Bücher der Reihe Cambridge Library Collection - Spiritualism and Esoteric Knowledge

Immensely popular in nineteenth-century France, this substantial book went through five editions between 1818 and 1863. It is an A-Z encyclopedia of the occult sciences, listing notable practitioners and books, superstitions, demons, spirits and other phenomena associated with magic, divination, sooth-saying and the supernatural. Its author, the prolific Collin de Plancy (1794-1881), moved to Paris in 1812. He owned a bookshop and speculated in property, a venture which resulted in his exile to Brussels. In 1837, he returned to Paris, rejected his earlier anticlericalism, and converted to Catholicism. The preface to the 1845 edition of his Dictionnaire Infernal, reissued here, claims its purpose is to refute error, banish superstition, and explain literary symbols and imagery.Significantly, the preface and the book's concluding paragraph affirm the Church's role as a source of truth, and the book carries the approval of the archbishop of Paris.

A pioneer in the field of astrophysics, Johann Zöllner (1834-1882) was a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Leipzig and an associate of the Royal Astronomical Society. Zöllner was best known for his work on astronomical photometry and spectrum analysis, on which he published widely. He invented the astronomical photometer used for measuring stellar magnitudes. He was also interested in optical illusions: the 'Zöllner illusion' consists of straight parallel lines which appear to be unparallel. This book, published in German in 1878-1879 and translated into English by Charles C. Massey in London in 1880, exemplifies the shift in Zöllner's interests in later life: he became involved in the public debate surrounding the scientific veracity of spiritualism. Here Zöllner describes his observations of experiments conducted by the medium Henry Slade in his own home.

First published in 1869, this book describes the spiritualist activity of Scottish-born Daniel Dunglas Home (1833-86), who emerged as a medium in the United States in the wake of the Fox sisters' alleged 'spirit rappings' in the mid-nineteenth century. Written by the Irish journalist and politician Windham Thomas Wyndham-Quin, Lord Adare (1841-1926), who befriended Home in 1867, the book records Adare's observations of seventy-eight spiritualist sittings over two years, and reports verbatim the conversations between Home and the spirits with whom he was allegedly in contact. Adare also describes Home's supernatural interactions away from the formal setting of a seance. The accounts were originally written as private reports to Adare's father, the landowner and archeologist Edwin Wyndham-Quin, third Earl of Dunraven. Dunraven was deeply interested in spiritualist activity and wrote the introduction to this work, which also includes a classification of all spiritualist phenomena.

Eduard von Hartmann (1842-1906) had expected to follow his father's military career, but an injury forced him to reassess his ambitions. Torn between music and philosophy, he settled on the latter and in 1869 published his first book, The Philosophy of the Unconscious, which proved a great success. Published in 1885 as the period saw an enormous rise in the popularity of spiritualism, this work attempts to give psychological explanations for all occult phenomena, including subjective delusions as well as 'objective' physical manifestations, without resorting to hypotheses of ghosts, demons or trickery. C. C. Massey, a leading theosophist and translator of the work, wrote, 'Now for the first time, a man of commanding intellectual position has dealt fairly by us as an opponent.' This work will appeal to anyone with an interest in the growth of spiritualism and the philosophical and metaphysical debates of the nineteenth century.

The journalist and author W. H. Davenport Adams (1828-91) established a reputation for himself as a popular science writer, translator and lexicographer. He also wrote several children's books. In this 1889 work, Adams gives a general introduction to alchemy in Europe and traces the development of magic and alchemy in England from the fourteenth century onwards. Initially the disciplines were persecuted by the Church and met with 'the prejudice of the vulgar', languishing throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In Book 1 Adams portrays the English 'magicians' Roger Bacon, whom he considers to have been ahead of his contemporaries; John Dee and William Lilly, astrologists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, respectively; and the English Rosicrucians. Book 2 is a historical account of witchcraft in England and Scotland, from the middle ages to the witch trials of the seventeenth century, and includes a chapter on witchcraft in literature.

'A pioneer of modern anthropology', A. C. Haddon (1855-1940) contributed to the fields of embryology and evolutionary science before turning his interests to human civilisation and its history. In this work, first published in 1910, Haddon makes use of his wide-ranging knowledge of folk rituals and religious beliefs to introduce readers to basic principles of sympathetic magic, divination, talismanic powers and fetishism. A strong believer in the importance of preserving local religious practices and beliefs, Haddon uses the work to document customs from Britain to West Africa, America to Australia. Topics include forms of contagious magic, premised on a mutual influence between objects; amulets and talismans; magical names and words; and divination. In the second portion of the book, devoted to fetishism, Haddon offers an authoritative description of the fetish as a 'habitation, temporary or permanent, of a spiritual being', establishing basic definitions for an important field of cultural research.

Charles Piazzi Smyth (1819-1900) was appointed to the post of Astronomer Royal for Scotland and Regius Professor of Astronomy at Edinburgh University in 1846. He was respected for his practical work, and his Teneriffe, an Astronomer's Experiment (1858) is also reissued in this series. However, this book, first published in 1864, is testimony to the author's interest in 'pyramidology', and although it was so popular in his own lifetime that it was reprinted five times, his eccentric interpretation of the data he had collected by measuring all aspects of the Great Pyramid of Giza damaged his scientific reputation. Smyth was convinced that the British measurement standard of an inch as a basic unit of length was associated with the sacred cubit of the Bible. This measure was supposedly incorporated in the Pyramid, which he claimed was built under divine guidance by the Ancient Israelites, and enshrined scientific information.

Although famous throughout Europe for his mind-reading skills, Stuart C. Cumberland (1857-1922) was a staunch critic of the 'rascality' of some spiritualist practices and their practitioners. He claimed that many of the seances and other events which he had experienced were merely fraudulent money-making impostures. He wrote several books on his life as a thought-reader, in which he also revealed the techniques of fake mediums and psychics. (His That Other World, of 1918, is also reissued in this series.) In this 1888 work, Cumberland narrates his own history and career and describes some of his most memorable seances. One of these took place in the House of Commons, where Cumberland subjected none other than the prime minister at the time, W. E. Gladstone, to having his thoughts read. Their encounter made a great impression on the author, who found Gladstone one of his most remarkable subjects.

Chemist and illusionist John Henry Pepper (1821-1900) lectured at the Royal Polytechnic Institution in London, and incorporated experiments, illusions and magic lanterns into his popular science lectures. In 1862 he developed a stage-show illusion called 'the ghost'. This involved using strategically placed pieces of glass and specific lighting in order to create the illusion of ghostly figures on stage. The illusion was immensely popular in the second half of the nineteenth century - it was visited by royalty, and Pepper's show toured to America, Canada and Australia. In this book, first published in 1890, Pepper details the history of 'the ghost' and the process of carrying out the illusion. 'Pepper's Ghost' is considered to be a precursor to cinema, and this book will be of interest to those studying the development of popular nineteenth-century culture, the 'entertainment industry', and the origins of cinema.

William Newnham (1790-1865) was a general medical practitioner, also qualified as an apothecary, who played a prominent role in his profession and was widely recognised for his skill. His particular medical interest lay within the fields of gynaecology and obstetrics, although he also published several papers on topics including phrenology and human magnetism. This 1830 publication contains a series of essays he had recently written for The Christian Observer. In them, Newnham argues that dreams, visions, apparitions and other apparently spiritual manifestations, whether good or bad, arise from physiological rather than supernatural causes. He provides evidence that the effects on the brain from disease, medications (including nitrous oxide and opium) and trauma, causing 'disturbance of brainular function', can produce such experiences. Anticipating criticism, he insists that the light of science benefits true religion rather than undermining it, contrasting 'real Christianity' with 'superstitious' creeds including Catholicism, Islam and Hinduism.

This is the final book written by the seventeenth-century occultist and alchemist, Thomas Vaughan (1621-66). Originally published under Vaughan's penname, Eugenius Philalethes, in 1655, the work found a new audience in the Rosicrucian circles of the nineteenth century, when William Wynn Westcott, Supreme Magus of the Society, republished the volume in 1896 with a commentary by an associate, S. S. D. D. 'I have read many Alchemical Treatises', its annotator comments, 'but never one of less use to the practical Alchemist than this.' For its later readers, however, the value of the text lay in its insights into the history of hermetic thought rather than its alchemical advice. An important work of occultist philosophy in both its seventeenth- and nineteenth-century contexts, it purports to reveal nothing less than the origin of all life. The paragraph-by-paragraph commentary in turn demonstrates the history of its reception and interpretation.

The political philosopher and writer William Godwin (1756-1836), who was also the husband of writer Mary Wollstonecraft and father of Mary Shelley, was known for his philosophical works and novels. In this work, originally published in 1834, Godwin turns to the issue of the supernatural, and to some of the famous - and sometimes unexpected - people associated with it. He begins by defining some magic practices, such as divination, astrology, and necromancy, giving examples of the latter from the Bible. The remainder of the work consists of brief sketches of people and places involved in the occult world, beginning in the Ancient Middle East and Greece, surveying the Christian era in Europe, and ending with the New England witch trials. In a remarkable work of synthesis, he discusses apparently supernatural episodes in the lives of many historical figures, from Socrates and Virgil to Joan of Arc and James I.

Published in 1874, this collection of reports by the chemist and scientific journalist Sir William Crookes (1832-1919) describes his controversial research into psychic forces. In 1870, Crookes decided that science had a duty to study preternatural phenomena associated with spiritualism, and he spent the next four years carrying out experiments which tested famous mediums including D. D. Home, Kate Fox and Florence Cook. This fascinating work describes Crookes' witnessing of the movement of bodies at a distance, rappings, changes in the weights of bodies, levitation of individuals and automatic writing. Although he was strongly criticised by his contemporaries, Crookes would not be deterred from his psychical research, demonstrating that he thought all natural phenomena worthy of scientific investigation. A great experimentalist, Crookes refused to be bound by tradition and convention, and his story reveals one of the important episodes in the history of the spiritualist movement.

Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin (1805-71) is often called the father of modern conjuring. His name was later adopted by magician and escape artist Harry Houdini, whose highly sceptical expose of Victorian spiritualism is also published in this series. The best-known magician of his time, Robert-Houdin toured France, England and Germany, performed for Queen Victoria, and was sent to French Algeria by Napoleon III to demonstrate the perceived superiority of French magic to the local shamans. This book, originally published in 1868, is devoted primarily to coin and card tricks, but Robert-Houdin also describes many other magical tricks and includes a history of conjuring. In 1877 the book appeared in this English translation by Louis Hoffmann (1839-1919). Hoffmann (real name Angelo John Lewis, a barrister) had published his own guide to magic in 1876, and both books caused controversy for revealing the secrets of stage magicians in such unprecedented detail.

Born Alphonse Louis Constant, French magician Eliphas Levi (1810-75) wrote prolifically on the occult sciences. His hugely popular Dogme et rituel de la haute magie, published in French in 1854, was translated into English by Arthur Edward Waite (1857-1942) in 1896. In the present work, Waite condenses Levi's two volumes into one. The first part outlines Levi's theory of the doctrine of transcendent magic and discusses a wide range of magical phenomena, including bewitchment, Kabbalah and alchemy. The second part focuses on the practical aspects of ritual and ceremony in Western occult philosophy. Waite, a mystic and occult historian, edited several alchemical and magical texts for publication in the wake of the mid-nineteenth century occult revival. His translation is accompanied by a preface outlining Levi's colourful career. The original two-volume French edition is also reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection.

Anna Mary Howitt Watts (1824-1884) was a painter and writer, and the daughter of William Howitt (1792-1879), one of the subjects of this double biography. Justinus Kerner (1786-1862) was an inspiration to both Howitt and his daughter. A German poet, trained as a doctor, he became famous both as a patron of the arts and an early pioneer of the spiritualist movement. This account of Kerner's life is full of vivid descriptions of ghostly apparitions and supernatural events. Howitt, a popular writer and radical local politician who was raised a Quaker, became increasingly attracted to spiritualism after the deaths of two of his sons. Watts' book, written after her father's death and first published in 1883, is more than a memoir of a beloved parent. As a record of the beliefs of the spiritualists it provides essential information about early Victorian attitudes to this world and beyond.

Chauncy Hare Townshend (1798-1868), poet and collector, was a well-connected friend of Robert Southey and Charles Dickens. He became fascinated with Mesmerism while in Germany and went on to popularise it in England. This book, first published in 1840, was his passionate defence of Mesmerism. Developed in the late eighteenth century by Franz Mesmer, Mesmerism was a kind of hypnosis based on the theory of animal magnetism. With its spiritual associations and uncanny effects, it was an extremely controversial topic in the nineteenth century and its practitioners were widely considered fraudsters. Townshend describes in detail the mental states Mesmerism induces, which he identifies as similar to a state of sleepwalking. Perhaps most fascinating are the eye-witness accounts describing experiments carried out by Townshend on the continent, in which he hypnotised his subjects into feeling his own sensations and knowing things they could not know.

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) is best known for his poetry and for historical novels such as Ivanhoe and Rob Roy, but he also had a lifelong fascination with witchcraft and the occult. Following a spell of ill-health, Scott was encouraged by his son-in-law, publisher J. G. Lockhart, to put together a volume examining the causes of paranormal phenomena. This collection of letters, first published in 1830, is notable for both its scope (examining social, cultural, medical and psychological factors in peoples' paranormal experiences) and its clear, rational standpoint. Scott explores the influence of Christianity on evolving views of what is classified as 'witchcraft' or 'evil', and he explains the many (often innocuous) meanings of the word 'witch'. Written with palpable enthusiasm and from a strikingly modern perspective, this volume explores a range of topics including fairies, elves and fortune-telling as well as inquisitions and witch trials.

In 1888 the University of Pennsylvania sponsored the first ever American archaeological expedition to Mesopotamia, to Nippur, about 160 km south of Baghdad. Among the artefacts discovered were the remains of over 100 inscribed bowls from the early centuries CE. Some contain unidentifiable writing, but most carry spiral inscriptions of exorcism texts in one of three Aramaic dialects and scripts: that of the Babylonian Talmud, a Syriac dialect, and Mandaic. This book, first published in 1913, contains transcriptions and annotated translations of texts from forty of the bowls, together with an inscription found on a human skull, and 41 illustrations. A substantial introduction sets the material in the broader context of Hellenistic magic. The author traces the bowl magic back to ancient Babylonian sorcery, and explores its relations with cuneiform religious texts and Greek magical papyri, emphasising its culturally eclectic character and the diversity of its users.

First published in 1888, this biography relates the remarkable life of Scottish-born medium Daniel Dunglas Home (1833-1886). Descended from a long line of reputed seers, Home was easily the most well known and sought-after of the spiritualists of his day. Famous for his ability to levitate and communicate with the deceased, Home carved out an illustrious career for himself, conducting seances for Napoleon III, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (whose husband Robert lampooned Home as 'Mr Sludge the Medium'), Tolstoy, and Queen Sophia of the Netherlands among others. Written by Home's second wife, Julie de Gloumeline, this book seeks to set the celebrated medium apart from his contemporaries by outlining the truth and purpose behind Home's supernatural exploits. D. D. Home provides a fascinating and personal insight into an enigmatic figure who, in the twenty-five years he worked as a medium, was never exposed as a fraud.

Intended as a supplement to Sir Walter Scott's 1830 Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, this 1832 publication seeks to explain and expose the science behind the alleged 'magic' of spiritualists and conjurors. David Brewster (1781-1868), a Scottish natural philosopher and historian of science, was highly regarded in his lifetime but has since faded into obscurity. Penned at the request of Scott, Brewster's friend and neighbour, this book follows an epistolary structure, consisting of thirteen letters each addressing and exposing different aspects of the alleged supernatural activity, in keeping with the format of Scott's publication. Brewster's subject matter includes optics, magic lanterns, automata, alchemy, fire-breathing, spontaneous combustion, spectral illusions and various other phenomena. In each case he carefully outlines how this 'magic' is created with optical illusion, narcotic drugs, gas inhalation, and chemical tricks. The book offers an intriguing insight into nineteenth-century attitudes towards the supernatural.

Although Stuart Cumberland (1857-1922) was renowned for his mind-reading skills, he was a staunch critic of related spiritualist practices. He claimed that many seances and other events that he had seen confirmed his suspicions that 'the chief basis of the movement was money-making'. So he decided to launch his own campaign to uncover the truth about the methods of spirit-mediums, and in this work, published in 1918, he explains many mediums' tricks, such as making tables move using special silk thread, not spiritual aid. He lectured about the subject in places ranging from Cambridge University to Lambeth Palace, and attributed his own success to his ability to read muscle movement, rather than any supernatural communication. Providing a fascinating picture of the changing spiritualist movement, this work illustrates the extent of the social and political influence of some spiritualists, but also how credibility about their practices was being challenged.

In this 1917 publication English physicist Sir William Fletcher Barrett (1844-1925) purports to rescue psychical research from the scorn of his colleagues and provide indisputable evidence for the existence of psychic phenomena. A successful scientist (he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society and was honoured with a knighthood), Barrett was better known for his psychical work and his attempts to reconcile it with his scientific pursuits. Certain that the human spirit could linger after bodily death, in this book Barrett examines a wide range of spiritualist practices including levitation, spirit photography, mediumship, automatic writing, the ouija board, clairvoyance, and telepathy, carefully considering the evidence for each phenomenon in the hope that they will in time be recognised as scientifically established facts. This book is a much-revised edition of Barrett's 1908 publication On the Threshold of a New World of Thought, republished to include more 'trustworthy' evidence.

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535) was a controversial Renaissance theologian and writer who published work on the occult and magic, and his writings influenced later leading literary figures such as Goethe. Agrippa, although born near Cologne, spent his life travelling around Europe, to Italy, Spain, France, England, Switzerland and the Netherlands. He wrote his De occulta philosophia in 1511 (though it was not published until twenty years later) and its three volumes are the best-known works on Renaissance magic, though Agrippa tried to distance himself from the occult side and instead stress more metaphysical aspects. In Henri Cornelis Agrippa, published in 1911, writer Joseph Orsier examines Agrippa's life. The first part of the work discusses Agrippa's travels, writings, thoughts and controversies. The second part is a translation collection of seventy of his letters, dating from 1509 to 1532, to and from a range of correspondents, including Erasmus.

German-born Sanskritist and philologist Max Muller (1823-1900) was a pioneer in the field of comparative mythology and religion. Settling in England in 1846, during his distinguished career he served as Taylorian professor of modern European languages, curator of the Bodleian Library and Oxford's first professor of comparative philology. The content of this book was originally presented as part of a lecture series delivered at the University of Glasgow in 1893, where Muller was serving as the Gifford Lecturer. Muller's aim in presenting these lectures was to show that the only way of properly understanding religious phenomena was through utilising historical method. The three volumes preceding this one focused on 'physical religion', 'natural religion' and 'anthropological religion'; this fourth book, on theosophy, contains fifteen lectures, the subject matter ranging from Alexandrian Christianity and the eschatology of Plato to the journey of the soul after death.

James N. Pinkerton published Sleep and its Phenomena in 1839. The essay is a revision of a lecture first given to the medical faculty of the University of Edinburgh. In this work Pinkerton introduces his theory of types of sleep, analysing sleep in terms of its completeness. He follows with discussions of dreaming, sleepwalking, spectral illusions, sleep-time apparitions, hibernation and the sleep of plants, analysing each sleep-time activity in terms of sleep type. This work was one of the first to link the activities of the facial muscles and the nervous system during sleep with dreamed movements, thoughts and emotions. It was a pioneering work of nineteenth-century medical research into sleep and helped to establish Pinkerton's reputation. He is still well known today as one of the first to find a correspondence between sleep-actions and dreamed thoughts. It is an important work of Victorian medical research.

The philosopher and literary author Isaac Taylor (1787-1865) published this book anonymously in 1836. The work is a development of two earlier works: Saturday Evening (1832) and Natural History of Enthusiasm (1829), all three attempts to provide a philosophy to deal with the major problems and spiritual questions of the day. The popularity of Physical Theory led to Taylor relinquishing his previous anonymity. The work is a religious and philosophically speculative exploration of the possible paths of knowledge to information regarding the future existence of human beings. Taylor believed that knowledge of the human physical constitution could be used to conjecture information about the modes of human eternal life and eternity's scheme of moral duties. The work was very popular among contemporaries and offers today an important insight into Victorian intellectual life. It is a rich source for historians of nineteenth-century religious philosophy.

The distinguished surgeon and medical writer Walter Cooper Dendy (1794-1871) published On the Phenomena of Dreams in 1832. The work carefully traces the history of western thought and philosophy on the topic of dreams and visions, examining authors from Aristotle to Hume and Pyrrho to Berkeley, and maps the development of poetical and literary traditions on the subject. Dendy's work then moves to an attempt to find a medical explanation and material source for dreams, psychic visions and illusions. Dendy presents his concept of a ghost as an intense idea, and attempts to classify and categorise different types of psychic experiences. Dendy's work was a pioneering attempt to find scientific solutions to supernatural phenomena. Very popular at the time, it now offers an invaluable insight into the Victorian fascination with the occult and the desire to approach the supernatural with reason and the rigours of scientific investigation.

Horace Bushnell (1802-1876) was a minister in the Congregational church. A prolific author, his Christian Nurture established his reputation, and some scholars have asserted the work's singular importance to American Protestant Liberalism and Christian education in the nineteenth century. This work, first published in 1858, exemplifies Bushnell's importance and influence in nineteenth-century Protestantism and discusses 'the great question of the age'. Controversially defining the supernatural as extant outside the realm of the divine, Bushnell argues that the human is an example of the supernatural, human freedom which makes this so: man acts both within and without the chain of cause and effect; mankind is part of both nature and supernature. Controversially, then, Bushnell places the supernatural within 'the one system of God'. For theologians and scholars of religious history and the history of ideas, this work will be of great interest.

Published just a year before his seminal Le Sommeil et les Reves (1861), this book by French scholar L. -F. -Alfred Maury (1817-1892) examines the complex history of occult philosophy. A librarian by profession, Maury was widely published in geography, archaeology, medicine, law, psychology and bibliography as well as history, and was a well-known figure in Parisian intellectual circles. In this 1860 publication Maury considers the relationship between science and magic, purporting to demonstrate how people have been 'elevated' from the darkness of supernatural belief into the light of modern science. The book is divided into two parts. The first examines the traditions of magic and astrology in the ancient civilisations of Persia, Greece, Babylon, Rome, and the Orient, and the influence of Christianity on magic. The latter half includes an investigation of possible explanations, considering magic in relation to drugs, dreams, hallucinations, somnambulism, and the imagination.