Spiritualism and British Society between the Wars (2000)

Book Review from the September 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Spiritualism and British Society between the Wars. By Jenny Hazelgrove. Manchester University Press

Many, perhaps a majority, believe that there is life after death. Although the churches, particularly the Roman Catholic Church, discourage the view, some draw the conclusion that it is therefore possible for the living to contact the dead and vice versa. This is the basis of Spiritualism and its “mediums” between the living and the dead.

Spiritualists have evolved an elaborate theory to explain how this is possible but most adepts are no more interested in this than the average church-goer is in theology. It’s the simple, popular belief that it is possible to contact the dead that attracts them. But it is not only ordinary people who believe this. It is a view that has been shared among others by Robert Owen, Alfred Russell, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and WB Yeats.

Hazelgrove examines the popularity of these beliefs between the wars and is particularly concerned with the image of the medium, who was generally a woman (medium, apparently, is also a feminist issue). As she is writing from a sociological point of view, she is not concerned with the truth or otherwise of Spiritualist claims but only with the existence of Spiritualism and mediums as social facts. Nevertheless, there is enough material in her book to use to reinforce the case against Spiritualism.

Since there is no scientific evidence of life after death, it’s reasonable to assume that mediums cannot be contacting the dead. So what are they doing? Some will be out-and-out frauds who are deceiving vulnerable and gullible people as a way of obtaining the money we must all obtain, one way or another, to survive under capitalism. All so-called “materialisation mediums”, those who claim to produce physical manifestations of the dead, fall into this category since they will know that they themselves produce the muslin or cheese cloth they call “ectoplasm”.

Some of the others will be frauds too, feeding back to their victims information supplied by them or which they have previously researched. Some may be sincere in the same way that a Roman Catholic priest, who will know full well that he is only serving sour wine and dry biscuits to his parishioners in communion, will genuinely believe that he has somehow transformed them into the blood and flesh of Christ. In other words, they will know that they have fished for the answers or have caused the tapping noises but will mistakenly but genuinely believe that this was prompted by their “Spirit Guide” “from the other side”. Others will justify their activities as bringing solace to unhappy people (which they do). Yet others will be suffering from a severe mental disorder involving hallucinatory delusions.

As Hazelgrove explains, you can’t just become a medium like that. You must have some aptitude for the role and you must be accepted by the Spiritualist community. There was even, between the wars, a special residential school for training mediums. It is clear from the account Hazelgrove gives of the background of some well-known mediums of the inter-war years that mediumship did provide a socially acceptable role for some women who heard voices and saw visions and who would otherwise have ended up in a mental asylum.

Hazelgrove also examines the role of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). This was a society set up by a group of Cambridge academics in 1882 to investigate life after death in a scientific manner. Their basic premise was that this existed and their work consisted in trying to distinguish fraudulent mediums from genuine ones.

Hazelgrove doesn’t like them (because they were men investigating women) but she does record the amusing fact that every “psychical researcher’s” dream was to find a genuine medium while exposing those allegedly discovered by their rivals as frauds. The overall result was that there was no general agreement that any one was genuinely able to act as a channel between the living and the dead. It never occurred to them that this failure to find a genuine medium might be due to the fact that there is no life after death and that they were therefore never going to find what they were looking for.

Adam Buick