Law and Magic Blog

The History of the Paranormal in France

I just purchased two interesting books by Nicole Edelman from Amazon France: Voyantes, guerisseuses et visionnaires en France 1785-1914 (Albin Michel) and Histoire de la voyance & du paranormal du XIIIIe siecle a nos jours (Seuil). The first translates roughly as Female Clairvoyants, Healers, and Seers in France from 1785-1914 and the second as History of Clairvoyance and of the Paranormal from the Eighteenth Century to the Present. Neither has been translated into English as far as I can tell. The content is unusual, at least for English-speaking readers, so maybe some publisher will be tempted.

Ghosts, Reincarnation, Spiritualism: New Books To Read

Some new acquisitions for that unread pile of books (and I've actually started reading these):

Owen Davies, Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Really entertaining and thorough.

John Warne Monroe, Laboratories of Faith: Mesmerism, Spiritism and Faith in Modern France (Cornell University Press, 2008). For the specialist; has a chapter on the spirit photography trial of Emile Buguet.

Lynn Sharp, Secular Spirituality: Reincarnation and Spiritism in Nineteenth-Century France (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006).

Melvyn Willin, Ghosts Caught on Film (F&W, 2007). Provocative photos of "ghosts" and "spirits" on film, some well-known and some not. I admit I'm not close to being an expert in photography. But since the author speculates, and invites his readers to do so, here are my speculations. I suspect that a lot of the phantoms in the photos are more likely to be tricks of the light or errors on the part of the photographer (or the camera) than documentation of visitors from beyond the grave. Still, food for thought. Compare with The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult (Yale University Press, 2005), a much more elaborate book prepared for a recent exhibition.

New European Union Directive Replaces Fraudulent Mediums Act

Here's some discussion of the new European Union Directive that's replacing the (British) Fraudulent Mediums Act 1951. The Directive places responsibility on the person providing a service (in this case, the psychic) to show that s/he did not mislead the consumer (client).  Some practicing psychics foresee a problem, thinking that the scrapped legislation provided more protection for them than does this EU legislation. The notion of treating psychic services as consumer consumables really offends them. Here's another article on the subject from Reuters.

A Times of London article apparently set off some anxiety among astrologers and psychics with its interpretation of the new legislation. After discussing the possible impact of the Directive with several attorneys, the Times reporter noted that fortune tellers would have to issue disclaimers and tell their clients that readings were "for entertainment only." The Spiritualist Workers' Association responded that it does not believe it is the main "target" of the new legislation. Check out this page prepared by the SWA on "the law and you."

Some Publications on Alfred Russel Wallace, Spiritualist

Some interesting publications on Alfred Russel Wallace, who along with Charles Darwin, championed natural selection (although Wallace came up with it independently and had a somewhat different understanding of the phrase). Wallace was a follower of spiritualism; here are some discussions of that period of his life and philosophy.

John R. Durant, Scientific Naturalism and Social Reform in the Thought of Alfred Russel Wallace, 12 British Journal for the History of Science, 31-58 (1979).

Malcolm Jay Kottler, Alfred Russel Wallace, the Origin of Man, and Spiritualism, 65 Isis 145-192 (1974).

Michael Shermer also has some discussion of Wallace's Spiritualist leanings in his book In Darwin's Shadow (Oxford, 2002).

It's Only a Game, Isn't It? Not Any More...

It had to happen, what with all the interest in the paranormal making its way to the big screen. Michael Bay of Platinum Dunes, which has remade several horror flicks including The Amityville Horror and Nightmare on Elm Street, and writer David Berenbaum (Elf) are bringing the Ouija board, well, to life. They haven't revealed the plot line yet, and it could be anything at all, but it's bound to be spooky. Read more here.

The Still Unexplained (But We're Working On It)

MSNBC.com highlights some "weird science" written up by Benjamin Radford here, in a sidebar for an article discusses why Indiana Jones is an entertaining character but a really bad archaeologist. [He seems utterly unaware of the law regarding historic artifacts, even in the 1930s. Ya don't just grab 'n go, pal.] Mr. Radford reviews Bigfoot, near-death experiences, deja vu, psychic detectives, ESP, and the placebo effect, among other unexplained phenoms. All interesting, and worthy of discussion. A tip of the hat to MSNBC and Mr. Radford for this overview of the subject metter.

Across the Pond

Here's a link to a post at Ben Goldacre's BadScience.net in which he discusses the new legislation that replaces the soon to be repealed Fraudulent Mediums Act, that itself replaced the Witchcraft Act of 1736. Among his comments:

Psychics are popular. They do what they say on the tin. They serve consumers who possibly shouldn’t watch telly after 9pm, but who have chosen to seek out practitioners with a very odd take on evidence. Apparently, special protection will be given to those who may be “particularly vulnerable” on account of their “credulity” (”consumers who may more readily believe specific claims”).

With my tiny brain, I can’t see how anyone is going to rationally police this kind of thing, given that the whole industry is, by definition, based on nonsense, and it’s plainly undesirable to ban things simply because they’re stupid.

...

The Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) has given us a taster of the comedy to come, adjudicating last month in all seriousness on Zara, the “UK’s premier psychic adviser”. It was concerned that statements like “I will cast a spell to grant your wish”, “might be interpreted to mean that her spells would be successful”. Thank God the ASA is there to save us from this underhand marketing practice. I don’t understand why anyone would pay for a spell if they didn’t think it would be successful.

Then the regulator tried to assess Zara’s powers. “We considered that the claim ‘premier psychic adviser’ implied that Zara offered an objectively superior service to all other psychic advisers … because we had seen no comparative evidence to show that Zara offered an objectively superior service to all other psychic advisers, the claim was misleading.”

It’s unclear what kind of evidence might have sufficed for the ASA. If it was a provable phenomenon then perhaps that would genuinely have been mis-selling. Maybe Chris Forster, the BNP’s moustachioed psychic candidate for the London Assembly, could have helped the ASA take a more quantitative approach. His speciality is “remote viewing of people, property or businesses, ie to analyse accurately at a distance”, and he promotes himself as “the only qualified internal auditor and accountant working full-time as a psychic”.

This nonsense is everywhere, and I’m glad of it (although not the BNP part). I am very happy to live in a world where “Alien doctors treated my cystitis” can be a news story in the Hartlepool Mail (”I don’t tell people … I don’t think they believe me. That’s why I’m telling my story to the Mail, to give credibility. I want to get it into concrete evidence”).

Good stuff.

An Update On a Request For a Pardon for "Hellish Nell"

NPR had this follow up story on the chase after a posthumous pardon for spiritualist Helen Duncan. The first story I heard about Mrs. Duncan was from 1998 on Scott Simon's Weekend Edition. I was particularly interested since I'm working on a book about her trial for witchcraft.

Spiritualism and Wills

Christopher Buccafusco, University of Chicago Law School, has published a piece in an area that I've been looking at for a while as a result of my interest in the history of Spiritualism. It's "Spiritualism and Wills in the Age of Contracts." Here's the abstract.

Spiritualism was one of the most salient cultural phenomena of late-nineteenth-century American life. The belief of considerable numbers of respectable citizens that they could communicate with the dead via an entranced medium called into question both popular and scientific conceptions of rationality, volition, and freedom. In turn, these changing ideas about the mind challenged American law's commitment to its belief in free and reasonable legal actors. This Article, the first to consider Spiritualism's implications for American law, examines the legal reaction to the anxieties Spiritualism generated for the age of contract. Principally, it looks at the judicial response to cases of Spiritualists' wills that were challenged on the grounds of insanity and undue influence. In dealing with such cases, I argue, American judges adopted a realist, pragmatic strategy of promoting polyphonic discussion and preserving democratic decision making. Approaching the subject from the perspective of cultural legal history, I suggest that popular culture, science, and the law were mutually constitutive discourses in which nineteenth-century Americans enacted their anxieties about the mind, the will, and the family. Finally, I argue that a contextualized understanding of these nineteenth-century debates can suggest much about current legal debates about rationality, responsibility, and volition engendered by recent discoveries in behavioral economics, the psychology of emotions, and cognitive neuroscience.

Download the entire paper from SSRN here.