A Short History Of Spirit-Channeling
We do not know of a "primitive" or preliterate culture that had no form of institutionalized communication between spirits and the living. This phenomenon seems to be universal in the ancient (especially "prehistoric") world, and only begins to come under serious assault with the rise of monotheism around 1000 BCE--and even then only as the "fraudulent" or "dangerous" activity of other groups, not of one's own. If you are a monotheist, when your own god talks to you it is divine inspiration; when out-groupers hear the voices of other gods or spirits it is necromancy (the ancient term for spirit-channeling or psychic mediumship) or demonic possession--or a hoax, because obviously (and it becomes increasingly "obvious" toward the beginning of the Common Era) those gods and spirits do not exist. Only your own god does. With the rise of rationalism out of monotheism as a competing "religion" in the last three or four centuries before our era, this opposition to other groups' spirit-channeling as fraudulent was gradually extended to all spirit-channeling: there are no spirits, there are no gods, nothing survives the death of the physical body so there is nobody for "psychic mediums" or "spirit-channelers" or "necromancers" to talk to and the whole thing is a confidence trick. This is, of course, roughly where we are today.
Ancient Egypt is often thought of as the beginning of trance-channeling as a mode of communication with the spirits of the dead; but dream-channeling was common in Egypt as well, and in the mid-second millennium BCE the pharaoh Amenhotep IV (later Akhnaton) seems to have channeled his famous vision of monotheism in a dream.The Egyptians were also the first to establish the later almost universal pattern according to which the dead person's spirit (or ba) retains the attributes of the living embodied person (or du), so that a priest in life remains priestly in death, and a peasant remains a peasant.
The ancient Chinese gave the name wu to trance channels: Wang Ch'ung in the first century CE wrote that "among men the dead speak through living persons whom they throw into a trance; and the wu, thrumming their black chords, call down the souls of the dead, which then speak through the mouths of the wu" (quoted in Klimo 80-81). The Chinese also seem to have been the first to use a mystical planchette, very much like the one used on Ouija boards today (a device invented in Baltimore by Elijah J. Bond and William Fuld around 1892 and popularized by Parker Brothers since 1966 [Klimo 197]). The Chinese device was called a chi; it looked more like a modern divining or dowsing rod, and when the spirits came down into it, it began to move, spelling out the gods' messages on paper or in sand.
In ancient Greece the spirits of the dead were called keres; they were thought to escape from the jars in which corpses were stored and then to haunt the dwellings of the living. By the sixth century BCE the Thracian Dionysiac cults were using shamans as trance channels to communicate with the spirits, or what by then were known as theoi or gods, discarnate immortal beings with superhuman powers. As I suggested above, it is likely that rationalist philosophy was born out of the Dionysiac, Orphic, and Eleusinian mystery cults devoted to the channeling of these gods; certainly much ancient Greek philosophy, especially that of Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and Plato, was thoroughly soaked in these mysteries (see also my Translation and Taboo, 54-61). In Plato's Theagetes Socrates confesses, "By the favour of the Gods, I have since my childhood been attended by a semi-divine being whose voice from time to time dissuades me from some undertaking, but never directs me what I am to do" (Klimo 82). The Greek oracles at Dodona and Delphi and other sites were trance-channelers who would prophesy by sinking into a trance and being possessed by discarnate spirits--some of the famous ones by a single spirit, or what we would today call a "spirit-guide." Oracles often lived in caves and thought of the spirits they channeled as coming up to them from the underworld through fissures in the rock. Pythagoras used something like a Ouija board as early as 540 BCE: a "mystic table" on wheels moved around and pointed toward signs that were then interpreted by the philosopher himself, or his pupil Philolaus. The muses were also channeled spirits: the muse-inspired poet or singer was thought to be the mere bodily vehicle for the singing of the muse ("Sing in me, muse," begins Homer's Odyssey).
By the time the Romans [lost link] had conquered Greece, the rationalist tide was turning against spirit-channelers. Cicero, the Roman rationalist whom the early Church Fathers so revered, railed against spirit-channeling or necromancy on the grounds that it involved ghastly pagan rituals:
It is not, therefore, surprising to find that the doctrine of human sacrifice is necessary to successful ghost-raising, and Cicero hurling against Vatinius the charge of sacrificing boys for necromantic purposes. It is a piling on of horrors, a motive which inspires many of the extravagances of magical ritual, when the most powerful spell for coercing the presence of the dead is held to demand the sacrifice of an unborn babe, ripped untimely from its mother's body. And another theory, which we have already noticed, doubtless assisted to cement the connection of human sacrifice with necromancy, the belief that in articulo mortis the spirit of the dying man hovered between the worlds of the living and the dead, and was able to give tidings of the future because it stood on the threshold of the next world. ...
The spells and sacrifices of witches and wizards give them power to raise the dead from the tomb, and to learn of the future from the summoned ghosts. In the magical practice of late and post-classical periods an instrument is sometimes provided through which the ghost speaks. The ghost is summoned into a corpse, either that of the victim of the horrid sacrifice or one selected, as in the scene in Lucan's Pharsalia, from the graveyard in which the incantation takes place. The papyri give directions for calling the spirit into the corpse, and coercing it to reveal the future. (Halliday 242-44)
The movement from polytheism to monotheism among the ancient Hebrews is still marked in the Hebrew Bible in the retention of the plural Canaanite noun elohim "gods" as the singular name of the One God, also called YHWH or Yahweh; earlier the elohim were thought of as various "powers, ghosts, gods, the human dead, and angel-like beings" (Klimo 85). The first five books of the Hebrew Bible, the Pentateuch, were long thought to have been written by Moses, the first Hebrew spirit-channeler to be named a "prophet"; he knew this history of his people not because he himself experienced it all but because he channeled it directly from Yahweh. Later Hebrew prophets, including Samuel, Elijah, Elisha, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Isaiah, David, and Solomon (check these for chronological order), channeled Yahweh either clairvoyantly (saw him in visions) or clairaudiently (heard his voice speaking to them), or both. People who channeled spirits other than Yahweh were condemned to death as witches, wizards, and necromancers; in 1 Samuel 28, for example, Saul, who has outlawed witches, goes to the Witch of Endor to get information from the recently deceased Samuel that Yahweh won't give him: "And the woman said unto Saul, I saw gods ascending out of the earth. And he said unto her, What form is he of? And she said, An old man cometh up; and he is covered with a mantle. And Saul perceived that it was Samuel ... And Samuel said to Saul, Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up?" (1 Sam 28:13-15).
Christianity was based on the teachings of a man who claimed both to be God and to channel God. The horrific "pagan" scenes described above, the spirits of the dead lured into corpses, point strongly to such New Testament scenes as Jesus raising Jarius' daughter (Mark 5:39-40) or Lazarus (John 11:39-44), or summoning up of the spirits of Moses and Elijah at the Transfiguration (Luke 9:28-36)--or, for that matter, God raising Jesus himself on the third day (Matt 28:9, Luke 24:13-16, John 20:11-18). Jesus seems to have charged his followers as well with the power to channel spirits: "For it shall be given you in that same hour what ye shall speak," he tells the apostles at one point. "For it is not ye that speak, but the spirit of your Father that speaketh in you" (Matt 10:20). Saul channels the dead Jesus on the road to Damascus, and is struck blind; when he regains his vision he converts to Christianity and becomes its most powerful prophet, Paul. I will be returning to Paul on spirit-interpreting later in the chapter. John of Patmos describes his vision in the Book of Revelation specifically as channeled: "I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day, and heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet, saying ..." (Rev 1:10). As Arthur Findlay suggests in his massive (and from an orthodox Christian or rationalist viewpoint quite tendentious) study The Psychic Stream, or The Source and Growth of the Christian Faith:
This combination of circumstances, the urge Jesus had to return to earth after his death, and the clairvoyance of one or more of his disciples, changed the outlook of the dejected band he had left behind. Rejoicing took the place of sorrow, and, instead of the earth life of the Master ending in apparent failure, his disciples came to realise and believe that it had ended in a glorious triumph. The scattered band reunited to discuss the meaning of it all, and we can be sure that whoever had seen him glorified, as Paul puts it, would be the centre of attention.
After this, Jesus may have been seen on other occasions. This is quite a reasonable supposition, considering the fact that the indications are that there were some amongst his followers who had mediumistic qualities. It is quite possible that Jesus was not only seen but heard, and that he also communicated through any who were trance mediums or in whose presence the Direct Voice could be heard. From the accounts which have been given to us it seems as if several of his followers had this gift of trance.
Quite unconsciously, therefore, Jesus laid the seed of the mighty organisation which developed under the title his followers bestowed upon him [the Christ]. During his lifetime such an idea as being the founder of a world religion had never occurred to him, just as it never occurred to him that being seen by one or more who mourned him would be the spark needed to set the world on fire with a new idea.
Jesus, when the remembrance of what he had suffered faded from his mind, would cease being earth-bound and reach out for pastures new. Like most other people, he would have friends on the other side who would help him to adjust his outlook to the new order into which he had just arrived. This would help him to forget his earth sufferings, he would gradually realise that his troubles were over, and that all he had gone through would never happen again. Gradually he would become interested in the affairs of the etheric world, which he would find in many respects similar to the one he had left, but more beautiful. Life would become easier and happier, and soon all earth troubles would be forgotten, though this does not mean that he would lose his interest in this world, in fact, from what Paul tells us, he evidently retained it throughout Paul's lifetime. (577-78)
Findlay to the contrary, of course, Christian doctrine does assume that the Jesus-spirit remains very interested in this world today, two thousand years later, and always will, until the world is destroyed in the apocalypse. And--a quick sidebar on translation here--if we follow Christian theology rather than Findlay's quite interesting revisionism and postulate analogically that the spirits of dead source authors too remain very interested in the fate of their expressive remains on earth, it should be clear that spirit-channeling or ghost-raising or necromancy is much closer to (indeed in important ways it is the model for) the orthodox Christian doctrine on translation than to Cicero's antispiritualist rationalism. For Cicero, rationalist opponent of mystics and spiritualists, the source text and its author are dead and have no claim on posterity; they have neither the right nor the power to control the reading, rewriting, or dissemination of their words. The translator does with them what s/he will; uses them as a mere springboard for his or her own expressive development. (For further discussions of Cicero along these lines see my "Classical" and conclusion to What is Translation?)
For Greek, Roman, and Christian spiritualists, on the other hand, and their heirs among conservative translators and translation theorists still today, the source author and text do have that right, and, to the extent that their translators submit to the necessary regimen of self-emptying and instrumentalization, they also have the power. The source author is the authoritative source of meaning; even in the afterlife s/he remains a supremely interested party who vigilantly monitors the dissemination of his or her work here on earth; the translator who would do justice to this discarnate but nevertheless watchful and concerned spirit must convey the author's "true" "original" words and intentions exactly as he or she would want them to be conveyed.
As the Christian church extended its circle of influence across Europe during the first millennium of our era, it mobilized ever greater vigilance against "unauthorized" spirit-channelers thought to be channeling evil or "unclean" spirits; these people were described as "possessed" or "obsessed" (and exorcized) when the channeling was unintentional, as witches and wizards (and executed) when it was intentional. Other spirit-channelers were canonized as saints. From our perspective today the deciding factor in this saint/witch split would often seem to be more sociological than theological: mediums who achieved great popularity or won favor with the secular or ecclesiastical authorities were sainted; others were burned as witches and heretics. It was not always, in other words, a matter of what spirits you channeled, but how you channeled them. Famous Christian channelers include Saint Odile in the seventh century, Saint Hildegarde of Bingen in the twelth century, Richard Rolle of Hampole (who also translated the psalter into English) in the fourteenth century, Joan of Arc in the fifteenth century, Michel de Nostradamus, Saint Teresa of Avila, and Saint John of the Cross in the sixteenth century, George Fox (founder of the Quakers) in the seventeenth century, and Emanuel Swedenborg in the eighteenth century. In 1837 a group of discarnate American Indians seem to have requested permission to use the bodies of some Shakers in upstate New York, still Indian country in those days, in order to reconnect with earthly life: "It was reported," Jon Klimo writes, "that an entire tribe at a time would take over, whooping, singing, dancing, eating, and conversing with one another in their native language" (96). Mid-nineteenth-century Spiritualism, born through the three psychic daughters of John Fox in Hydesville, New York, became a full-fledged movement on both sides of the Atlantic that finally peaked just after the first World War with tens of millions of devotees. Isaac Post developed, supposedly in collaboration with inventors in the spirit world (notably Benjamin Franklin), a system of raps for spelling out words (more on this technology in the cyborg chapter). The Russian Czar Alexander the Great and the American President Abraham Lincoln were thought to have received the command to free the serfs and slaves from the spirit world, at almost exactly the same historical moment in 1861; Lincoln's trance channel, Nettie Colburn, was one of the President's most trusted advisors. The international scientific community launched massive investigations into the channeling phenomenon, but many of the most famous channels--Daniel D. Home, Florence Cook, Eusapia Palladino, the Rev. William Stainton Moses, John Ballou Newbrough, Frederick S. Oliver, Lenore Piper--baffled the scientists by passing every test for fraud (skeptics sneered that scientists were the easiest of all to fool). Piper was examined by William James in 1885, and utterly convinced the Harvard psychologist that she had supernormal powers.
