Mattering the Invisible

Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral

Diana Espírito Santo, Jack Hunter

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781800730670
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Exploring how technological apparatuses "capture" invisible worlds, this book looks at how spirits, UFOs, discarnate entities, spectral energies, atmospheric forces and particles are mattered into existence by human minds. Technological and scientific discourse has always been central to the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century spiritualist quest for legitimacy, but as this book shows, machines, people, and invisible beings are much more ontologically entangled in their definitions and constitution than we would expect. The book shows this entanglement through a series of contemporary case studies where the realm of the invisible arises through technological engagement, and where the paranormal intertwines with modern technology.

Part I

Bodily Semantics, Metaphor, and Mediation

Chapter 1

Organicism and Psychical Research

Where Mediums and Mushrooms Meet

Jack Hunter

We are sitting in a darkened garden shed in suburban Bristol known as the Bristol Spirit Lodge. The windows are blacked out, the door is locked, and a red light has been switched on in the corner, which bathes the room in a warm, womb-like glow. In the north corner of the lodge is a curtained-off area known as the “cabinet,” with a high-backed chair inside for the medium to sit in. The curtains are pulled aside so that we, the sitters, can see the medium through the gloom as she enters into her trance state. As we watch, her legs begin to move about jerkily, she breathes heavily, and she pushes herself up on the arms of the chair with her head bowed, while the circle leader, Christine, reads the opening prayer and begins the séance:

Heavenly Father and Spirit Friends. We ask that you draw close to us tonight. We are sitting together in Love and Light, and are working only for the highest good. We invite communication with the spirit world, that is evidential of continuing life and consciousness. We invite physical phenomena that may be witnessed by us all, and be spoken about to others, so that they too may become open towards belief. We thank Spirit for their Love and Protection and ask for a circular canopy to be placed over us all. Thank you, amen.

Eventually the medium settles down, relaxing into the chair with her eyes tightly shut. The circle leader gently turns up some music playing through a small CD player next to the cabinet, and we wait in the red glow, eyes fixed on the meditating figure sitting between the heavy curtains. She is now in the depths of her trance state, and we are waiting silently and expectantly for something to emerge. Toward the middle of the second track on the CD, about ten minutes into the session, we hear growls and grunting coming from the inside of the cabinet, indicative of a spirit trying to make its presence known. Christine, the circle leader and founder of the Bristol Spirit Lodge, gently welcomes the proto-voice, and in a warm relaxed tone encourages the spirit to open up and talk with the assembled sitters. Christine has been doing this for several years now—patiently sitting with developing mediums on a weekly basis and helping spirits to manifest in her garden shed. Even in a séance with a well-developed medium, it can take a while before the spirit personality starts to engage in a coherent dialogue with the assembled group. In this instance the spirit is an undertaker by the name of Graham, mattered through the body of his entranced medium. The medium leans forward, with her shoulders pushed broadly upward and her arms hanging heavily, and begins to cough:

Circle Leader: Would Graham like to chat now?

Graham: [More coughing]

Circle Leader: Is there anything you would like to say?

Graham: [Grunting, rocks back and forth in the cabinet]

Circle Leader: Hello Graham.

Graham: [Rocking back and forth] Am …

Circle Leader: … Yes …

Graham: Am I too loud … for the camera?

Circle Leader: No, you’re fine. Just carry on.

Graham: Good. I do not see why I should need to adjust.

Circle Leader: You don’t do you! As you’re on camera now, would you like to tell us what you used to do?

Graham: Again?

Circle Leader: Yes again, sorry. I know it must get boring for you …

Graham: Very well. I was an undertaker, a long, long time ago …

The process of manifesting spirits at the Bristol Spirit Lodge, therefore, is often a gradual one, involving many brief exchanges like this—at least to begin with. It may take many weeks, or even months, for a distinctive spirit personality to fully express itself in a séance, and some do not make it at all—appearing once or twice as garbled vocalizations but never becoming a fully communicable entity. There is a great deal of coaxing involved in the process, of gently encouraging the spirits to make themselves known through the medium, by asking questions and making supportive comments to the spirits as they try to communicate. The first signs of a presence might take the form of twitches, spasms, gestures, or gurgling sounds that are noted by the circle leader and indicate a desire to speak. As noted by Nurit Bird-David in the context of Nayaka spirit possession in India, these subtle movements and gestures may be understood as a sort of meta-communication, “namely, communicating that [spirits] are communicating” (Bird-David 1999: 76). They are focused in on by the group and gently encouraged over time. What begins as a slight twitch may eventually, through this process of engagement and participation, come to express itself as a fully developed personality.

Arguing along similar lines, Bird-David understands the devara—a variety of nature spirits incorporated in Nayaka spirit possession practices—as manifestations of relational personhood, brought into existence through social interactions, specifically through engaging them in conversation and dialogue. She writes that “keeping the conversation going is important because it keeps the Nayaka devaru interaction and in a sense the devara themselves ‘alive.’” Moreover, and remarkably similar to the practices of the Bristol Spirit Lodge, Bird-David describes the form this interaction takes as “highly personal, informal, and friendly,” consisting of “joking, teasing, [and] bargaining.” The conversations held between spirits and their communicants are said to include “numerous repetitions or minor variations on a theme” (see, for example, Graham’s frustration above about being asked to retell his backstory time and time again), in which the Nayaka and the devara “nag and tease, praise and flatter, blame and cajole each other, expressing and demanding care and concern” (Bird-David 1999: 76). The interactions between spirits and sitters at the Bristol Spirit Lodge could equally be described in this way—the spirits are brought into the world through dialogue and conversation, but above all through interaction with the sitters.

The point I am getting at here, in the context of this book, is that the kind of spirit communication I observed at the Bristol Spirit Lodge (Hunter 2018) does not seem to be so much a case of turning the medium on like a radio receiver and then tuning in with a dial but rather is more like a process of nurturing—a participatory process of encouragement and growth, gradually enabling the spirit to manifest. Mediumship development, I therefore suggest, is perhaps better understood using an organic rather than technological metaphor. This will be the theme of the following chapter—exploring the possibility that organismic and process models might offer a better framework for understanding the kind of spirit communication that takes place in mediumship development circles, where the paranormal is “mattered” through the biology of the physical body.

Greening the Paranormal

The world plainly resembles more an animal or a vegetable than it does a watch or a knitting-loom. Its cause, therefore, it is more probable, resembles the cause of the former. The cause of the former is generation or vegetation. The cause, therefore, of the world, we may infer to be something similar or analogous to generation or vegetation. (David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, pt. VII)

It is not often that I find myself in agreement with the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume (1711–76), but in this instance I think that I do. Hume’s statement was made in response to the Reverend William Paley’s (1743–1805) famous “Watchmaker” argument for the existence of a divine creator. Paley had argued that the world resembles the intricate design of a pocket-watch mechanism in the way that it has apparently been “put together” by a conscious designer. This is taken as evidence for the existence of the God of classical theism. Hume’s critique is to suggest that the world, when we really look at it, more closely resembles a living organism and not an artificial mechanism. From this Hume reasons that the cause of its existence is much more likely to resemble similar, if not identical, processes to those observed in the sphere of biology—processes of organic growth and gradual development rather than anything artificially put together by human hands. If we follow Hume’s line of thinking here then it makes sense to suggest that biological, or organismic, models of the world might be a closer match to reality than mechanistic and reductionist frameworks.

In the recent edited book Greening the Paranormal: Exploring the Ecology of Extraordinary Experience (2019), I have suggested, along with colleagues and contributors, that there is a “green” or ecological dimension to the paranormal, not just in terms of the content and effects of paranormal experiences (which often carry an ecological message and occasionally result in a dramatic shift in ecological awareness for experiencers) but also in the sense that there appear to be deeper underlying ontological connections that run through ecology and the dynamics of the paranormal. Building on some of the ideas explored in that book, the perspective here suggests that models and concepts from biology and ecology might provide novel new frameworks for understanding extraordinary experiences and phenomena and their place in the natural world. This is a sentiment that is echoed in the work of Sir Alister Hardy (1896–1985), eminent biologist, marine ecologist, and founder of the Religious Experience Research Centre, who was engaged in a lifelong quest to understand the relationship between religious experience and the wider contexts of biology and ecology. In his first Gifford Lecture (1963–64), Hardy wrote:

I will confess that perhaps my main interest in ecology is the conviction that this science of inter-relationships of animals and their environment will eventually have a reaction for the benefit of [humankind]. … I believe that one of the great contributions of biology this century will be the working out of ecological principles that can be applied to human affairs: the establishment of an ecological outlook. (Hardy 1966: 24)

The suggestion here, then, in the context of the wider themes of this book, is that we might be able to apply this “ecological outlook” to our understanding of a wide range of “human affairs,” including religious experience, mediumship, the paranormal, and other processes by which human beings matter the invisible. Before we proceed to look at some of the key principles of organism, ecology, and their relationship to the paranormal, however, I first want to take a moment to unpack the distinction between organicist and mechanist modes of understanding the world.

Organicism and Mechanism

Broadly speaking, the distinction between organicism and mechanism can be broken down into a debate about whether we adopt a holistic or a reductionistic perspective on the world. Gilbert and Sarkar (2000) write that reductionism is the basis of most physics and chemistry. They suggest that it has a twofold function. Firstly, it functions as an epistemology, a way of finding out about the world by breaking it down into its constituent parts. This is an epistemological framework that also comes with the assumption that all scientific knowledge will eventually be reduced to the “terms of physics.” Secondly, reductionism also serves as an ontology—an understanding that the world is best explained in terms of its constituent parts (particles and subatomic particles, for example) and that reality is structured from the “bottom up” (Gilbert and Sarkar 2000: 1–2). It is this understanding of the world that justifies the millions spent on projects like the Large Hadron Collider, where physicists smash particles together to try to access the fundamental building blocks of the physical universe. By contrast, the organicist view sees the holistic, top-down perspective as essential for understanding the world around us. Biologist Rupert Sheldrake, an example of an organicist thinker, gives a useful definition of organicist philosophy:

This philosophy denies that everything in the universe can be explained from the bottom up, as it were, in terms of the properties of subatomic particles, or atoms, or even molecules. Rather, it recognises the existence of hierarchically organised systems which, at each level of complexity, possess properties that cannot be fully understood in terms of the properties exhibited by their parts in isolation from each other; at each level the whole is more than the sum of its parts. (Sheldrake 2009: 26)

One way in which this broader “holism-reductionism” debate filters down into ecological science is in the context of modeling the development of ecological systems, where it is known as the “emergentism-reductionism” debate (Bergandi 2011). Emergentists argue that ecological systems are best understood in terms of the complexity that emerges from the numerous interactions that take place within them. In their paper on the sociology of ecological science, John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark (2008) identify a tension early in the development of the field between those researchers who assumed such an organicist, holistic, and teleological interpretation of ecosystem development and those who assumed materialist, reductionist, and mechanistic views. To illustrate the features of the organicist approach to ecosystem development, Foster and Clark refer to the work of plant biologist Frederic Clements (1874–1945), who is best known for his research into plant succession—the process by which plant communities develop from pioneer species through to climax vegetation. For Clements, the direction of succession toward increased biodiversity, greater complexity, and increased interdependence was indicative of some form of teleological drive, with the climax community essentially understood as a single living organism. Foster and Clark explain Clements’s view of ecosystem development in the following terms:

Clements provided an idealist, teleological ontology of vegetation that viewed a “biotic community” as a “complex organism” that developed through a process called “succession” to a “climax formation.” He therefore presented it as an organism or “superorganism” with its own life history, which followed predetermined, teleological paths aimed at the overall harmony and stability of the superorganism. (Clements and Chaney 1937: 51, cited in Foster and Clark 2008: 326)

From this perspective, succession is always directed toward “harmony” and “stability” within the ecosystem, and is the process by which such “superorganisms” grow to maturity (for more on this see Hunter 2020, especially in relation to notions of harmony in nature). Understood through the lens of emergentism (an organicist perspective), ecosystem development is a process whereby different elements of the system work together for the mutual benefit of the whole—the “superorganism.” James Lovelock’s famous “Gaia hypothesis” is essentially an extension of this general observation about ecosystems to the whole Earth system. The Gaia hypothesis, developed by Lovelock and Lynn Margulis (1938–2011), in the 1970s, essentially suggests that the Earth itself is a single living system, composed of multiple interrelated parts (including the chemical and mineral composition of the Earth, as well as all organic life forms), which effectively work together to maintain a stable global system through homeostatic processes (Lovelock 2000). In other words, nature is always striving to maintain a certain balance and is continuously moving toward increased complexity and interdependence.

This teleological interpretation of Gaian principles has its critics, however. In his 1982 book The Extended Phenotype, for example, outspoken atheist and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins argued against the Gaia hypothesis precisely on the grounds that it seems to present a top-down teleological explanation for global homeostasis (i.e. that it is, in some sense, purposefully steering itself toward balance and complexity). He writes,

A network of relationships there may be, but it is made up of small, self interested components. Entities that pay the costs of furthering the well being of the ecosystem as a whole will tend to reproduce themselves less successfully than rivals that exploit their ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. On the Materiality of Unseen Things
• Part I. Bodily Semantics, Metaphor, and Mediation
• Part II. Orders of Sound, Sight, and Measurement
• Part III. Mattering Invisible Powers
• Conclusion. Mediation and Variable Communications
• Index