‘Plato’s Ghost’ Emerges from Wild Ride through Spiritualist Movement

Religion professor’s research results in scholarly work with no shortage of good tales

JENNIFER McMANAMAY
Staff writer

Paige Critcher's photo appears on the cover of Cathy Gutierrez's book.

Sweet Briar associate professor of religion Cathy Gutierrez’s new book, “Plato’s Ghost: Spiritualism in the American Renaissance,” is a scholarly work on a gripping subject. If you don’t believe it, ask Mary Todd Lincoln or Arthur Conan Doyle.

Sure they’re dead, but no good Spiritualist of 19th-century America would have let that stop them. Gutierrez’s 232-page monograph, due to be published by Oxford University Press this month and available at amazon.com by fall, examines the Spiritualist movement that swept the country beginning in the mid-1800s. It gathered enough followers to make politicians worry about capturing their vote, and at least piqued the interest of such notables as Mark Twain and Charles Darwin.

While the book is a serious study of Spiritualism’s tenets, philosophical influences and its legacy, Gutierrez says the movement brims with fascinating stories. She stumbled on one of them years ago while doing research for a graduate class. It was a newspaper account of a woman identified as “Mary of a New Dispensation” who was asked to give life to a machine. The woman apparently experienced a hysterical pregnancy and appeared to go into labor.

“And boom, that was it. I had to figure out who these people were and how they thought. It was such an outrageous moment that I knew that to get inside their heads would be a wild ride,” Gutierrez said.

“I am also very much attracted to their ethics — universal salvation, equal rights for women, pro-Abolition, prison reform and a host of lesser causes. I think they were the real gateway for multiculturalism in America and were very much ahead of their time.”

Spiritualism is an overflowing bucket of ideas, which Gutierrez tackles by organizing them in themes and analyzing them, sometimes using colorful historical accounts as illustration. They believed in talking to the dead, for example, and in addition to popularizing séances, tried to devise machines for contacting people in the afterlife.

Among the politically progressive Spiritualists’ concerns were women and children trapped in bad marriages with violent men, Gutierrez said. She describes the advocacy of women like suffragist and Spiritualist Victoria Woodhull, who led on issues such liberalizing divorce laws, women’s rights and “free love.”

“Spiritualists also believed that love and even sex continued in heaven so the stakes were high for valuing love and marriage,” Gutierrez said. “The free love movement condoned consensual adult sex without interference by religious or civil authorities.”

Gutierrez argues in the book that modern Spiritualism became the religious expression of the American Renaissance. According to the publisher’s synopsis, it was a “culture in love with history as much as it trumpeted progress and futurity, and an expression of what constituted religious hope among burgeoning technology and colonialism. Rejecting Christian ideas about salvation, Spiritualists embraced Platonic and Neoplatonic ideas.”

Spiritualists believed that everyone goes to heaven and that hell does not exist, Gutierrez says. Theirs wasn’t a “saved-versus-damned” view of the world.

“I argue that esoteric teachings of Platonic and Neoplatonic thinking, brought to America through groups like the Freemasons and perpetuated by a new interest in what we would now call world religions, made for a new kind of ethics,” she said. “Knowledge and progress rather than us-versus-them were the hallmarks of progressive religion.”

The book’s title is a reference to Plato’s influence on the movement, but it also evokes one of Spiritualism’s more lurid chapters: spirit photography.

William Mumler accidentally made the first ghost photograph while using a wet-plate process to make a self-portrait. A ghostly figure appeared behind his image. Gutierrez said he showed it to a Spiritualist friend to tease him, but after the photograph was splashed across Spiritualist publications, Mumler recognized an opportunity.

He claimed to become a convert and opened a studio specializing in “spirit sittings,” charging as much as $10 dollars for a 50-cent photograph. He was eventually prosecuted for fraud but it was never clear to some experts who examined his techniques how he did it — despite apparitions of living persons occasionally appearing in his photographs and court testimony showing 10 different ways to fake the images with wet-plate photography.

“Mumler was acquitted on all counts and compared to Galileo, fighting an uphill battle for science in the face of treachery,” Gutierrez said.

In a kind of homage and because she knew Sweet Briar photographer Paige Critcher had lately been working with 19th-century ghost photography techniques, Gutierrez asked Critcher to make the cover art for the book. Although the publishing schedule didn’t allow enough time to make a new image, Critcher’s work does appear on the cover. The photo is a street scene in Prague, taken in 2005 using a view camera.

“Paige is my favorite photographer and I love all of her work,” Gutierrez said. “That stunning shot from Prague really evokes an otherworldly and 19th-century feeling, so it worked out perfectly.”