THE FOUNDER OF MORMONISM, JOSEPH SMITH, LIKE MOST PROPHETS, was and is considered by his followers to be an unusual, uniquely talented individual because of his spirit contacts. Yet four years after his death, the spirits were again making their presence known, this time to ordinary people right across America. Stranger still, the unlikely development was anticipated by the spirits themselves in a prophecy by the famous “Seer of Poughkeepsie,” Andrew Jackson Davis.
Davis, who was born in rural New York State in 1826, seemed set for a life of obscurity—he was apprenticed to a shoemaker—when a tailor named William Levingston asked him to take part in some mesmerism experiments. Although Levingston had learned minimal technique from a traveling lecturer, the seventeen-year-old Davis turned out to be a dream subject. Soon he was exhibiting paranormal powers, like remote viewing, the ability to read a book blindfolded, and, most important, a talent for conversing with spirits. The experiments were a turning point in Davis’s life. In 1844, he made visionary contact with the spirits of Swedenborg and the ancient Greek physician Galen. The latter engaged in a little propaganda for his own medical system, then told Davis he was destined to become a clairvoyant healer. Swedenborg went even further. He proclaimed Davis would be the instrument for a forthcoming revelation of wisdom and truth to the whole of humanity. Levingston and David promptly opened a clinic where David made trance diagnoses and prescriptions for sick clients.
A year later, Davis embarked on a series of public demonstrations in New York that resulted in some 157 channeled lectures. These so impressed a wealthy patron named Silone Dodge that he arranged to have them published in book form. Davis’s career as a seer and clairvoyant was well and truly launched. He continued to write books, pamphlets, and articles throughout the remainder of his life and continued his work as a healer. Later in life, when a New York law banned mesmeric healers, he reacted by enrolling in the United States Medical College where he earned himself degrees in both anthropology and medicine—a move that allowed him to continue his practice.
Davis’s prediction about widespread spirit contact came much earlier in his career, some four years after his initial vision of Galen and Swedenborg. Following information from his spirit contacts, he announced that soon everyone would be able to do what he did and converse with spirits directly. At the time it seemed highly unlikely, but before long, the new craze of Spiritualism was spreading through the country.
Modern Spiritualism, as a technique of spirit contact and a minority religion, owes its origins to raps that occurred in a two-room cottage at Hydesville, New York, in 1848.1 The Fox family from Canada, who owned the cottage, were, like its previous residents,2 frequently disturbed by noises in the night, until eventually Kate Fox, the youngest daughter, established communication with the source of the sounds, which subsequently claimed to be the spirit of a peddler who had been murdered in the house. But even before this open identification, Mrs. Fox suspected she was dealing with spirits and called in her neighbors to witness the phenomena. One of them wrote:
There were some twelve or fourteen persons there … Some were so frightened that they did not want to go into the room … Mrs. Fox asked questions and I heard the rapping which they had spoken of distinctly. I felt the bedstead jar when the sound was produced.3
The few friendly neighbors soon turned into curious crowds, as word of the phenomena spread. Excitement increased when excavation of the cottage cellar produced some bones and teeth, promptly claimed as the remains of the murdered peddler.
Kate Fox and her sister Lizzie went to live with an elder sister, Leah, in Rochester, New York, and the phenomena—now considerably expanded from the original raps—went with them. The sound of coagulated blood poured on the floor was followed by the cold touch of spirit hands. A group of Methodists called round to speak in tongues, encouraging more spirit noises still. Tables moved of their own accord. Coded messages arrived from the Beyond.4 Within a year, others began to discover they could move tables and produce spirit raps as well as, if not better than, the Fox girls. The practice of what became known as Spiritualism began to spread.
Davis took the Rochester phenomena to be fulfillment of his prophecy.5 He already had a substantial following and his imprimatur added further impetus to the emerging movement. Soon Spiritualism was sweeping through America. In 1852, the wife of a New England journalist brought it to Britain.6
Although no longer the fad it once was, Spiritualist-style mediumship remains to this day the most popular method of spirit contact within Western culture. There are frequent television demonstrations on the satellite-based Paranormal Channel, Spiritualist churches represent a minor but tenacious religion in many capital cities, and even the traditional séance with its associated phenomena has been deemed worthy of a three-year investigation by the Society for Psychical Research.7
Where the main thrust of Spiritualism has always been communication with spirits of the dead, it is not unusual for mediums to become “channels” for “higher beings” who may or may not themselves be human. Historically, the founder of modern Theosophy, Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, followed this pattern, beginning her New York mission by contacting “John King,” the spirit of a dead buccaneer, but later transforming herself into a channel for the teachings of her highly evolved Secret Masters. More recently, the Spiritualist medium Grace Cooke (1892–1979) began her career with emphasis on postmortem communications but went on to found the White Eagle Lodge to promote the spiritual teachings of her “guide,” White Eagle, who was once incarnated as a Native American.8 Occasionally, individuals like Fran Rosen-Bizberg (“Parvati”), with no Spiritualist background or training, begin to operate as channels. Rosen-Bizberg is an American now living in Poland who followed a career path as an educationalist until, in 1997, she began to receive “transmissions” from an extraterrestrial “higher intelligence” originating in the constellation of Orion.9
While Spiritualism was still in its infancy among the white population of the nineteenth-century United States, a whole different form of intervention was developing among the Native American population, an intervention that would ultimately lead to disaster. The first indication of things to come arose among the Northern Paiute prophet-dreamers (medicine men or shamans) in western Nevada. Their visits to the spirit worlds convinced them that the Native American dead were about to return to earth. When they did, this would lead to an ousting of the whites and the restoration of native lands, food supplies, and the traditional way of life. In delivering the message, the prophet-dreamers mentioned one telling detail: this desirable situation would be hastened by the performance of special dances and songs revealed to the medicine men in their visions. Among these was a variation of a circle dance performed by Native Americans from prehistoric times. The new form was known as a Ghost Dance, since it was designed to encourage the protection of spirit ancestors.
The first Ghost Dance appears to have developed out of visions by a Paiute healer named Hawthorne Wodziwob (Gray Hair) in 1869. Wodziwob announced that he had traveled to the land of the dead where souls of the recently deceased promised to return to their loved ones in a few years’ time. Circle dances were held within his community to celebrate the revelation. Wodziwob continued to preach his message for three years with the help of a fellow shaman named Tavibo. Tavibo in turn was the father of a boy named Wovoka, who later became better known under his English name of Jack Wilson.
Wilson was a particularly interesting individual. In his early years, he had visions and heard voices he attributed to God, but he experienced such difficulty in interpreting them that his family arranged shamanic help and training for him. During a solar eclipse on January 1, 1889, he had a particularly potent vision in which he stood before God and watched many of his tribal ancestors engage in the pursuits they had most enjoyed during their lifetimes. God then showed him a promised land teeming with game and told him how the red man might attain it. God’s central message was one of love. The tribespeople were urged to love one another, stop intertribal warfare and, tellingly, live at peace with the whites. They were forbidden to lie or steal and had to abandon the age-old self-mutilation practices traditionally associated with mourning. Following these rules would reunite them with their loved ones in a new and better world where there would be no disease or old age. The message was essentially that already channeled through various other medicine men. There was even mention of a circle dance, a five-day ceremonial that, if performed at the proper intervals, would hasten the blissful reunion.
Wilson returned to normal consciousness convinced that with the aid of the dance, all evil would soon be dismissed from the world and the earth would be filled with love, food, and faith. He began at once to preach the message of his vision and was soon attracting the attention not only of his own people but of neighboring tribes. The power of his words was underpinned by the appearance of stigmata on his hands and feet. Gradually the revelation and its attendant ceremonial spread to the Missouri River, the Canadian border, the Sierra Nevada, and northern Texas. As it did so, it took on all the trappings of a religious movement and attracted a fast-growing number of converts, not only among the Native Americans but among a few of the white settlers as well.10 By 1890, Wilson’s words reached the Sioux, a tribe on the edge of rebellion.
A ghost dance, painted from life, one of many such spirit-inspired ceremonies that proved such a disaster for the Native American peoples
Although Wilson’s essential message was clearly one of peace and love, some listeners managed to misunderstand it. Among them was Chief Kicking Bear of the Lakota Sioux, who elected to focus on the concept of “ghost shirts,” which were rumoured to repel bullets by means of spiritual power.11 At the time, the Sioux were on a collision course with the American government, which had broken a treaty and embarked on a course of action that left the Native Americans close to starvation. Troops were sent in and when the Sioux began to celebrate the Ghost Dance, a nervous government, with no real understanding of what was going on, refused to withdraw the soldiers. The situation went from bad to worse until its culmination in the massacre at Wounded Knee, when the Ghost Shirts failed to protect the Sioux.
Changing conditions eventually made the Ghost Dance obsolete, although a few tribes kept it going into the twentieth century. The overall effect of the movement, however, was to prepare the Native Americans for further accommodation with the white population and, to some extent, an acceleration of native conversions to Christianity—developments with an extraordinary influence on the course of American history.