Peter CostelloSpiritualism must have reached its historic acme in the years between the wars, when such people as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were fervent missionaries for the belief. Historians have surmised that this was one outcome of the millions of lives lost in the Great War, and the inconsolable grief of those left behind.
One senses it has declined since, but then one has to take some past figures about the appeal of the occult into consideration. In 1935, for instance, in the US it was estimated there were 30,000 astrologers, 20 magazines devoted to the subject, plus some 2,000 newspapers which carried a daily column.
In France in the same period it was estimated that the annual budget for occultism of all kinds in the country ran to 200 milliards of francs, when scientific research was funded merely to the tune of 65 milliards. Today with Christianity in decline, we could apply a large multiplier to those figures.
Margins
Spiritualism survives, but on the margins. Tom Colton is a professional medium, and a minister in the Spiritualist church. This movement too was at its height after the Great War, but the number of churches has declined, as spiritualism has adapted itself to the new spiritual movements of today.
This book is devoted to his personal experiences and the experiences of his clients in dealing with the world of spirits. The stories he tells are sadly less than reassuring.
Now Christians of all kinds, indeed people any kind of religion, have little difficulty in believing in the survival of life after death. But in the spiritualist world view, at least as described by Tom Colton, there is little space for God, the community of saints, or even the ranks of spiritual beings were are told about in the scriptures. Can we build a true religious faith on the fact that our great-grandmother supposedly reveals to us through the voice of a medium that “All is well”?
In his book one reads of things one could have read about in the books of the great spiritualist era, but one hears little of the deception, the false hopes, the misleading advice that are also a feature of spiritualism. One has only to go back to the Fox sisters who began the spiritualist movement back in the 1840s in Hydesville, New York, and to read critical accounts of their lives to realise that that there is much which enthusiasts for spiritualism over the years have preferred to leave unsaid.
Heavens
Tom Colton alludes in passing to Emmanuel Swedenborg, but here I am afraid the reader will find few of the secrets of the heavens that are described in Coelestia Arcana. But then I suppose Swedenborg was a kind of Christian.
Readers in any way concerned with this question might like to be reminded of Fr Brian Grogan’s Where to from Here: the Christian Vision of Life after Death (Veritas, €14.99/£11.99), already reviewed in these pages, along with the same writer’s To Grow in Love: The Spirituality of Ageing (Veritas, €12.50/£9.99).
Those interested in the wider issues of spiritualism and psychic investigations might care to read the books by that open-minded schoolmate and harsh critic of Conan Doyle, Fr Herbert Thurston SJ, well established classics in their field, the essential matter of which has not dated.