Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [125]
The kind overtures of the two dead editors were part of a pattern: what Susanna found in the spirits’ communications was usually what she wanted to hear. At a difficult time in her own life, it must have been a welcome sensation to be in contact with the two men who, thirty years earlier, had been her literary mentors—almost as good, indeed, as having an apology from Agnes. Now that she had overcome her suspicion of spiritualism, she embraced its message (as she interpreted it) that God is perfection, and that it is man’s proper condition to move towards that perfection by struggling against limitations of reason, worldly pleasures and evil spirits. She also found herself very comfortable with a faith that didn’t need an autocratic male cleric as its arbiter. As a woman who had rejected the Church of England in Suffolk, and been thrown out of the Congregationalist Church in Belleville, she enjoyed her seemingly direct line to heaven.
Catharine Parr Traill arrived for a visit while the Moodie Spiritoscope was working overtime. Being a more ingenuous woman than Susanna, and encouraged by her sister’s arguments, she allowed herself to succumb to the spiritualist fervour. “My sister Mrs. Traill, is a very powerful Medium for these communications,” Susanna remarked, “and gets them in foreign languages.” But poor, long-suffering Catharine didn’t have so much fun. Susanna recorded that “her spirits often abuse, and call her very ugly names.” There was, however, one aspect of the occult that both women loved: it allowed them to talk to their dead children. The Moodies’ son Johnnie, drowned fourteen years earlier, sent his father a message that, “I love him, and am ever at his side trying to overthrow the evil influence of bad men, who presumptuously deny the divinity of my Lord.” For her part, Catharine was made happy, according to Susanna, “by the intercourse of her dear children, which has quite overcome her fears of death that she till lately entertained.”
By now, John was chomping at the bit. Spiritualism was a very welcome distraction from financial worries and his mounting problems in the sheriff ’s office, and he yearned to get more involved. He wanted to be a medium through which messages were sent, rather than a passive recipient of the messages. In 1858, he visited New York City again and called on “my amiable friend, Kate Fox,” with whom he had often discussed his enthusiasms. And his wish was granted. Speaking through Kate, his dead mother told him to be “faithful to your new vocation, and great Spirits will aid you.” When he inquired as to what his new vocation would be, his mother told him that it was “Healing in every form.”
Spiritualism had been linked to healing from its earliest days. In Europe in the late eighteenth century, followers of the Viennese physician Franz Anton Mesmer had claimed that they could cure patients of ailments ranging from blindness to rheumatism by controlling the flow of electrical energy through their bodies—which usually meant putting them into a trance. Once “mesmerism” arrived in the New World, where there was no medical establishment to authenticate its claims, it quickly became the subject of sensational demonstrations at fairs and carnivals. The charismatic preacher Henry Ward Beecher mesmerized his sister Harriet Beecher Stowe (the future author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin) and threw her into delicious convulsions: “spasms and shocks of heat and prickly sensation ran all over me.” The orgasmic overtones of this new