Lights and Shadows of Spiritualism

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Scottish spiritualist DANIEL DUNGLAS HOME (1833-1886) may well have been the most famous celebrity medium of the Victorian world, his hundreds of seances attended by some of the biggest names of his day. Though not everyone was a fan-Robert Brownings’ 1864 poem Sludge the Medium is a thorough lashing of Home-he remains renowned to this day for never having been exposed as a fraud. It’s ironic, then, that this 1877 book, is best remembered for Home’s exposing of the false prophets and phony mediums of his day. But that doesn’t come until the first third of the work. In Part I, Home explores the spiritualism of the world’s oldest civilization, from the faiths of the first pagans to the spiritualist beliefs of ancient Greece and Rome. And in Part II, he discusses spiritualism in the Jewish and Christian eras, including the spiritualism of the Bible and the great seers of recent centuries. Modern paranormal debunker James Randi has noted one instance of the medium’s dishonesty: though published under his own name, both this book and Home’s 1864 autobiography, Incidents in My Life, were in fact ghostwritten by Home’s lawyer, W. M. Wilkinson. Whether Home was a fraud or not, though, this remains a fascinating, is biased, history of spiritualism.