Mumler Converted

I have often heard it said and I will say it now, myself, that Spiritualists are radicals. Spiritualists are vocal sorts. Spiritualists are manly women. Spiritualists are girlish men. Spiritualists are barn-burners of every conceivable checker and stripe. They are socialites and profiteers. Spiritualists are death-indentured, morbid to their turned-out toes. Spiritualists are woodland mystics, rolling bones in cavern floors, and Spiritualists are vaudevillians, Levites of the trap and the travelling show. Spiritualists are dress reformers. Spiritualists are foes of marriage. They are hypocrites but realists, too. Spiritualists are hopers, dreamers, immoderate cosmic philosophers all, and they are supernaturalists, depending on your view of things. Spiritualists are black occultists. Spiritualists are optimists. Spiritualists are soft inventors—they are lily-white shamans and unlettered doctors. Spiritualists are très naïve. Spiritualists are young and old. Spiritualists are, wholly, fools.

Spiritualists are many things, but Spiritualists are rarely liars. They have no reason to be such—a fact that I could now speak to.

Spiritualists are merely there. They gaze, and in that act, know all.