Brigham Young University
by Leslee Thorne-Murphy
In a belief system that featured mediums who channeled spirits from another realm, a core concept was lending out one’s mind and body in the act of written and verbal composition. Spiritualists used such methods of story-telling as automatic writing (in which a spirit guides the hand of the medium) and mesmeric trance speaking (in which a spirit tells a story or gives a lecture through a medium). How, then, would Spiritualists introduce such potentially confusing and frightening phenomena to their children? This presentation will examine narratives printed in The Lyceum Banner, a periodical published in conjunction with the Spiritualist version of Sunday School, the Children’s Progressive Lyceum. In the interest of introducing and normalizing clairvoyance and clairaudience for their juvenile readers, the writers engaged, ironically, with notions integral to nineteenth-century realism, as well as forecasting ideas germane to twentieth-century phenomenology and twenty-first century cognitive studies.