Rochester Knockings by Hubert Haddad

Author:Hubert Haddad [Haddad, Hubert; Grotz, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781940953212
Publisher: Open Letter

IX.

The Aspiring Medium

Across the territory—from the Champlain Valley to the Great Plains, from the mountain states to the Gulf Coast, or from New England to Main Street America—the new doctrine that wasn’t yet a religion, but rather a credo combining devotion and an aspiration toward the scientific, spread with the quickness of a brushfire that, like a thousand voices in the wind, gave greater credence to the Messianism of the Quakers, Seventh-Day Adventists, or the Mormon pioneers in the West fleeing persecution. They all denounced hell, that pagan invention, and likewise rejected the purgatory of the Catholics, longing for an intimate communication with God and his angels, without counsel or arbitrator of good and evil. Under the clear-sighted protection of the Spirit, spirits could very well populate spaces and worlds.

This providence of Modern Spiritualism very quickly touched hundreds of thousands, millions of Americans rich and poor in an age when the Grim Reaper spared no one in his vast harvests, let alone children of all ages, who were more likely to disappear than to one day follow their parents’ path. One thus saw the emergence of countless mediums, like so many frogs born in the rain, a new species of preachers with their props, a number of whom discovered themselves: pastors at odds with their congregations, itinerant apothecaries, hypnotists dragging along Mesmer tubs in their wagons, retrained street peddlers, rodeo jugglers, professional cheats, and other conjurers. They officiated in every imaginable place after a media campaign or a circus parade, in churches, private homes, convention halls, covered markets, public spaces. Each in his or her manner promised a variety of shivers to gullible crowds for a dollar or a cent per head. These post-mortem communications became so popular in town, where turning tables was the fashion, that it was common among the bourgeois to gather in the evenings around a pedestal table, and anyone could improvise being mediator of the other world, provided that the rest didn’t die laughing.

Encouraged by the aura of the Fox sisters led by Leah and their most fervent disciples, including the poetess Anna Blackwell, the actress Charlene Obo, the miraculously healed rheumatic Achsa W. Sprague, or the enigmatic Wanda Jedna, American women finally held a new way to take their turn speaking without being booed at like those feminists in municipal assemblies advocating the right to vote, or else persecuted and threatened with death, in the wake of intrepid abolitionists like Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, or Susan B. Anthony, who were running from hills to valleys preaching a holy war against supporters of slavery and males, those predators of a similar breed.

In order for Modern Spiritualism not to be taken over by charlatans and to remain pure of any commercial alloy, as well as to keep away conspiracies and virulent charges from universities and scientific institutions as much as from the leagues of orthodox Puritans with figureheads like Ellen White, a sworn opponent of irrationalism, the sensible followers of the Fox sisters introduced missions of mediums in charge of enlightening the masses.

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