Laboratories of Faith: Mesmerism, Spiritism, and Occultism in Modern France

New
Hardcover
2007
$69.55

At a fascinating moment in French intellectual history, an interest in matters occult was not equivalent to a rejection of scientific thought; participants in seances and magic rituals were seekers after experimental data as well as spiritual truth. A young astronomy student wrote of his quest: I am not in the presence or under the influence of any evil spirit: I study Spiritism as I study mathematics. He did not see himself as an ecstatic visionary but rather as a sober observer. For him, the darkened room of occult practice was as much laboratory as church.
In an evocative history of alternative religious practices in France in the second half of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, John Warne Monroe tells the interconnected stories of three movements-Mesmerism, Spiritism, and Occultism. Adherents of these groups, Monroe reveals, attempted to modernize faith by providing empirical support for metaphysical concepts. Instead of trusting theological speculation about the nature of the soul, these believers attempted to gather tangible evidence through Mesmeric experiments, seances, and ceremonial magic. While few French people were active Mesmerists, Spiritists, or Occultists, large segments of the educated general public were familiar with these movements and often regarded them as fascinating expressions of the modern condition, a notable contrast to the Catholicism and secular materialism that prevailed in their culture.
Featuring eerie spirit photographs, amusing Daumier lithographs, and a posthumous autograph from Voltaire, as well as extensive documentary evidence, Laboratories of Faith gives readers a sense of what being in a seance or a secret-society ritual might actually have felt like and why these feelings attracted participants. While they never achieved the transformation of human consciousness for which they strove, these thinkers and believers nevertheless pioneered a way of being religious that has become an enduring part of the Western cultural vocabulary.

Synopsis

At a fascinating moment in French intellectual history, an interest in matters occult was not equivalent to a rejection of scientific thought; participants in seances and magic rituals were seekers after experimental data as well as spiritual truth. A young astronomy student wrote of his quest: I am not in the presence or under the influence of any evil spirit: I study Spiritism as I study mathematics. He did not see himself as an ecstatic visionary but rather as a sober observer. For him, the darkened room of occult practice was as much laboratory as church.

In an evocative history of alternative religious practices in France in the second half of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, John Warne Monroe tells the interconnected stories of three movements-Mesmerism, Spiritism, and Occultism. Adherents of these groups, Monroe reveals, attempted to modernize faith by providing empirical support for metaphysical concepts. Instead of trusting theological speculation about the nature of the soul, these believers attempted to gather tangible evidence through Mesmeric experiments, seances, and ceremonial magic. While few French people were active Mesmerists, Spiritists, or Occultists, large segments of the educated general public were familiar with these movements and often regarded them as fascinating expressions of the modern condition, a notable contrast to the Catholicism and secular materialism that prevailed in their culture.

Featuring eerie spirit photographs, amusing Daumier lithographs, and a posthumous autograph from Voltaire, as well as extensive documentary evidence, Laboratories of Faith gives readers a sense of what being in a seance or a secret-society ritual might actually have felt like and why these feelings attracted participants. While they never achieved the transformation of human consciousness for which they strove, these thinkers and believers nevertheless pioneered a way of being religious that has become an enduring part of the Western cultural vocabulary.

$69.55

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 308
Edition: 2nd edition
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 20 Dec 2007
ISBN 10: 0801445620
ISBN 13: 9780801445620

Media Reviews

A mesmerizing overview of a foreign field. Monroe has immersed himself in the ferment of ideas going on in this period and analyzes what they meant to people then, however naive they may now seem. He stresses just how widely read the publications of some of the figures that he discusses were, making them a crucial factor in any balanced assessment of French intellectual life.

-- Tom Ruffles * Fortean Times *

Laboratories of Faith is an account of scientists and others who used scientific language and concepts to investigate the 'spirit world.' They aimed to give the proof of the validity of spiritual endeavor that a materialistic age demanded. Metaphysics was no longer going to be a matter of philosophical speculation, but one of rigorous experimental study. Thus French savants handed themselves over to every conjurer and charlatan in the land.... It is an excellently researched, scholarly look at serious-minded people seeking empirical truth for the doctrines they already believed by faith, a 'science of God.' With a firmer grip than most writers on his subject, Monroe puts these events into their political context, showing how psychic phenomena had a rewarding way of changing shape to reflect the preoccupations of those observing them. In the post-1848 atmosphere of political repression journalists enjoyed reporting exciting events that were not subject to censorship; Catholic priests were able to play on anxieties by presenting the devil as a demonstrable presence in the seance room; scientists could portray themselves as objective guardians of rationality. The political left also gained solace from these phenomena, following revolution and a conservative backlash. Victor Hugo, for example, in 1853 asked a table for a 'commentary,' to which it replied 'Republic.' He asked the table to strike the floor as many times as there were years from then until the republic; the table struck two blows. Thus a divine order ruled the universe and a French republic was part of that order. It was very reassuring, once you had overcome your reserve about talking to a table.

-- Jad Adams * The Guardian *

This is a deeply humane book. John Warne Monroe takes us into the occult world of first-rate mediums, for-profit somnambulists, sober scientists, bored aesthetes, earnest seekers, clueless dupes, shrill moralists, tireless self-promoters, and blatant crooks. He introduces them to us without a hint of mockery or condescension. In fact, he writes about them in ways that make us see them as entirely familiar and utterly human.

-- Raymond Jonas, Giovanni and Amne Costigan Professor of History, University of Washington

This is a superb book, thoughtfully conceived, richly documented, and elegantly written. It builds on an existing tradition of revisionist scholarship regarding the religious history of modern France, but it approaches the questions raised by that scholarship with a new depth and imagination. John Warne Monroe offers an original and suggestive account of the nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century roots of New Age religion. Beyond that, he also calls into question the view of French cultural history of that era as marked by the triumph of a militantly secular republic and with it a materialist and anticlerical intellectual vision.

-- Jonathan Beecher, University of California, Santa Cruz

Author Bio

John Warne Monroe is Assistant Professor of History at Iowa State University. He is the winner of Yale University's Theron Rockwell Field Prize.