Understanding Spirits

 Hunting Ghosts & Finding Wisdom

A Basic Guide to Spiritualism and the Birth of Theosophy by Greg Guma

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Even before the Civil War began in 1861 about two million people in America joined the spiritualist movement. It had been growing for more than a decade. When the fighting ended in 1865 even more were in mourning and ready to become believers. 

It was a time of uncertainty and change, of discoveries, inventions, extreme wealth, grinding poverty, and growing corruption. Millions were alienated, mourning, seeking solace and asking questions about the meaning of life.

Around the country, invisible forces — at first labeled either as demons or spirits of the dead — produced noises, knocked over tables, made musical instruments and people fly through the air, or even materialized. Most people were skeptical; some became violent or abusive in response. But psychic explorers continued to investigate, witnessing unexplainable phenomena in controlled environments and interviewing mediums apparently linked to them.

Into the Mystic explores the true story of how Helena Blavatsky and Henry Olcott did just that, and brought ancient Eastern wisdom to the West, creating the foundation for the modern New Age movement. Spirits of Desire, an historical novel, follows Blavatsky, Olcott and others as they search for the truth about ghosts, seances, elemental forces, astral projection and past lives. This is a basic introduction to the key historical figures and concepts discussed and explored in both books. A video interview and impressionistic montage follow the text. — GG

Orders: Into the Mystic Spirits of Desire

A woman of power with a special mission 

Helena Blavatsky

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, eventually known as HPB, Jack and Madame,  left Russia in 1848, at age 17, in a bold escape from her marriage to a 40-year-old husband. Long before meeting Henry Olcott in Vermont, she had been around the world, often on her own, and absorbed the ancient spiritual traditions of Egypt, India and Tibet. 

She viewed her destiny as bringing the “secret doctrine,” a body of knowledge she also called occultism, Brahma Vidya, wisdom religion and Divine Magic, to a materialistic yet psychically fertile western world.

After serving in Garibaldi’s army, and a brief second marriage in Russia, she left her homeland for good. Eventually landing in New York in 1873, at the instruction of unseen spiritual masters, she drew together a circle of admirers and followed the spiritualist craze until she read one of Henry Olcott’s accounts about the Chittenden mediums. 

This was karma, she thought. He would be her partner in the “great work.”

A grieving journalist looking for ghosts

Henry Olcott

By the 1870s, Henry Steel Olcott, a retired colonel, had shifted his focus from corruption in naval yards during the Civil War to the study of mediumistic phenomena. He launched his career as Agriculture Editor for the New York Tribune, but made his name covering John Brown’s execution. 

After the war, he investigated government fraud and built a successful legal practice in customs and insurance, moonlighting as a lobbyist. He’d even been asked to uncover an alleged conspiracy surrounding Lincoln’s assassination. But none of it really interested him. Henry was disillusioned and in mourning. 

He made two visits to Chittenden, Vermont in 1874. Attending many seances and witnessing manifestations, he reported nightly materializations of “spirit forms” of all shapes and sizes and hearing music played by disembodied hands. He also obtained copies of what he called spirit writing.

A troubled medium haunted by his past

William Eddy 

William Eddy was born in Weston, Vermont in 1833. At age 13, he and his family moved to Chittenden, a township with less than 800 people at the western edge of the Green Mountains. 

His mother Julia Ann was psychic, able to foretell the future and communicate with the dead. She hid her abilities for years, fearing her husband’s reaction. But the birth of her first son ended that deception. Although William resembled his father physically, his arrival had revived Julia’s clairvoyant abilities. And her powers were inherited by her son.

By 1874 he was one of the most gifted mediums in the country. He was also a wounded soul with secrets in his past.

A cynical doctor determined to expose them 

George Beard

Dr. George Miller Beard graduated from Yale College and studied at the New York College for Physicians and Surgeons. After serving in the Civil War, he established a New York City practice, specializing in nervous diseases. He was one of the first to experiment with electricity as a stimulant, and used “central galvanization” to treat skin diseases. 

In 1874, he initiated a study of “animal magnetism” and spiritualism, convinced that such phenomena were tricks or delusions. That October, he visited the Eddy farm to “observe” a seance. Using a disguise, he got into the Circle Room with his “scientific” device. 

The plan: to connect electrical current to a ghost.

Seances

In 1870 estimates of spiritualists ran as high as eleven million, almost a third of the US population, many of them desperate to know what happened after death. In parlors and farmhouses they consulted mediums and attended seances to find out.

By 1874, the Eddy family’s seances in Chittenden were famous, their farm a pilgrimage site for just about anyone interested in contact with the dead. Henry Olcott made two visits, the second lasting more than two months, and published his findings in a major newspaper, The New York Graphic.

Attending seances and witnessing manifestations in a large, second floor Circle Room, he reported many materializations nightly —huge Native Americans, spouses and children, businessmen in expensive suits, even the departed Julia Ann Eddy.

Astral Projection

Spirits of the dead rarely return or communicate with the living, responded Helena Blavatsky, who also attended seances in Chittenden and met Henry Olcott there. Instead, she said, the materializations were “usually the astral body or double of the medium or someone present.” In other words, astral projection. A medium like William Eddy was a passive vehicle, she said. His mind was attracted by the “astral light,” his body in a trance. 

Today, between 8 and 20 percent of people claim to have had an out-of-body experience at some point — the sense that consciousness, spirit, or the “astral body” is leaving the physical body.

Elemental Forces

When someone dies, according to Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophy, life, the physical body and the astral body separate and vanish. But the essential being awaits reincarnation in the Kama-Loka, an astral realm with no boundary, sometimes known in mythology as Hades or the Underworld.

 Nearer to the material plane, elementals are also waiting. They are fluidic astral phantoms, formless entities with no sense of morality, attracted to mediums, hoping to “live” again by proxy, and assuming different shapes with the help of sensitive individuals or groups. For a short period they experience a vicarious existence, speaking, even acting through their human hosts. 

Some elementals don’t know what they are talking about, Helena warned, but “others are most dangerous, and can only lead one to evil.”

Karma

Karma is destiny, an enveloping web that each person weaves over a lifetime. People plan and create their own, good and bad, and the Law of Karma adjusts the effects. 

Helena Blavatsky sometimes described it as the Law of Retribution, others call it the law of cause and effect. If someone is suffering, choosing not to help when possible is bad karma. In the end, you’re really hurting yourself. 

Karma can come instantly, later in life, or after reincarnation into another life entirely. It also determines when and how you come back, thus affecting future existence. Good intent and good deeds create good karma and better rebirth. 

 Over time, the word has generally come to mean “what goes around comes around.” 

Past Lives

The idea that human beings live many lives before reaching perfection has been around for centuries. Helena called it metempsychosis. It’s also known as reincarnation, rebirth, and transmigration. 

The last term had a drawback in the 19th century: it suggested that a human being could regress to a lower form from life to life. According to Theosophy, “once a human being, always a human being.” 

The purpose of life is spiritual emancipation, said Helena, and the soul reincarnates according to the Law of Karma.

In Spirits of Desire, Helena and William Eddy are karmically linked. To save him she must take him into a past life — their time together before the French Revolution — to heal an ancient wound.

Helena Blavatsky’s Impact

Within a year of meeting in Vermont, Helena and Henry founded the Theosophical Society in New York, developing chapters worldwide over the next quarter century and deeply influencing spiritual leaders like Annie Besant and Jiddi Krishmamurti; philosopher Rudolf Steiner; poets W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens; inventor Thomas Edison; transformative leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Augusto Sandino; and artists Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian. 

She gradually initiated Olcott into the “secret doctrine.” After a tumultuous and controversial career she died in London in 1891. Blavatsky was the first Russian (actually born in Ukraine) ever to become a naturalized American citizen.

Many consider her the godmother of the New Age movement.

What is Theosophy?

Theosophy became part of 19th century vocabulary with the establishment of the first Theosophical Society in New York. During its first years, the two founders built a movement by focussing more broadly on the reintroduction of ancient wisdom and rituals from successive cultures, civilizations and epochs. 

Helena said the concept of theosophy came from second century Alexandrian philosophers, although the word itself is a compound of the Greek theos (god) and sophia (wisdom). Or, as she put it, “Divine Wisdom.” 

The theosophical movement was rooted in a few basic beliefs. There is one absolute, incomprehensible and infinite essence, said Blavatsky, “the root of all nature, and of all that is, visible and invisible.” Humanity’s “eternal, immortal nature” is a radiation of what she called the “Universal Soul.” The most important aim was “the relief of human suffering under any or every form, moral as well as physical,” she wrote. “And we believe the former to be far more important than the latter.”

Helena also explained that “ a true Theosophist must put in practice the loftiest moral ideal, must strive to realize his unity with the whole of humanity, and work ceaselessly for others. Now, if an Occultist does not do all this, he must act selfishly for his own personal benefit; and if he has acquired more practical power than other ordinary men, he becomes forthwith a far more dangerous enemy to the world and those around him than the average mortal.”

In the Circle: An Impressionistic Montage

Spirits of Desire: An interview with the author on educational TV (RETN)

Juking the Vote: How to Steal a Presidency

Samuel Tilden won the popular vote for president in 1876. But Republicans were unwilling to accept the results and disputed the returns in Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana. It was the start of a struggle that ended post-Civil War Reconstruction and demonstrated big business domination of the national power structure.

In 2024, the response if Trump loses is likely to be a variation, possibly preventing enough states from certifying the results of close races that no one gets enough electoral votes to win.

By Greg Guma 

Overturning the “will” of the voters, especially in a presidential election, is routinely described as anti-democratic and unprecedented. Unfortunately, that’s only half-right. A race for president has already been stolen in the US, and it could happen again. 

The precedent was set in 1876. Ulysses Grant had been persuaded not to seek a third term. That was possible until a Republican Congress passed the 22nd amendment in 1947, less than two years after Democrat Franklin Roosevelt — elected four times — died in office.

After Grant stepped down, Sen. Roscoe Conkling of New York was so confident he would be the next Republican nominee that he prematurely picked Ohio Governor Rutherford B. Hayes as his running mate. The party chose Hayes instead, while the Democrats nominated another New Yorker, Samuel Tilden, governor and persistent reformer.

Tilden won the popular vote, but Republicans were unwilling to accept the results and disputed the returns in Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana. It was the start of a struggle that ended post-Civil War Reconstruction and demonstrated big business domination of the national power structure.

Samuel Tilden                                      Rutherford Hayes
         won the vote.                                        became the president.

The similarities between those deceptive 1876 maneuvers — athletes and cops call it “juking” —  and what Trump attempted are clear. But the Electoral Count Act didn’t exist until 1887. One of its goals was to minimize the role of Congress, placing most responsibility on the states. As long as enough states resolved disputes, certified results, and forwarded them to Congress in time, the results were supposed to be final.

But what if that doesn’t happen? In 2020, Trump’s Republican accomplices in seven swing states created and submitted fraudulent certificates, claiming that Trump rather than Biden won the electoral votes. In 2024, the response if he loses is likely to be a variation, possibly preventing enough states from certifying the results of close races that no one gets enough electoral votes to win. An effective third candidate makes it more likely. In fact, it’s what the “no labels” movement hopes to do.

If that happens, it becomes a “contingent election,” the fallback created by the 12th Amendment. The House of Representatives picks the president; the Senate chooses the vice president. But there’s a twist: House delegations from each state have a single vote, so the presidency goes to the candidate whose party controls 26 or more states.

If no decision is reached by Inauguration Day, the vice president becomes acting president. If the senate can’t choose a VP, the job goes to the House Speaker, next in the line of succession. Who gets that job depends on which party holds a House majority after the 2024 elections.

As Gore Vidal described the aftermath of the Tilden-Hayes election in his novel, 1876, “The United States is now on the verge of civil war.” Tilden had 184 electoral votes and Hayes was sure of 166. but 19 remained “in doubt.” News reports “excite the people dangerously,” he wrote. “There is talk of a march on Washington. The south is reported to be arming.” 

Although Republican, Conkling declared Tilden the victor, but warned “that desperate Republicans may yet steal what is not theirs.”  

On Dec. 6, the electors met. As expected, Republicans in four states (Oregon had joined the revolt) sent two sets of returns, one fraudulently favoring Hayes. Six weeks later, Congress worked out a compromise: a 15-member electoral commission that included five members of the Supreme Court. Although Congressmen would be on the commission, Vidal described it as a “novelty” that would “exist outside the Congress, as well as outside the Constitution.”

According to William Doyle, Vermont historian and a former state senator, the legislation that set up the commission was sponsored by a Vermonter, US Sen. George Edmunds. Republicans were so pleased with his work that they honored him with symbolic nominations for president in 1880 and 1884. 

Not everyone was favorably impressed. Charles Francis Adams, brother of Henry Adams, a railroad reformer, called Edmunds an “ill-mannered bully” and “the most covertly and dangerously corrupt man” he had seen in public life. Edmunds was apparently angry that the Union Pacific railroad had refused to put him on the payroll,” Adams claimed, so he blocked every effort to reach an agreement over the railroad’s government debt.

Railroad interests orchestrated the outcome of the electoral dispute, according to historian Michael Hiltzik. In his railroad history, Iron Empires, he explains that Tom Scott, head of the Pennsylvania Railroad, “greased the path to compromise” in order to draw the south back into national politics to fulfill his dream of a transcontinental line.” At the time his railroad’s huge profits made it the most powerful US corporation. Scott monitored the process, got Pennsylvania’s delegation to support the compromise, and provided the private train car that brought Hayes to Washington for his inauguration. 

In what was called the Compromise of 1877, “Democrats agreed to throw their support behind the man ever after known as Rutherfraud B. Hayes,” writes Jill Lepore in These Truths, her US history. Hayes became president “in exchange for a promise from Republicans to end the military occupation of the south. For a minor and petty political win over the Democratic Party, Republicans first committed electoral fraud and then, in brokering a compromise, abandoned a century-long fight for civil rights.” 

The Electoral Commission meets

In the end, it came down to one vote — Joseph P. Bradley, appointed to the Supreme Court by Grant “after a long and somewhat shady career as a railroad attorney,” as Vidal put it. At first it looked like he would break for Tilden. But when the commission met, he went the other way.

The media was divided. While The Times praised Bradley, Vidal wrote, The Sun hinted at “money changing hands” and reminded readers that “when he was a West Texas circuit judge, he was bought by the railroad interests.” The Texas Pacific had awarded the presidency to Hayes, The Sun concluded.

Hayes steals a ride.

Abraham Hewitt, New York Congressman and Tilden ally, claimed that Bradley was visited before the vote by a Republican member of the commission. “Whatever the strict legal equities,” he allegedly argued, “it would be a national disaster if the government fell into Democratic hands.”

After the decision, Hewitt called the commission a fraud. But he had to admit that a prolonged crisis was disrupting American business and the economy. In other words, Vidal concluded, Hewitt and others felt “four years of Hayes is better than four years of civil war.”

How about the next four? In less than 14 months, Congress and the country may face a similar choice.