Ectoplasm

[Daniel O'Hara]

On Tue, 18 Feb 1997, David Casseres wrote:

> The Great War
> finished the job of demolishing any real competition for spiritual 
> direction, and after WW II it was time for the occult program to pass 
> from the intellectual Elect to the spiritually needy preterite 

...except the causal relations implicit here aren`t quite as neat as all 
that. One literary landmark would have to be Conan Doyle`s worldwide 
crusade for Spiritualism, begun shortly after WWI; also his spiritualist 
Professor Challenger novel, "The Land of Mist,"  published 
interbellum, which describes the diversity of individuals involved (in 
London, at least) and is still of interest not least for its dissection 
of the class relation of spiritualism to the Anglican & Roman churches. At 
that time occultism was the province of the preterite, and mediumistic ability 
was no respecter of class, as Conan Doyle all too readily points out. 
Certainly the most famously faked fairy photographs were not products of 
any intellectual elite, but of an eight-year old girl and her sister. GR 
seizes the religion/spitualism vs. scientific materialism axis in the 
same structural vein as "The Land of Mist," tho` ACD was a little more 
candid about his motives than TRP...
Similarly with eugenics. ACD`s long-lived interest in Masonic lodges of 
all kinds brought to his attention the American eugenics programme. "A 
Study in Scarlet" covers the Masonic ground; the eugenics issue crops up 
again and again, notably in "The Lost World." Although he wasn`t averse to 
producing war propaganda ("His Last Bow" being an example of the way
he turned Holmes a proto-Colossus, the wartime decryption machine,)
it was unsafe to mutate any other, less machinic character for such
purposes given his own promulgation of the spiritualist cause.
People in glass houses, and so on...