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By Root 321 0

the Woodhull Memorial, as her testimony was known, had been dictated to her in a dream by a ghostly, tunic-wearing Greek elder—a spirit guardian who had guided all of her public utterances ever since she was a little girl. Woodhull’s presidential campaign was quixotic and short-lived, quickly eclipsed by her twin passions for publicity-mongering and political chicanery. The medium–activist selected Frederick Douglass as her running mate—but without asking him. “I never heard of this,” the abolitionist hero later said.

Another Spiritualist voice in Congress belonged to U.S. Senator James Shields. In 1854, the Illinois Democrat rose on the Senate floor to present a petition signed by fifteen thousand American Spiritualists. Shields begged senators to take seriously the petitioners’ request to fund a “scientific commission” to investigate the possibility of talking to the dead—perhaps, Shields offered, even looking into “establishing a spiritual telegraph between the material and spiritual world.” For most Spiritualists, science and religion were not at odds but were natural allies in the march of progress. Many considered communiqués from the spirit world to be as scientifically provable as the electrical current or the telegraph signal—faculties that only strengthened their belief in unseen forms of communication. Shields’s Senate colleagues were having none of it, and in short order they hooted down the former general, one guffawing that his proposal should be dispatched to the Committee on Foreign Relations.

Some of the nation’s better-respected political reformers also counted themselves as believers in the Rochester rappings. They included the liberal congressman and Lincoln confidant Robert Dale Owen, who participated in dozens of nightly sittings that summoned up a voluptuous female spirit named Katie King. King “materialized” in physical form and received gifts and doting gazes from the aging activist. When Owen learned he was being tricked by an actress, it so broke him that he spent time in a sanitorium. The reformist newspaper editor Horace Greeley invited the younger Fox sister, Kate, to live for four months in his dark, rambling home in Chappaqua, New York. With Greeley and his wife, Kate attempted to contact the couple’s departed five-year-old son. So heavily did the lines between progressive politics and Spiritualism intersect in the nineteenth century that it was rare to find a leader in one field who had not at least a passing involvement in the other.

Spirit Journeys

Spirit rappings had a peculiar way of spreading. Soon they were being heard at séance circles in the drawing rooms of Paris and London, where the fashionable classes took a deep interest in things that went bump. Spiritualism became, in effect, the first spiritual movement that America exported abroad.

In France in the late 1850s, a stout, bearded writer and lecturer named Allan Kardec crafted “Spiritism” into a full-blown religion, complete with its own cosmic theology, liturgy, and doctrine of redemptive, or karmic, reincarnation. Determined to appear as no one’s imitator, Kardec displayed little fondness for his American counterparts—or, it seemed, for anyone. His English friend and translator Anna Blackwell recalled Kardec as possessing such a “habitual sobriety of demeanor that he was never known to laugh.” Regardless, after his death in 1869, the French theologian became venerated as a kind of Spiritualist saint in Latin America, where his writings had been spread by Portuguese traders. To the current day, Kardec’s image—depicted not as stout but firm and angular—appears on devotional candles and amulets from Peru to the barrios of North America. In Brazil, where Espiritismo is an officially recognized faith, the government placed Kardec’s image on a postage stamp in 1957 to celebrate the First Centenary of Organized Spiritism.

And Spiritualism traveled still farther, inspiring a vast supernatural religion in the nation of Vietnam. It began in the late 1920s, when a Vietnamese civil servant working for the French colonial administration