Spiritualism | Heterodoxology

Giants’ Shoulders #29: Esoteric Science Special

Athanasius Kircher's museum

Heterodoxology is proud to present the twenty-ninth installment of your favourite History of Science Blog Carnival: The Giant’s Shoulders. This time featuring an Esoteric Science Special, dedicated to all those esoteric pursuits of superior knowledge; a celebration of all strange, alien, and counterintuitive methods that have been attempted to dissect, read, or tame nature’s secrets, from renaissance natural philosophy to present-day Grand Unified Theories – from the cleverly inventive, through the hopelessly megalomaniac, to the simply misguided.

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on November 16, 2010 at 11:46 am Comments (5)
Tags: 2012, Almagestum Novum, Anne-Laurence Caudano, apocalypse, archaeoastronomy, archaeology, Ben Freivogel, Benjamin Franklin, Benoit Mandelbrot, biomedicine, black holes, Byzantium, cameras, Charles Darwin, Coca Cola, computing, Copernicus, Cornelius Agrippa, dinosaurs, ecology, Esoteric Coffeehouse, forensic science, fractals, Francis Bacon, Fred Hoyle, Galileo, geocentricity, heliocentricity, homeopathy, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Joseph D. Coker, Madhava, Manuel I Komnenos, Maxwell's demon, Mayan civilization, Michael Mästlin, nuclear fusion, nuclear weapons, occult properties, Paracelsus, Post-Apocalyptic, Ptolemy, robots, Samuel Hahnemann, Science Fiction, scientific instruments, Technocracy, Tetens, The Giant's Shoulders, Thomas Kuhn, transhumanism, Tycho Brahe, UFOs, Vito Volterra, William Coblentz, William Crookes, William Whewell

Esotericism, Religion and Science in Toronto – report on the IAHR (part 1)

As shamelessly advertised on this blog before, there were several esotericism-and-science-related things happening at this years quinquennial world congress of the International Association of the History of Religion (IAHR) in Toronto. There was a three-session panel on esotericism, organized by my colleague Marco Pasi, and a two-session panel on science, religion and the arts in the early 20th century (under the title Seduced by Science), organised by my colleague Tessel Bauduin and myself. Having had more than a week now to overcome what was only a minor jet lag after all, it is time for a short report on events.

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William McDougall and the Professionalization of Parapsychology

William McDougall (1871-1938): British psychologist, eugenical agitator, and professionalizer of parapsychology.

It is admittedly with some pride I notice that my very first history of science article has now been published. Since I am essentially an autodidact when it comes to history of science/science studies it was important for me to get through the peer review process of the Journal for the History of the Behavioral Sciences. Additionally, a scholarly discourse on psychical research and parapsychology has been developing on the pages of JHBS over the last few years, especially with articles by Heather Wolffram, Courtenay Grean Raia, and Sofie Lachapelle. I hope to make a modestly contribute to this developing discourse with “A nice arrangement of heterodoxies: William McDougall and the professionalization of psychical research”.

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Frederic W. F. Myers and Gothic Psychology

F. W. H. Myers

“Frederic Myers will always be remembered in psychology as the pioneer who staked out a vast tract of mental wilderness and planted the flag of genuine science upon it.” With these words the far more famous American psychologist and philosopher, William James, concluded his 1901 obituary of British classicist, amateur psychologist and founding member of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), Frederic W. F. Myers (1843-1901). According to James, Myers’ work would set a new standard for the psychological sciences of the 20th century. More than a decade into the 21st, the name is mostly remembered by parapsychologists and historians with an interest in the quirkier twists that psychology could have taken.

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Published in:

on April 10, 2010 at 1:19 am Comments (4)
Tags: ether, Frederic Myers, History of psychology, immortality, Jean-Martin Charcot, mediums, Pierre Janet, psychical research, Sigmund Freud, Society for Psychical Research, Spiritualism, subliminal self, unconscious, William James

Naturalistic Spiritualisms

Spiritualism was a symptomatic cultural trend of the Victorian period. For decades mediums captivated the worker, the bourgeois, the nobleman, the socialist utopian, the Christian apostate, and people from virtually any and all professions, with their table rappings, levitating furniture, full-form materializations, and messages from beyond the grave. When a message was coming through, whether from the ghost of Benjamin Franklin, the archangel Gabriel, or the sitter’s aunt Nelly, the spirit medium provided the goods. But despite this caricature, which no doubt does full justice to much of the movement, spiritualism also became a heated battleground for deeply natural-philosophic questions: what is Nature, how does she operate, and what can we know about her? Where are the boundaries of the natural to be drawn?