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Anatomy of a Séance: a History of Spirit Communication in Central Canada
By Stan McMullin. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2004. xxxiv + 260 pp. $75.00 hardcover. ISBN 0-7735-2665-X. $27.95 softcover. ISBN 0-7735-2716-8.
Spiritualism, a popular movement in which ordinary people made contact with spirits of the dead though mediums, flourished in Britain and North America from the mid-nineteenth century until well into the twentieth. Spiritualist claims and the unusual psychic phenomena associated with mediums were studied by the British and American Societies for Psychical Research founded in the early 1880s. Both spiritualism and psychical research have received a good deal of attention from American and British historians, but virtually none from Canadians. Stan McMullin's Anatomy of a Séance goes a good way toward filling that vacuum. Relying on several substantial collections of heretofore-unused archival materials, McMullin provides a history of the interconnected networks of spiritualists and psychical researchers in central Canada from before Confederation through to the middle of the twentieth century.
McMullin first encountered Canadian spiritualists some years ago while researching Walt Whitman, and then again later while doing research on William...