Engl. 368 - Spiritualism - some more points from my speech

Today, I gave a report on Spiritualism - first, thanks for being a good audience. I (like most people) hate speaking in front of people.

I mostly spoke about the concepts of Spiritualism, and the idea that we are surrounded by ghosts at all times. Many of the people attracted to this movement were Transcendentalist, but one of the leaders of the movement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, actually hated the Spiritual movement, and thought it was full of tricks and chicanery.

Nevertheless, spiritualism attracted many prominent men and women, including James Fenimore Cooper, Mary Todd Lincoln, and Arthur Conan Doyle.

As I said, Swedenborg and Mesmer were both credited with inspiring some of the beliefs of spiritualism. However, Mesmer really had little to do with what we now call hypnotism, even though his name is where we get the word mesmerize. The honor of creating hypnotism goes to James Braid, who named it after the Greek God of sleep, Hypnos. Interestingly, he later discovered that hypnosis could be induced without sleep, and attempted to rename his procedure 'monoideism', which is not nearly as cool sounding and never stuck.

While some of the antics of the later mediums may resemble those of a street magician (levitation, knowing what was written in a closed envelope, causing furniture to move), one of their greatest detractors was Harry Houdini, who had a sort of open challenge out to claim he could debunk any one that he saw.

In the case of the Fox sisters, Maggie was the only one who confessed to fraud, in 1887. Katy, the youngest, was a very successful (though alcoholic and troubled) medium in Europe at the time, and though she never responded publicly to Maggie's outing, she sent a number of letters expressing shock that Maggie would say such things. Evidence seems to suggest that the sisters themselves were never entirely sure if what they were doing was real or a fake. Maggie retracted the confession one year later, and all of the sisters then died within five years - Leah in 1890, Katy in 1892, and Maggie in 1893.

There is still some controversy as to whether Maggie's confession was true or if she just did it for the $1500 offered her by a young newspaper editor.

So, real, or not? Decide yourselves.