The Salem Witchcraft, the Planchette Mystery, and Modern Spiritualism: With Dr. Doddridge's DreamStowe, Harriet Beecher
History
The Salem Witchcraft, the Planchette Mystery, and Modern Spiritualism: With Dr. Doddridge's Dream
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
Spiritualism; Upham, Charles Wentworth, 1802-1875. Salem witchcraft; Witchcraft -- Massachusetts -- Salem
But if this is wonderful, what shall we think of the achievements of
this same "electricity" and "magnetism" in revealing facts of the second
class--facts which the questioner himself did not and does not now
_know_ were in his mind, but only _supposes they must have been_? Think
of a diffused element of nature, which, from the dawn of creation had
been blind and dead, and only passively obedient to certain laws of
equilibrium, suddenly assuming intelligence and volition, burrowing into
a man's brains, rummaging among ten thousand thoughts, emotions, and
experiences stored up in the archives of his memory, and finally coming
to the mere fossil of a (_supposed_) experience from which the last
vestige of memory-life had departed, and seizing this incident, it moves
the little board with an intelligent volition, and lo, the fact stands
revealed.
And again, what of that spicy colloquy in which Planchette writes the
words "devil," "devil's brother," "stir fires," "broil you," etc.? Oh,
Mr. H. tells us, "That was owing to the irritation of the mediums,
their horror and fright, their superstition, and their repugnance to
the questions that were being asked." Curious, is it not? to see
"electricity" seizing hold of this irritation, that horror, the other
fright, and such and such a superstition, repugnance, and disgust,
and, carefully arranging these mental emotions, building them up by a
mysterious mason-work into a distinctly defined and sharply pronounced
individuality, with a peculiar moral and intellectual character of its
own, differing more from each and all of the parties present in the
flesh than any one of the latter differed from another! And this
individuality, too, putting forth a volition which was not _their_
volition, moving the Planchette which _they_ did not move, making
and arranging letters which _they_ did not make and arrange, writing
intelligent words and sentences which _they_ did not write, and then
causing this creation to assume the name and character of a regularly
built "devil"--a character which appears to have been so far from these
young persons' minds that they were unwilling to look it in the face,
and were sorely afraid of it! Surely, if "electricity" can do all this,
then "electricity" itself is the "devil," and the less mankind have to
do with it the better.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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