Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred by Jeffrey J. Kripal

Lincoln engaged Spiritualist beliefs and confessed to precognitive intuitions of their own or their loved one’s deaths. 45 It was quite another when spirits began showing up for “spirit photographs” (which usually amounted to little more than primitive double exposures) or when floating trumpets and accordions played on a literal stage in poor light, for paying patrons no less. Such scenes did not exactly instill confidence in Cambridge intellectuals.
    Nor did many of the spirit messages. There were real beauties here, like the one Gauld quotes from the spirit sermon of Reverend H. Snow: “We cannot dwell minutely upon the particulars which go to make up the sum total of the vastness of immensity.” 46 What made the situation even more appalling to professional writers was the fact that similar lines were being composed from the spirits of the likes of Emanuel Swedenborg, Saint Paul, and John the Baptist. Gauld dryly concludes: “Of their efforts one can only say that if the great minds of this world degenerate so much in the next the prospect for lesser fry is bleak indeed.” 47
    Things were not entirely bleak, however. For one thing, as numerous historians, including Gauld himself, have pointed out, these outlandish belief systems often encoded the most progressive and socially liberal visions of the time, visions that would only find realization decades later when the broader culture in effect “caught up” with what the spirits had been saying for quite some time. On some issues, moreover, the culture has
yet
to catch up with the nineteenth-century séances.
    The Spiritualist movement, for example, was often especially liberal and ahead of its time when it came to gender and sexual issues. Discussions around both the mysteries of postmortem sexuality and the practice of an earthly ethic of free love were not uncommon in Spiritualist literature, and both the Spiritualist and especially the later occult communities were
filled
with heterodox sexual ideas, mystico-erotic practices, and alternative genders and sexualities. These included, among other things, the abandonment of dysfunctional marriages for “spiritual affinities” or soul-mates, sexual intercourse with Elementals or subtle beings, ectoplasm emerging from between the legs (read: from the vaginas) of female mediums, the theological identification of the Fall with sex (a quite common equation in the history of Western esotericism), ritual intercourse without orgasm or movement (a practice taught by Thomas Lake Harris and latter dubbed “Carezza”), a famous female religious leader known to her intimates as “Jack” (Madame Blavatsky), and an equally famous male leader who received his most potent magical revelation in a traumatic homosexual ritual encounter that he himself designed (Aleister Crowley). 48
    Then there was Eusapia. Blum explains: “She tended to wake from trances hot, sweaty, and, well, aroused. Several times, she’d tried climbing into the laps of the male sitters at the table.” 49 Palladino, it turns out, was hardly alone in her paranormally aroused sexuality. The hidden history of psychical research sparks and arcs with such energies. My sense is that only a small fraction of this material has been reported, and almost none of it has been carefully analyzed and really understood. Hence Eric J. Dingwall, a prominent historian of the field, once shared with the American artist and superpsychic Ingo Swann that he possessed an entire archive of materials on what Swann calls “sexualizing energies” (which Swann sees as metaphysically related to “power energies” or psychical abilities and the “creative energies” witnessed at work in artists, writers, and thinkers). “He kept this collection quite close to his chest,” Swann explains in
Psychic Sexuality
: “But in correspondence to me, he indicated that a good portion of it included