‘Rachel Comforted’: Spiritualism and the Reconstruction of the Body after Death

 

Tragedy struck Edith Cecil-Porch Maturin four times between 1900 and 1917. First, her twelve-year-old son died in 1900, followed five years later by her nephew. Another nephew and son were killed during World War I. When, in 1920, she decided to publish the words her first son had spoken to her immediately after his death, she dedicated her book, Rachel Comforted: Conversations of a Mother in the Dark with Her Child in the Light, to ‘other Rachels still uncomforted.’ The Rachel she was referring to figures in the Old Testament story of a woman who ‘mourned for her children and refused to be comforted, because they were not [alive].’ Despite Maturin’s conventional religious beliefs, neither the Bible nor the consolations of the established churches soothed her anguish over her child’s death. In contrast, her experiences with spiritualist communication (using a planchette, a small, heart-shaped board supported by two casters and a pencil which, when a person rested her fingers lightly on the board, traced letters without apparent conscious direction) had provided comfort—and she wanted to share this release with all the mothers recently bereaved in the carnage of the war. There were two ways in which communicating with her child ‘in the light’ helped: it convinced Maturin of an afterlife, and it reassured her that this afterlife was familiar and thus not to be dreaded. Maturin described how her ‘wounded mother-heart’ was relieved to discover that her son had not become a ‘far-away, unapproachable angel’ but possessed a body almost identical to the one she had hugged, and that he was residing in a place where there were cottages covered with roses, cricket courts, electric lights, motor-cars and trains, pets, furniture, songbirds, flowers, and class differentials. When she asked her son whether he was happy, he replied that only her grief marred his pleasure: ‘Are you happy, Sunny?’ she asked, to which her son replied via her planchette, ‘Yes, yes, yes, Mother. Quite, quite, quite. Kisses 12,000’ (Maturin, 1920). Rachel was comforted.

 

Mrs. Maturin was no crank. She was an active feminist and suffragist, an adventurer, and a prolific writer of novels, essays, and accounts of her treks in exotic places. Her experiments with spiritualism were shared by a wide range of working-class and middle-class people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Spiritualism catered for people disillusioned with traditional Christianity and claimed that the established churches not only had ‘no new message’ but even failed ‘in the presentment of the old’ (Tilby, 1918, p. 253). Spiritualist movements flourished not only within an increasingly secular culture, but also during certain periods. In particular, they grew when the level of ‘extraordinary’ deaths soared (as in wartime), as opposed to the ‘ordinary’ deaths of the elderly or the very young. Although its history is generally traced to 1848—when two sisters, Maggie and Katie Fox, started communicating with spirits from their house in Hydesville, New York—spiritualism flourished immediately after the devastation of the American Civil War (which saw half a million men killed) (Kerr, 1972, p. 108), and its heyday was during the first World War and immediately afterward. During that devastating war, spiritualists were used to ‘trace’ men who had been reported ‘missing in action’ or killed. This function was described by one officer, Brigadier General C. R. Ballard, in a letter to his mother on March 1, 1915. He wrote:

Capt. Mosley has had some very curious news; his sister was married to an officer in the Guards who was wounded and missing at the Chateau in August; she of course made all sorts of inquiries, and went to a clairvoyant who told her that her husband was lying badly wounded in a hospital in Munster. After that very contradictory reports came in—first it was officially reported he was dead—then the Geneva Red Cross people told her he had been picked up alive on the field—then a man of his own Regt. turned up who declared he was dead and brought a dying message—which seemed quite conclusive. Last week, however, she got a letter from him himself saying he was badly wounded and had been in Munster all the time. (Ballard, 1915)

 

Ballard professed not to believe such spiritualist communications, although he admitted that the spiritualist message had been ‘an infinite comfort’ to the sister. Ballard’s example was unusual in one respect: the loved one being sought turned out to be alive. More usually, spirits communicated with their loved ones in order to persuade them of their death. Thus, one mother received (in Morse code via the wireless) a message from her son, who had been posted as ‘missing.’ Her son told her: ‘Mother, be game. I am alive and loving you. But my body is with thousands of other mothers’ boys near Lens. Get this fact to others if you can. It is awful for us when you grieve, and we can’t get in touch with you to tell you we are all right’ (Rutherford, 1920, p. 24). Sons, lovers, and husbands were ‘all right’ in the afterlife.

 

This revival of spiritualism around the time of World War I did not surprise spiritualists. After all, they wisely observed, there were ‘so many hands thrust back to clasp our own here, so many hearts eager to tell us that they are yet near us and alive’ (Glenconner, 1920, p. 135). Yet the spiritualist phenomenon was a very diverse one, and the ways in which spirits communicated with earthbound people were numerous. Spirits guided the hands of mediums, their words ‘automatically’ appeared on slates, tables danced, strange tappings were heard, and pianos began playing significant tunes. Physical phenomena included the materialization of the dead person (or a part of the dead person), movement of objects, psychic lights, and spirit photographs, while mental phenomena include telepathy, clairvoyance, spirit healing, and thought transfer. If the range of methods used to communicate was wide, spiritualism contained an even more bewildering diversity of belief. However, central to all spiritualist beliefs were the ideas that the human personality or soul survived the death of the body and that communication was thus possible. Through an analysis of the writings between the bereaved and the spirits, this blog examines one component of this movement: the function of these writings for the bereaved around the time of World War I. The purpose of their communication was multifarious, but managing grief and enabling the bereaved person to ‘forget’ the departed loved one were always central. Paradoxically, this process of ‘forgetting’ was achieved by reassuring the bereaved that the loved one continued to ‘exist’ in a recognizable form.

 

Spiritualism provided a way for people to stop being distraught about a special death and to reinvent their lives. In almost all accounts, spirits explicitly instructed the bereaved to cease mourning. For instance, S. O. Cox had become interested in spiritualism after his daughter, Ella, died at the age of fourteen. In their communiqués, Ella repeatedly scolded Cox for excessive grief. Cox’s dead father even made an appearance to reinforce the message. ‘Be happy. Cultivate a sense of humour,’ his father's spirit commanded him, before threatening him with the question, ‘What is the good of coming to see you unless we bring a little of the happiness from up here?’ (Cox, n.d., pp. 26–27). ‘Every tear tortures the dead,’ wailed one dead soldier. This soldier continued:

Tell the mothers and fathers and sisters and wives to stop crying. No man can stand the sight of tears, the sound of sobs. They feel it much worse here, because they can't get in touch to comfort. It’s awful. ... We are still capable of mental anguish. That is the hell material. And every tear shed on earth falls on a heart here. (Rutherford, 1920, pp. 33 and 36)

In particular, it pained the spirits to be thought of as ‘dead.’ As one spirit insisted, the so-called dead actually possessed ‘more life than ever. If the bereaved and sorrowful could only realize that, the pain of parting would be greatly alleviated’ (Lodge, 1916, p. 24). Indeed, bereaved people were doing no one any good by grieving. Grief could artificially attach spirits to the earth, hindering their progress and ‘casting a shadow over the brilliant outlook of eternity’ (dead father speaking to Winifred Graham, in Graham, n.d., p. 217). Inordinate grief was ‘really selfish on the part of those who indulge in it’ (Business Man, 1927, p. 17). In the worlds of an airman killed during World War II, speaking through the famous medium Estelle Roberts: ‘Father, don't look back; look forward ... we are still alive. I will be all right so long as you do not grieve’ (Barbonell, 1944, p. 46).

Spirits were fighting a losing battle, though, and they had a duty to comfort those relatives and friends who insisted upon (or were incapable of resisting) their sorrow. They did this in two ways. First, they comforted the bereaved by telling them that ‘death’ had been painless. In the words of the spirit of Charles Dickens, the ‘pillow of death’ was ‘smooth’ (Melbourne Medium, 1873, p. 5). One spirit, known only as ‘A Soldier Doctor,’ had been talking to a young man killed in the first World War. This soldier-spirit had described how he had been struck by shrapnel during battle and, while still running, ‘came over.’ In the afterlife, the soldier

continued his flight toward the enemy, who he soon met coming toward him in the same aggressive way—two combatants met and thought they were in deadly battle when they discovered they had lost earthly bodies. Each made the discovery about the same time. Their astonishment caused a cessation in hostilities, and I met them looking at one another in a bewildered sheepish manner. (H.M.G. & M.M.H., 1920, p. 44)

The ‘sheepish’ looks of two noble warriors (engaged not in anonymous artillery barrages but in the ‘fair’ bayonet struggle) underlined the surprising painlessness of dying in battle. For other soldiers, the emphasis was more realistic, focused rather on escaping the ‘awful holocaust, the carnage and the slaughter which the Hun has brought into Europe.’ This was the view of the ‘new correspondent’ communicating to earthly men and women on June 25, 1916. He stressed the ‘the immediate relief this is the saving thought,—Release!!’ (Recorder, 1916, pp. 45–46). There might be a brief period of ‘sharpness’ as the spirit was released from the body, but it was a fleeting moment. Thus, the spirit of Private Dowding reassured his readers:

Physical death is nothing. There really is no cause to fear. ... Something struck hard, hard, hard against my neck. Shall I ever lose the memory of that hardness? It is the only unpleasant incident that I can remember. I fell, and as I did so, without passing through any apparent interval of unconsciousness, I found myself outside myself. ... You see what a small thing is death, even the violent death of war! ... no horror, no long-drawn suffering, no conflicts. Dowding, 1917, pp. 6–8)

A mother was told by her son that there was ‘no horror in death. I was one minute in the thick of things, with my company, and the next minute Lieutenant Wells touched my arm and said: ‘Our command has crossed. Let's go ... Bob, we're dead.’ I didn't believe it at first. I felt all right’ (Rutherford, 1920, p. 25). As in many of these examples, the shift from the earthy to the spiritual plane was often so slight that it took a while for men to recognize that a radical change had taken place. ‘Many people do not realise that they are dead’, exclaimed ‘A Business Man,’ ‘They have been very ill, and in great pain, and passing over, find themselves free of pain and think that they have recovered’ (Business Man, 1927, p. 17). Men were quite cheery in the afterlife: ‘It's a lifelong holiday, day and night ... everything is delightful!’ enthused the spirit of one man killed at Neuve Chapelle in 1915 (dead soldier called H***** in Recorder, 1915, p. 37). Or, as another explained to his mother, ‘the soul leaves the body as a boy jumps out of a school door. That is suddenly and with joy’ (automatic writing from a spirit, in Rutherford, 1920, p. 28).

 

Second, spirits reassured the bereaved of their continual presence. The dead are all around us, they asserted (Kennerley, 1939, p. 7). This could be proved through the use of photographs taken in spiritualist studios throughout the country, but most famously in the photographs of spirits hovering above mourners during the armistice celebrations in 1918 (see photos in Barlow, c. 1930; also see Stead, 1925). As numerous spiritualists shouted loudly, ‘Love bridges the chasm’. Such love brought peace to women like Pamela Glenconner and Violet Prattley, who had a son and a husband, respectively, killed in the battle of the Somme, 1916. They both sought and received comfort from spiritualist communication with their loved ones. In the words of Glenconner, who spoke to her son in her sleep: ‘So great was the sense of consolation after one of these dreams, that the fact of his having died would on waking seem almost negligible; for hours after I was lapped in a sustaining sense of joy’ (Glenconner, 1920, p. 102). What did these spirits tell people? As we have already seen, they provided homely reassurances and exhortations to ‘carry on.’ In addition, however, the message of spirits was often highly prescriptive. They frequently lectured their listeners about appropriate behavior, including warning soldiers against going to prostitutes. They admitted that they would

shadow those evil creatures who try to tempt men to obsess. As soon as one of these harpies gets hold of a young fellow, and begins to suggest that he should obtain earthly pleasures … our spirit warns him against doing so. (Ward, 1920, p. 66)

Spirits also attempted to influence behavior more directly through moral instruction. Suicide, capital punishment, and cremation were strongly disapproved of (Business Man, 1927, p. 42). During a war that seemed to represent the opposite of progress and human goodness, they recited slightly old-fashioned, even childish morality tales stripped of philosophical modernism. From the Other World, S. O. Cox's daughter informed her father that she was growing pansies in her garden, and that when he did good works her pansies ‘look up, nod, and smile,’ but when he had selfish thoughts they became faded and marked. ‘My garden reflects the work you do,’ she lectured in a sweet, high-pitched voice, which was probably as effective in influencing behavior as the more gruff commandments issued by God the Father (Cox, n.d., pp. 25–26). The reasons for leading a ‘good and moral’ life here on earth did not include the threat of hell. In an article published in The Spiritualist in 1873, entitled ‘How Do the Spirits Live?’ readers were assured that ‘the better lives men live on earth, by doing good to everybody and everything, the happier they will be in the hereafter. ... The angels in heaven and upon earth are happy in proportion to the goodness and usefulness of their lives’ (‘How Do the Spirits Live,’ 1873, p. 195). Goodness was clearly ascribed to the spirits: they were clothed in colors depending on their deeds on earth. Thus, red indicated that they had performed more than their share of evil deeds; blue signaled a life of good deeds; and pale blue marked out the holiest spirits (Gorer, 1955, p. 259). In the words of the spirit of Charles Dickens, communicating in 1873, ‘knowing and feeling’ that ‘holy and innocent’ spirits were always watching ‘binds you up in faith, establishes you in hope, and gives you strength to battle with the temptations of the soul’ (Melbourne Medium, 1873, p. 4).

 

The nature of the spirits’ lives in the afterlife also preoccupied people on earth. In many ways, the bereaved discovered, the afterlife was remarkably similar to life on earth—or, at least, similar to idealized life on earth. Ideal gender relations, for instance, were maintained in the other world. Death relieved the individual of his or her body, but gender was located in the ‘soul’ rather than the body (Ashby, 1915, p. 7). Thus, in spiritual communication with his father, the young soldier Raymond Lodge admitted that there were men and women in the other world and, although they did not have children, they still fell in love with each other (Lodge, 1918, p. 197). Of course, there was something pure and virginal about love in the spiritual realm. Spiritualists evoked the Victorian concept of chastity as an ideal for both men and women, even within marriage. No woman was going to be ‘bothered’ by her lover in the spiritual world! In the words of the spirit simply known as M. A.: ‘We have sex in the highest sense, but free from bodily lusts and passions’ (M.A., 1930, p. 13). There was ‘no sexuality in the grosser sense and no childbirth,’ swore the writer and enthusiastic spiritualist Arthur Conan Doyle in his The New Revelations (1918, p. 98).

 

The other world was free of other anxieties as well. It was a dirt-free zone where there was no decay and no excrement. Although the spirits often claimed to be able to eat and drink (indeed, they gave extravagant and sensual descriptions of such pleasures), they did not defecate. One Victorian lady recounted a discussion with a spirit in which she gave him an apple to eat, then asked him ‘What became of the apple?’ The spirit, Joey, told her that it had simply been ‘dispersed into the air’ (Echoes of the Eighties, 1921, chap. 20). More bluntly, another spirit informed his listeners that they ate only fruit and vegetables and this food was ‘entirely burnt up in our bodies, there is no sewerage’ (M. A., 1930, p. 13).

 

There was another form of purification that occurred after death. The body survived the afterlife—but in a slightly different form. Because of ‘the sin and sorrow of our race,’ the future body was a ‘glorified likeness’ of what it was on earth, spiritualists discovered. All blemishes would be removed. The Rev. D. M. Lamont admitted that some bereaved people wanted to ‘see their friends after death just as they saw them on earth.’ ‘The very blemish on that dear face had become endearing to me,’ they told him. Lamont reminded such people that ‘it was the love behind the blemishes that endeared them. When that same love will translate itself into the features of the glorified countenance, those longings for defects shall vanish.’ The body would retain its unique identity, but its beauty would be ‘enhanced.’ The ‘victory of Christ over sin and death cannot be complete except He restored the whole man body and soul,’ Lamont explained (Lamont, 1920, pp. 51, 58–60, 63). Arthur Conan Doyle provided another explanation for the retention of individual likeness (albeit without unsightly scars and suchlike) after death. In 1918 he asked, ‘Are we to be mere wisps of gaseous happiness floating about in the air?’ He provided his readers with the answer:

If there is no body like our own, and if there is no character like our own, then say what you will, we have become extinct. What is it to a mother if some impersonal glorified entity is shown to her? She will say, ‘that is not the son I lost—I want his yellow hair, his quick smile, his little moods that I know so well.’ (Conan Doyle, 1918, p. 105)

 

But spiritualism did promise a ‘wholeness,’ which must have been reassuring to many bereaved parents, wives, and lovers after the first World War. Men did not bleed in the other world; gaping wounds left by bayonets or shrapnel were instantly healed; limbs ripped off by bombs were replaced (Chapman and G.A.W., 1927, p. 64; Lawrence, 1921, pp. 9–10; Lodge, 1918, p. 195; Ward, 1920, p. 185). Such processes did not benefit only the young men mutilated in battle. Congenital deformities slowly disappeared in the other world (Kelway-Bamber, 1918, p. 11; Lodge, 1918, p. 195). Teeth that did not fit were replaced (Lodge, 1918, p. 195). Even older men or those who had undergone a long sickness prior to death rejoiced that their bodies after death reverted to their prime: ‘I am now hale and hearty, looking a young man in the prime of life,’ boasted one spirit to his earthly son (Thomas, 1928, p. 107).

 

The comfort provided by such reassurances was not concerned only with the corporeal survival of the individual. In a world where the sacrifice of the dead was being demeaned, the spirit world insisted on honoring their sacrifice. In a session of automatic writing from a ‘new correspondent’ just before the battle of the Somme, the message is clear:

They [the dead soldiers] are splendid but there are thousands of them. ... Heroes! gods! if devotion and bravery are worth Divine attention! Your duty is to give this assurance (these letters) to the mourners of the men who have fallen in battle. (Recorder, 1915, pp. 45–46.)

The spirits never ceased asserting that the war was a ‘righteous’ one that really would ‘clear away some old evils and prepare the ground for the building up of a better civilisation’ (Ward, 1917, pp. 25–26). The enemy simply ‘must be fought to the death’ (letters by a dead soldier called S****, 11 May 1916 in Recorder, 1916, p. 15). Heroism and self-sacrifice were back in fashion among the spirits, who rallied against a culture that seemed to value only place and power, gold and greed. Remember, they cried, self-sacrifice and love prepared men and women for the spirit life (automatic writing by S****, 7 May 1916, in Recorder, 1916, p. 7). Spirits during World War II also took up this refrain, reassuring their listeners that what they were doing to ‘put the world right’ was valuable: ‘It’s a great task you have set yourselves,’ one spirit urged (Barbanell, 1944, p. 48).

 

The spirits also persuaded people back on earth that their struggle on the Western Front was a holy one, fully supported by hosts of angels and spirits who hovered over the battlefields, unwilling to desert their comrades in their valiant fight (Bere, letter to his wife, March 29–30, 1917; automatic writing by S****, May 7, 1916, in Recorder, 1916, p. 6). Some spirits even formed ‘relief battalions’ to bring comfort to wounded men (automatic writing from ‘Bob,’ killed in France, to his mother, in Rutherford, 1920, p. 40; cf. Downs, 1920, p. 11). Furthermore, it was easy for these spirits to identify the ‘good’ from the ‘evil’ dead because the auras hovering above the German soldiers spelt ‘grossness, bestiality, cruelty, and absolute cur-rish [sic] fear,’ while the auras hovering over British troops were ‘bright with hope, love of country, of fellow-soldier, of home, and all that is beautiful and bright’ (automatic writing by S****, May 7, 1916, in Recorder, 1916, p. 26). In the afterlife, the two types of souls obviously could not mingle. The German dead were ‘too brutal for our gospel, they go to their own place—attracted thither by a wonderful law of attraction, which is to be the extension and fulfilment of the same law of like, or repulsion, which we went through on earth’ (message from S****, June 4, 1916, in Recorder, 1915, p.26).

 

This blog has concentrated on only one aspect of spiritualist communication: its function in comforting, reassuring, and making the sacrifice of death a worthy one. Clearly, however, spiritualism was not only about bereavement, or even death. For many it was a livelihood or a light-hearted form of recreation; others were merely indulging an intellectual curiosity about the other side. Whatever the motives, however, tens of thousands of bereaved parents, spouses, siblings, and friends found in the often unbelievable descriptions of the other world a belief system that comforted them and enabled them to rebuild their lives. The visionary world described by the spirits held much in common with earthly life, except in a number of areas (particularly those aspects of modern life considered to cause anxiety), and their message was often highly prescriptive. Much of their communication consisted of morality tales, a repudiation of the gross dismemberment of war, and a devastating critique of modernism. The power of the medium over his or her customers cannot be doubted, but many bereaved people found through spiritualism a direct route of their own to their loved ones in the afterlife. Through molding their vision of the afterlife, they created a space within which the dead could be both honored and put to one side. In this way, Rachel was comforted.

 

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