A more pedestrian description of the 19th century Spiritualist movement may go something like this:

"Spiritualism as a religious movement was a varied set of beliefs and practices related to the conviction that the living and the dead could be in meaningful communication. It flourished in the second half of the 19th century and considerably affected both Universalism and Unitarianism at the time.

One event that precipitated 'Modern Spiritualism', as it was called, was the 1847 publication of The Principles of Nature, composed by Andrew Jackson Davis, a young entranced seer from Poughkeepsie, New York. He claimed the spirit of Emanuel Swedenborg had dictated the book, an airy speculation on the evolution of the cosmos, culture and religion. In 1848 three young sisters, Margaret, Kate and Leah Fox, generated public excitement with their claim to have contacted spirits of the dead through telegraphic rapping in their home near Rochester. From the Fox sisters' experience came the pattern for the séance, or spirit circle. Soon many "mediums," especially sensitive to "impressions" from spirits, guided hopeful participants.

[S]piritualism exhibited some undeniably wild features. Its practice centered on the séance. Participants sat around a table as they waited for spirits to make themselves known, in the near-dark, with hands joined to facilitate the movement of 'energy'. Sometimes the disembodied spirits spoke using the medium's voice, or wrote messages using the medium's hand. But even more uncanny or entertaining events might also occur. Furniture might tip or levitate. Musical instruments might float above the sitters' heads and play tunes. Letters, coins, flowers or birds might materialize and fall on the table. The spirits might guide entranced participants through impromptu allegorical skits, enacting, perhaps, the journey of the soul after death. Sometimes lower spirits might take license to conduct more scandalous activities through their entranced human instruments." (Buescher, J., "Spiritualism" passim)

But spiritualism was, as Daniel Cottom argues, a far more profoundly disruptive and disturbing phenomena that upset the very foundations of Victorian rationalism and empiricism. The spiritualists' fascination with communication led them to an examination of language that undermined the foundations on which enlightened rationality was built.

"Like the writer who finally finds the right track, reason wants to overlook trickeries and follies in order to preserve order and intelligibility; hence its frustration with a movement that claimed the title of reason while neither overcoming nor condescending to the contradiction of individual experience. Reason asserted the improbability of communication with spirits, but spiritualism trumped this assertion. It suggested the improbability of communication of any kind and so raised upsetting questions about the identity - the spirit - of reason." (Cottom, 1991, p.69)

As the medium, Clara Sherwood, pointed out, "Notice even the danger there is of mistakes occurring in the transmission of thoughts through the simple medium of words."

In challenging reason, spiritualists also challenged the dominant epistemological and aesthetic frameworks of the time - science, pyschology, history, literature and art. As Cottom points out, in dramatising, for example, the power of the medium through their seances, they were able to demonstrate the role that representation and language played in the ideology of science. The presence of spirits was no less believable, they argued, than the presence of a mysterious ether, the existence of atoms or the invisible conduction of electricity.

"They reached out for and were haunted by an imagined origin of communication glimmering through the intentions of disparate individuals to convey particular meanings. Like so many in this time, the spiritualists were no longer satisfied with the access to this imaginary origin once symbolically provided by the established institutions of church and state; what set them apart from the crowd was their reluctance to relocate this origin in more modern and presumably reformed institutions of knowledge, among which could be counted empirical science and realist art. Their skepticism towards interpretative authority even in its modern forms led them to regard scientific civilisation as above all else a form of communication, an institution built on rhetorical figures, with its foundation established in the figure of the medium. And while spiritualists were often foolish in this way of grasping how communication worked in the modern world, their foolishness was often perspicacious, allowing them to see how their culture was likely to be occulted by its own discourse of scientific revelation. " (Cottom, 1991, p.85)