Who is the author?
Arthur Conan Doyle, famous for writing the Sherlock Holmes stories, developed a strong interest in esotericism and the occult. He was an on-again-off-again Free Mason, a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and an avowed Spiritualist. Contrary to popular belief, this interest in a world beyond the physical did not begin with the death of his son.
Doyle had this to say with regard to the rumor that his interest in the paranormal was sparked by the death of his son:
“It has been said, too, by these unscrupulous opponents that the author’s advocacy of the subject, as well as that of his distinguished friend, Sir Oliver Lodge, was due to the fact that each of them had a son killed in the war. The inference being that grief had lessened their critical faculties and made them believe what in more normal times they would not have believed. The author has many times refuted this clumsy lie, and pointed out the fact that his investigation dates back as far as 1886.”
Doyle, A. C. (2021). Spiritualism and The War. In The History of Spiritualism Volumes (Vol. 2, pp. 410–410). essay, Curious?
He was inspired to write The History after having separately compiled detailed reports on various events and individuals relevant to the Spiritualist movement. These included: Swedenborg, Irving, A. J. Davis, The Hydesville Incident, the history of the Fox sisters, the Eddy brothers, and D. D. Home. Doyle believed that the movement lacked a historian who was sympathetic to its beliefs. Having already gone “some distance in doing a fuller history,” Doyle enlisted the help of research assistant W.Leslie Curnow. Doyle admits in the preface that Curnow’s assistance went beyond the scope of mere research and that Curnow provided several mostly-finished articles which Doyle has only added to. Doyle does not specify which ones and does not give his reasons for not giving Curnow a co-author credit.
What is the book?
The History of Spiritualism by Arthur Conan Doyle is a chronicling of important events and figures in the Spiritualist movement. Doyle dates the advent of modern spiritualism to The Hydesville Incident, which occurred on March 31, 1848. This incident marked the beginning of the Fox sisters’ public career as spiritual mediums. Doyle credits them (or rather the spirits who spoke to them) with establishing much of the ritual and philosophy that would become standard for the Spiritualist movement. The Fox Sisters serve as an anchor point for the rest of The History.
Doyle begins Volume One with a few chapters on pre-Hydesville mediums, including famed Christian Esotericist Emanuel Swedenborg, whom Doyle credits as the first spirit medium. He covers the Fox Sisters and the building of the movement in both America and Great Britain. There are several chapters that focus in on the careers of other famous mediums and the scientists who worked with them.
Volume Two follows much the same pattern, continuing with more accounts of famous mediums and experimentation to prove their validity. Doyle dedicates a few chapters to specific aspects of Spiritualist research and mediumship, including: Ectoplasm, Spirit Photography, Direct Voice, and Moulds. He rounds out the volume with a few chapters that are more like essays on spiritualist philosophy. There is a discussion of Spiritualism’s compatibility with mainstream Christianity. There is also brief description of the afterlife as it has been related to various mediums from their spirit advisors.
Overall, the book is a window into the Spiritualist movement as it saw itself in the 1920’s. It is, at times, disorganized, inaccurate, and incomplete. It is closer to an exercise in Spiritualist Apologetics than it is an actual history. Readers coming to this text a century after its writing will probably not find Doyle’s arguments compelling. A disproportionate amount of the text is spent defending the credibility of individual mediums, many of whom admitted to fraud or were caught red handed committing fraud. Still, the book itself is an interesting cultural artifact that will leave the reader with many questions worthy of further investigation.
My Thoughts
There’s really no nice way to say this. Doyle, for all his intellectual accomplishments, is not much of an academic. He is a poor historian. He makes absolutely no attempt at objectivity. His arguments are full of logial fallacies. He injects pure opinion, speculation, judgement, and outright insults to people who do not agree with him at every turn.
Doyle assumes that the reader has heard all the negative things the mainstream media of is day has to say about his favorite movement, and he is extremely defensive from page one. Doyle will frequently interrupt his own retelling of events to respond to his imagined critics. Much of Doyle’s frustration comes from the scientific community’s refusal to accept the testimony of credible witnesses as irrefutable proof of life after death and the authenticity of mediumship. Doyle will acknowledge that many mediums have admitted to fraud, been caught perpetrating fraud, and have frequently been wrong in their readings. This, to Doyle, does not mean that everything those mediums did should be thrown out. Learned gentlemen of science witnessed these mediums perform and they could detect no trick. Harry Houdini begged to differ, but that’s a different book.
Personally, I don’t find eye witness testimony very compelling whether there was intentional fraud or not (though, I find it even less compelling when there is a record of intentional fraud). It really doesn’t matter to me how accomplished a gentleman the witness is. It doesn’t matter what restraints they said they placed on the medium. A group of people can come to believe in a shared delusion without any intentional fraud among its members. Doyle is correct in his lament that there is no amount of testimony that would convince me that his mediums are speaking with deceased human beings. Science requires a falsifiable hypothesis that can make predictions and produce repeatable results. Doyle readily admits that the medium-spirit communication can provide unreliable information, just as human-human communication does, and that results are not always duplicable because psychic conditions can never be exactly the same. What Doyle’s movement was engaged in was not scientific, and it was, correctly, not treated as science by the scientific community.
Still, we wouldn’t be interested in the occult if we thought science could adequately explain everything. Unfortunately for Doyle’s movement, the traditionally religious and the occultists both proved difficult to convince. Even among those willing to believe that there was a magical or spiritual nature to the phenomenon, the Spiritualist interpretation was questioned. To Christians, who are taught to fear the temptations and tricks of the devil, these mediums were playing with fire. How could they ever be certain that the entity on the other end of the line was who they claimed to be? To the newly established psychical researcher, might this not be some form of Extra Sensory Perception combined with Telekinesis? How can we ever verify that the phenomenon is what Doyle claims it to be?
This is assuming, again, that there is no intentional fraud, and of course, there was plenty of intentional fraud. I’m disappointed to say that I suspect some of that fraud to have been perpetuated by Doyle himself. There are dozens of curious omissions throughout the book of facts that would harm Doyle’s attempts to debunk the debunkers. At times, Doyle’s rambling and disorganized style is used to great effect to misdirect the reader from potentially damning information. One notable example is when Doyle makes it seem that the ghost haunting the Fox household in 1848 used knocking to reply to questions when the Fox sister’s were absent. The actual testimony of the witnesses says that the Fox sisters were present for the communication.
There was also the body that was found in the walls of the Fox home decades later, near (but not) where the ghost indicated that he was buried. Doyle neglects to mention reports that the bones were a random assortment which, at the very least included, chicken bones. When Kate Fox confesses to faking her mediumship, Doyle would have you believe that she demonstrated only that she could control the knocking, not the mechanism by which it occurred. Contemporary reports indicate that she very much did demonstrate how she created the knocks by cracking her toes. We know that Doyle knows this, because he mentions how the ghost communication occuring in the absense of the Fox sisters conclusively puts to rest accusations of joint cracking.
Doyle is not a good advocate for his beliefs. He is emotional, hyperbolic, and ready to bend the truth to get back at those who he believes have been unfair to his movement. Doyle reminds me of a believer in bigfoot who fakes tracks to try to convince more people to look into the actual monster that he knows haunts these woods. He is, at best, a sloppy historian.
Who should read this?
I can really only recommend this book to those who are interested in it as a cultural artifact of its time. The information within is inaccurate, disorganized, and honestly boring. I can’t even recommend this to people who believe in spiritualism. Doyle is more interested in defending the reputations of now-forgotten individuals in the Spiritualist movement than he is in documenting any of the philosophy or theology of the movement itself. He doesn’t provide much information about how to practice spiritualism or why we should even want to.
Podcast
- Part 1 – Before Hydesville
- Part 2 – The Hydesville Incident
- Part 3 – Tangible Results