Spiritualist Signal and Theosophical Noise

Abstract

Recent media studies research on 19th-century Spiritualism has foregrounded the technological metaphors that suffuse Spiritualist models of the séance. However, this article shows that the actual phatic channels proposed by Spiritualism consisted almost entirely of mediating chains of human spirits who stood between the bereaved séance guests and the spirits of the dear departed called “strangers.” While the “strangers” were, like the séance guests, departed white people, the authoritative “control spirits” were frequently exotic others such as “Indians” from the American imaginary of the Frontier. Beginning in 1875, the apparent transparency of the Spiritualist séance became the object of critique of an emerging occultist movement of Theosophy, which sought to undermine the authoritative human spirits of Spiritualism by turning the human spirits of the Spiritualist séance wholesale into disruptive non-human mediators called “Diakkas,” “Bhuts,” and “Elementals,” and replacing Spiritualism's authoritative “Indian” control spirits drawn from the imaginary of the American frontier with Tibetan “Mahatmas” drawn from the orientalist imaginary of the Empire. These elementals initially represented noisy non-human “parasites” of Spiritualist channels, but later these parasites take over the channel and become the channel themselves in the form of what came to be called the “elemental essence.”.