Reviewed by Matthew L. Tomkins
Conjuring the Spirit World is a series of richly illustrated essays on art works and props related to seances and magic shows. Edited by George H. Schwartz, who also writes the opening and closing chapters, the book was produced by the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) in Salem, MA to act as a complement to the physical exhibition with the same name. The book takes a material cultures approach, with the writings and historical content closely linked to depicted items from the exhibition, including paintings, posters, photographs, stage apparatuses, costumes, film stills, and manuscript pages that are beautifully presented throughout. The extensive use of images from the museum’s archives provide a nice focus on the geographic location of Salem, although the text does not hesitate to offer up references to events throughout other parts of the America, and Europe. For readers who may be relatively unfamiliar with histories of magic and spiritualism, the book provides a lovely introduction to the historical relationships between mediums and magicians, seances and magic shows. Many of the usual suspects make brief appearances, including: the Fox Sisters, the Davenport Brothers, Harry Houdini, Margery (Mina Crandon), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. And any readers who might already be acquainted with the broad strokes of the history of magic and spiritualism will still be almost sure to discover some fascinating new ideas.
Schwartz’s introduction neatly lays out the book’s (and, by extension, the exhibition’s) thesis, using a promotional lithograph poster of Golden Age magician Howard Thurston as a reference point. The poster depicts a tuxedo’d Thurston cradling a human skull. Green mist rises from the skull’s eye sockets, and in the haze float partial human figures, disembodied hands grasping musical instruments, and grinning imps. While Thurston’s name is in the boldest text, the poster also asks, “DO THE SPIRITS COME BACK?” And notes, in smaller font, “I wouldn’t deceive you for the world.” This example nicely establishes the book’s tone as a mediation of belief, deception, scepticism and credulity, all anchored in considerations of historical art and artifacts. Refreshingly, in this passage, and throughout the following chapters, the authors consistently add nuance to the easy binary of heroic debunking magicians versus predatory fraudulent mediums. To be sure, the problem of fraud is acknowledged, but Schwartz explicitly describes the multi-faceted appeal of spiritualism’s “anti-hierarchical access to divine forces, its support for progressive causes like abolition, its alignment with scientific thought” and “the sense of closure provided to those who were unable to mourn the dead,” particularly during times of war.
The first main chapter, ‘Mediums, Magicians, and Makers’ is also written by Schwartz and provides an overview of artefacts and texts that had been instrumental in artistically “demonstrating” the existence of spirits in the natural world – variously to prove the reality of spiritual phenomena with apparent empirical evidence or to disprove it by appealing to natural trickery and illusion. The chapter surveys a range of objects texts and stories. It opens with a description of Etieene-Gaspard Robert’s Phantasmagoria shows that combined magic lantern projections with sound and smoke effects, before moving on to discuss Pepper’s Ghost, and magician Joseffy’s ‘Balsamo, the Living Skull’ automata.
Schwartz also discusses a number of periodicals and catalogues, including Mahatma magazine and Gambols with the Ghosts for promoting magical apparatus that were written to appeal both to magicians and spiritualists. The later portions of the chapter feature a whirlwind tour of spirit painting, Ouija boards, spirit photography, slate writing and telepathy acts. The text does an excellent job of exemplifying the “symbiotic but often antagonistic relationships” between proponents of spiritualism, anti-spiritualist entertainers, and scientific investigators. In particular, I appreciated how this chapter highlighted the complexity of such interactions with brief historical anecdotes, illustrated with photographs of relevant objects and ephemera. For example, a playbill advertising a spirit cabinet performance by the medium T. Warren is used to discuss the debunking efforts of spiritualist periodicals like The Banner of Light, which, despite being highly sympathetic to promoting spiritualist causes, still went out of its way to warn readers about fraudulent actors. Schwartz presents advertising posters for the magic acts of Harry Houdini and Claude “The Man Who Knows” Alexander, and he describes Houdini’s efforts to debunk fraudulent mediums, but also recounts some of Alexander’s criminal activities that took place in parallel with his work as an entertainer.
The second chapter, written by Lan Morran, focuses on the concept of mourning objects, starting by presenting funerary objects that were used in colonial Salem in the days before the rise of Spiritualism and describing how such traditions set the stage for the eventual practice of spirit photography. In the next chapter, Jennifer Lemmer Posey returns to the topic of Phantasmagoria and magic lantern shows to discuss how such attractions used scientific advances to bridge “the monstrous and the marvelous” for entertainment purposes. Subsequent essays by Mark Schwartz, Christopher Jones, and Tony Oursler respectively feature discussions of spirit cabinet routines, from the Davenport Brothers to David Copperfield, spirit photography, and the spiritualist artist Ethel Le Rossignol. Each essay is lavishly illustrated, and features stories that often link to events that happened locally in Salem, such as a playbills for a for a stereoscopic magic lantern show that took place at Mechanic Hall in 1876.
The book’s final essay, titled, Belief in the Body, is written by neuroscientist, Tedi E. Asher, the neuroscientist in residence at PEM. Her essay hinges on the discussion of the book Spectropia written by J. H. Brown in 1864. Brown hoped his book would serve to dispel the “superstitious belief that apparitions are actual spirits by showing some of the many ways in which our sense may be deceived.” However, Asher argues, by way of a brief thought experiment, that his debunking efforts were likely insufficient to shift the beliefs of people who might already be emotionally inclined towards belief in spirits.
I was somewhat disappointed that Asher’s essay limits itself to the discussion of perceptual afterimages, and does not incorporate any other scientific advances in anomalistic (e.g., French, 2024) or cognitive psychology or the ‘Science of Magic’ (e.g., Kuhn, 2019). In seeking to explore experiences of seemingly spiritual and supernatural phenomena, researchers from the birth of Spiritualism through the present day have developed experiments, often inspired by magic trick methods, to advance our scientific understanding of the human mind. For example, in the late 1880s, psychical researchers, Richard Hodgson and S. J. Davey (1887) reported a series of experiments in the Society for Psychical Research’s Journal and Proceedings that explored how sitters in hoax seances could make remarkable errors in their recollections, failing to notice or remember significant events and even seeming to falsely remember events that never happened. Their findings about human perception and memory have since been borne out by more conventional psychological experiments on human memory and perception (e.g., Loftus & Palmer, 1974; Simons & Chabris, 1999). More recently, modern neuroscientists have used short films of sleight-of-hand magic tricks, presented to participants in functional magnetic resonance imaging brain scanners, to investigate neurological mechanisms of surprise, curiosity, and other epistemic emotions (e.g., Parris, et al. 2009; Ozone et al. 2021). I would have very much liked to see some more active engagement with this kind of research in an essay on the neuroscientific implications of magic and spiritualism. That being said, I very much appreciated Asher’s concluding observation that the ideological conflicts around belief in spiritualism and the nature of evidence mirror contemporary societal conflicts around the nature of truth, and that efforts at understanding the mechanisms that lead to belief formation might well be a useful tool for mediating, if not resolving disputes.
Overall, Conjuring the Spirit World presents a fascinating survey of the complex historical and social interplay between spiritualism and performance magic; its material culture approach allows for an eclectic range of topics, times, and places with a rich variety of illustrations to accompany and text. The original PEM exhibition may be closed now, but it will be touring throughout coming months, and its spirit will live on in this book, which itself is a remarkable object to add to the collection of anyone with an interest in magic, spiritualism, and the relationship between art and human belief.
References
French, C. (2024). The science of weird shit: Why our minds conjure the paranormal. MIT Press.
Hodgson, R., & Davey, S. (1887). The possibilities of mal-observation and lapse of memory from a practical point of view. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 4, 381-495.
Kuhn, G. (2019). Experiencing the impossible: The science of magic. MIT Press.
Ozono, H., Komiya, A., Kuratomi, K., Hatano, A., Fastrich, G., Raw, J. A. L., ... & Murayama, K. (2021). Magic Curiosity Arousing Tricks (MagicCATs): A novel stimulus collection to induce epistemic emotions. Behavior Research Methods, 53, 188-215.
Parris, B. A., Kuhn, G., Mizon, G. A., Benattayallah, A., & Hodgson, T. L. (2009). Imaging the impossible: An fMRI study of impossible causal relationships in magic tricks. Neuroimage, 45(3), 1033-1039.
Simons, D. J., & Chabris, C. F. (1999). Gorillas in our midst: Sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events. perception, 28(9), 1059-1074.