 0:19:39.800 always clear what the messages were. So if you think 0:19:39.800 --> 0:19:45.960 about this, it's a it's a technology that is kind 0:19:46.000 --> 0:19:52.840 of mimicking and inspired by the new technologies of electricity 0:19:52.880 --> 0:19:56.600 and the telegraph. They're trying to do something very similar 0:19:56.680 --> 0:20:01.400 but with spirit power. And if you think about it, 0:20:01.400 --> 0:20:07.560 it's kind of boring. Um two. And what what that 0:20:08.880 --> 0:20:14.360 informs me of is the great hunger for spirit communication. 0:20:15.040 --> 0:20:20.359 If you think about people and these they have other 0:20:20.440 --> 0:20:23.080 things to do, but they are sitting around a table. 0:20:23.200 --> 0:20:27.080 Think how long it took to get a spirit message 0:20:27.160 --> 0:20:30.880 by passing your hands over the alphabet until you heard 0:20:31.000 --> 0:20:33.480 raps at a single letter, and then you had to 0:20:33.560 --> 0:20:38.679 repeat that process maybe fifty or a hundred times to 0:20:38.800 --> 0:20:44.560 get a brief spirit message. And meanwhile, you're kind of 0:20:44.800 --> 0:20:48.080 hoping that you have a human medium who will be 0:20:48.119 --> 0:20:52.240 an effective vehicle for communication. You're hoping that you have 0:20:52.480 --> 0:20:58.240 created the right atmosphere in the seance room that will 0:20:58.280 --> 0:21:03.200 make a spirit comfortable to communicate and confident that this 0:21:03.320 --> 0:21:07.400 is a medium through which they can communicate, and an 0:21:07.400 --> 0:21:10.960 audience that will be receptive to their message. So you 0:21:11.000 --> 0:21:13.879 have a lot going on, and just think about I 0:21:13.880 --> 0:21:18.080 mean this is we tend to think of seances as 0:21:18.119 --> 0:21:21.879 a parlor game, and certainly they could become that, and 0:21:21.880 --> 0:21:28.600 they did become that a popular entertainment. But the first seances, 0:21:28.760 --> 0:21:32.160 I don't think we're games at all. I think they 0:21:32.240 --> 0:21:36.879 show us the deep, deep hunger to communicate with the 0:21:36.920 --> 0:21:41.160 spirits of the dead, the deep hunger to be reconnected 0:21:41.400 --> 0:21:45.359 with loved ones that we have lost, and the deep 0:21:45.440 --> 0:21:48.840 hunger for knowledge of the divine, for knowledge of what 0:21:48.960 --> 0:21:53.679 will happen after we die. Mm hm And you mentioned 0:21:53.720 --> 0:22:00.360 the Fox sisters, uh, before we get there, um, very 0:22:00.560 --> 0:22:04.760 very soon before uh, Andrew Jackson Davis, the Poughkeepsie seer 0:22:05.480 --> 0:22:11.760 um publishes on harmonial philosophy, and you mentioned the trying 0:22:11.760 --> 0:22:15.760 to get the atmosphere right conducive to spirit communication, and 0:22:15.800 --> 0:22:19.640 the idea of harmony becomes very important to spiritualist practice 0:22:19.680 --> 0:22:22.439 and belief. UM. Can you talk a little bit about 0:22:22.640 --> 0:22:26.480 Andrew Jackson Davis and how his ideas were significant and 0:22:26.560 --> 0:22:29.679 his trances were significant in a way that distinguished them 0:22:29.720 --> 0:22:32.480 a little bit from say, the Shaker visionaries or other 0:22:32.680 --> 0:22:38.800 trance or clairvoyance experiences that preceded him. So Andrew Jackson Davis, 0:22:38.880 --> 0:22:42.880 the Poughkeepsie see or the prophet of the Harmonial philosophy 0:22:43.200 --> 0:22:47.640 was quite different from the Shaker visionaries who preceded him. 0:22:48.280 --> 0:22:53.400 They were um seeking messages or receiving messages, whether they 0:22:53.440 --> 0:22:56.560 sought them or not in the context of a community 0:22:56.800 --> 0:23:03.840 gathered around a single figure, mother Ann Lee Um. Andrew 0:23:03.920 --> 0:23:08.240 Jackson Davis didn't have that kind of community around him. 0:23:08.400 --> 0:23:12.120 He tried to create it, but he never had that 0:23:12.240 --> 0:23:16.159 sense of authority that Mother Anne did, or the sense 0:23:16.359 --> 0:23:20.200 of creating a community that would live by a set 0:23:20.240 --> 0:23:25.159 of agreed upon rules. So he was really just preaching 0:23:25.359 --> 0:23:31.120 this harmonial philosophy to like minded individuals wherever he might 0:23:31.280 --> 0:23:36.679 find them. And I wonder whether his philosophy would have 0:23:36.720 --> 0:23:39.040 caught on in the way that it did, And it 0:23:39.160 --> 0:23:43.359 certainly did catch on in a very powerful way. But 0:23:43.520 --> 0:23:46.600 I wonder if it would have done that without the 0:23:46.640 --> 0:23:51.040 Fox Sisters, because the Fox Sisters brought a kind of 0:23:52.040 --> 0:23:59.200 popular accessibility to spirit communication, whereas Andrew Jackson Davis preached 0:23:59.200 --> 0:24:04.080 a harmony philosophy that made room for spirit communication but 0:24:04.280 --> 0:24:09.600 placed it in a much broader context. He the spirit 0:24:09.680 --> 0:24:13.840 who spoke through him was the spirit of Emmanuel Swedenborg, 0:24:14.440 --> 0:24:22.240 and Swedenborg's vision, which Andrew Jackson Davis was inspired by, 0:24:23.240 --> 0:24:30.640 Um described a world of spheres. Swedenborg had been involved 0:24:30.640 --> 0:24:35.639 in the mining industry, and he understood the world in 0:24:35.800 --> 0:24:42.280 terms of levels, both levels under the ground and levels 0:24:42.359 --> 0:24:46.679 spheres above the ground that are through which the soul 0:24:46.840 --> 0:24:52.280 advances in its journey towards heaven. So there's a notion 0:24:52.359 --> 0:24:56.680 of progression, and this is something that Andrew Jackson Davis 0:24:56.800 --> 0:25:00.800 wrote about that people found very meaningful, the idea that 0:25:00.840 --> 0:25:06.640 the soul continues to progress after death. Where Orthodox Calvinism 0:25:06.720 --> 0:25:12.160 and Protestant faith taught that whatever virtue you had accomplished 0:25:12.240 --> 0:25:15.400 in your life at the moment of death or lack 0:25:15.480 --> 0:25:19.800 of virtue determined your faith for eternity, that you would 0:25:19.880 --> 0:25:22.880 either be damned or you would be blessed to sit 0:25:23.000 --> 0:25:26.640 at the right hand of God for eternity and saved 0:25:26.840 --> 0:25:31.639 thereby from the flames of hell and eternal suffering. You 0:25:31.640 --> 0:25:35.119 would go to one of those two places according to 0:25:35.160 --> 0:25:37.639 the state of your soul at the time of death. 0:25:38.000 --> 0:25:41.840 This was a source of huge anxiety to family members 0:25:42.119 --> 0:25:46.000 who might not have known the state of their loved 0:25:46.000 --> 0:25:49.000 one's soul at the moment of death. They might not 0:25:49.200 --> 0:25:53.120 have felt confident that their loved one was among the 0:25:53.160 --> 0:25:58.080 elect who had been selected by God to enjoy His 0:25:58.160 --> 0:26:03.000 blessings forever and be reunited with their family in heaven. 0:26:03.960 --> 0:26:07.600 So if this is a source of huge anxiety, and 0:26:07.600 --> 0:26:14.360 Andrew Jackson Davis address that anxiety with the idea building 0:26:14.359 --> 0:26:18.040 on Swedenborg, that the soul can continue to progress in 0:26:18.200 --> 0:26:24.680 grace following death, and many spirit messages described the so, 0:26:24.760 --> 0:26:31.000 for example, people who communicated with children who had been lost, 0:26:31.080 --> 0:26:34.520 some of them even before the age of being able 0:26:34.560 --> 0:26:38.120 to speak, not to mention, before the age of reason 0:26:38.200 --> 0:26:41.240 of knowing the difference between right and wrong. How could 0:26:41.240 --> 0:26:43.800 you know what the fate of such a child would 0:26:43.840 --> 0:26:50.280 be if they couldn't choose whether to do good or ill. 0:26:51.320 --> 0:26:54.159 So families had a lot of anxiety about this, and 0:26:54.200 --> 0:26:58.440 the notion that a child could continue to progress after 0:26:58.640 --> 0:27:04.359 death allowed people to hear spirit messages from their deceased 0:27:04.800 --> 0:27:09.360 beloved babies and children who could describe to them how 0:27:09.400 --> 0:27:15.240 they continued to develop, continued to learn, were educated, learned 0:27:15.240 --> 0:27:18.760 to read and write, and develop in all kinds of 0:27:18.800 --> 0:27:26.080 ways after death, and usually these messages of consolation also 0:27:26.320 --> 0:27:31.960 assured the parent or the survivor that the deceased spirit 0:27:32.040 --> 0:27:37.080 continued to care about them after death. A particularly consoling 0:27:37.200 --> 0:27:42.719 idea for the parents of children who had been lost 0:27:42.800 --> 0:27:50.080 before they could express gratitude or or fealty or loyalty 0:27:50.200 --> 0:27:53.720 or love to the parents who loved them so much. 0:27:54.640 --> 0:27:58.560 M hm. And you you mentioned that in this second 0:27:58.560 --> 0:28:03.120 grade awakening period it um, there there are multiple ways 0:28:03.160 --> 0:28:06.800 in which Christianity is fragmenting. I think there's the I 0:28:06.800 --> 0:28:09.600 think it's Emerson, or maybe it's the Row who says 0:28:09.400 --> 0:28:11.920 that the stern old face have all been pulverized. Right. 0:28:12.400 --> 0:28:16.040 And so you're looking at an American religious landscape that 0:28:16.080 --> 0:28:23.320 includes now Methodists and Universalists and Shakers and Quakers and Baptists. 0:28:23.359 --> 0:28:26.240 And there are these practices in the in the in 0:28:26.280 --> 0:28:29.080 the period like camp meetings and circuit preaching and a 0:28:29.119 --> 0:28:33.480 new privileging of religious enthusiasm. And how did this kind 0:28:33.520 --> 0:28:39.520 of uh, i'll say, riotous religious atmosphere um. You mentioned 0:28:39.520 --> 0:28:42.040 this a little bit, maybe a couple more of your 0:28:42.080 --> 0:28:45.440 reflections on how it opened a space for spiritualism and 0:28:45.880 --> 0:28:50.400 maybe which traditions, which theological traditions, do you see as 0:28:50.440 --> 0:28:56.040 the strongest influences on Spiritualism's origin. Well, you would think 0:28:56.320 --> 0:28:59.880 that those who were involved in what you called riot 0:29:00.120 --> 0:29:05.880 us expressions of spirituality might be the most likely to 0:29:06.320 --> 0:29:11.400 give birth to spiritualist communication. Not so, it was more 0:29:11.560 --> 0:29:18.200 the quiet faiths. It was Quakerism, Unitarians, and universalists who 0:29:18.240 --> 0:29:24.360 were apt to explore spiritualism. Quakers in particular, had already 0:29:24.520 --> 0:29:32.240 a notion that the individual contains within themselves a perfect 0:29:32.280 --> 0:29:37.320 transcript of ultimate truth, that each individual is a transcript 0:29:37.480 --> 0:29:40.400 of the mind of God, and so we should look 0:29:40.480 --> 0:29:44.479 within ourselves to know the mind of God. And that 0:29:44.600 --> 0:29:48.600 notion of what Quakers called the inner Light was very 0:29:48.640 --> 0:29:53.080 close to what spiritualists would do when they looked to 0:29:53.200 --> 0:30:00.000 individual mediums to hear the voices of spirits, to hear 0:30:00.160 --> 0:30:06.320 spiritual knowledge UM coming from an individual, and the idea 0:30:06.440 --> 0:30:12.600 that an individual medium could look within themselves could so 0:30:12.680 --> 0:30:18.640 the the seance had some commonalities with a Quaker meeting, 0:30:19.320 --> 0:30:23.760 where Quakers sit in silence to await the voice of God. 0:30:25.320 --> 0:30:30.000 That's what spiritualists are doing. Also, they're waiting for a 0:30:30.120 --> 0:30:35.479 spirit voice they Now, Quakers would never be so rude 0:30:35.800 --> 0:30:39.560 as to do what is often done in a spiritualist 0:30:39.600 --> 0:30:45.400 church service or um seance, which is to boldly ask 0:30:45.760 --> 0:30:48.720 are there any present? Are there any spirits present who 0:30:48.720 --> 0:30:53.680 wish to communicate um? Spiritualists do not wait in silence 0:30:53.920 --> 0:31:02.640 as uh Quakers might. They create the conditions to promote 0:31:02.640 --> 0:31:08.800 spirit communication UM. But it's interesting that they do view 0:31:09.760 --> 0:31:16.240 silence quiet, perhaps proceeding by preceded by him singing or 0:31:16.400 --> 0:31:23.040 prayers that would create the ambiance, the atmosphere in which 0:31:23.040 --> 0:31:28.000 a spirit would feel comfortable communicating. Let's go to talking 0:31:28.040 --> 0:31:31.800 about one of those particular Quakers, who is a remarkable 0:31:31.880 --> 0:31:36.400 historical figure that I had never heard mentioned or addressed 0:31:36.400 --> 0:31:38.360 in any of the histories that I've read, but who 0:31:38.440 --> 0:31:42.560 just stands out as so key to a number of movements. 0:31:42.920 --> 0:31:47.040 I'm talking about Amy post Um. Nancy Hewitt's just published 0:31:47.080 --> 0:31:50.760 a fantastic biography of her called Radical friend Um. But 0:31:50.800 --> 0:31:53.760 I would love to hear your reflections on Amy Post 0:31:53.840 --> 0:31:57.000 as a Quaker in Rochester, New York, because she's at 0:31:57.040 --> 0:32:02.360 the she's at the center of women's rights conventions, she's 0:32:02.400 --> 0:32:05.720 helping to run the underground railroad through Rochester, and she's 0:32:05.800 --> 0:32:09.200 there to be the midwife for spiritualism. Can you tell 0:32:09.280 --> 0:32:13.280 us a little bit about Amy Post? Absolutely. Amy post 0:32:13.400 --> 0:32:16.800 is one of my favorite historical characters. She was in 0:32:16.840 --> 0:32:20.080 the room where it happened, not just for spiritualism, but 0:32:20.240 --> 0:32:26.080 for so many new developments in radical, radical religion in 0:32:26.120 --> 0:32:30.840 the area of Rochester, New York. And she was a 0:32:30.880 --> 0:32:36.600 critical figure in spiritualism because of the degree of respect 0:32:36.760 --> 0:32:40.480 that she commanded. So she became kind of a mentor 0:32:40.600 --> 0:32:47.560 to the Fox Sisters. She lent credibility to this development 0:32:47.600 --> 0:32:52.360 of spiritualism by her friendship with the Fox Sisters and 0:32:52.440 --> 0:32:58.960 also by her um by the fact that spiritualism spread 0:32:59.080 --> 0:33:03.040 through her net work of radical Quakers. And these were 0:33:03.120 --> 0:33:09.800