The Next World: Extraordinary Experiences of the Afterlife by Gregory Shushan

Author:Gregory Shushan [Shushan, Gregory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: shamanism and near-death experiences, what kind of afterlife, leonora piper, near-death experience, lifer after death, reincarnation, mediumship
ISBN: 9781786771827
Publisher: White Crow Productions Ltd
Published: 2022-04-26T06:00:00+00:00

Spiritual Enlightenment, Intolerance, and Historical Inaccuracies

Racism, classism, and religious intolerance are disturbing trends in the pre-1975 narratives. This has some important ramifications for those who wish to view the afterlife descriptions as genuine, for they indicate either that the next world is truly a systemized bigoted realm, or that the spirit communicators were portraying merely their personal intolerant mind-dependent afterlife. However, the latter possibility is inconsistent with the recurring claim by the spirits themselves that death brings about spiritual transformation. If the afterlife (particularly on the higher spheres) is a place of equality and enlightenment, surely our spirit communicators would have risen above their negative and harmful social conditioning. The other possibility is that the information conveyed by spirits was filtered through the mediums’ minds and thus overlaid with the institutionalized bigotry of their times.

Such attitudes are common throughout 19th and 20th century mediumship literature, and can be traced to the earliest days of Western spiritualism. For example, according to alleged spirit communications via French medium Adèle Maginot, “The souls of Negroes are as white as ours; it is only in the skin they differ from us; but in heaven everyone is white.” While perhaps a tone-deaf attempt at inclusivity, Maginot continued, “There are no negroes who like their color. When they compare it with that of the whites, they envy the white color. They prefer us in all. Black women seek after white men, and black men after white women. They have no affection for their color, had they any they would be deprived of it in heaven where all men are white” (Louis-Alphonse Cahagnet, The Celestial Telegraph, 1845; in Ferguson 2012: 119). It will be recalled that “Raymond” (via Leonard) similarly stated that the higher the spirit realm, the lighter the complexion of its inhabitants (Lodge 1916: 269).

Racial segregation was also a characteristic of the afterlife as described by alleged spirits through Andrew Jackson Davis, the so-called “American Swedenborg” and proponent of free love. In addition to an “exclusively African realm” ridiculously named Monazolappa, there were two Native American realms, Wallaveesta and Passaeta. Unlike Leonard’s and Flint’s scripts, however, this was not a system of self-segregation, for Davis explained that whites have “pre-eminence” in the other world, and represent “the higher race to come” (Death and the After-Life, 1865; in Ferguson 2012: 120-1). In other writings, Davis characterized black skin as a disability alongside “defective cranium” and “weak physiological structure” (The Great Harmonia, 1850; in ibid. 32-3).

In 1898, renowned naturalist and evolutionary theorist Alfred Russel Wallace wrote that according to spirits in the afterlife, there are “millions of undeveloped and degraded spirits” of uncivilized and “less advanced races” in the other world, whose “reclamation and education” “is a sore burden” to “more advanced spirits” (ibid. 12-13).

Racism also occurred in SPR experiments. In one notorious incident, “Hodgson” (via Mrs. Piper) claimed that before his death he told James Hyslop that if he died first he would communicate to Hyslop through a medium in African-American “minstrel”-type dialect. The word Piper

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