Pub Date : 2021-11-22DOI: 10.1163/15700593-02201008
C. Ferguson
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Pub Date : 2021-11-22DOI: 10.1163/15700593-02201004
Roger Luckhurst
The Ghost Club was founded to discuss matters spiritual, psychic and occult in 1882 by Spiritualist William Stainton Moses and mystic Alfred Alaric Watts. It was intended as a club ruled by a gentleman’s code of honour—with all matters discussed kept strictly confidential. While maintaining secrecy, it also obsessively minuted and documented its discussions, leaving behind thousands of pages of records that have yet to be properly investigated, owing to conditions around their use. This essay is an attempt to examine the importance of the Club, and how it might readjust our understanding of the networks of the London occult in the late-Victorian and Edwardian eras.
{"title":"The Ghost Club, 1882–1936","authors":"Roger Luckhurst","doi":"10.1163/15700593-02201004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700593-02201004","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The Ghost Club was founded to discuss matters spiritual, psychic and occult in 1882 by Spiritualist William Stainton Moses and mystic Alfred Alaric Watts. It was intended as a club ruled by a gentleman’s code of honour—with all matters discussed kept strictly confidential. While maintaining secrecy, it also obsessively minuted and documented its discussions, leaving behind thousands of pages of records that have yet to be properly investigated, owing to conditions around their use. This essay is an attempt to examine the importance of the Club, and how it might readjust our understanding of the networks of the London occult in the late-Victorian and Edwardian eras.","PeriodicalId":41783,"journal":{"name":"Aries-Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-11-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43329085","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-22DOI: 10.1163/15700593-02201009
M. Raivio
{"title":"Women and Gender Issues in British Paganism, 1945–1990, by Shai Feraro","authors":"M. Raivio","doi":"10.1163/15700593-02201009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700593-02201009","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41783,"journal":{"name":"Aries-Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-11-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49223503","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-22DOI: 10.1163/15700593-02201003
Efram Sera-Shriar
The backbone of Victorian spirit investigations rested with the credibility of the witnesses who attended spiritualist events such as séances. But how did someone become a credible witness of spirit or psychic phenomena? What were the processes by which their testimonies became trustworthy representations of genuine experiences? This paper explores these questions by examining the visual epistemology of the scientific naturalist and sceptic John Tyndall (1820–1893), as a way of understanding the politics of constructing scientific testimony during the late Victorian period. Visual epistemology can be defined as an embodied practice of observation that moves beyond merely being the physical act of looking at things to include a range of skilled activities. Key to this paper is an attempt to challenge earlier whiggish accounts in the historiography that have perpetuated the myth that science conquered spiritualism in the nineteenth century. Instead, it exposes a more complicated narrative about Victorian science’s uneasy relationship with spirit and psychic phenomena, and raises important questions about the authority and limit of scientific naturalism.
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Pub Date : 2021-11-22DOI: 10.1163/15700593-02201007
E. Richardson
On 15 July 1908 The Times advertised a talk on ‘personal experiences in spirit-photography and the scientific aspect of spiritualism’, due to take place that night at the Eustace Miles Restaurant. Attendees could look forward to not only ‘exhibitions of spirit writing’, but also to enjoying a ‘flesh-free’ meal afterwards. This entertainment speaks to confluence of spiritualist belief and vegetarian ideals that was played out elsewhere in societies, private seances and public demonstrations. Beyond a shared commitment to progressive causes, they held in common a belief in the purity of vegetable foods and the corrupting nature of flesh. Mediums were encouraged to avoid meat and disputes over the proper diet for believers raged through the movement’s periodicals. This article examines how the language of dietetics and the science of nutrition functioned in the séance, and what this reveals of the tricky negotiation of immateriality and corporality in spiritualist discourse.
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Pub Date : 2021-11-22DOI: 10.1163/15700593-02201001
C. Ferguson, Efram Sera-Shriar
Science and spiritualism studies is an interdisciplinary academic sub-field of no recent vintage. Since the early nineteen-seventies, studies of major scientific naturalists such as Alfred Russel Wallace, Edward Burnett Tylor, William Crookes, and others have showed a growing willingness to acknowledge and account for the psychical interests and sometimes ardent spiritualist convictions of their subjects. From these initially individualistic case studies has emerged a broader picture of the role of spiritualist beliefs and psychical investigation on the settlement of modern scientific disciplines, methods, and networks. This trajectory is exemplified with particular clarity in the sub-titular ambition of Richard Noakes’s excellent 2019 Physics and Psychics: The Occult and the Sciences inModernBritain, a studywhich establishes psychical research not as the faddish interest of a cadre of admittedly high-placed scientific eccentrics, but rather as a key catalyst in the late-Victorian development of the physical sciences. At the start of the twentieth century, he argues, psychical research and spiritualist phenomena may have been frequently derided by physical scientists, but they were also far more difficult to ignore than they have since become. Even if only to be rejected and debunked, such subjects demanded address by leading scientific naturalists of their day. The current special issue of Aries takes inspiration from and responds to this increasing complex historiography of spiritualism and science, noting its gains and addressing its challenges. Perhaps chief among the latter is the need to overcome a persistent lack of confidence about, or understatement of, the
科学和唯心主义研究是一个跨学科的学术子领域，没有最近的年份。自20世纪70年代初以来，对阿尔弗雷德·鲁塞尔·华莱士、爱德华·伯内特·泰勒、威廉·克鲁克斯等主要科学博物学家的研究表明，他们越来越愿意承认和解释他们研究对象的精神兴趣，有时甚至是狂热的唯灵主义信念。从这些最初的个人主义案例研究中，可以更广泛地了解唯心主义信仰和心理调查在现代科学学科、方法和网络解决中的作用。理查德·诺克斯（Richard Noakes）出色的2019年《物理学与精神病学：现代英国的神秘与科学》（Physics and Psychics:the Ocult and the Sciences in ModernBritain）的名义下的雄心尤其清晰地体现了这一轨迹，该研究将心理学研究确立为一批公认的高级科学怪人的时尚兴趣，而是作为维多利亚晚期物理科学发展的关键催化剂。他认为，在20世纪初，心理学研究和唯灵论现象可能经常被物理科学家嘲笑，但它们也比现在更难被忽视。即使只是被拒绝和揭穿，这些主题也需要当时领先的科学博物学家来解决。当前的《白羊座》特刊从这一日益复杂的唯灵论和科学史学中获得灵感并做出回应，指出了它的收获并应对了它的挑战。后者中最主要的可能是需要克服对
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Pub Date : 2021-11-22DOI: 10.1163/15700593-02201006
C. Ferguson
Feminist, anti-vivisectionist, occultist, and one of the first British women to qualify as a medical doctor, Anna Kingsford remains notably absent from recent studies of Victorian science and spiritualism. Her efforts to synthesize occult and scientific worldviews have been side-lined by those of male contemporaries such as Oliver Lodge and Alfred Russel Wallace, ones whose professional status and gender coordinates more readily align with implicit assumptions about the kind of person for whom disenchantment posed an intellectual problem that might best be solved in the laboratory. My paper positions Kingsford at the very heart of the late Victorian project to accommodate scientific innovation and spiritual belief by tracing her attempts to forge an intuitive epistemology superior to what she viewed as the deeply suspect championship of objectivity. In doing so, it aims to expose and redress blind spots within recent esotericism studies-based approaches to the disenchantment debate.
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Pub Date : 2021-11-22DOI: 10.1163/15700593-02201010
Matteo Di Placido
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Pub Date : 2021-11-22DOI: 10.1163/15700593-20211005
Z. Kostićová
Carlos Castaneda has been studied mostly as a fraud anthropologist, novelist/philosopher and a contributor to the emerging phenomenon of neo-shamanism. Instead, this article focuses on Castaneda’s individual philosophy and religious system as developed in his written works. A threefold classification is proposed—early, transitional, and late works, complete with chief characteristics of each. The analysis shows how Castaneda slowly drifted from the scholarly style through stress on the narrative to full-fledged religious texts. These changes also reflect on Castaneda’s personal life; from academic ambition through public scandal ‘debunking’ his counterfeit works to the formation of a little new religious movement, of which Castaneda was a charismatic leader. Unlike most scholarly analyses of Castaneda that focus mainly on the early writings, this article takes into serious consideration his late works and shows that it was here that the author fully developed as a religious thinker and guru.
Carlos Castaneda主要作为欺诈人类学家、小说家/哲学家和新萨满教现象的贡献者而被研究。相反，本文关注的是卡斯塔内达在其著作中发展起来的个人哲学和宗教体系。提出了三重分类——早期作品、过渡作品和晚期作品，并分别具有各自的主要特征。分析表明，卡斯塔内达是如何通过强调叙事慢慢从学术风格转向成熟的宗教文本的。这些变化也反映了卡斯塔内达的个人生活；从学术野心到公开丑闻“揭穿”他的伪造作品，再到组建一个新的宗教运动，卡斯塔内达是这个运动的魅力领袖。与大多数学术界对卡斯塔内达的分析主要集中在早期作品上不同，本文认真考虑了他的晚期作品，并表明正是在这里，作者充分发展成为一名宗教思想家和大师。
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Pub Date : 2021-11-22DOI: 10.1163/15700593-02201002
I. Hesketh
This article considers the way chemist William Crookes utilized the editorship of the Quarterly Journal of Science to promote the scientific importance of spirit phenomena. It explores the publishing of Crookes’s series of sensational articles that investigated the ‘Psychic Force’, a purported force of nature that Crookes discovered during experiments with the medium Daniel Dunglas Home. Crookes thus used the platform afforded to him in the journal to describe his experiments and present his evidence within the framework of an orthodox scientific discourse. While Crookes endured much criticism from certain scientific men, the serial format of his investigation meant that he was able to generate a great deal of interest. It also meant that his subsequent articles in the series could respond to critics by adjusting his experiments, overcoming perceived difficulties, and providing his readers with new and exciting details concerning his ongoing investigation as it was being conducted.
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