Spiritualism and the Occult

Catalog description

This course treats popular spiritualism starting in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when millions of people in Europe and America described themselves as spiritualists and shared a recognizable set of practices. These served as a platform for spiritual immediacy guided by central questions: How can the living communicate with the dead? What technologies apply to our inner lives? How do people represent encounters with invisible things like spirits? This course covers early mediumship and women, spiritualism and art, with a focus on automatic and alchemical methods of producing "spirit art" in the past and present, and occult concepts of technology, to explore how the invisible became a place to expand community and reimagine what's real.