Spirits, Seers and Seances

Spirits, Seers and Seances
Author: Steele Alexandra Douris
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2023-09-08
Genre:
ISBN: 9780738774619

Séances, paranormal investigations, fortune telling, and other spiritualist practices helped define the Victorian era--and they continue to shape our world today. In the time of Jack the Ripper, A Christmas Carol, Dracula, and Edgar Allan Poe, spiritualism and the supernatural were cultural touchpoints. This book reveals how they've left such a profound impact on both the past and present. Steele Alexandra Douris reveals the history of automatic writing, cartomancy, hypnotism, clairvoyance, and more. You will learn how Victorian belief in ghosts, fairies, and nature spirits shaped our celebrations for All Hallows' Eve and Christmas. With historic examples and hands-on exercises, Spirits, Seers, and Seanceshelps you connect to the ideas and values of the 19th-century spiritualist and mediumship movement in the United Kingdom and United States.

Supernatural Entertainments

Supernatural Entertainments
Author: Simone Natale
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2016-03-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 0271077379

In Supernatural Entertainments, Simone Natale vividly depicts spiritualism’s rise as a religious and cultural phenomenon and explores its strong connection to the growth of the media entertainment industry in the nineteenth century. He frames the spiritualist movement as part of a new commodity culture that changed how public entertainments were produced and consumed. Starting with the story of the Fox sisters, considered the first spiritualist mediums in history, Natale follows the trajectory of spiritualism in Great Britain and the United States from its foundation in 1848 to the beginning of the twentieth century. He demonstrates that spiritualist mediums and leaders adopted many of the promotional strategies and spectacular techniques that were being developed for the broader entertainment industry. Spiritualist mediums were indistinguishable from other professional performers, as they had managers and agents, advertised in the press, and used spectacularism to draw audiences. Addressing the overlap between spiritualism’s explosion and nineteenth-century show business, Natale provides an archaeology of how the supernatural became a powerful force in the media and popular culture of today.

Victorian Women and the Theatre of Trance

Victorian Women and the Theatre of Trance
Author: Amy Lehman
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2014-01-10
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0786454717

Spiritualists in the nineteenth century spoke of the "Borderland," a shadowy threshold where the living communed with the dead, and where those in the material realm could receive comfort or advice from another world. The skilled performances of mostly female actors and performers made the "Borderland" a theatre, of sorts, in which dramas of revelation and recognition were produced in the forms of seances, trances, and spiritualist lectures. This book examines some of the most fascinating American and British actresses of the Victorian era, whose performances fairly mesmerized their audiences of amused skeptics and ardent believers. It also focuses on the transformative possibilities of the spiritualist theatre, revealing how the performances allowed Victorian women to speak, act, and create outside the boundaries of their restricted social and psychological roles.

Table-rappers

Table-rappers
Author: Ronald Pearsall
Publisher: Sutton Publishing
Total Pages: 258
Release: 1972
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780750936842

Dealing with all aspects of the Victorian fascination for the occult, this title identifies issues such as the credulity of the believers, unexplained phenomena such as levitation and manifestations and the intense rivalry between professional mediums, who were not above sabotaging each other's seances.

Calling the Spirits

Calling the Spirits
Author: Lisa Morton
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2022-10-10
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 1789142814

From Halloween expert Morton, a level-headed and entertaining history of our desire and attempts to hold conversations with the dead. Calling the Spirits investigates the eerie history of our conversations with the dead, from necromancy in Homer’s Odyssey to the emergence of Spiritualism—when Victorians were entranced by mediums and the seance was born. Among our cast are the Fox sisters, teenagers surrounded by “spirit rappings”; Daniel Dunglas Home, the “greatest medium of all time”; Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose unlikely friendship was forged, then riven, by the afterlife; and Helen Duncan, the medium whose trial in 1944 for witchcraft proved more popular to the public than news about the war. The book also considers Ouija boards, modern psychics, and paranormal investigations, and is illustrated with engravings, fine art (from beyond), and photographs. Hugely entertaining, it begs the question: is anybody there . . . ?

Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists

Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists
Author: Srdjan Smajić
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2010-04-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1139485881

This book is a study of the narrative techniques that developed for two very popular forms of fiction in the nineteenth century - ghost stories and detective stories - and the surprising similarities between them in the context of contemporary theories of vision and sight. Srdjan Smajić argues that to understand how writers represented ghost-seers and detectives, the views of contemporary scientists, philosophers, and spiritualists with which these writers engage have to be taken into account: these views raise questions such as whether seeing really is believing, how much of what we 'see' is actually only inferred, and whether there may be other (intuitive or spiritual) ways of seeing that enable us to perceive objects and beings inaccessible to the bodily senses. This book will make a real contribution to the understanding of Victorian science in culture, and of the ways in which literature draws on all kinds of knowledge.

Buckland's Book of Spirit Communications

Buckland's Book of Spirit Communications
Author: Raymond Buckland
Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide
Total Pages: 407
Release: 2013-12-01
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 0738703990

The author of the bestselling "Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft" writes a handbook for anyone who wishes to communicate with spirits, as well as for the less adventurous who simply want to satisfy their curiosity about the subject.

Aylmer Vance: Ghost-Seer

Aylmer Vance: Ghost-Seer
Author: Alice & Claude Askew
Publisher: Lulu.com
Total Pages: 166
Release: 2015-07-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 132937634X

This is a collection of eight ghost stories, written by the remarkably prolific husband and wife team of Claude and Alice Askew, centering on Aylmer Vance, an investigator of the supernatural. Dexter, the narrator, meets Vance during a fishing holiday and Vance tells him three ghost stories on successive nights, each story involving Vance more closely in the action. The fourth story brings Dexter himself into the action, and reveals him to have unsuspected clairvoyant powers. The remaining stories feature Vance and Dexter as a sort of Holmes-and-Watson team investigating incidents not all of which prove to have supernatural causes. The final story, "The Fear" is very effective, describing a house in which a general feeling of extreme fear grips the inhabitants at various times and locations; the emotion of fear is effectively evoked and an interesting tale is constructed as Vance and Dexter work to assign the fear "a local habitation and a name".

Dreams of a Spirit-Seer by Immanuel Kant - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)

Dreams of a Spirit-Seer by Immanuel Kant - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)
Author: Immanuel Kant
Publisher: Delphi Classics
Total Pages: 149
Release: 2017-07-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 178877714X

This eBook features the unabridged text of ‘Dreams of a Spirit-Seer by Immanuel Kant - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)’ from the bestselling edition of ‘The Collected Works of Immanuel Kant’. Having established their name as the leading publisher of classic literature and art, Delphi Classics produce publications that are individually crafted with superior formatting, while introducing many rare texts for the first time in digital print. The Delphi Classics edition of Kant includes original annotations and illustrations relating to the life and works of the author, as well as individual tables of contents, allowing you to navigate eBooks quickly and easily. eBook features: * The complete unabridged text of ‘Dreams of a Spirit-Seer by Immanuel Kant - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)’ * Beautifully illustrated with images related to Kant’s works * Individual contents table, allowing easy navigation around the eBook * Excellent formatting of the textPlease visit www.delphiclassics.com to learn more about our wide range of titles