turned his ire toward the spirit guide John King himself. keenly compares the distances most physical manifestations involved, measured against the length of outstretched arms of mediums perched on a centrally-located table in the room's small confines-Mr. came prepared with skepticism, though he claimed he was not previously 'prejudiced toward Spiritualism.' After a thorough criticism of Koon's fiddle 'hoe down' and the other presented phenomenon-Mr. So, the following day, after a 'breakfast fully in keeping with their lodgings,' off to Koons went G, intent on seeing his manifestations at one farm or another. Something did manifest in G's quarters on the Tippie farm that evening, however. In fact, he found the Tippies wholly unprepared to host his party, being told that 'the spirits had left' to the extent that no manifestations would be forthcoming that night. The remaining phenomena were also liberally borrowed by the Davenports). And, of course, Jonathan Koons and John Tippie construct their spirit rooms, which birthed entirely new species of phenomenon-dark séances, physical manifestation and spirit-speaking through trumpets-as well as their 'Spiritual Machines' in the spirit-designed tables used as conduits for John King and his tribe of discarnate entities (King himself being another enduring 'first' to be put to use by subsequent generations of mediums. John Murray Spear tries to spark the Second Coming with his New Motive Power.

Robert Hare starts to make his turn toward Spiritualism. For the tech-junkies, it's also the first year we have real cooperative-communication apparatus: Wagner's Psychograph, Hornung's Emanulector, and Pease's Spiritual Telegraph Dial. The bandwagoneer mediums without the talents for rapping start finding mechanical means to circumvent their shortcomings. The tables tournantes phenomenon hits Germany in March, then France by the summer, making tipping tables a bonafide worldwide phenomenon.

1848 will always, of course, get all the credit as Spiritualism's birthday, but it is 1853 when things truly start happening. It really is amazing just how much this year changed the entire dialogue of Spiritualism. For the last few months, the wheels have been spinning in the sand of 1853. Assuming the séance was not simply an elaborate hoax, was it perhaps evidence that we live simultaneously on more than one plane of existence, and that direct communication between planes and their inhabitants is possible? This discussion is about boundary crossing, methodologically, in terms of subject matter, and ontologically, in seeking to understand how the world is constructed.Work continues on the big talking tables book. The discrete boundary we like to think unites our physical body with whatever other elements make us human (soul, spirit, consciousness, mind) was suddenly called into question. A second boundary crossing involved the body of the medium.

Spirit possession and mediumship are not unusual topics for an anthropologist of religion, but by studying paranormal phenomena in the UK I had crossed a disciplinary boundary of academic probity, and risked being seen as gullible and academically unsound. The physical/trance demonstration was part of my research into mediumship and afterlife phenomena. Neither 'believer' nor 'sceptic' I was open to experience whatever the evening had in store. The purpose of this paper is first, to provide an examination of Rosemary Brown's public persona second, to relate it to the spiritualist tradition, in order to demonstrate that the constituent elements of Rosemary Brown's persona were available in the spiritualist cultural repertoire and third, to relate this same persona to the implications of gender in the understanding of mediumship among spiritualists.Īs I sat in a darkened séance room, holding the hands of my neighbours and singing along to popular songs on a cassette recorder, I felt a mixture of foolishness and nervous expectation.

In order to convince the public that her music had a spiritual origin, she described herself (and was described) as a simple housewife and mother with no profound musical knowledge, therefore hardly capable of writing original musical pieces in the styles of acclaimed composers. Brown also furnishes a promising persona case study. In the 1960s, she started to notate hundreds of musical pieces that she attributed to the spirits of several great concert music composers with whom she claimed to be in touch as a spirit medium. Rosemary Brown (1916-2001) is certainly a highly unusual case in music history.

Seance table trick rattling