Tinker Bell on Mars

Abstract

It is no surprise that belief in the world of spirits and messiahs, belief conditioned essentially by social disenchantment, should cause socially disenfranchised groups to attempt to unite that belief with political and economic arguments derived from utopian socialists. For a time in the nineteenth century there was certainly debate and bridge-building between both spiritualists and socialists, and utopian socialists were also in the spiritualist movement. This was especially so in Britain, where many of the founders of the Labour Party were themselves spiritualists. Spiritualism’s egalitarian nature also allowed women to take centre stage in proceedings and created ground for debate on temperance and suffrage. Frustrated revolutionary émigrés escaping from the failed insurrections of the period from 1830 to 1848, arriving from France, Poland, Hungary, Bohemia and Germany also took to spiritualism (or spiritism as it was then called) as a compensation for their impotence in their own national affairs; a symptom of psychic displacement, frustration, fanaticism and despair. The spiritualist movement was not only egalitarian, it was also democratic in the basic sense, not communist but communalist, open to the influence of the Church and scientific reasoning.