Public Seances - An Introduction
Although most séances took place in private homes, there are records of public séances. The goal of the public séance varied but usually took two forms: séances were performed in public as entertainment or as an experiment to prove the validity of spiritualism. These purposes of entertainment and experimentation were not always separated, as the excerpt from “A Medium’s Confession” in this section illustrates. Publicity changed the way an séance was conducted by involving audience members who could participate as impartial judges of what was occurring on stage. As you can imagine, many of these audience members were not impartial or were unaware of the stage effects many mediums used.
While this section includes accounts of public séances, it also features descriptions of public debate over séance practices. Spiritualism was not confined to fashionable parlors: men from various fields of scientific research were engaged in publicly discussing spiritualism and the ways to empirically test séance ritual. Elizabeth Wadge comments, “Given the constantly changing nature of the discipline, it proved difficult to separate areas of legitimate investigation from those regarded as more dubious. Throughout the nineteenth century, the assumption that orthodoxy and unorthodoxy could be kept apart was increasingly under attack” (25). The public séance was a space where these conflicts between orthodoxy and ‘heresy’ took place, while also forcing scientists to negotiate what legitimate empirical research entailed.
Practicing an séance also had distinct effects on a person’s public reputation; even though an séance may originally take place in a home, the medium and participants could face ramifications in public for dealing in such a socially controversial practice. As chapter four reveals, the domains of public and private were blurred in the séance due to its highly controversial nature. Explicitly public spaces however transformed the personal religious experience of the séance into an explicit debate over scientific inquiry and epistemology in general. More specifically, public séances engaged with the question of who had the authority to determine proper epistemological practices: “Knowledge and authority could be negotiated in the mid-Victorian period” (Lamont 901). The London Dialectical Society began investigating spiritualistic practices in 1868, and while only some of their proceedings are included in the chapter they nicely demonstrate the intense “negotiation” work that Lamont points to, and the widespread public debate séances ignited.