Speaking with the Dead

Front matter

An Ethnography of Extrahuman Experience

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Preface

. Mother’s Day . How Not to Speak with the Dead . Spirit Guides and the Daily Afterlife

Acknowledgments

I owe a tremendous debt of thanks to the committee and members of the Canberra Spiritualist Association, as well as the mediums, not all of them members of the Association, who spoke at their services and consented to being recorded. Norman and Lynette Ivory, Sarah Jeffery and Julian Glover, Janet Adams, Jane Hall, Selma McLaren, Penelope Murray, Elayne Strahan, and Jen Webb have been wonderful dialogue partners. Many other csa members have shared their experiences, reflections, and philosophies with me in recent years as well, and I regret not being able to list everyone. I fondly remember here the late Debby Walker, whose devotion to Spiritualism gave her resilient energy, hope, and humor in the face of a terminal disease. Her voice is profoundly missed, but will be heard in these pages.

My collaborator in the research project, the sociologist Andrew Singleton, has been a generous and insightful friend and colleague. He and I acknowledge the support of our universities and the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Project grant number 170100563.

At the Australian National University, I am beyond grateful to Shameem Black, Francesca Merlan, and Carly Schuster for their engaged and encouraging responses to the work as it developed. At the University of Oslo, members of Marianne Lien’s and Wenzel Geissler’s writing group gave lively and useful feedback on a draft of part of Chapter 2. Courtney Handman, Michael W. Scott, Kristina Wirtz, and Erin Yerby have also given critically insightful feedback which has pushed me to reconsider my assumptions and develop the analysis throughout the book. Over several years of work, the complete manuscript received two anonymous reviews which were both erudite and sympathetic. I owe special thanks to Eileen A. Fradenburg Joy and Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei for believing in the manuscript and seeing it safely across planes of existence, and to SAJ for editing the text skillfully.

The research project would not have been possible without the involvement of my family, Sharon, Andrew, and Evan, whose patient goodwill and humor is a source of inspiration and support. Finally, this book is dedicated to three remarkable sisters, the Usakowskis: To my mother, Alexis, whose interest and open-mindedness in religious and spiritual matters has always inspired me; to her late sister, Carole, whose faith ran deep in ways I did not understand but have come to respect; and to her younger sister, Zmira, who forged her new way into an old tradition. This book is dedicated to you with love and affection.

Preface

Because much of this book deals with spoken words, a few notes on the recording and transcribing process may be useful. I did a lot of audio recording during the research project, all of it with the permission of the Canberra Spiritualist Association and the mediums working at their services. My equipment was a small and inexpensive Sony mp3 recorder with an external microphone. Recording conditions were sometimes difficult, with (for example) a heater blowing, a coffee urn boiling, and the room itself providing plenty of echo. Readers will note several instances in which inaudible speech is mentioned, and what “inaudible” sometimes means in these cases is “not recorded clearly enough.”

I have gone over transcripts of all of the recordings multiple times to make corrections and verify accuracy. In the service of readability, I have edited text lightly to heal the bumps and bruises of real-time talk. Ellipses indicate snippets of deleted text. I do not mark every deletion with ellipses; for example, sometimes I eliminate minor repetitions, placeholders (“um”), false starts, and the like without indicating them. Em dashes (—) indicate interruption, either by oneself or another speaker. As an example of the smoothing-out process, “But he’s also showing me gum trees,’ quoted in Chapter 1, was originally spoken as “But sh — the— he’s, he’s also showing me gum trees.”

I generally use real names for mediums and pseudonyms for audience members. One person whose real name I use is given a pseudonym in discussing a sensitive event. Priscilla, Benedetta, and Ariadne (first mentioned in Chapter 2), Warren, Aunt Stephanie, and Stella (Chapter 3), Maura (Chapter 4), Jessica, Wanda, Anne, and Jack (Chapter 5), and Susan (Chapter 8) are all pseudonyms.

Chapter 1

Within any spiritual or religious tradition, nothing could seem more obvious than the reality of the unseen world. Gods demand attention. Spirits compel action. In a famous essay on religion’s cultural foundations, Clifford Geertz (1973, 118) wryly observed that when he asked a Balinese man who had gone into trance and performed as the goddess Rangda if the man believed Rangda were real, the question left Geertz “open to the suspicion of idiocy” — What do you mean, is Rangda real? I was her. But outsiders often view these practices negatively: Who could believe such things? Don't you know you're talking to air? There is an imbalance of certainties, then, in which spiritual claims inspire either devotion or scorn.

Many social scientists who study religious life try to avoid these extremes. A careful observer can try to understand the social reality of spirits without insisting on any reality beyond that. Social reality can be a slippery concept even for social scientists, though, and the balance between skepticism and advocacy has proven difficult to sustain for many authors.

In this book, I try to maintain the balance. As part of my ongoing research on popular religion, I developed an interest in the religion known as Spiritualism. In Spiritualism, you speak with dead people. In its heyday from the mid-nineteenth century into the early twentieth, Spiritualist séances and public demonstrations attracted huge crowds and attention. It had deep but often unacknowledged influence in politics, with Alfred Deakin in Australia and William Lyon Mackenzie King in Canada acting on Spiritualist principles. Although some scientists attempted to investigate the movement's claims soberly, many commentators couldn't help tilting in one direction or the other. Harry Houdini, the magician and escape artist, wrote A Magician Among the Spirits in 1924 to denounce Spiritualist mediums as “vultures,” adding that he did not mean to insult actual vultures, which are a blameless natural species. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes and dear friend of Houdini, toured Australia as an evangelist for Spiritualism and announced in his two-volume history of the movement that Spiritualism was the greatest event in history since the coming of Christ (Houdini 1924, 217, and Doyle 1926, vii).

In deciding to conduct research with Spiritualists, I intended, as far as possible, to hold the difficult balance: to be open-minded, to learn what they had to teach, and to try to understand how Spiritualism works culturally — that is, how people create it together. The reader can judge whether I have kept the balance or not. I must mention that the Spiritualists of Canberra, Australia, were an exceptionally welcoming group. They seemed happy to have an outsider join them. This was a chance for them to teach me what they knew to be solid facts. And, as a small and aging congregation, they were glad to have someone in his forties help run some of the practical aspects of services, like setting up the computer and speakers before the service.

I joined the Canberra Spiritualist Association (CsA) in 2015. Becoming a member simply meant paying twenty dollars, signing my name to an application form, and waiting for the committee to approve. I attended often enough that, in addition to being accepted as a member, I was asked to join the church committee and duly elected to it in August 2016. I also took the night courses the csa offered on mediumship, psychic skills, tarot, and dream interpretation. In January 2019, I moved to Norway and served out my committee term from a distance. I continued to correspond and consult with Association members as I wrote up the findings of my research.

This book is the result. It is a portrait of a modern religion with an old purpose: to communicate with the dead. I have tried to speak with spirits. I have witnessed many mediums try as well, and they do a better job of it than me. Most of this book will describe what I learned from skilled mediums and what it feels like to try mediumship as a newcomer. I will discuss moments from services, private readings, and other events, telling the stories of how mediums find their way into a world where talking with people on the astral plane is sometimes routine but never dull.

Like any religious movement, Spiritualism is a historical creature. It has changed in profound ways since it began. Although many present-day Spiritualists describe their religion as primeval, it took institutional shape in the mid-nineteenth century. Its early popularity was stoked by physical manifestations such as mysterious knocks, writing by unseen hands, musical instruments floating about the room, and, to the delight of historians of photography, images of ghosts and ectoplasm (spirit substance oozing from mediums’ bodies). When spirits were contacted in the early days of the movement, they might be family members, but they were just as likely to be famous figures. Benjamin Franklin showed up notably often at early séances. Since those days, however, Anglophone Spiritualism has deemphasized physical manifestations. Mediums today are likely to be “mental mediums.” They receive impressions which they believe come from the spirit world: sights, sounds, scents, tastes, feelings, and intuitions. Their task is to pass these signs on to living human audiences in order to figure out who this deceased person is and what they want to say. Mental mediums do not usually change their tone of voice as they converse between dead and living. For example, they do not sound creaky when speaking for grandparents or use tiny voices when speaking for children. They nonetheless bring forth a parade of characters when they do their work. These characters are your late loved ones. Benjamin Franklin doesn't show up from the spirit world anymore. Your grandmother does.

It is tempting to view Spiritualism as one way people address the vulnerability of families. As extended families shrink to nuclear families, nuclear families fragment, and hometowns become a succession of worksites, it is plausible to see movements like Spiritualism as attempts at making kinship stable. The people you really love and care for, mediums say, will always be with you. You will always be with them. Family is eternal. This understanding of Spiritualism’s appeal gains traction when we consider how older Christian visions of heaven and hell have lost plausibility for many people. Except for fundamentalists, who believes in eternal hellfire anymore? And if there is a heaven, isn’t it less likely to feature harps and clouds and more likely to look like the version mediums describe, a loving family forever?

But Spiritualism is not just a way to make family ties feel secure. Much of the passion poured into mediumship comes from the modernist conviction that science is the source of truth. Modern Spiritualism took shape in the same era as Darwinian understandings of evolution. At the same time, developments in technology like telegraphy and photography prompted new thinking about the possibilities of communication and recording. As a result, Spiritualists came to cherish the idea that progress is woven into the design of the universe and the claim that life after death is provable. Scientific investigators like members of Britain’s famed Society for Psychical Research worked to understand whether mediums’ skills came from genuine otherworldly sources, or perhaps from telepathy, keen observational powers, or subconscious memory — or, for that matter, from mediums’ fraudulence and audiences’ gullibility (Blum 2007, and Crabtree 2015).

Although mediums and skeptical investigators often disagreed on what counted as evidence of real communication with the dead, many nineteenth- and twentieth-century mediums came to agree that they needed to prove their claims. Today, the kind of evidence most Spiritualist mediums produce is a harmony between their description of a person’s character and a listener’s memories of that person. If a medium describes your late grandmother's personality vividly, with supporting details that cluster like stars around the sense of a story, then, Spiritualists argue, the medium has shown you something true and deeply comforting about the nature of existence. There is no such thing as death. Your late loved ones are showing up here and now to speak with you.

The technologies that fired people’s imaginations about spirit communication in the nineteenth century, especially photography, might seem to threaten Spiritualism these days. Photos and videos stored online now make accurate representations of dead people imperishable. Even the best mediums can’t portray the dead as clearly as a photo or capture their voices as crisply as a recording. Mediumship is a notably complicated and chancy form of memory-work. But, I suggest, Spiritualist practices are likely to thrive with new technology because the connection Spiritualism makes between living and dead is not only about memory. Spiritualism emphasizes recognition. The point of a medium telling you about your deceased loved ones is not to look or sound like them, but to acknowledge them, and often to acknowledge them publicly, before an audience. In providing this opportunity for recognition, mediums underscore the fact that your loved ones mattered and your relationship with them mattered — and will always continue to matter.

If I am correct in predicting that mediumship will continue to thrive in the twenty-first century and beyond, there is still no doubt that Spiritualist churches face the same challenges as other religious institutions. Just as the majority of Christians

1 In writing about recognition, I am drawing especially on Keane (1997). I am also inspired by Barbara Myerhoff’s discussion of the “fierce human drive to be noticed,” which she makes in reference to Jewish seniors in Los Angeles and resonates with my experiences with Spiritualist mediums. What Myerhoff says about elderly Jewish people's self-understandings applies well to mediums’ work of expressive relationship-building: “the opposite of honor is not shame, but invisibility” (Myerhoff 1978, 183; emphasis in original).

prefer to skip church on Sunday, so the majority of Spiritualists — or, to broaden the category, people who are interested in hearing from the dead—do not want to sit through a formal service. They will watch celebrity mediums on Tv, from Theresa Caputo to Tyler Henry to John Edward. They will attend psychic fairs, and occasionally pay a medium for a private, individual reading. Attending regular meetings is less appealing for many. But women have kept Spiritualism alive. Indeed, Spiritualisms growth and development has always been profoundly shaped by female leaders. The movement began with knocking sounds heard in the presence of two sisters, Kate and Maggie Fox, in upstate New York in 1848. Many of the popular and influential mediums in Spiritualism’s heyday were women. It gained strength in its resonance with nineteenth-century women’s rights movements. And, as I show in the following pages, twice as many women as men attend Canberra Spiritualist Association meetings. This is emphatically not to say that men do not participate — and Spiritualist women sometimes say they wish more men would join. But this is a movement where women not only participate, but regularly speak with public authority. As practiced in Spiritualism, mediumship is distinctly modern in its empowerment of women and emphasis on the need for evidence to support its claims. For these reasons and others, I resist using the term “haunting” in these pages, although it might seem to fit a religion in which you speak with spirits. There is now a tendency in nonfiction writing to use the term “haunting” to analyze many kinds of loss, damage, and domination. But to approach Spiritualism in these terms, I suggest, would skew the possibilities of understanding it. Spiritualists made it clear to me that what they were doing was normal and unremarkable, so I am searching for suitable language to represent this. To put it plainly, in Spiritualism, the dead are not coming to haunt you but to help you. They are still alive, making

2 Key sources on Spiritualist feminism include Moore (1977, chapter 4), Braude (1989), and Owen (1989). For histories of the movement's heyday, see Podmore (1902), Brandon (1983), and McGarry (2008).

continual spiritual progress, gesturing toward a vitalist cosmos in which there is no end to existence and intimate connection is absolute.

I have to mention that my first encounter with Spiritualism was deeply upsetting. While living in Melbourne in the late 2000s, I had signed up for a mail-order course to learn more about Spiritualism because I was fascinated by the idea that people would go to church on Sundays to hear not from ministers but from the dead. As part of the course, there was one meeting held at the Victorian Spiritualists’ Union's stately old hall in central Melbourne.

That day, I traipsed over to ABeckett Street to hear about this curious religion. I do not remember much about the session except for one moment.

There were several speakers. One was a woman who told us how her young daughter — a toddler — had died of cancer. And, the woman said, this was wonderful. It showed that her daughter loved her and had gone ahead into the spirit world to guide her mother from there.

I was aghast. I had a young son, and the idea of celebrating a child’s death was revolting. I tried hard not to be judgmental. I knew intellectually, if not emotionally, that the woman must have felt pain at one time, and maybe did still. But I couldn't put on critical armor. I sat there, dumbstruck, thinking: This is wrong. Then I left. When the completion certificate for the mail-order course arrived, I ripped it up and threw it away. I figured I had heard enough that day on ABeckett Street.

Several years later, having moved to Canberra, I began to wonder if Spiritualism deserved a second look. I was not sure why I felt this way. My father had died a few years earlier, which might seem to be one reason; yet while I missed him, I was not expecting or wanting to hear from him. At his memorial service in Newton, New Jersey, while I was speaking, I looked out into the audience and saw him sitting there — and even in that moment, I felt my mind was probably playing tricks on me. The next instant, he was gone. I was miserable that day, but I did not feel I needed to connect with him in any way except through memory.

I knew that part of my interest was practical. I wanted to have a research project close to home so I would not need to spend a lot of time away from my family. I had been conducting research in the Pacific, especially Fiji, which I loved. But by the time I moved to Canberra, my wife and I had two young sons, they were growing up quickly, and it was difficult to take them on trips to the islands. Of course, I was still repulsed by the idea of listening to rhapsodies about children’s deaths. But I wondered if my first experience had been anomalous. Maybe even hardcore Spiritualists would have felt uncomfortable with the lesson on ABeckett Street years before.

Another reason was intellectual. I realized that members of the public who know anything about Spiritualism tend to see it as a strange bird, flapping its wings vainly in modern storms. Spiritualists themselves cheerfully acknowledge that their views meet with public skepticism. Yet the attempt to communicate with spirits has an extensive human history, and central themes of Spiritualism, including the importance of your family in the afterlife and the ideal of human perfectibility, are endorsed by many people who would reject the idea that they are closet Spiritualists. I wanted to understand more about this imbalance in which many of a group’s values are respected but the group’s existence is largely unknown and, for those who do know about it, sometimes ridiculed.

In addition, having worked in the Fijian language during my earlier research, I had become painfully aware that a lack of deep fluency limits one’s analysis. During my research I enjoyed speaking Fijian every day and was confident in my functional competence. But I was also aware of how much I was missing: individual voices, inside jokes, the salt in the soup of language. I wanted to try an English-language project in which I could analyze how people talk with each other about spiritual things, knowing that even if I got confused by people's philosophy or logic, I would understand the nuances of how they expressed themselves.

So I began attending services at the Canberra Spiritualist Association. As I mentioned above, I was warmly welcomed. I let people know I was interested in what they had to say, and that I had a research project in mind, too. I began to learn how mediumship works. When the research project was officially funded and approved by university ethics boards as well as the csa, I made audio recordings of services with mediums’ permission.

One of the first things I noticed was that Spiritualist mediumship stands in a middle zone of people’s understandings about how easy or difficult it is to communicate with spirits. In shamanism, as classically described by Mircea Eliade (1964), a young person typically has to become sick to gain healing powers. Being able to contact the spirit world starts with a painful apprenticeship. In comparison, I learned during my research in rural Kadavu Island, Fiji, that spirits are easy to reach. Most people in Kadavu are members of the Methodist Church. They enjoy drinking the mildly numbing beverage kava for hours every day. (I enjoy kava, too.) But the Methodists of Kadavu, influenced by evangelicals, worried that kava — the traditional drink of their ancestors — might be a conduit to those ancestors. And those ancestors might be up to no good, spiritually speaking. One Methodist minister told me he often said a prayer at kava-drinking sessions to guard against this connection between drinkers and spirits. In other words, making contact with spirits is too easy: You only need to take a sip.

In short, shamans work hard to get the gift of spirit communication. For Fijian Methodists, communicating with spirits is easy, but you shouldn't do it. Spiritualists fall between these extremes. They believe that anyone can communicate with the dead, and the dead are eager to take part in conversations. But becoming a good medium requires diligent practice. Some people may have more natural ability than others, but no one becomes a top medium on talent alone. You have to practice hard, make plenty of mistakes, and keep developing.

Mediumship does not require enchanted surroundings. It enchants the place it’s in, even if this place is a large, echoey multipurpose room in a bland community-center complex. In this case, the suburb is Pearce, where the Canberra Spiritualist Association holds its meetings on the first, third, and fifth Sundays of each month, with a summer break from mid-December until mid-January. The room is large but unremarkable. Its wooden floors are mostly covered by hard black-rubber matting sealed to the floor with duct tape. Stackable black plastic chairs stand on gray metal legs. The walls are white, and long white vertical blinds shield large windows. The back of the room has a curtained stage which is used for storage. A visitor, looking at the architecture and decor, might expect anything from a dance class to a school assembly.’

A few members show up an hour before the service and arrange the chairs in an arc focused on the front and center of the room. A microphone is placed behind a card table holding a creaky laptop computer and video projector. Cables sprout from the table’s equipment, with two lines running to speakers mounted on portable stands at either side of the room.

Despite the room’s plain functionality, there are clues that something out of the ordinary is going on here. On a table near the door stand three framed images. One, an old photograph, shows what looks like rumpled cloth with a man’s face peering from within it. The other two are reproductions of book covers, Sir Arthur Conan Doyles The History of Spiritualism and

3 Many Australians see the city of Canberra itself as decidedly unmagical, cold and boring with roads that only go in circles — the place where your tax dollars go to die. Peter Proudfoot (1994) offers a different view, arguing that Walter Burley Griffin and his wife Marion designed Canberra according to spiritual principles of sacred landscapes, making it a site akin to Stonehenge, Glastonbury, the Egyptian pyramids, and other geomantic hot spots. Laurie Duggan (2001, 170) argues that Proudfoot overstates the case due to his reliance on later accounts by the Griffins, but acknowledges that Walter “may have imbibed” principles from Spiritualism’s cousins Anthroposophy and Theosophy at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago.

Estelle Roberts's Fifty Years a Medium without its cover text, just a picture of the stately Roberts with ethereal faces shimmering about her. At the far front of the room is another table, a low one draped in purple cloth overlain with white cloth. It has a vase of artificial flowers and a jug and water glasses on it, suggesting something modestly ceremonial.

Now comes the surest sign that something unusual is taking place. The service is underway, and a tall, broad-shouldered woman, standing at the front of the room and addressing an audience of sixteen people, is saying she “just heard a church bell ringing,” although the room is silent. She goes on to explain:

And this person is coming through to me with bell ringing. [Whispers:] It’s so beautiful. [Normal voice:] But he’s also showing me gum trees. So this is someone in Australia who also appreciated bell ringing. Yes, it’s definitely in Australia. And I'm being... shown cauliflower. Cauliflower, ‘kay, we'll go with cauliflower. And I’m being shown a goat. Anyway... a goat. I’ve got this man who thoroughly enjoys the bell ringers, who had a penchant for cauliflower with white sauce and a sprinkling of cheese, and there’s also a goat connection with him, be it either he had goats or he knew someone who had goats, or something like that. But there’s a goat connected with this man. Does anybody resonate with this man?

The popular image of mediums is that they are on fishing expeditions. Standing before an audience, a medium will supposedly say things like, “I see the letter M; and an overwrought person in the front row will cry, “Its Grandma Mary!” As the excerpt above shows, however, talented Spiritualist mediums work in a more unpredictable way than this. They offer clues to a mystery that can sometimes sound like it was written by a surrealist author. These are odd and remarkably specific details: The deceased man was an Australian who enjoyed church bells, cauliflower with cheese, and had some kind of “goat connection” The combination of church, cheese, and goats is so specific it’s funny, and the medium slyly suggests she herself is surprised by the impressions she’s receiving.

And then, when she asks, “Does anybody resonate with this man?,” a woman in the audience immediately answers, “Yeah” “You do,’ the medium responds. “Oh, good. I'm not batty? Here is the moment where it is all too easy to tip the interpretive boat. On one side, the medium might be accused of “cold reading” (watching people's reactions to figure out what to say next) or “hot reading” (looking up audience members’ details before the reading); or the audience member might be suspected of wanting so desperately to hear from a loved one that she bends random details into patterned truths (goats? well, he spent time on a farm). On the other side, one might insist that the weirdness of the details proves that spiritual communication is really taking place. If you wanted to trick someone into thinking you were speaking with a spirit, why would you mention cauliflower with white sauce and cheese, never mind the goats? Better to stick with the letter “M” and see where it takes you. Here, then, is where I want to proceed with the most caution, moving ahead without capsizing. The conversation that actually developed that day between the medium and her living respondent, needless to say, was not like a conversation you would overhear in a supermarket line. Yet there was no hint of haunting or damp ghostliness, despite the fact that the third party in the conversation was dead. It was just a friendly question-and-answer session, with details offered, accepted, or rejected as a portrait came into view. The man was a pipe smoker? (“Yeah, absolutely”) He was impatient? (The audience member did not respond clearly.) Well, he insisted on punctuality. (“Yes.”) He liked going outside for fresh air? (“Absolutely”) He knew how to play the gum leaf as a musical instrument, a rare Australian skill? (“No, no”) Less than nine minutes after she heard church bells, the medium finishes her reading for the woman in the audience, both of them having agreed that the man was the woman's father. The medium then moves on to her

4 These quotations come from a service held in May 2017.

next spiritual dialogue: “Okay, I've got a man with me at the moment who used to walk his dogs. And I feel these dogs were quite big. Got big dogs. Big — two dogs.”

If we insist on proving or disproving the existential claims that frame these encounters, we would need to silence questions about mediums’ intentions and self-understandings and the conversation’s therapeutic charge. An investigator with an axe to grind will find something to hack apart soon enough. But, as I have mentioned, I am not posing questions of truth or falsehood in this book, although I do consider the topics of fraud and failure in Chapter 5. Rather, I am looking at the cultural dynamics of Spiritualist mediumship, especially the ways mediums and audiences learn to work together.