In 1854 the United States Senate received a request for a congressional investigation into the possibility of receiving messages from the dead.1 This request was signed by 15,000 adherents of the Spiritualist movement - a movement that had been triggered by the Fox sisters six years earlier.
The senators' answer ridiculed Spiritualism as yet another relic of premodern "superstition": In their opinion, alchemy and natural magic had to their credit the fact that they had been the predecessors of rational "useful" science. In contrast, Spiritualism was an absurd delusion that could only be accounted for by the corporal and mental instability of individuals or by the ineffectiveness of the educational system.2 The Senate thus echoed the Enlightenment's polemics against magic and folk belief. In this essay I attempt to determine the place of Spiritualism in enlightened nineteenth-century America. I compare the Fox sisters - the "mothers" of Spiritualism - and their early followers with a German sect that worshipped ghosts. This sect flourished in the early 1770s in Württemberg, in a rural town hardly touched by Enlightenment ideas. Traditional folk tales about the spirits of the dead provide the background matrix of a tertium comparationis. I concentrate on three major topics: First, the origins of the respective spirit narratives; second, the organizational patterns developed by Spiritualism and the ghost sect; and third, their ideas concerning life after death. The comparison is justified by structural affinities between the two cases of alleged contact with the dead. It clarifies the specifics of both systems of belief and helps us to understand the role they played in their respective societies.
Make-Believe: Contexts, Origins, and Development of Spiritualism and the Ghost Sect
The Fox sisters' Spiritualist movement and the Württemberg ghost sect emerged in areas that had earlier witnessed religious revival movements. Pietism was an integral element of Württemberg Protestantism. During the first decades of the eighteenth century Württemberg's authorities had looked with suspicion upon the so-called Separatist Pietists that formed local conventicles and engaged in household and family worship. In 1743 the duke officially legalized them and at the same time established church and state control over these groups. After that the Pietists, formerly outspoken critics of the state, became reclusive and quiet. They did not rekindle their zeal until the 1780s when lay preachers inspired a new wave of religious enthusiasm.3 The Fox sisters found their first followers where they lived, in a part of upstate New York that had come to be known as the Burned-Over District. It had been inflamed by a variety of religious revivals in short succession; the Shakers and the Mormons, Perfectionists and Millerites all had found adherents here.4 During the earliest stages of their careers the Fox sisters came under the influence of the Congregational Friends, a small group of former Quakers. The Congregational Friends considered the disciplinary structure of Quakerism irreconcilable with the idea of the "inner light" - God's spirit in every individual that guaranteed personal freedom.5
The Foxes started off from this background of religious heterodoxy. A very brief outline of the Fox sisters' career will be sufficient here.6 In 1848 mysterious rapping and knocking noises were heard in a house in Hydesville, New York, which was at that time inhabited by the Fox family, who were German Americans (their family name had originally been "Voss").7 It was claimed that the noises were messages from the dead. The family's three daughters, Margaret, Kate, and Leah, were considered to be mediums. In the presence of the Foxes the dead "spoke" on their own account or even answered specific questions by knocking. During the 1850s the Fox sisters attracted enormous public interest from all over the United States and Europe. Under the guidance of Leah, who was the eldest of the sisters by more than twenty years,8 the Foxes became the first professional mediums. Numerous investigations into the authenticity of the spirit manifestations conducted by scientists, doctors, and theologians were an integral part of the Fox sisters' career. The sisters always welcomed these investigations and yet always rejected them later as prejudicial and hostile because the results suggested that the spirit noises had been made by the mediums themselves. In contrast to later Spiritualists the Fox sisters never actively engaged in politics;9 politicians and state officials also took no official notice of the sisters.10
In the 1860s the Fox sisters slowly withdrew from the public eye. By that point the Spiritualist movement they had helped found had spread all over the United States and to Europe.11 Literally thousands of mediums imitating the practices of the Fox sisters offered their services. Despite criticism, the Spiritualists themselves never seriously questioned the authenticity of the Foxes' claims. One might say that the events at Hydesville not only were the starting point of Spiritualism; the way in which they were interpreted by the Fox sisters and their earliest followers also was the closest approach to an orthodoxy that the dazzlingly complex Spiritualist movement made before the end of the nineteenth century.
In contrast to the American Spiritualists, the Württemberg ghost sect has so far been ignored by historians.12 We therefore must look at it in some detail. In 1770 Anna Maria Freyin, the maidservant of Georg Buck, a butcher in the small Württemberg town of Weilheim an der Teck, claimed to have met two spirits. The nature of these spirits was ill defined: Although Freyin maintained they had gone to heaven, they nevertheless haunted her master's house. I will return to this apparent contradiction. The spirits or ghosts were seen and heard by Freyin, Buck, and a fast-growing number of curious visitors. The ghosts that, in a peculiar way, belonged to heaven rather than to earth conducted religious services with those present. They quoted passages from the Bible, prayed, sang religious songs, and urged people to live morally impeccable lives according to Christian ethics. Within weeks random gatherings at Buck's house to see the ghosts and worship with them developed into regular meetings. Buck, who had been excluded from the Eucharist because of his drinking and laziness, became the spokesman at these meetings.
According to Protestant tradition, the church suspected the ghosts were really demons and complained to the authorities. Christoph von Bühler, the head of the regional administration (Oberamtmann), promptly exiled Freyin from Württemberg.
Nevertheless, the ghosts kept coming to Buck's house, and the meetings continued. Buck, who was heavily in debt, borrowed money from some of the ghosts' adherents. He promised to repay them as soon as the spirits had told him where a treasure could be found or how he could win a fortune in the lottery. But there was more to this movement than monetary motives: The people who met regularly at Buck's came to regard the spirits' utterances as divine revelation. It was claimed that the ghosts were capable of working miracles greater than those that had occurred at the birth of Christ. Buck's followers stated publicly that they received far better instruction in Scripture from the spirits than from their minister. The religious songs sung by the spirits were said to be of unearthly beauty and in themselves proof of the divine nature of the apparitions.13 Freyin was adored as a saint: She was called "redeemer of souls . . . right holy warrior, spiritual mother . . . worker of miracles." The ghost worshippers celebrated the anniversary of Freyin's decisive meeting with the spirits on the Epiphany, which in German had the somewhat ambivalent name of "Fest der Erscheinung." This can be interpreted as the celebration of Jesus's appearance or as the "feast of the apparition." Thus, the church holiday was reinterpreted and its name understood as an allusion to the spirits. Buck adopted a six-year-old boy whom he did not allow to attend Protestant services and catechism. The child was considered to be on particularly good terms with the ghosts. According to Weilheim's Protestant minister the boy offered the spirits a veneration solely due God: He had reportedly been taught to kneel down and worship them. In all likelihood he was being prepared for the role of priest.
Freyin's and Buck's followers cultivated the aggressive self-confidence of an elitist group. They "alone had bright, open eyes, whereas the other people were blind, perverse, and pitiable." They claimed to have received a special gift from God, arguing that "the matter about the ghosts was something divine and those who were not chosen could not comprehend it." The Freyin-Buck group can be seen as a religious sect; a new cult was established in the form of regular gatherings, a holiday, and the gestures of adoration performed at least by Buck's adopted son. The ghost worshippers actively tried to recruit other people to join their group and openly rejected the authority of the established church. Freyin supposedly had begun to write down the sayings of the ghosts, their prayers and hymns considered immediate divine revelations by the sect. This basically was the genesis of a holy book.
Early in 1771 the central administration of the Württemberg Protestant church decreed that the meetings at Buck's house were to be discontinued immediately. This prohibition was ignored. One month later the Oberrat, Württemberg's state council, ordered Bühler to find the exiled Freyin. The authorities hoped that if Freyin could be convicted for fraud, the activities of the ghost worshippers would come to an end. But Bühler was not able to find Freyin - a raid on Buck's house ordered by the duke failed because warning had been given in advance. The leaders of the ghost sect reveled in "prophecies" reinterpreting harassment and impending failures as the road to martyrdom and a prerequisite to their final triumph. They insisted with even more zeal on the truth of their revelations and attacked the established ecclesiastical and secular institutions. Buck publicly denounced the minister of Weilheim as a "preacher of lies" and the town clerk as a "writer of lies" (Lügenprediger, Lügenschreiber). Buck thus denied the representatives of church and state their moral integrity. He thereby implied that the church and the state themselves were based on mendacity. Buck rejected both officeholders as liars, frauds, and - regarded from the perspective of an unenlightened Christian ideal state - as opponents of the divine order. In doing so Buck denounced both church and state as corrupt. The Weilheim minister was right when he warned Bühler that the polemics of the ghost sect could be harmful to public order and to the social fabric itself.
At Weilheim the consequences of Buck's breach with the traditional order began to appear. A local official who had joined the sect was despised by Buck's opponents and also disrespected by Buck's followers as a representative of the established order. Religious doubts were voiced, and some of the parishioners complained that "they no longer were sure what to believe . . . [and] wanted to throw their bibles out of the window."
The ghost sect emerged at a time when Württemberg's old religious minority, the formerly critical conventicles of Separatist Pietists, seemed to have been silenced for good. Facing what they considered another threat of "revolution" the authorities finally resorted to harsh measures. After they had refused to confess that they were frauds Buck and another leader of the ghost sect were sent to Ludwigsburg Prison for two years. Without their spokesman the group slowly dissolved. In 1773 Bühler managed to arrest Freyin. Under massive pressure she confessed that she had been hiding in Buck's house all the while staging the alleged appearances of the spirits. Some days later Freyin escaped from prison in the traditional way, using a rope made from bedclothes. This time, however, she disappeared for good. The last person who spoke out in favor of the ghost sect even after imprisonment and flogging was pronounced insane by the Württemberg authorities in 1774.
The differences between the Fox sisters and the Württemberg ghost sect are obvious. Following the principles of the Enlightenment the authorities of the midnineteenth-century United States did not consider it their duty to judge religious orthodoxy. The American discourse was predominantly scientific: Did the Fox sisters really communicate with the dead? Were their allegations correct? In contrast, the Württemberg discourse was predominantly religious: Were the teachings of the ghost sect true?
Because of the scientific nature of the American discourse, the Fox sisters' spiritual messages were considered an object of empirical research, whereas nothing that we would consider rational scientific investigation ever took place in Buck's house. Although Württemberg's state authority was comparatively tolerant, it was far from being indifferent when religion was concerned. As one might expect, the unenlightened state persecuted magic or at least unorthodox beliefs, whereas the enlightened state ignored them and thereby allowed them to flourish. By separating church and state the Enlightenment had made room for heterodoxy and magic. It was their pre-Enlightenment environment that made Freyin and Buck revolutionaries. The authorities could not ignore their claim that they had received divine revelations without the assistance of the church, especially when it became obvious that these revelations were at least in part contradictory to established theology. The ghost sect formed a new hierarchical structure analogous to the churches, but in doing so it brought into question the old hierarchies of society.
Let us now take a closer look at the origins of the respective movements and the ways in which they constructed their spirit narratives. Freyin claimed that she had encountered a ghost whom she described as dark and terrifying. In Christian folklore almost every ghost longs to end its existence.14 It wants to leave the realm of the living for good and to go to heaven. Some just linger on in their usual surroundings, their workplaces and homes, without apparent cause and disappear after a certain time. Most must remove a specific obstacle that binds them to Earth: A wrong has to be atoned for or a task was left unfinished before death. The living could free wandering souls by praying for them, blessing them, or helping them to accomplish their respective tasks. Freyin somehow - she never elaborated on that point - managed to deliver the ghost she had met. The phantom changed its appearance and became bright white and beautiful. Freyin maintained that after his deliverance the ghost kept returning to Buck's house night and day and was even joined by a second white spirit. According to folk belief, the redemption of a ghost meant that its ties with the world of the living were dissolved; it would show itself - in white symbolizing its redemption - one last time and then disappear forever.15 The ghost Anna Maria Freyin had freed, though, still remained visible to her and to others: The white figures that Freyin, Buck, and numerous other persons saw in the house in Weilheim were no ghosts that existed between the world of the living and the hereafter of Heaven, Hell, or - according to Catholic teaching - Purgatory. They had been delivered, that is, they had already reached eternal bliss. The apparitions therefore were part of the heavenly sphere, their utterances regarded as divine revelation. The motif of the redemption of a ghost, so well established in Christian folklore, had been used by Freyin in contradiction with folk tradition and theology alike in order to create a new religious narrative of direct contact with heaven.
The Fox sisters' alleged first encounter with ghosts followed more traditional lines: In their house in Hydesville the Fox family had repeatedly been disturbed by strange rapping and knocking sounds. When these rappings seemed to react to things the Fox children said, their mother asked the mysterious being several direct questions. These questions were answered by knocking noises. Mrs. Fox's questions mirrored traditional ghost beliefs: Were the rappings caused by an "injured spirit"? Had a wrong been done him in this house? Had he been murdered? Was his body hidden in the house? Under what circumstances had he been killed, who was the murderer, and should he be brought to justice?16 The sources depict Mrs. Fox as a woman who had little formal education but a rich knowledge of folklore. As her eldest daughter remarked in retrospect: "We knew nothing of Clairvoyance, Magnetism, or Trance Mediums," but ghost legends had often been narrated in the family.17 When the Foxes called their neighbors to witness the manifestations, they at once accepted the interpretation along the lines of popular belief suggested by Mrs. Fox. Without hesitation, they went into the cellar to identify the spot where the corpse was supposedly hidden, and one day later a series of fruitless diggings started in the basement of the Hydesville house. This behavior was completely in keeping with old folk belief: It was vital to find the murdered man's body and give him a Christian burial, otherwise his soul could not rest.18 In addition to that, the ghost obviously wanted justice to be served: The person it had identified as the murderer soon had to defend himself against accusations. In the beginning the narrative of the Fox sisters was not about mediumship at all; it was about a haunted house presented in entirely traditional terms. When the Foxes left Hydesville and the mysterious rappings followed them into their new home, they declared that they had found another haunted place and inquired about crimes committed there.19
The idea that noises caused by ghosts could be used as a means of communication was unusual but not alien to popular culture: The best known example was of course the Cock Lane ghost that had caused a major sensation in 1762.20 Ann Braude pointed out that the notion that women were more apt than men to become mediums because of their alleged passivity and suggestibility was entirely in keeping with old gender stereotypes.21 Virgins were thought to have a special affinity for spirit influences in magical folklore.22 This means that at the very beginning of the Fox sisters' career there was an alleged poltergeist apparition that was interpreted and dealt with in an entirely traditional way, whereby the old ideas of using the ghosts' noises as a means of communication and of spirits that presented themselves to women had been applied. This was exactly the kind of bricolage one might expect in traditional folklore. Up to this point, the Fox sisters' story seems as void of all enlightened thought as Freyin's narrative.
Structuring Belief
Thanks to Bühler, who wrote report after report about the ghosts, we are well informed about Buck's followers. All his early adherents suffered from deficiencies in their social lives, but these deficiencies were of various natures: People with a bad reputation found their way into Buck's gatherings. The respectable poor and people without family support joined the sect. The Amtmann of Weilheim, the head of the local administration, became an ardent follower of Freyin. As the representative of territorial authority he was an outsider in town, subject to constant critical surveillance by the townspeople. Within the group of Buck's followers social differences did not matter. On the contrary, the ghost worshippers were criticized for consciously ignoring them. When Bühler learned that his subordinate, the Weilheim Amtmann, had joined Freyin's sect, he was outraged not because the Amtmann had accepted the religious authority of a woman but because he had accepted the authority of a maidservant whom he treated as if she was his social equal or even his better. Within two years the background of the ghost worshippers became completely heterogeneous. An alderman and a number of craftsmen who seem to have been perfectly integrated in local society had joined the movement. When a noblewoman became interested in Buck's sect her family intervened claiming that she was feeble-minded and needed to be put under guardianship.
Due to the lack of structure of early Spiritualism, it is next to impossible to say anything conclusive about the Fox sisters' followers in terms of number or social status.23 Preoccupied with the respectability of the movement, Leah Fox and the other spokespersons stressed time and again the support it received from people of a "higher order of intelligence" and quoted endless lists of doctors, lawyers, and clergymen who had formed investigative committees.24 The fashionable bourgeois forms of presentation the Fox sisters used, including lectures and fee-based private consultations, at least suggest that they attracted a bourgeois audience, the fashionable and the would-be fashionable.
As one might expect, these bourgeois Spiritualists did not regard themselves as "conservative" or even as opponents of the Enlightenment. Although the Foxes used elements of traditional ghost beliefs, there was a "technical" element of modernization in the Fox sisters' séances: Instead of asking simple questions to be answered with a knock for the affirmative and silence for the negative, from the summer of 1848 onward the alphabet was recited, and the spirits spelled complex sentences by rapping for the appropriate letter.25 Four years after Morse had send the first telegram from Washington to Baltimore, this became known as the "spiritual telegraph." In later séances it was claimed that this mode of communication had not been conceived by any living person. It was the spirits themselves who had had the idea and who slowly and carefully manipulated the Fox sisters into applying the new means of communication. The Fox sisters even knew who had invented the spiritual telegraph: the spirit of Benjamin Franklin. The inventor and revolutionary leader of the American Enlightenment, Franklin was an inventor and revolutionary in the spirit world, too. In the words of Leah Fox, Spiritualism was "a new truth, which was destined to revolutionize this world, and establish a communication between the here and the hereafter. . . . It is not surprising that the Spirit on the other side who seems to have been the principal initiator, not to say the inventor of this new development in the evolution of Humanity . . . was . . . Benjamin Franklin."26 In one of his earliest messages Franklin claimed that "the world will be enlightened" by Spiritualism.27
Indeed, this was how the Spiritualists themselves depicted their movement. They ridiculed their opponents as conservative, unenlightened. As the Spiritualist and ex-governor of Wisconsin Territory Nathaniel P. Tallmadge wrote in 1853, the skeptics were "Far behind the intelligence of the age [in which] . . . mesmerism and clairvoyance . . . are considered by intelligent and scientific men as well established as electricity and magnetism."28 Leah Fox compared herself with Galileo and the skeptics at Harvard University with the Salem witch hunters.29 She also kept referring to the movement she had helped to found as "Modern Spiritualism" not so much to stress the differences between spirit messages and traditional ghost beliefs but rather to emphasize that she considered Spiritualism to be an integral part, indeed the pinnacle, of the enlightened era that had begun with the American revolution.
The religious aspects of Spiritualism did not run contrary to this trend; as a matter of fact, they reinforced it. For Leah Fox the spirit messages she presented as concrete, scientific facts had demonstrated the "immortality of the soul (heretofore a mere dogma of unproved and unprovable 'faith'), which is the foundation corner-stone of all religions and of all Religion. In the words of [Apostle] Paul, to 'faith' they 'add knowledge.'"30 The idea that wraiths appeared to prove that death did not terminate human existence was not new; in fact, it was the stock-in-trade of the theological interpretation of ghosts since at least St. Thomas Aquinas.31 But the Fox sisters and other Spiritualists reinterpreted it in a particular way. Of course, the spirits declared that they intended to fight materialism, but they wanted to do so by - quite literally - materializing themselves. By producing effects in scientifically controlled environments they demonstrated the reality of a hereafter by using electricity and magnetism with superior scientific knowledge.32 Religion had become the object of Spiritualist-scientific proof, and it was proven to be in line with Enlightenment principles: The religious message of the spirits was opposed to churches, strictly nondenominational, and deistical. On the basis of these findings it becomes obvious that the U.S. Senate was quite wrong when it denounced Spiritualism as a relic of the unenlightened past.
The organizational patterns of Spiritualism mirrored its non-dogmatic, antiauthoritarian principles as well as they mirrored structural elements of America's republican society. Even the Fox sisters, the mediums par excellence, never achieved or claimed any kind of institutionalized authority. In contrast to Freyin, they did not attempt to establish the hierarchy and dogma of a new church. Everyone could consult a medium, and it was maintained that every family had at least one member with mediumistic talent.33 Bret Carroll demonstrates in his history of Spiritualism that the movement overcame its opposition to supralocal organizations and binding rules only at the end of the nineteenth century, when fraudulent mediums and sensationalism strongly threatened its credibility.34 But Spiritualism remained antiauthoritarian, based not on groups or institutions but on individuals reflecting the ideals of an enlightened bourgeois society. It has already been mentioned that during the earliest stages of their careers the Fox sisters had come under the influence of the individualistic doctrine of the Congregational Friends. This religious individualism certainly influenced the Foxes, but the personalized theology of the Congregational Friends itself was part and parcel of the new enlightened culture that emphasized the freedom and responsibility of individuals.
Believing in Structures
Not only the Spiritualist movement itself was shaped by the new demands and possibilities of postrevolutionary civil society. The new society also profoundly reshaped the imagination of the dead. The Fox sisters quickly stepped beyond the boundaries of popular ghost beliefs. They claimed that just weeks after the first rappings at Hydesville their own dead grandfather had urged them to help other people communicate with their "friends in heaven."35 Conjuring up the dead or conversing with them in dreams and trances was an element of popularized learned beliefs. John Dee, Emanuel Swedenborg, the Shakers, and Andrew Jackson Davis all had allegedly talked to souls from the hereafter and not to the ghosts as described in folk tales. The Fox sisters and all Spiritualists after them adopted this tradition and dropped the imagery of ghost legends that had been so prominent at the beginning of their career. They no longer communicated with ghosts lingering between the realms of the living and the dead, haunting places until they fulfilled a special task. They now maintained that they were able to establish contact with and receive messages from any dead person. In this respect the Fox sisters were right never to use the word "ghost" for the apparitions they allegedly dealt with but to refer to them discreetly as "spirits."
Both the Fox sisters and Freyin had managed to construct narratives that started with elements of traditional ghost legends and developed into the claim of having contact with the hereafter. During the early modern period the common denominator of all theological schools engaged in the debate about ghosts was that this was impossible. The Catholic Church accepted at least the theoretical possibility that God could send souls from Purgatory back to Earth. Having renounced the idea of Purgatory, the reformed churches maintained that all ghosts were just demons trying to deceive those people whose faith was shaky. In any case, it was not possible for the living to converse with the souls of the dead. Of course, there were folktales about dreams of damned or saved souls. But these motifs were not related to ghost legends. Insofar as the impossibility of contact between the world of the living and the hereafter of Heaven and Hell is concerned, popular culture basically shared the ideas of learned theology: The whole point of redeeming a wandering spirit was to sever its bonds with the living world. Traditional ghost belief had never questioned, let alone ever provided, an alternative to Christian notions of life after death.
Freyin, Buck, and her followers claimed only to be able to see two redeemed souls. The role of the Württemberg ghosts was that of saint, prophet, or angel: They revealed the will of God to the faithful. In this respect, Freyin's ghosts more resembled Joseph Smith's angel Moroni than the infinite number of dead seen by the Fox sisters.36 In addition to their claim of being in contact with delivered ghosts, the Württemberg sect entertained ideas concerning the hereafter that differed from those of the established Protestant Church. The surviving records provide precious few details. According to Buck, the apparitions proved, contrary to Protestant teachings, that there was "a third place in which the ghosts of the deceased stayed." Even if this brought the Catholic image of Purgatory to the minds of Württemberg's Protestant ministers, Buck was probably thinking of something else. The souls in Purgatory did not interact with the living world and were hardly capable of conveying religious instructions. The Catholic neighbor territories of Württemberg did not accept Buck's explanation. On the contrary, it greeted his assertions with "laughter and scorn . . . and was said that if such things would happen in their area the fantasts would be punished severely on life and on limb." The "third place" was probably the realm of ghosts between Earth and the Christian hereafter. It seems likely, even though there is no clear evidence that Freyin and Buck were influenced by Pietism. Espousing the ideas published in 1765 by Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, an influential minister, some Württemberg Pietists believed in the existence of the "intermediate realm" (Zwischenreich), where the souls of the deceased awaited their ascent to heaven. Yet Pietists never entertained the idea that spirits could relay religious instructions. On the contrary, prominent Pietist preachers were said to conduct sermons of consolation for the dead residing in the intermediate realm.37
Unlike the practices of the ghost sect, in Spiritualism the living did not receive messages from the dead during the equivalent of a divine service held at more-or-less regular intervals. Rather, contact with spirits took the form of a voluntarily established communication between unspecified individuals. At least in theory, anyone could converse with anyone else. Whereas Freyin's two ghosts were religious teachers of unquestionable authority for the whole group, the dead in Spiritualist belief were at best personal guides. The structure of communicating with spirits established by the Fox sisters reflected the modern everyday communication processes of midnineteenth-century America. Contact with the spirit world had been democratized, and the interaction with spirits was not in any way controlled by hierarchies or authorities.
The Spiritualists' hereafter was unlike the one imagined by orthodox Christianity. American Spiritualists - Andrew Jackson Davis prior to and in this respect more influential than the Fox sisters - presented a dynamic version of Swedenborg.38 Heaven consisted of seven concentric spheres, the seventh being the seat of God. In entering heaven each soul assumed a position within the spheres corresponding to its level of spiritual development attained on earth. But the souls did not remain in one position: Under the influence of higher spirits they could and inevitably would rise to the seventh sphere. There, they would not be united with God but rather join him while keeping their individual personalities. Heaven had become a place of improvement and evolution, of the permanent progress of individuals. Leah Fox summarized death as "but birth into another stage of progressed and progressive life, in unchanged personality and identity."39 The static eternal bliss of Christianity was done away with. Hell, the cul-de-sac of eternal damnation, became completely obsolete in a dynamic hierarchy of upward mobility.
What was the meaning of this new conception of the hereafter? What was its particular attraction? Even if we do not share Bronislaw Malinowski's crude functionalism, we may assume that the rules and purposes of magic as well as the imagination of the spirit worlds are constructed in correspondence with the needs and ideals of the respective society.40 In some cases, for example fairy rafts or the witches' sabbath,41 folk belief creates not a utopia but rather a somewhat distorted but still easily recognizable mirror image of everyday society, a "doppelgänger" society.
In any case, spirit beliefs tend to reinforce societal values. Traditional ghost beliefs are the best example of this. Ghosts are punished or have to atone for crimes or misconduct as defined by everyday standards of acceptable behavior: A miser must count his money for eternity, an aristocratic hunter who rode through the villagers' crops must join the Wild Hunt, the peasant who manipulated his neighbor's boundary marker to his advantage must find somebody who can point out the place where the marker rightly belongs, and a murderer must continually re-enact his deed.42 Ghosts exemplify moral obligations: Deceased friends or relatives return to give aid or advice.43 Even if they did not necessarily have disciplinary function, it is quite obvious that ghost legends reflected and confirmed the rules of an everyday morality concentrating on social roles, community, and family values.
One might say that traditional ghost beliefs spelled out a system of norms in keeping not with the reality of preindustrial rural society but rather with the expectations of behavior this society upheld. In folk belief ghosts exemplified social rules, but they were not imagined in analogy to a society. They were defined as exceptions, as the few unfortunate ones who could not leave the world of the living as long as they had their specific tasks to fulfill. The ghost ships, armies, and the Wild Hunt are no exceptions: Generally speaking, they are not depicted as a group of individuals but rather as a collective identity.44 Freyin had blurred the distinction between ghosts and redeemed souls, but even she was still fixated on the traditional imagery of spirits as solitary, nonsocial beings: She claimed to be able to communicate only with the two spirits she had redeemed.
When Spiritualism renounced the orthodox Christian teaching of Heaven and Hell it gained a freedom denied to traditional folk belief. The dead now were available for the construction a different imagined society. Traditional ghost beliefs had been expressions and confirmations of the norms of preindustrial societies, and the fairy rafts and witches' sabbath had even been mirrors shaped by these rules. The same is true of Spiritualism. That the spirits were totally unlike their traditional predecessors was due to the simple fact that society, or rather the ideals of society, had changed. The dynamic hierarchy of individuals both willing to and capable of improving their position in the Spiritualist hereafter reflected nineteenth-century East Coast America, a bourgeois capitalist society that emphasized the individual's "pursuit of happiness." Both systems of belief did not deny or question the existence of a hierarchy, that is, of classes, but were convinced of that it could be scaled. Progress by society as a whole as well as by the individual was a central idea. The Spiritualists' interpretation of heaven and the values of this bourgeois society were very optimistic: Not only could every soul reach the seventh sphere, every soul would inevitably reach it. The Spiritualists' hereafter might well have been invented by Horatio Alger, the Fox sisters' contemporary. The Spiritualist idea of the dead as free-willed individuals in an environment that demanded and rewarded progress absolutely corresponded with the enlightened ideals of society. The Württemberg sect had been based on a traditional, more-or-less intact agrarian society; it still lacked the social experiences and the set of ideas engendered by the Enlightenment, which the Fox sisters were able to use. "Modern Spiritualism" imagined "modern" spirits: It spelled the Enlightenment of the dead. When Tallmadge defended the Foxes' claim that Franklin's spirit invented the spiritual telegraph, he did not hesitate to justify Spiritualist beliefs by referring to his conception of American society: "With all the evidence of progress which surrounds us here, how can we discard such evidences from the spirit-world, which is believed to be one of 'everlasting progression'?"45 The success of the Fox sisters and of the movement they had helped found was due to their twofold use of the Enlightenment discourse: They presented spirit messages as rationally proven and open to scientific investigation. The subject matter of these messages both reflected and expressed popularized Enlightenment ideas and the values of the new bourgeois society. In this respect, Spiritualism was totally in keeping with traditional ghost beliefs: The imagined realm of spirits both was shaped by and confirmed society's rules and ideals. Thus, the Fox sisters and their followers were less innovative than the Württemberg ghost sect.
Corresponding to bourgeois society, Spiritualism always emphasized the role of the individual. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that at least a part of the movement could even surpass society in its quest for personal rights. Some mediums became spokespersons for the abolitionist campaign and the suffrage movement. Spiritualism was not subject to what Timothy McCarthy called the "split personality disorder" of midnineteenth-century America that embraced the Enlightenment at the same time that it tolerated slavery.46
In 1888, facing poverty and alcoholism, Kate and Margaret Fox accused their sister Leah and other Spiritualists of exploiting them. Both publicly admitted that they had produced the so-called spirit rappings themselves and renounced Spiritualism.47 Margaret converted to Catholicism.48 Her rejection of Spiritualism repeated old denominational arguments: "No, the dead shall not return, nor shall any that go down into hell. So says the Catholic Bible, and so say I. The spirits will not come back. God has not ordered it."49 For her to withdraw from Spiritualism meant returning to pre-Enlightenment thought.