A product of the ""spiritual hothouse"" of the Second Great
Awakening, Spiritualism became the fastest growing religion in the
nation during the 1850s, and one of the principal responses to the
widespread perception that American society was descending into
atomistic particularity. In Body and Soul, Robert Cox shows how
Spiritualism sought to transform sympathy into social practice,
arguing that each individual, living and dead, was poised within a
nexus of affect, and through the active propagation of these
sympathetic bonds, a new and coherent society would emerge.
Phenomena such as spontaneous somnambulism and sympathetic
communion with the dead-whether through seance or ""spirit
photography""-were ways of transcending the barriers dissecting the
American body politic, including the ultimate barrier, death.
Drawing equally upon social, occult, and physiological registers,
Spiritualism created a unique ""social physiology"" in which mind
was integrated into body and body into society, leading
Spiritualists into earthly social reforms, such as women's rights
and anti-slavery. From the beginning, however, Spiritualist
political and social expression was far more diverse than has
previously been recognized, encompassing distinctive proslavery and
antiegalitarian strains, and in the wake of racial and political
adjustments following the Civil War, the movement began to
fracture. Cox traces the eventual dissolution of Spiritualism
through the contradictions of its various regional and racial
factions and through their increasingly circumscribed responses to
a changing world. In the end, he concludes, the history of
Spiritualism was written in the limits of sympathy, and not its
limitless potential. A product of the ""spiritual hothouse"" of the
Second Great Awakening, Spiritualism became the fastest growing
religion in the nation during the 1850s, and one of the principal
responses to the widespread perception that American society was
descending into atomistic particularity. In Body and Soul, Robert
Cox shows how Spiritualism sought to transform sympathy into social
practice, arguing that each individual, living and dead, was poised
within a nexus of affect, and through the active propagation of
these sympathetic bonds, a new and coherent society would emerge.
Phenomena such as spontaneous somnambulism and sympathetic
communion with the dead-whether through seance or ""spirit
photography""-were ways of transcending the barriers dissecting the
American body politic, including the ultimate barrier, death.
Drawing equally upon social, occult, and physiological registers,
Spiritualism created a unique ""social physiology"" in which mind
was integrated into body and body into society, leading
Spiritualists into earthly social reforms, such as women's rights
and anti-slavery. From the beginning, however, Spiritualist
political and social expression was far more diverse than has
previously been recognized, encompassing distinctive proslavery and
antiegalitarian strains, and in the wake of racial and political
adjustments following the Civil War, the movement began to
fracture. Cox traces the eventual dissolution of Spiritualism
through the contradictions of its various regional and racial
factions and through their increasingly circumscribed responses to
a changing world. In the end, he concludes, the history of
Spiritualism was written in the limits of sympathy, and not its
limitless potential.
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