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 DYSTOPIA:
A N AT U RA L HIST O R Y
Dystopia: A Natural
History
A Study of Modern Despotism,
Its Antecedents, and
Its Literary Diffractions

GREGORY CLAEYS

1
 3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Gregory Claeys 2017
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2017
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016943110
ISBN 978–0–19–878568–2
Printed in Great Britain by
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 In Memoriam,
István Hont (1947–2013)
an abundance of warmth and light
 Acknowledgements

Readers may recall Orwell’s observation that ‘Writing a book is a horrid, exhausting
struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness’ (‘Why I Write’, 1946). Thankfully
I have had some skilled intellectual physicians to help me through the moments
when I thought I might succumb to this one. In particular, a very special thanks is
due to Artur Blaim, Michael Levin, Lyman Tower Sargent, and Dan Stone, who
made invaluable comments on parts of the manuscript and have greatly improved
the final version. I am also grateful to Antonis Balasopoulos; Mosab Bajaber; David
Bradshaw; Brentford FC and its fans for helping me see how the beautiful game is
like war but so much better; Justin Champion; Janice Cullen; Zsolt Czigányik; José
Maria Perez Fernandez; Justyna Galant; Diletta Gari; Sam Hirst; Anna Hont;
Thomas Horan; Jessie Hronesova; Mark Jendrysik; Marta Komsta; Tom Moylan;
Duncan Kelly; Andrew Milner; the Museum for the Political History of Russia,
St Petersburg; Patrick Parrinder; Mark Preslar; Emine Şentürk; James Somper;
Sandy Stelts at Penn State University Library; Henry Tam; Fátima Vieira; Luisa
Hodgkinson and the interlibrary loan team at Royal Holloway, University
of London; the London Library; the British Library; and the Orwell Archive,
University College London, especially Mandy Wise. In Cambodia I am particularly
grateful to the staff of the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam),
including its director, Youk Chhang, and Deputy Director, Eng Kok-Thay, and
Dalin Lorn; and at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, Keo Lundi. Parts of the
argument have been presented at conferences or seminars at Budapest, Cambridge,
Durham, Granada, Grand Forks, Krakow, Lisbon, London, Montreal, Newcastle,
Oxford, Pittsburgh, Prague, Sewanee, the European University, St Petersburg, São
Paulo, the University of Sussex, and Timişoara. I am grateful to audiences for their
feedback, and especially to members of the Utopian Studies Society (Europe) and
the Society for Utopian Studies (North America). The support of the Leverhulme
Trust was indispensable. I am thankful to the Salem Press for permission to reprint
passages from ‘Huxley and Bolshevism’, in M. Keith Booker, ed., Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World: New Critical Essays (Salem Press, 2014), pp. 91–107. At Oxford
University Press I am grateful to Cathryn Steele and Hollie Thomas. Elizabeth
Stone was an astute and helpful copy-editor. As always, my wife and family have
been supportive and endlessly patient. Finally, thanks to Christopher Duggan,
whose life was cut short tragically before the book was finished, for twenty years of
friendship and encouragement.
 Table of Contents

List of Illustrations xi

P A R T I . T H E TH E O R Y A N D P R E - H I S T O R Y
OF DYSTO PIA
1. Rethinking the Political Dystopia: The Group and the Crowd 3
Introduction: Rethinking Dystopia 3
Group Psychology and Dystopia 18

2. Monstrosity and the Origin of Dystopian Space 58

Introduction: Teratology and Dystopia 58
The King of Dystopia: Satan’s Triumphant March 79

PART II. TO TALITARIAN ISM A N D DYST OPIA

3. The Caveman’s Century: The Development of
Totalitarianism from Jacobinism to Stalinism 113
Introduction 113
The Concept of Totalitarianism 114
The Prototype: Year II of the French Revolution
(September 1793–July 1794) 118
Bolshevik Terror and the Gulag System 128

4. Totalitarianism from Hitler to Pol Pot 177

Nazi Germany and the ‘Final Solution’ 177
China 212
‘Abolish Everything Old’: Cambodia under Pol Pot 219
Eradicating the ‘Other’: Explaining Totalitarian Genocide 236

P A R T I I I. T H E L I T E RA R Y R E V O L T
AGAINST COLLECTIVISM
Introduction to Part III 269

5. Mechanism, Collectivism, and Humanity: The Origins

of Dystopian Literature, 1810–1945 273
The Literary Dystopia: Problems of Definition 273
From Satire to Anti-Jacobin Dystopia in Britain 291
Great Britain: Social Darwinism, Eugenics, Revolution, and Mechanical
Civilization, 1870–1914 294
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x Table of Contents
The USA, 1880–1914: Bellamy and His Critics 316
Britain and the USA: Dystopia Turns towards Science Fiction 333
Anti-Bolshevism and Anti-Fascism, 1918–1940 337
Conclusion: The Contours of the Literary Dystopia, 1792–1945 355

6. The Huxleyan Conundrum: Brave New World as Anti-Utopia 357

Introduction: The Road to Brave New World 357
The Book 361
Science and Brave New World 365
Huxley and Bolshevism 369
Huxley and Hedonism: High vs Low Utilitarianism 375
Huxley after Brave New World 378
Conclusion 388

7. Vaporizing the Soviet Myth: Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four 390

Introduction 390
Prelude 392
Spain and Socialism 398
World War II and Socialism 402
‘Notes on Nationalism’ and Group Identity 405
Animal Farm 407
Nineteen Eighty-Four 409
‘I do not understand WHY’: Interpreting Nineteen Eighty-Four 421
Nineteen Eighty-Four and Group Identity 437
Conclusion 445

8. The Post-Totalitarian Dystopia, 1950–2015 447

Introduction 447
The Leading Texts 448
Thematic Synopsis 488
Appendix: A Few Words on Film 491
Conclusion to Part III 494

Conclusion: Dystopia in the Twenty-First Century 497

Bibliography 503
Index 543
 List of Illustrations
2.1. Indian monsters c.1550. © Mary Evans Picture Library 10038329. 64
2.2. The Deluge (1633 engraving). © INTERFOTO/Sammlung Rauch/Mary
Evans 10446662. 66
2.3. St George killing a dragon. © Mary Evans Picture Library 10067761. 68
2.4. Hell, Hieronymus Bosch, c.1500. © Mary Evans/Interfoto Agentur 10226987. 85
2.5. Witches kiss the Devil’s ass. © Mary Evans Picture Library 10017826. 97
2.6. Inquisition: questioning. © Mary Evans Picture Library 10037552. 101
3.1. Crowd tramples bourgeois, 1919. © Mary Evans Picture Library 10012144. 131
3.2. ‘Death to the Bourgeoisie’, Sergey Petrovich Melgounov, The Red Terror in
Russia ( J. M. Dent, 1926). 135
3.3. Leon Trotsky as enemy, 1928. © Mary Evans Picture Library 10081705. 140
3.4. Keep Your Tongue Behind the Teeth! (1941 Soviet poster). 168
4.1. ‘Jews Not Wanted’. © Everett Collection/Mary Evans 11000408. 189
4.2. Gas chamber, Majdanek concentration camp. © Gregory Claeys. 205
4.3. Gas chamber complex (destroyed) Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
© Gregory Claeys. 205
4.4. Tuol Sleng prisoners. © Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. 230
5.1. Ruins of London, Gustav Doré, 1870. © Mary Evans Picture
Library 10022798. 312
5.2. Robot from Čapek play, 1929. © Mary Evans Picture Library 10006107. 336
 PART I

T H E TH E O R Y A N D
PRE-HISTORY OF DYSTOPIA
 1
Rethinking the Political Dystopia
The Group and the Crowd

We do not believe, we are afraid.

(Eskimo shaman)1
[F]ear, my good friends, fear is the very basis and foundation of modern life. Fear
of the much touted technology which, while it raises our standard of living,
increases the probability of our violently dying. Fear of the science which takes
away with one hand even more than what it so profusely gives with the other.
Fear of the demonstrably fatal institutions for which, in our suicidal loyalty, we
are ready to kill and die. Fear of the Great Men whom we have raised, by popular
acclaim, to a power which they use, inevitably, to murder and enslave us. Fear of
the War we don’t want and yet do everything we can to bring about.
(Aldous Huxley, Ape and Essence, 1949)
Hell is other people.
(Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit, 1944)

I NT RO DU C T I O N: RE T H I NKI N G D Y S TOP I A

The word ‘dystopia’ evokes disturbing images. We recall ancient myths of the
Flood, that universal inundation induced by Divine wrath, and of the Apocalypse
of Judgement Day. We see landscapes defined by ruin, death, destruction. We
see swollen corpses, derelict buildings, submerged monuments, decaying cities,
wastelands, the rubble of collapsed civilizations. We see cataclysm, war, lawless-
ness, disorder, pain, and suffering. Mountains of uncollected rubbish tower over
abandoned cars. Flies buzz over animal carcases. Useless banknotes flutter in the
wind. Our symbols of species power stand starkly useless: decay is universal.
Or: we see miles of barbed wire broken by guard towers topped with machine
guns and searchlights; the deathstrips and minefields; the snarling guard dogs; the
eyes of the haunted gaunt faces of the skeletal half-dead staring out of deep sockets
aghast at their ill-deserved fate; corpses piled up like logs, grimacing skulls frozen in
the last moment of madness.

1 Quoted in Stephen Wilson, The Magical Universe: Everyday Ritual and Magic in Pre-Modern

Europe (Hambledon, 2000), p. xvi.

4 Dystopia: A Natural History

Or: grim streets dominated by giant portraits of the Leader witness lengthy
queues for food of weary ill-clad workers as revolutionary announcements of norms
exceeded in the production plan blare out from a thousand loudspeakers.
Or: a proliferation of mushroom clouds indicates humanity’s end through
nuclear war.
Or: roaring planes fly overhead dropping bombs which burst among us, as men
in gas masks stride over mangled corpses to stick bayonets into us or incinerate us
with flamethrowers.
Or: human society resembles an ant heap in which mammoth cities are domin-
ated by vast teeming slums and immense skyscrapers which are separated by walls
from elite compounds guarded by menacing security forces.
Now the black and white newsreels give way to colour: dystopia’s is blood-red.
Violent explosions interspersed by screams of terror deafen us and rock the earth: this
is the sound of dystopia. Burning flesh, cordite, sweat, vomit, urine, excrement,
rotting garbage: this is the stench of dystopia. But what really reeks is stark naked
barbarism: the perfumed scents of civility are but a distant memory. We have reverted
to savagery, animality, monstrosity. And then, perhaps mercifully, the end comes.
* * * *
Visions of the apocalypse are at least as old as 1000 BC, when, in Norman Cohn’s
rendering, the triumph of chaos over order defined the Egyptian ‘Prophecies of
Neferti’, which foretold of the complete breakdown of society. The ‘great no longer
rule the land’, the ‘slaves will be exalted’. Crime, robbery, and murder are rampant.
The desert encroaches. The Nile turns blood-red by the corpses floating in it.2 The
Greek term, apokalypsis, unveiling or uncovering, indicates the revelation of man-
kind’s destiny.3 Many variations on it come down to us through the ages. Once
they were the preserve of millennialists who heralded the final punishment of sin
and the dawning of a new Divine era. Now such nightmarish scenarios occupy an
increasingly prominent position in our vocabulary and our mental world, but
without the hopeful outcome promised by theology.
Most of what we associate with ‘dystopia’ is thus a modern phenomenon,
wedded to secular pessimism. The word is derived from two Greek words, dus and
topos, meaning a diseased, bad, faulty, or unfavourable place. It first probably
appeared in the mid-eighteenth century, but was not widely used until the twentieth.
It has some awkward cousins, like Jeremy Bentham’s ‘cacotopia’, or ‘evil place’. In
common parlance, the word functions as the opposite of ‘utopia’, the bad place versus
what we imagine to be the good place, the secular version of paradise.
Yet it is readily apparent that such a stark juxtaposition leaves much to be desired.
Utopianism, in Lyman Tower Sargent’s well-known description, has three ‘faces’, the

2 Norman Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos, and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith (Yale

University Press, 1993), pp. 19–20; The ‘Admonitions of Ipu-Wer’, as described in Robert Gnuse,
‘Ancient Near Eastern Millennialism’, in Catherine Wessinger, ed., The Oxford Handbook of
Millennialism (Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 236–7.
3 Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come, p. 163.
 Rethinking the Political Dystopia 5

literary, communal, and ideological.4 But we do not normally speak of dystopianism,

and we recognize no dystopian ideologies as such. The noun dystopia is often used
synonymously with dystopian literature. However, as Ruth Levitas points out,
‘Dystopias are not necessarily fictional in form; neither predictions of the nuclear
winter nor fears of the consequences of the destruction of the rain forests, the holes in
the ozone layer, the greenhouse effect and the potential melting of the polar ice caps
are primarily the material of fiction.’5 The adjective dystopian implies fearful futures
where chaos and ruin prevail. So there are non-literary, empirical usages of the term.
Most commonly, from both literary and historical viewpoints, dystopia is
identified with the ‘failed utopia’ of twentieth-century totalitarianism, treated in
Part II.6 Here it typically means a regime defined by extreme coercion, inequality,
imprisonment, and slavery. Often this is described as some concept of collectivism
run wild, though some include conformist tendencies in liberal societies which
encourage egalitarian repression and intolerance.7 Many authors, however, simply
equate ‘totalitarianism’ with ‘dystopia’. Thus, to Steven Rosefielde, Stalinism was
simply an ‘infernal dystopia’, and dystopia itself, particularly ‘the communist
dystopia’, is defined as: ‘The antithesis of Utopia. A hellish state brought about
by attempts to construct unrealizable ideal systems.’8
This indicates three main, if often interrelated, forms of the concept: the political
dystopia; the environmental dystopia; and finally, the technological dystopia, where
science and technology ultimately threaten to dominate or destroy humanity.
Amongst these types, it is the totalitarian political dystopia which is chiefly
associated with the failure of utopian aspirations, and which has received the
greatest historical attention. This will accordingly be our chief concern in this
book. The other two types will come into sharper focus in Part III.
We can see from the outset, however, that each of these types of dystopia might
be understood as independently aligned to ideas of utopia in some way, perhaps in
earlier periods, or as running parallel at a number of levels. One modern incarna-
tion of the political dystopia, for instance, might be conceived as originating in part
in the same year, 1516, that Thomas More’s Utopia appeared, when the first
‘ghetto’ for Jews was created in Venice (the word being derived from an area
where waste was stored). The conquest of the New World—adverted to by

4 Lyman Tower Sargent, ‘The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited’, Utopian Studies, 5 (1994), 1–37.
5 Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (Syracuse University Press, 1990), p. 195.
6 Thus Michael Geyer, for instance, writes of the ‘utopian’ and ‘dystopian’ dimensions of Nazi

ideology (Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick, Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared
(Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 36), while Maurice Meissner writes of the ‘utopian and
dystopian elements’ in Maoism: Marxism, Maoism and Utopianism (University of Wisconsin Press,
1982), pp. 184–211, and contrasts ‘Mao’s utopia’ to ‘Mao’s dystopia’ (p. 209). Norman M. Naimark
writes of Hitler’s ‘racial dystopia’ (Stalin’s Genocides (Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 5).
7 An early instance of this trend is noted in David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (Yale University

Press, 1950).
8 Steven Rosefielde, Red Holocaust (Routledge, 2010), pp. 14, 246, 257. Here the term is

specifically linked to the idea of an ‘anti-utopia’, and described as first being denominated a dystopia
by John Stuart Mill (p. 16). Pol Pot’s regime is also described as a ‘dystopia’ (p. 118), and his methods,
indeed, as ‘dystopicide’, meaning ‘the unpremeditated, but nonetheless culpable consequence of
blindly trying to “storm heaven” ’ (p. 119).
6 Dystopia: A Natural History

More—simultaneously held out the promise of remaking one part of humanity

while enslaving another. Or a utopia of opulence and consumption might be
understood as generating a dystopia of scarcity and environmental degradation.
But the relation between utopia and dystopia may be more intimate still.
Modern readers who peer closely into More’s paradigmatic text discover much
about which to be alarmed. Like the snake in the Garden of Eden, dystopian
elements seem to lurk within Utopia. The country, we are informed, was founded
by civilizing its barbarians and then artificially isolating a peninsula by transforming
it into a fortified island.9 Utopia remains an imperial power. When overpopulated
it sends out colonies, seizing the uncultivated land of indigenous peoples, and
driving out ‘any who resist them’.10 Well-paid mercenaries keep enemies at bay, the
Utopians’ much-vaunted contempt for gold, silver, and jewels here standing starkly
in contrast with the great value their wealth has when expended on slaying their
enemies. Utopia’s peace and plenitude now seem to rest upon war, empire, and the
ruthless suppression of others, or in other words, their dystopia.
Then there is the virtuous society of Utopia itself. Here we discover that suppressing
vice requires extraordinary regulation and surveillance. In Utopia there are
no wine bars, no pubs, no whorehouses. There are no opportunities for wickedness, no
hiding places; there is no scope for conspiring in secret. They are always under the
observation of their fellow citizens and have no choice but either to work as hard as the
next person, or else engage in respectable pastimes.11
We cannot travel outside our neighbourhood without passports. We must wear
the same plain clothes. We must exchange our houses every ten years. We cannot
avoid labour. We all go to bed at the same time (8 p.m.), and never, under penalty
of slavery, with someone else’s wife or husband. We have religious freedom, but we
cannot deny that the soul dies with the body, since ‘but for the fear of punishment,
they would have nothing but contempt for the laws and customs of society’.12 In
More’s time, for much of the population, given the plenty and security on offer,
such restraints would not have seemed overly unreasonable. For modern readers,
however, Utopia appears to rely upon relentless transparency, the repression of
variety, and the curtailment of privacy. Utopia provides security: but at what price?
In both its external and internal relations, indeed, it seems perilously dystopian.
Such a conclusion might be fortified by examining selectively the tradition which
follows More on these points. This often portrays societies where (in the words of
the eighteenth-century French communist Étienne-Gabriel Morelly), ‘it would be
almost impossible for man to be depraved, or wicked’.13 This is achieved both
through institutions and mores, which underpin the common life.14 The passions

9 It is commonly described as isolated, ‘a lonely island somewhere in the vast expanse of the ocean’

(Gerhard Ritter, The Corrupting Influence of Power (Tower Bridge Publications, 1952), p. 70): the
reverse is the case.
10 Thomas More, Utopia, ed. David Wootton (Hackett Publishing Co., 1999), p. 103.
11 Ibid., p. 108. 12 Ibid., p. 147.
13 Quoted in Frank Manuel, ed., French Utopias (Schocken Books, 1971), p. 100.
14 In Morelly’s case, all property aside from that required for daily needs, pleasure, and work was to

be public, and all citizens were to be maintained and employed by the public, contributing according to
their strength, talents, and age.
 Rethinking the Political Dystopia 7

are regulated and inequalities of wealth and distinction are minimized. Needs,
vanity, and emulation are restrained, often by prizing equality and holding riches in
contempt. The desire for public power is curbed. Marriage and sexual intercourse
are often controlled: in Tommaso Campanella’s The City of the Sun (1623), the first
great literary utopia after More’s, relations are forbidden to men before the age of
twenty-one and women before nineteen. Communal child-rearing is normal; for
Campanella this commences at age two. Greater simplicity of life, ‘living according
to nature’, is often a result: the desire for simplicity and purity are closely related.
People become more alike in appearance, opinion, and outlook than they often
have been. Unity, order, and homogeneity thus prevail at the cost of individuality
and diversity. This model, as J. C. Davis demonstrates, dominated early modern
utopianism.15 And utopian homogeneity remains a familiar theme well into the
twentieth century.
Given these considerations, it is not unreasonable to take as our starting point
here the hypothesis that utopia and dystopia evidently share more in common than
is often supposed. Indeed, they might be twins, the progeny of the same parents.
Insofar as this proves to be the case, my linkage of both here will be uncomfortably
close for some readers. Yet we should not mistake this argument for the assertion
that all utopias are, or tend to produce, dystopias. Those who defend this propos-
ition will find that their association here is not nearly close enough. For we have
only to acknowledge the existence of thousands of successful intentional commu-
nities in which a cooperative ethos predominates and where harmony without
coercion is the rule to set aside such an assertion. Here the individual’s submersion
in the group is consensual (though this concept is not unproblematic). It results not
in enslavement but voluntary submission to group norms. Harmony is achieved
without, in the Millian sense, harming others.16
Readers whose interest is chiefly literary may not in any case share these
anxieties. They will rightly assume that the most common use of ‘dystopia’ is
synonymous with the ‘dystopian novel’, which portrays an extremely negative or
evil fictional state usually dominated by fear. Here George Orwell’s great work,
Nineteen Eighty-Four, remains paradigmatic. This is treated in Part III. But
Orwell’s presence can be detected throughout this book. One of his chief mes-
sages, the value of a dialogue between history and literature, is central to my effort
here to synthesize the literary and historical approaches to the concept. Part I also
takes up another central Orwellian theme, the threat to individuals posed by
groups, in demonstrating the centrality to dystopia of approaches drawn from
group psychology, sociology, and the history of religion. These are presented here
with a brief overview of the prehistory of the modern dystopia.
* * * *
To place groups at the centre of our analysis as such is to recognize the proximity of
some types of utopia to some types of dystopia. Both utopia and dystopia conceive

15 J. C. Davis, Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing 1516–1700

(Cambridge University Press, 1981).

16 On Mill’s definition of harm see my Mill and Paternalism (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
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8 Dystopia: A Natural History

of ideal harmonious groups which privilege close connections between individuals

and the unity and interdependence they exhibit. A key question here is how
inclusive or exclusive this exchange of benefits is. Typically, the collectivist dystopia
assumes two main forms: the internal, where coercion pervades the privileged main
group; and the external, where coercion defines the relationship to outsiders as a
means of upholding the main group, who are, however, free of most of the repression
inflicted upon outsiders. Stalinism, we will see, typifies the first type, and More’s
Utopia the second. In both cases, however, equality and plenty are enjoyed by some
groups at the expense of others.
The crucial question here is how many are involved on each side. The more
universal the system of benefits, the more utopian the society. A glib observer might
posit that a utopia was a society surrounded by a wall designed to keep others out,
and a dystopia one intended to keep its inhabitants in. Yet it is an abuse of language
to propose that societies where 51 per cent of the population live a privileged life by
oppressing the other 49 per cent are ‘dystopias’. Most societies, on the basis of
gender alone, let alone the accumulation of property, would have to be called
dystopian as a consequence. Many majorities are willing to sacrifice minorities for
their own well-being. But we can certainly see the case for treating some dystopias
as utopias of the equal few based upon the oppression of the many.
Another way of approaching this question is to privilege the human relationships
at work. How well people get along is a key marker of their anxiety or sense of well-
being. We may be at ease with one another in a markedly hierarchical society,
secure in our places if prosperity and tolerance prevail. Alternatively, we may be
anxious, paranoid, and fearful in an egalitarian society where nonconformity is
suppressed. So we might portray the utopia/dystopia relationship in terms of a
spectrum of anxiety, with relative peace, friendship, and the absence of fear at one
end, matched by anxiety, paranoia, and alienation on the other.
Yet it is not impossible that these extremes still share common features. Both
utopias and dystopias normally, though not universally, exhibit a collectivist ethos.
People sacrifice their individual interest to the common good. Social solidarity
trumps selfish individualism. In the utopian case this ‘enhanced sociability’, as it is
termed here, is voluntary and freely engaged in.17 It is regarded as an acceptable
price to pay for avoiding unrest and extreme inequality. In dystopia, however, these
bonds more often appear as what Leszek Kołakowski calls ‘compulsory solidarity’.
Here they are coerced, and even contingent upon the enslavement of others.18 This
coercion fundamentally erodes all that is truly valuable in solidarity. And yet, to
confuse matters further, both types also intermingle in various complex ways.
At its bleakest, then, the collectivist dystopia usually exhibits an extreme ethos of
sociability centring on a fervent devotion to the common good, which is, in reality,
despotic rather than consensual. In striving constantly to render each sufficiently
self-sacrificing, this despotism generates a fear which penetrates deep into the

17 See my ‘News from Somewhere: Enhanced Sociability and the Composite Definition of Utopia

and Dystopia’, History, 98 (2013), 145–73.

18 Leszek Kołakowski. The Death of Utopia Reconsidered (Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 237.
 Rethinking the Political Dystopia 9

individual personality, and which dominates everyday life, sometimes for decades
or longer. It is exacerbated by perceived failures to achieve the norms of self-
sacrifice. These processes, in turn, are often linked with dystopia’s obsession with
enemies, and its determination to eliminate them, or at least neutralize their threat,
while simultaneously creating them anew as a means of justifying the power of the
regime. This, at least, is the hypothesis with which we can commence.
* * * *
In the twentieth century, such a condition of universalized fear was certainly
intensified by the immense destructiveness of overly rapid modernization, or so
several prominent examples in Part II—the USSR, China, Cambodia—suggest.
But as a psychological state, dystopia may also be conceived to be humanity’s starting
point. We may view ourselves as a mentally fragile species today. But many of us have
far less to fear than our ancestors. This book is subtitled ‘a natural history’ in part
because it is often concerned with the emotional substrata of behaviour, and how the
relationship between a few key emotions and the types of society we live in evolves. It
suggests that we collectively progress from natural to socially compounded forms of
fear. At first all the natural world is populated by threatening gods, monstrous beings,
and malevolent spirits; hence our attention in Chapter 2 to monsters, the primordial
symbols of evil both without and within. Many of these gradually disappear. Others
are reinvented, or rediscovered as inner monstrosity, or replaced in later modernity by
fear of the science and technology we have created, of the recreation of our selves in
the image of our machines, and of their eventual domination over us. But the fear
remains constant, if fluctuating, even if its objects vary.
Anthropology is thus a logical starting point here. Our ‘natural’, original psychic
state is one of constant mental anxiety. A materially defined world is broadly
predictable. A magical one is fraught with contingency. At our peril we fail to respect
and propitiate the powers which lie in forests, dells, and springs, or to safeguard from
evil spirits, by blessings, amulets, and sacrifices, our seed, crops, animals, and houses.
In Ernest Crawley’s words, ‘in the thought of many peoples man’s whole environ-
ment is more or less full of the agencies or influences of evil’.19 To Lucien Lévy-Bruhl,
‘primitives’ attribute causation to the operation of unseen powers.20 Plants, trees,
stones, animals are all conceived as ‘endued with mystic attributes’ and linked by a
single spiritual principle. The differentiation between humans and animals is slight,
and many animals are assumed to take human form, and vice versa. Animism, the
belief in spirit beings, is pervasive in the early stages of humanity. ‘Primitives’
have no sense of the ‘miraculous’ or the ‘impossible’. Illnesses, death, and injuries
are never ‘natural’, and are often blamed on witchcraft, or on the displeasure of
the dead, who are usually conceived as still living in ethereal form (as they also are
in More’s Utopia).

19 Ernest Crawley, The Mystic Rose: A Study of Primitive Marriage and of Primitive Thought in Its

Bearing on Marriage (Watts & Co., 1932), p. 14.

20 Those whose mental world is dominated by magical assumptions would be more suitable, for this

would include Europeans and other ‘civilized’ peoples until quite recently.
10 Dystopia: A Natural History

A far wider range of behaviour, Bronisław Malinowski insists, is thus regarded as

‘sacred’ and ‘hedged round with prohibitions and special rules of behaviour’ than in
later modernity. All of life’s great events—birth, adolescence, marriage, death—are
ritualized initiations (into and out of groups). Eating, worshipping, marriage,
menstruation, sexual intercourse, pregnancy, childbirth, illness, cultivating food,
dying, and being buried have usually been surrounded by restrictions and rituals of
many kinds.21 So much of daily life is ritualized that ‘the social’ and ‘the religious’
become virtually identical. Thus, the ‘savage . . . perpetually lives in a world of
mysticism and ritualism’.22
Here the power of faith, the wish to keep all this glued together, or ‘clean’, not
tainted by evil, represents an immense emotional investment. Our life is frequently
structured around and always contingent on it, for we cannot bear chaos. We are
persistently challenged by threats of death, injury, illness, and affliction. Witch
doctors are particular sources of terror in most early societies.23 Anxiety about the
purification required to avoid or free oneself from magic spells is ever-present.24
Many of the Dayaks of Borneo, for instance, appear to live ‘in perpetual dread of
what we call fate’, believing themselves to be ‘constantly subjected to malevolent
influences’. Most rites are an attempt to neutralize them.25 The knowledge that one
has inadvertently violated taboo has killed many—as if struck dead on the spot.26
This is not a happy existence. Entire societies may thus serve as dystopian proto-
types of paranoia and aggression. The unfortunate Dobu Island people of New
Guinea described by Ruth Benedict, poor and with few natural resources, are a
study in relentless, ill-tempered hostility. Singular in their obsessive paranoia, fear
of witchcraft, and almost complete lack of trust for one another, they are (or were)
almost uniformly ‘lawless and treacherous’. Recent converts from cannibalism,
their aversion to laughter is, or was, notable.27

Other Prototypes of Dystopia: Militarized Societies, Slavery,

Despotism, Prisons, and Diseased Spaces
Besides the more malevolent types of early society, five other models pertinent to
the modern collectivist political dystopia merit mention. The first are highly
militarized or war-centred societies, like ancient Sparta. According to its famous

21 Freud’s great concern here was in the proximity of taboo prohibitions and neurosis: Totem and

Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics (Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1960), p. 26.
22 Bronisław Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays (Free Press, 1948), pp. 1, 7.
23 Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think (George Allen & Unwin, 1926), pp. 65, 263–301;

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, The ‘Soul’ of the Primitive (George Allen & Unwin, 1928), pp. 232–60, 254.
24 Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Primitives and the Supernatural (George Allen & Unwin, 1936), pp. 5, 20–1,

227–65; Lévy-Bruhl, The ‘Soul’ of the Primitive, pp. 15–58.

25 Lévy-Bruhl, Primitives and the Supernatural, p. 21.
26 As Freud instances: Totem and Taboo, p. 21.
27 Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (1934; Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952), pp. 94–124, here 94,

120. For a revised assessment, see Susanne Kuehling, Dobu: Ethics of Exchange on a Massim Island,
Papua New Guinea (University of Hawaii Press, 2005).
 Rethinking the Political Dystopia 11

founder, Lycurgus, Sparta’s citizens were nominally equal, dining together, dis-
daining trade and luxury, gold and silver (like Utopia’s inhabitants), and using only
iron money. Their raison d’être was conquest, the earliest form of organized sadism.
According to Plutarch, ‘All their education was directed toward prompt obedience
to authority, stout endurance of hardship, and victory or death in battle.’28 Feeble
infants were abandoned to die on the hillsides. Children were raised in common.
Young males were given only one cloak a year to wear, slept on beds of rushes, and
were taught to steal food. They were also subjected to annual ritual public beatings,
and were forbidden to practise inferior trades, cultivation being left to their slaves,
the helots. Foreigners were banned from the country. The numbers involved here
were remarkably small, perhaps 9,000 citizens with an army of 6,000 in Lycurgus’
time.29 The time frame of Sparta’s greatness (fifth–third century BC) was relatively
brief. But Spartan equality provided a vital precedent for Plato, More, Harrington,
Rousseau, Robespierre, and many other later writers.
A second prototype for the collectivist dystopia is slavery. Like war, slavery has
been ubiquitous throughout history. The ancient Chinese, Indians, Babylonians,
Assyrians, Persians, Egyptians, Greeks (c.15–40 per cent of the population), Romans
(30–40 per cent in the early Christian era), and Nordic and Teutonic peoples all had
large slave populations. Millions of slaves were created in the Spanish, Portuguese,
Dutch, French and British conquest of the ‘New World’, and almost as quickly killed
off. (In the Spanish Americas, for example, as many as half the slaves working the
Potosí silver mines died during an average week’s work.)30 Perhaps 20 million
Africans—as much as a fifth of the continent’s population—were seized to cultivate
the southern American Spanish and Portuguese and northern American British
colonies, and then the United States prior to the Civil War (when about one-third
of the South’s population were slaves). East Africa was another active slaving region.
In the late nineteenth century, the immense African Congo, where as many as
10 million may have died, was held as a private rubber-plantation slave fiefdom by
the Belgian King, Leopold. Here, extreme brutality, beating, and severing hands as
punishment were common, as was the taking of hostages to secure rubber supplies.
Nazi Germany and the USSR under Stalin, as well as several other modern regimes,
can be described as slave states, even as consciously reintroducing the principle.31
‘State slavery’ has thus been seen as ‘one of the characteristic features of 20th-century
totalitarianism’.32
Thirdly, political despotisms, a lamentably common form of regime, are key
antecedents for totalitarian dictatorship. Their governing principle is usually de-
scribed as fear or terror.33 Aristotle first proposed the juxtaposition of regimes based

28 Plutarch, Moralia (15 vols, William Heinemann, 1968), vol. 3, p. 237.

29 W. G. Forrest, A History of Sparta 950–152 BC (Hutchinson, 1968), p. 45.
30 Sheldon Watts, Epidemics and History: Disease, Power and Imperialism (Yale University Press,

1997), p. 91.
31 Eugene Victor Walter, Terror and Resistance: A Study of Political Violence (Oxford University

Press, 1969), p. 5.
32 Jules Monnerot, Sociology of Communism (George Allen & Unwin, 1953), p. 13.
33 See Corey Robin, Fear: The History of a Political Idea (Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 27–160.
12 Dystopia: A Natural History

on friendship to those rooted in fear and estrangement which we will adopt here.
He recognized that, ‘in tyranny there is little or no friendship’, and that despotism
involved inverting friendship and adopting ‘every means for making every subject
as much a stranger as possible to every other’.34 In the early modern period,
Machiavelli advised princes that it was better to be feared than loved. Hobbes
described the use of fear as an instrument of control as well as of social bonding.
He also viewed the state of nature—here another dystopian model—as one of
‘continual fear and danger of violent death’, which vindicated the necessity of
despotism to keep the peace.35 Bodin believed the threat of violence underlay the
masses’ subservience to the privileged.36 Montesquieu was the first prominent
eighteenth-century theorist to define terror as the ruling principle of despotism.37 In
the later nineteenth century, Herbert Spencer would conclude that fear of the living
was the root of all political control, and fear of the dead of all religious control.38
Classical despotism was the rule of a single tyrant. The prototype of modern
despotism, we will see in Chapter 3, came when, under the ‘Terror’ of Robespierre
and Saint-Just in 1793–4, the word ‘terror’ came to be understood as embodying a
legitimate instrument of the defence of the general will or popular sovereignty, of
the many rather than the few. The terror of ‘the people’ came quickly to be seen as
more all-encompassing and psychologically demanding than that of the single
autocrat. But it is also much more justifiable, resistance to the vast majority seeming
more perverse, unreasonable, and insulting than resistance to a tyrant. Many would
thus associate ‘popular’ terror with totalitarianism. But a soft form of an analogous
pressure to conform seemed also to emerge naturally in democracies. Alexis de
Tocqueville in Democracy in America (1836–40) thus saw the mass of individuals in
a democracy as succumbing to a ‘tyranny of the majority’ in matters of opinion in
particular.39 John Stuart Mill agreed that, ‘even in what people do for pleasure,
conformity is the first thing thought of; they like in crowds’.40 Here it was not the
threat of punishment by the state but rather a constant but moderate anxiety, mostly
respecting the disapproving opinions of others, which provided a social rudder. The
extreme and moderate forms of fear thus oscillate across the modern period. More
recently, we seem to be swinging back in the former direction; Joanna Bourke claims
that fear has become ‘the emotion through which public life is administered’.41 The
language of the ‘War on Terror’ constantly brings this message home to us.

34 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1161b; Robert Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century (John

Murray, 1999), p. 82.

35 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), pt 1, chs 10, 13.
36 Arno J. Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton

University Press, 2000), p. 99.

37 Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (Hafner Publishing Co., 1949), p. 81.
38 Herbert Spencer, Principles of Sociology (3 vols, D. Appleton & Co., 1905), vol. 1, p. 437.
39 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (2 vols, Longmans, Green & Co., 1875), vol. 1,

pp. 262–5.
40 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859; 3rd edn, Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green,

1864), p. 110.
41 Joanna Bourke, Fear: A Cultural History (Virago, 2005), p. x.
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However, in order to confirm my assurance of the non-intervention
of the devil in the phenomena of mediums, I desired to add another
experiment, which follows:
1419. As the devil speaks all languages, according to the ritual,
even those unknown, to see whether the occult power or spirit
which caused me to write possessed this satanic attribute, which,
being so, would prove the intervention of the devil in the
performance of mediums, I asked the invisible agent if it would
cause the Lord’s prayer to be written in several languages, and was
answered in the affirmative. Yielding my hand with a pen to the
motive power, the Pater was written in two ways, which the same
power, also by writing, said was in Valaque and in Russian. Then
requesting the same to be written in French, Spanish, Italian, and
Latin, it was immediately done; when requesting it to be written in
English and German, was answered it could not be done. Why not? I
inquired. Because you neither speak nor write those two languages,
which is necessary.
1420. In what languages then, I asked, are you able to make me
write? In the languages which I spoke on earth, as the Valaque and
Russian, and those which you speak. The Pater, thus written, I had
the honour to present it personally to Monseigneur the Archbishop of
Paris, by his request. Having mentioned this, I was advised to
request my spirit friend to write something in Valaque, and have it
submitted to some one acquainted with that language, in order to
determine the fact of its being so; which proposal I willingly
accepted.
1421. But, returned to my house, the idea occurred to me to make
an experiment to control my familiar spirit myself. I wrote on a piece
of paper a phrase in French, and took a separate copy of it on
another piece of paper. I read this phrase to my spirit, and requested
him to render it in Valaque. The spirit, having made some lines, told
me by writing that the translation was already made. I requested
him to do the same with it in Spanish, Italian, and Latin, and it was
done. Requesting him further to write the same in English, he
replied it could not be done, as I did not speak that language.
Allowing a few minutes to pass, I took the copy of the phrase, and
requested the spirit to do the same with it that he had done with the
original. The spirit having caused me to write, as he professed, the
same phrase in the same languages as he had caused me to write it
in previously, I hastened to compare the two translations; but what
was my surprise when finding the Spanish, Italian, and Latin
translations of the copy like those of the original; I found the
Valaque translation of the original and that of the copy not at all
alike!
1422. “Convinced, then, that my spirit did not understand the
Valaque, which proved to me, according to the ritual, that it was not
a devil, (un démon,) but that notwithstanding he had deceived me, I
gave him a severe reprimand, treating him as an infamous cheat,
and driving him from my presence. At this juncture, my hand was
caused to tremble excessively, which terminated by writing in large
characters: ‘I am the devil, and you are a bad preacher that seeks to
find out the secrets of God!’ Very well, I said; your proclamation in
large letters that you are the devil, is no reason why I should believe
it. The devil, according to the ritual, speaks all languages, and you
do not speak the Valaque nor English, and therefore you are not the
devil. If I am a bad preacher, that does not concern you. It is God
who will judge me, and I submit to his holy will. Could I see you as I
feel you, I would fix you well; but as it is, I decline any further
correspondence with you.
1423. “Scarcely had I expressed these words, when my hand,
being influenced, wrote as follows: ‘Pardon! pardon! I am not the
devil. If I said so, it was to frighten you, because you continued to
plague me with your questions; but I see you are a man that fears
nothing. You are not a bad preacher, but a great thinker. Continue
then to experiment with me, and I will always tell you the truth!’
1424. “Very well, I pardon you, and request you to say, without
deceiving me, what languages you do speak? ‘I speak no other
languages than those which you speak, and if I did otherwise, it was
for amusement.’ Then what are the languages which the spirits
speak? ‘Those of the communing person, and no others.’[33] And this
ended the meeting.
1425. “Wishing still to test what had been said to me by my spirit,
I went to the house of a writing medium, like myself, and begged
him to try some experiments in writing. In the midst of our
experiments, I wrote the following words on a small piece of paper
in Spanish: Como té llamos? and without making their signification
known to the medium in French, requested him to read them to the
spirit friend. This was done, but the spirit was silent. The medium,
however, insisting on an answer, was impressed by the spirit to write
the word malheur, (misfortune.) The reply not agreeing with the
question, I told the medium to say to his spirit that he had badly
replied. Then the spirit made the medium write as follows: ‘If I have
not complied with your request, it is because I do not understand
that language.’
1426. As the medium did not understand what had been read to
the spirit, which in French would mean, Comment vous appelez-
vous? (What is your name?) I perceived that if the spirit did not
reply to the Spanish, it was because the medium neither spoke nor
understood that tongue; which agreed with what my spirit had told
me. Then I requested the medium to ask his spirit to make me write.
On the affirmative response of the spirit, I took the pen, and
addressing the same question to him: Como te llamos? he replied in
Spanish—Benito. Answer me in French—Benoit. In Latin—
Benedictus.
1427. This experiment confirming what my spirit had told me, that
the spirits could produce only the language of those with whom they
communed, was a new proof for me of the non-intervention of the
devil; seeing, according to the ritual, that he is master of all
languages, and that mediums only write those they understand, and
have previously learnt.[34] If M. de Mirville desires to make some
such experiments with me, it will afford me great pleasure to do so.
 1428. Nota bene: What merits particular regard in the information
received from my spirit friend as to the language used by spirits in
communing with men is, that the same was said one hundred and
five years since by the ecstatic Swedenborg. See No. 236 of his
Treatise on Heaven and Hell, by Le Boys des Guays.
1429. This will suffice for the present for M. de Mirville. It remains
for him to explain the facts we have reported, and to reconcile them
with his Pneumatology: in expectation I proceed to notice the
Supernatural in General of M. de Gasparin.”

Second Part.

1430. “All the prodigies of the mesmeric subjects of clairvoyants,

the sorcery, haunting spirits, apparitions, visions, &c., owe their
origin, according to M. de Gasparin, to nervous excitement, fluidic
action, and sometimes are hallucinations. As I do not design here to
make a critical analysis of M. de Gasparin’s work, not considering
myself capable, and leaving this honour to those who are in some
scientific line, I design merely occupying myself with some facts
which refer personally to me, and which appear to me to oppose
some points in the doctrine of M. de Gasparin in his table-turning, or
Supernatural in General, as already noticed in the introduction to the
monograph, and I commence with the subject of ecstasy.
1431. “Speaking of ecstatics, M. de Gasparin explains himself as
follows: ‘As to their intellectual faculties, they are capable in those
cases of prodigious development. The ecstatics declare themselves
that they have two souls; that a voice foreign to their own causes
them to speak; that they suddenly receive ideas entirely unknown to
them, and terms of expression entirely strange to them. It happens
even that the peasant accustomed to patois, speaks French, and
that illiterate men express themselves in Latin. Now, have we
something here that is supernatural? Certainly not; it is a
physiological state, or often the treasures of reminiscence, which the
subject possessed, though in fact not aware of it. The peasant may
have known how to speak French; she may not have known it, and
still it may all have been engraved on the deep recesses of the
memory, where nothing is ever really effaced. Exalted or sick, she
finds herself in possession of the French language. A merchant, who
has scarcely passed the first classes, and who never knew Latin,
finds himself the possessor of the Latin language, and embarrasses
his doctor, whom he addresses in that tongue.’
1432. “According to this ecstatic theory of M. de Gasparin, it
follows that the ideas expressed by the subjects, and which were
unknown to them in their normal state, are nothing more than
reminiscences. I admit, with M. de Gasparin, that reminiscence is
only the return of the soul to the recollection of a thing or an idea,
which, though engraven on the memory, was forgotten. This return,
however, does not happen without some remarks, which, from the
recollection of some ideas or incidents, conduct the mind to the
recollection of what was forgotten.
1433. “I am a medium: according to the received opinion, a
medium is a waking magnetic subject. Now, every magnetic subject
is in a degree ecstatic; therefore I, being a medium, am ecstatic.
Well, I being ecstatic, take a pencil, and concentrating myself in that
state, request the occult power that moves my hand without my
volition to cause it to write, if it is possible, something on the
creation. The last word is scarcely pronounced when my hand
proceeds to write, without interruption, something true or false, on
the creation, which surprises me.
1434. “This interview terminates, and desiring to know if these
ideas on the creation come from reminiscences, I seek to discover if
they could have been engraven on my memory, either from reading
or hearing them related. With this view I commenced by reading
religious and philosophic books that would be likely to discuss the
question, but could find nothing like what I had written. I consulted
the public libraries, and they contained nothing on the creation
similar to what my hand had communicated. Not a professor,
philosopher, naturalist, physiologist, theologian, or historian, with
whom I had ever had any intercourse, could recollect any thing of
the kind.
1435. “After this, I reason as follows: having examined all the
means by which what was written by my hand on the creation could
have been impressed on my memory, nothing appears to warrant
that belief; therefore, these notions on the creation cannot be
regarded as reminiscences.
1436. “But it is not enough, we have said, that in reminiscence,
are necessary, which, by the recollection of an object, idea, or
notion, we are led to the further recollection of something forgotten.
That this should take place, some time is required, however little it
may be. However, in the case related, not a moment was required,
and this breaks up the required process, in order to respond to the
theory of M. de Gasparin.
1437. “Now, if these ideas on the creation are not reminiscences—
if they do not emanate from the devil, who, agreeably to our author,
is an entire stranger to these phenomena—if it is not the soul of a
deceased person that controlled my hand, as M. de Gasparin, being
a Protestant, does not believe in returning spirits nor in communion
with the dead, who then caused to be written by my hand such
strange things, without my knowledge or assistance? And I beg M.
de Gasparin to be so good as to explain this phenomenon, which
appears to be in opposition with his theory on the prodigies of
ecstatic subjects. Should M. de Gasparin desire to see what I have
written, he can be gratified. But what will he say, when having
requested my spirit to reply in writing on some subject familiar to my
mind, he is unable to do it, or replies contrary to my thoughts and
convictions? Can this be called reminiscence? I pass now to consider
mesmerism.
1438. “In speaking on this subject, the Supernatural of M. de
Gasparin says, ‘The clairvoyance of mesmerism appears in general to
have only the character of an echo. Its wonders are those of
reminiscence or perception of images and thoughts, which occupy
the intelligence of the person with whom the clairvoyant is in
rapport. This appears to be the balance-sheet of animal magnetism,
and it has changed but little since its origin.’ (Tome ii. page 311.)
1439. “According to what M. de Gasparin has just told us, it
follows, that when a clairvoyant tells us in his sleep that he sees the
spirit of a deceased person, and gives us an exact description of his
person, we are not to regard it as the deceased person that the
clairvoyant sees, but his image impressed on the memory of that
clairvoyant from acquaintance with the defunct when living, or in the
memory of the consulting visitor in rapport; so that the clairvoyant,
in these apparitions of the dead, is governed only by reminiscence or
the reflection of images or of thoughts. Now, having allowed M. de
Gasparin to speak, I desire in my turn to speak also.
1440. “In January, 1848, a work was published, entitled Les
Arcanes de la Vie Future Révelée: The Arcana of a Future Life
Revealed. My attention being attracted by the title of this work, it
was procured, and proved to be nothing but a collection of the
apparitions of deceased persons to clairvoyants.
1441. “On so delicate a question, I thought it best to consult the
Scriptures, to see whether the appearance of the dead to the living
was admitted by the sacred volumes. I opened, then, the Bible, and
the first passage that met my eye was the chap. xxvii. of the first
book of Kings, where it said that Samuel had appeared to the witch
of Endor, and that, by the intermediation of the latter, the prophet
spoke to Samuel; an apparition on which were sketched those
reported by M. Cahagnet in his Arcana. I saw afterward in the
second book of Maccabees, the high-priest Onias and the prophet
Jeremiah appearing to Judas Maccabeus. I see in St. Matthew, chap.
xvii., the apparition of Moses and Elias to Peter, John, and James on
the Tabor. Finally, I read, in chap. xxviii. of the said St. Matthew, that
at the death of our Saviour Jesus Christ, many of the dead appeared
to a great number of the inhabitants of Jerusalem.
1442. “Convinced by the holy volume of the possibility, or rather of
the reality, of the apparition of the dead to the living, I put to myself
this question: Can these apparitions of the dead to the living which,
according to the Bible, took place in former times, be permitted to
occur at the present time? In order to resolve that question, I
desired again to consult the Bible, and found the Holy Spirit, in
Ecclesiastes, holding the following language: ‘What has been, is
what shall be; and what has been done, is what shall be done
again.’
1443. “Then, I said to myself, the appearance of the dead to the
living has taken place, according to the Bible; therefore, agreeably to
the same sacred volume, what has existed at one time may exist at
another. Therefore, there is no reason for rejecting the doctrine of
communion of spirits, God willing, at the present time.
1444. “But it is to be found out whether the apparitions reported
in the Arcana were realities, or were only illusions, so called. The
solution of this problem belongs to me. And with this view I found
myself at the house of the author of the Arcana, where a very
serious discussion took place between him and myself on his work,
which ended with the apparition of my brother Joseph, the third one
that figures in the second volume of the Arcana. In fact, I called for
the apparition of my late brother, and scarcely had a few minutes
passed when the clairvoyant, Adile, told me she saw a gentleman,
and by the description she gave of the stature, costume, character,
the cause and place of the death of the person appearing, I could
not avoid recognising in the said person that of my brother Joseph.
1445. “This apparition had such an effect on me, as to keep me
awake the whole night, seeking to explain the phenomenon. But
becoming fatigued with researches, I thought, as a magnetizer, to be
able to explain these apparitions by the same means as M. de
Gasparin pretends to explain them at the present time. I said to
myself that clairvoyants saw the image of things impressed on the
memory of the persons with whom they were in rapport; the image
of my late brother being engraved on my memory, it was enough for
M. Cahagnet to put me, by an act of his will, in rapport with his
clairvoyant, for the latter to have seen the image of my brother on
the tablets of my memory.
 1446. “With this impression, I wrote to M. Cahagnet, saying to
him, that in spite of my assurance yesterday of the reality of the
apparition of my brother, my knowledge of magnetism had caused
me to-day to think otherwise, and that further evidence would be
necessary to convince me of its reality. M. Cahagnet having
complied, two spirits were evoked; one of my aforesaid brother
Joseph, and the other of Antoinette Carré, the sister of my domestic;
apparitions reported in the second volume of the Arcana, and the
description given by the clairvoyant could not have been more
correct. But as I still entertained the idea that these images could
not be traced by the clairvoyant in my mind, this meeting produced
no results. Curious, however, to know whether other clairvoyants
possessed the same faculty as the clairvoyant of M. Cahagnet in
regard to these apparitions, in the sense I understand them, I
begged M. Lecocq, clockmaker of the navy, living at Argenteuil, to
try some experiments with his sister, a very lucid clairvoyant.
1447. “Five apparitions appeared, of whom three were unknown
to him or his clairvoyant, knowing only their names; and their
identity was determined by the assistance of other persons present
who had known them, as reported from two sources, the letter
written me by M. Lecocq, which M. de Gasparin can see, and the
report made by the former to M. Cahagnet, which was published in
the second volume of the Arcana, page 244. In view of this fact, and
others of the same nature come to my knowledge, my opinion as to
the derivation of appearances and thoughts from the mind of
communicants through the clairvoyant begins to be modified.
However, to be entirely convinced of the reality of these apparitions,
I should require similar facts to be presented to my own eyes.
1448. “Animated by these sentiments, I requested a person in
whom I reposed entire confidence, to give me the name of a
defunct, entirely unknown to me, and that of Joseph Moral was
given. The young clairvoyant of thirteen years, whom I named at the
beginning of this monograph, being one day put to sleep by his
mother at my house, I used the opportunity to request the subject
to invoke the spirit of Joseph Moral. Scarcely had two minutes
elapsed, when the young clairvoyant announced the presence of a
person, whom she described. Having never seen the said Joseph
Moral, and therefore not able to say any thing about him, I was
limited to writing down a faithful account of him as given by the
clairvoyant.
1449. “The meeting ended, I sought the person who had
furnished the name, and reading the description, and much
surprised to find it correct, she said to me, ‘How, sir, were you able
to give such an exact description of M. Joseph Moral, whom you
never knew and have never seen?’
1450. “This fact was for me a positive conviction that clairvoyants,
in their communion with the dead, do not simply see the image of
the deceased in the memory of the consulting party, but that they
see the veritable souls of the departed, as the witch of Endor saw
the soul of Samuel, according to our creed, called the Holy Spirit of
the Ecclesiastic. And should M. de Gasparin desire to know the
person who gave me the name of M. Joseph Moral, it will give me
pleasure to wait on him to her house.
1451. “Here is another fact like the preceding, but still more
interesting. M. de Sarrio, of Alicant, in Spain, a cavalier of Malta,
gave to my brother Joseph, of whom I have already spoken, fifteen
thousand francs, to be distributed among the poor; for which sum
my brother aforesaid gave a receipt to the benevolent donor. At the
death of M. de Sarrio, his brother, the Marquis of Algolfa, becoming
his heir, found this receipt among the papers of the deceased. At the
death of my brother, the Marquis desiring to know if all the amount
had been disbursed, addressed my sister, who became his heir, on
the subject. But my sister, being unacquainted with his affairs, not
having lived with him, submitted to the marquis the schedule of the
deceased; which, showing only the distribution of half the amount,
the other half was claimed by the marquis, and finally made the
subject of a lawsuit.
1452. “My sister, much aggrieved, made me a party to her
troubles, in a letter from Alicant. Discomforted by what had
happened to my sister, I visited my young clairvoyant and demanded
the presence of my brother, who, as she had said, had several times
been with her. He was reported present, and I questioned him in
relation to the money received from M. de Sarrio, reproaching him in
regard to the reversion of the said balance, and the pain he had
caused my sister.
1453. “My brother, astounded at my language, said, that he owed
nothing to anybody; and as to the amount referred to, he had given
it to Father Mario before dying, to be distributed to the poor; to
prove which it would be necessary to call Father Mario. Scarcely had
my brother said this, when the clairvoyant said she saw a man with
my brother, and from the description she gave of him, I thought I
recognised a Capuchin friar, who, interrogated by my brother,
confirmed what he had said.
1454. “Having never heard the name of Father Mario, as I had left
Alicant thirty years before, I requested some particulars of his
country and family, and was told he belonged to St. Vincent du
Respect, one league from Alicant, &c., and I put the following
questions to my sister, by letter: Was your brother Joseph visited in
his sickness by a priest named Father Mario, having a sister at St.
Vincent du Respect? and do you know if this Father Mario is dead?
Following is the answer:
1455. “‘As to Father Mario, he left this country several years since,
and it is not known if he is in France or America. He did not visit our
brother in his last sickness, because he had left some years before.
He has two sisters, one was in Algeria, and the other went with him.’
The letters written by me to my sister on this subject, and her
replies, with other details, were published in the third volume of the
Arcana. The originals are at the disposal of M. de Gasparin, and I
would desire to ask that gentleman one question: Whether the
apparition of Father Mario, as established by the letters of my sister,
confirming the existence of Father Mario, is not a positive fact, and
not an hallucination? Whether, as this monk had never been seen
nor known by me, his image could possibly have been perceived by
the clairvoyant through any impression made upon my mind? Of
course, it could not have been the devil who personated Father
Mario, if M. de Gasparin correctly repudiates the intervention of
Satan in spiritual manifestations.
1456. “Can M. de Gasparin explain to me the appearance of Father
Mario consistently with his Psychological hypothesis in General.
These are the facts which I have at present to oppose to the
Psychological Rationale of M. de Gasparin. At a future time I shall be
prepared to say more to him as well as to M. de Mirville, both on
mesmerism and table-turning, as well as in regard to mediums.
1457. “If the marquis and count do not respond to my call, their
silence will do great injury to the cause of truth, science, and
religion. It is, then, in order not to act against interests so sacred,
that I take pleasure in hoping that these gentlemen will comply with
my wishes.”

Mechanical Movements without Contact. By Mr. Isaac Rhen,

President of the Harmonial Society of Philadelphia.[35]

1458. Among the most distinguished and eloquent advocates of

Spiritualism in Philadelphia, is Mr. Isaac Rehn, President of the
Harmonial Society. It is said that a good countenance is a constant
letter of recommendation. The truth of this adage is conspicuously
realized in the instance of this sensible and agreeable spiritualist.
There is an air of good feeling and sincerity in Mr. Rehn’s tones and
expression, which would cause him to be viewed as a reliable
witness before any honest and intelligent jury.
1459. The fact of mechanical movements being induced without
muscular contact, direct or indirect, is one of the phenomena which
scarcely any one will believe without intuitive proof. It will be seen
that on the third of February, 1854, after I had been engaged in the
investigation of spiritual manifestations for more than two months, I
was still so incredulous as to employ this language to Mr. Holcomb:
“You believe fully that tables move without contact, because you
have seen them thus moved; I am skeptical, because I have not
seen them move without human contact, although I have been at
several circles.”
1460. But one of the forms of this phenomenon, which has excited
the most wonder and incredulity, is that of the carrying of Mr. Henry
Gordon, a medium, through the air without the contact of any
mundane body. Mr. Rehn having been among the witnesses of this
fact, I requested him to give me a statement of it, as well as of
others of a similar kind. Subjoined is a letter, written in consequence
of my request:
Philadelphia, August 1, 1855.
Professor Robert Hare:
1461. Dear Sir: In obedience to your invitation, I will proceed to
make a brief statement of the more prominent facts supporting the
hypothesis, that the spirits of those who once dwelt with us do still
hold intercourse with mortals.
1462. During the early part of the year 1850, some friends of
mine, in whom I had full confidence, stated to me the result of
several intercommunions had with these mysterious agents, by
which I was led to a determination to test the matter for myself;
and, accordingly, on the fifth day of July, in company with a friend, I
visited New York, that being the only accessible point known to us at
which to gain the object of our visit. The Fox family, consisting of
Mrs. Fox, Mrs. Fish, (afterward Mrs. Brown,) Catherine and Margaret
Fox were then at Barnum’s Hotel, giving to the public opportunities
to test the reality or imposture of the so-called spiritual phenomena.
We called at the rooms of the family, and obtained a sitting during
the afternoon of the same day. A dozen or more persons were
present at the sitting, the result of which was the conviction that the
sounds were not a deception on the part of the mediums, but the
result of some occult force and intelligence, independent of the
ladies themselves.
 1463. Without entering into any detail of the incidents of the visit
above referred to, or speculations upon the general subject under
consideration, I propose to cite incidents in my own experience,
which go to establish the truth of spiritual intercourse.
1464. Shortly after the commencement of the sounds in the first
circle instituted in this city, and of which I was, from the first, a
member, demonstrations in the form of movements of tables, chairs,
and other articles commenced. Many times they were very violent,
but in most instances it was necessary that the hands of the
company, and especially those of the medium, should be upon the
table. During the session of a circle, however, held in the afternoon
—and of course in daylight—these movements became unusually
violent. Two card-tables, around which the company sat, having
been drawn to the centre of the floor, were thrown backward and
forward with great force. After moving thus for some minutes, one
of the tables started toward some two or three of the company, and
pressed heavily against them, causing them to recede until they had
reached the wall; the table would then retreat to the centre of the
floor, and, as it were, charge some two or three more, whom in like
manner it would press back. Thus it continued retreating and
attacking, until the entire company were seated around at the sides
of the room.
1465. Having thus cleared the floor in the central part of the
room, the table rose deliberately at the side next to myself, and so
continued until it had turned some distance beyond the point of
equilibrium, with the evident design of performing a revolution.
1466. These and other manifestations were at the time so
wonderful and strange to that part of the company present which
had never before met in a circle, as to cause great terror. One lady
became so much alarmed during the performance of the spirits with
the table as above described, that she screamed aloud, which
interfering with the requisite conditions for success, the table fell
heavily upon the floor, breaking off the top.
 1467. During the rising of the table on the side toward myself, I
reached my hand and pressed upon it, with the view of seeing what
force was employed in raising it. Upon removing my hand, it would
spring up as if it were suspended from the ceiling by an elastic cord.
1468. At the time this phenomenon was occurring, a friend of
mine, Mr. J. A. Cutting, of Boston, Massachusetts, being seated by
my side, found himself moved, as though some one had drawn the
chair on which he was sitting. He then placed his feet upon the front
round of the chair, so as to entirely insulate himself from the floor,
and while in this position he was raised from the floor, chair and all.
This gentleman was quite large and stout, weighing, I should think,
not less than one hundred and seventy pounds.
1469. I would here state particularly and emphatically, that at the
time of these most violent movements of the table, no hands were
upon them, nor was there any physical contact with the objects
moved.
1470. At the same session, a tumbler and pitcher being upon a
washstand in a corner of the room, some five feet distant from any
person present, suddenly a crash was heard in the direction in which
those articles were situated. Upon examination, the tumbler was
found to be broken into several hundred pieces, and what is still
more strange, the pieces were not scattered around, but occupied a
spot which did not exceed eight or ten inches in diameter! It seemed
as if the tumbler had collapsed; even the bottom, thick as it was,
was broken into many pieces. These facts occurred at the house of
Mr. George D. Henck, dentist, in Arch street, who, with the other
persons present on that occasion, will at any time corroborate these
statements.
1471. On another occasion, at the house of Mr. J. Thompson, of
this city, during a sitting, I requested, among other things, that the
spirits would move the table without physical contact. Mrs.
Thompson, Mrs. R-—-, and myself, the only persons in the room,
drew back from the table, and it was then moved some six or eight
inches. In addition to this, it moved from various points, and objects
were retained on the table, when under ordinary circumstances,
from the inclination of the table, they must have fallen off.
1472. At a sitting at my own residence, some two years since,
some very strange phenomena occurred. At the close of the session,
a young man, of slender frame and constitution, (Mr. H. C. Gordon,)
had his hand thrown violently upon the centre of a large dining-
table, weighing not less than eighty or ninety pounds. Some of the
company were requested to raise Mr. Gordon’s hand from the table.
This, after much effort, was accomplished, and, strange to relate,
the table accompanied the hand until it was entirely isolated from
the floor. This was a result which I would have doubted, had it not
come under my own personal observation.
1473. About the same time, a company of persons, whose names,
as far as I can recollect, I shall mention, were seated around two
tables, joined together, in order to furnish room sufficient to seat the
party. The house in which I then lived had two parlours, with folding
doors. The two tables referred to occupied the entire length of the
front parlour, leaving barely room enough for the chairs at the front
end of the room; the other end of the table extended quite to the
folding doors, leaving, of course, no passage on either end. It so
happened that I was seated at that end of the table projecting into
the doorway. The medium, Mr. Gordon, was seated about midway of
the tables, on the left, the other seats being occupied by the rest of
the company.
1474. After a variety of manifestations had occurred, the medium
was raised from his seat by an invisible power, and, after some
apparent resistance on his part, was carried through the doorway
between the parlours, directly over my head, and his head being
bumped along the ceiling, he passed to the farther end of the back
room, in which there was no one beside himself.
1475. Although all the individuals present had not equally good
opportunity of ascertaining the facts in this case, the room having
been somewhat darkened, still his transit over the end of the table
at which I was seated, and the utter impossibility of the medium
passing out in other way than over our heads, his continued
conversation while thus suspended, and his position, as indicated by
the sound, with other facts in the case, leave no reasonable doubt of
the performance of the feat.
1476. There were present on the occasion alluded to, the
following persons, viz.: Aaron Comfort, George D. Henck, Rebecca
Thomas, Naomi Thomas, Marianne Thomas, Esther Henck, Mrs.
Rehn, J. S. Mintzer, M. D., and many others.
Respectfully, I. Rehn.
1477. The truth of the elevation and carriage of this medium aloft,
by invisible agency, from one part of a room to another, does not
depend on the testimony of one set of observers; several other
respectable eye-witnesses have alleged the occurrence of a similar
manifestation in their presence.

Communication from J. M. Kennedy, Esq.

1478. One of our most zealous and eloquent spiritualists, is my

friend, J. M. Kennedy. He has done me the favour, out of many
striking manifestations observed by him, to communicate two, which
are among the most demonstrative of a physical power and mental
intelligence, and which cannot be ascribed to mortal agency. That in
which the magnetic needle was moved by his request, without
physical contact, is, as I conceive, pre-eminently interesting.
Philadelphia, August, 1855.
“Professor Hare:
1479. “Sir: You ask me to state some facts I have witnessed,
which tended to convince my mind that the varied phenomena,
occurring among us, are truly ascribable to the direct action of
disembodied spirits. I will state two matters, remarking, however,
that I have had other and different forms of evidence equally
satisfactory to me.
 1480. “About two years since, I was invited to meet a private
circle to witness physical manifestations. I met them at the house of
a near neighbour, whose lady is a medium. There were about ten
persons present. The circle being seated, the movement of the table
and tipping in answer to questions occurred. I now asked for a
communication with myself, which was assented to. I then inquired
if the spirits would move the table, despite of my power to hold it
still, the company to withdraw from the table, excepting the medium
and myself. The answer was, ‘We will!’ The company all arose, and
removed their chairs; I stood up and took hold of the table,
exercising my best judgment as to the use of my strength in the
pending contest. The medium having placed her hand on the table, I
promptly announced, ‘I am ready.’ At once, the movement of the
table commenced, despite of my efforts to prevent it, and having
slightly pushed me backward, it began to draw me in the opposite
direction. It moved entirely across the room, dragging me along with
it, my feet sliding on the carpet. I resisted the motion of the table
with all the power I could command, and no visible being but myself
had any contact with it, excepting the medium, whose hand (not
hands) was on the top of the table.
1481. “I then said, ‘If I sit on the table, will you throw me off?’
Answer. Yes. I at once sat on it, and the medium placing her hand as
before, I said, ‘I am ready,’ and almost instantaneously the table was
turned over on its side, of course, throwing me off. All this occurred
at a private house; the room was light enough to read small print,
and there was entire freedom to search for trick, machinery, &c.
There was to me evidence of an intelligent, invisible power, giving us
the tests we suggested and asked for, to prove its presence and
power.
1482. “On another occasion, there were present, at the dwelling
of another friend of mine, my friend and his lady, also a lad learning
business with him, and myself, the apprentice lad being the medium.
We sat in the parlour in the afternoon, windows open, room well
lighted.
 1483. “Among other manifestations which occurred was this: I
placed on the centre of the large dining-table a glass tumbler, on
which I placed a compass, the needle being one foot in length. On
the periphery of the compass, the alphabet, as well as the various
points, was painted, and at each letter there was a small metallic pin
permanently fixed. After changing the compass freely, to see if the
needle worked free and true, I left it so placed that the needle
pointed due north, according to the points marked therefor. We then
removed our chairs from the table some distance, no one being in
contact with it. My friend was on the east, his lady on the south, the
medium on the west, and myself on the north side of the table. I
then requested that the spirits would move the compass needle to
such points as we might designate; and naming north, south, east,
west, north-east, south-west, &c., perhaps, in all, nearly twenty
different points, I saw the needle promptly and quickly moved to
each point, as and when designated by me, and there held steadily
for a brief time; and on each occasion, after having been thus held, I
saw it fly back to the north point. I also requested that they (the
spirits) would spell John by moving the needle to the letters, and I
saw the needle promptly moved to the several letters required to
spell the name, stopping at each, tipping and touching the small pin
opposite the letter, and then immediately returning to its position
due north.
1484. “This manifestation I was compelled to regard as clearly
proving the action of an invisible, intelligent power, present with us,
and purporting to be a disembodied spirit once known among us as
a man. There was here also perfect freedom to search for trick,
machinery, &c.; and all these suggested explanations occurred as
clearly to my mind as to men generally, and were duly cared for by
me; for I was then an investigator of the truth of spirit
manifestations, and did not wish to be humbugged. These cases,
however, are but a sample of the chain of testimony that has
satisfied my mind fully on this question.
John M. Kennedy.”
 Communication from Wm. West, Esq.

1485. As respects the communication which follows, I have only to

say that I consider the author as quite reliable, both as to his
capacity to observe accurately, and his disposition to exert that
capacity faithfully. I believe him to have one of those minds which,
like the scale-beam, allows every thing pro or con to have its due
weight.
“Philadelphia, September 6, 1855.
“Professor R. Hare:
1486. “Dear Sir: At our last interview you wished a few facts from
my experience.
1487. “About three years since I lectured in this city against the
spiritual agency of ‘the modern manifestations,’ and advocated a
nerve aura, obedient to the will. At that time I had the power to stop
the physical movements. Subsequently, the agents in these
phenomena refused to obey me. I have since been informed by the
spirits, that they permitted me to control them for a time, in order
ultimately to convince me by depriving me of said power.
1488. “Having read your statement of the message transmitted by
you, through your spirit sister, from Cape May, in July last, to this
city, I have thought that an account of a similar despatch from
myself, through my spirit wife, to a circle in this city, might be
acceptable.
1489. “On the evening of June 22, 1853, while sitting at the table
at Mrs. Long’s, (a writing medium, living at No. 9 Thompson St., New
York), my deceased wife purported to be communicating with me. At
that time I had been appointed, by the spirits, dictator to a circle,
which convened every Wednesday evening at the residence of H. C.
Gordon, 103 North Fifth St., Philadelphia. I inquired of my wife if she
could convey a message to the circle then assembled in Philadelphia.
She answered, ‘I will try.’ I then requested her to take my respects
to the circle, and inform them that I was succeeding admirably in my
investigation, and becoming stronger in the glorious truth of spirit
intercommunion. In the course of seventeen minutes, the spirit
again announced her presence, and informed us she had delivered
the message. On the next Wednesday evening, I was present at the
circle in Philadelphia, and was informed by all the members present
that my communication had been duly received. Another spirit, I was
informed, had been communicating, when an interruption occurred,
and my wife gave her name, and, in substance, the communication,
through the hand of Mr. Gordon.
1490. “There were present about twelve persons of high
respectability, among whom were Mr. and Mrs. Howell, Mr. and Mrs.
Laird, Mr. Aaron Comfort, Mr. William Knapp, &c.
1491. “At Mrs. Long’s there were three or four persons present,
among them, I think, Mr. Ira Davis.
1492. “I am not a medium, therefore the objection of medium
sympathy is out of place.
Yours, &c. W. West.
“George St., 4th house west of Broad.”

Koons’s Establishment.

1493. Among the wonders of Spiritualism, none have excited so

much astonishment as the manifestations which have occurred at
the establishment of Mr. Koons, in Athens county, Ohio. The
phenomena are so extraordinary, as to be difficult to be believed,
even by Spiritualists; and yet there is far more evidence of their
truth than of any of the miracles recorded in Scripture. In no
instance has any of these been attested in due form by known
spectators, and admitting that, in this respect, there is no deficiency,
they were not of a nature to be repeated before a succession of
observers. Those at Koons’s have been repeated, and are still being
repeated. I first heard that there was such an establishment from
my spirit brother, at least fifteen months ago. My spirit friends
confirm the truth of the account received, and sanction the idea that
there is something in the locality which favours mediumship. I
subjoin the narratives of several visitors to the establishment in
question:

Communication from Joseph Hazard, Esq.

1494. Joseph Hazard, Esq., of Narragansett, R. I., is very well

known in Philadelphia, as well as in the vicinity of his residence. Mr.
Hazard accompanied me, in some of my investigating visits, to
spiritual circles, and was present, as I have mentioned, (139,) on the
occasion when I first saw a table move without contact. There is no
doubt but that he is a truthful witness. If he has overrated what he
heard or saw, it must be from the enthusiasm with which he was
inspired.
Athens Co., Ohio, May 4, 1855.
1495. My Dear Sir: I have been here these three days, witnessing
the wonderful spirit manifestations of which we have heard so much.
Allow me to assure you that the published account of them is no
more to the reality than shadow is to substance. No pen can
describe, and if it could, I believe no mind could believe that had not
witnessed them. The spirits talk audibly through a trumpet, not with
good articulation, but as if the process were mechanical. On the
accordeon, however, the language is exquisitely articulated, being
some beautiful air or catch, according to the number of words; the
harmony being perfect, and every note forming a part or whole
word. They frequently move overhead, next the ceiling, with a
rapidity of motion inconceivably astounding, blowing a trumpet with
deafening blasts at times, or beating a tamborine or some other
instrument.
1496. One of the exhibitions represents a spirit hand during this
circuit, beating a tamborine, there being a piece of sand-paper with
phosphorus on it, which they use for illuminating the hand. I saw
them begin the work and complete it. The hand was small and
delicate, and flew all over the room with something like the rapidity
of light on a broken surface of water, frequently snapping the
fingers, and stopping often near to myself and others, that we might
see it to full advantage.
1497. Another hand, which I could not see, touched me, but I
took hold of it. It seemed as if covered with buckskin.
1498. The spirits are now contriving a plan to exhibit in the light.
They say that light destroys the conditions necessary by their
present system, even that evolved by the phosphorus rendering the
operation very difficult.
1499. It appears evident that spirits to be seen with material eyes
are obliged to materialize themselves, or else spiritualize our vision;
and these things have been done repeatedly.
1500. I have not yet seen them write. I have heard them talk and
play on many instruments by the hour. There is a base and tenor
drum on which they perform with such violence, that it is almost
deafening at times, and the whole house resounds till it shakes
throughout. Some of the music is seraphic, especially when they
speak with the harmonicon, when it is more unearthly in its
character than I should have been able to imagine.
1501. The spirit houses are distinct buildings of one room, dark as
Erebus, and rather lonesome places, in this wilderness. I have,
nevertheless, obtained permission to sleep on the floor each night in
one: and during two of those nights I have been favoured with faint
music on the drums. Last night, from the moment I extinguished the
light, drumming was continued throughout the night, accompanied
by a few notes on the violin.
1502. The spirit said last night, “I can’t play a bit,” but,
nevertheless, he played some things delightfully. This was a new
performer, who had sent word he would perform this night, and that
he was a German.
1503. One spirit attempted to sing through the trumpet, but could
not make music; after each failure he would stop a minute, and
then, very good-naturedly, say, “I will try again.” This he did several
times, when he added “What shall I do for you, if I can’t sing?” He
at length took up an accordeon, and succeeded better on that; but I
presume did not suit himself, as he would exclaim every once in a
while, “Oh, dear!” very despondingly.
1504. The effort the spirits make to manifest themselves is very
great, evidently, and the amiability of their demeanour here is
striking. However, I cannot tell you but a small portion of what I
have seen, but believing you would be interested in this sketch, I
have hastily made it, and hope you will excuse the rudeness of it. If
I could not witness again what I have seen during the last seventy-
two hours, I would not part with the consciousness of it for the
whole State of Ohio.
I am very sincerely your friend,
Jos. P. Hazard.
To Prof. Robt. Hare, Philada.

A VISIT TO THE SPIRITUALISTS OF OHIO.

Letter from John Gage.—The Home of the Mediums and the

Haunts of the Spirits.—What they did, said, and wrote.

locality of jonathan koons.—a hilly land.

1505. The house of Mr. Koons is in Milford, Athens county, Ohio,

twenty-five miles south-west of McConnelsville, forty-two miles from
Lancaster, and sixty-seven miles from Columbus.
1506. Persons going from the West can go to Lancaster, which is
the nearest point by railroad, thence down the Hocking River by
stage, which runs daily to Chauncey, thence on foot two miles to
Koons. From the North persons would take the stage at Columbus,
thence to Lancaster by the lines above described. From the East
there are steamboats to McConnelsville, on the Muskingum, both
from Zanesville and Marietta, but from these private carriages must
be got; distance as above, twenty-five miles, but the miles bear no
correspondence to the hours, for on every route they think they do
well if they accomplish two and a half miles an hour. No man ever
travelled over so hilly a country anywhere else, and when you finally
get into Koons’s vicinity, you find the essence of hills personified;
there is no such thing as a level spot large enough to put a house
on.

THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITUALIST.—PRESENCE OF ELECTRICITY.

1507. Koons’s house is located on the south-east angle of a sharp

ridge, some few rods below the edge of the ledge, and where, when
the native trees occupied the ground, the lightning was wont to
make frolic among them; and where it still likes to sport. The stove-
pipe above the spirit room was burst off, and a number of times
during the sitting of the mediums, the electric sparks were seen to
play over the wires of the spirit table.

THE ROOM WHERE THE SPIRITS MANIFEST THEIR POWER.

1508. The spirit room is built of logs, as well as the house in which
Mr. Koons resides; it is situated at the end of his dwelling-house, and
six feet from it. It is twelve by sixteen feet square, and seven feet
high inside; there is a tight floor, and the ceiling above is of rough
boards, laid close edge to edge; in the garret above, there is less
than three feet clear room to the peak of the roof, and up here are
stowed old shoes and other old trumpery. There is a door in the
front, near the centre of the building, and a small window on each
side of it, and one window in the back side; the windows have each
close shutters outside to exclude the light. Across the back end of
the room are three rough board shelves. Two feet in front of these,
stands the spirit table, three feet wide and six feet long. In front of
this, and setting against it, is a common fall-leaf table, about three
and a half feet square, which extends to within one foot of the
stove; and across the back end of the room are two rough benches
for spectators to sit upon, and the front one comes within one foot
of the stove. Then, on each end of the table is room for three or four
chairs, all of which fills the room so full that there is no room to get
around. Mr. Koons’s seat is at the left of the table, where he sits and
plays the fiddle. Nahum, his son, sits on the left of the table; he is a
lad eighteen years old, and the principal medium; and his mother
sits next to him.

THE FURNITURE AND OCCUPANTS.

1509. The spirit table has a frame or rack standing on it, and
extended from one end to the other; this rack sustains a tenor drum
at one end and a brass drum at the other, attached to it by means of
wires; there are wires also passing in various directions about the
rack, and sustaining some small bells, some images of birds cut out
of copper plate, &c.; there are two fiddles, a guitar, banjo,
accordeon, French harp, tin horn, tea bell, triangle, and tamborine,
either hanging up or on the tables. The room will hold eighteen or
twenty persons besides the mediums, and when filled, as it usually
is, there is no room to pass around or between the people and the
table or stove.
1510. Some phosphorus is always placed on the table between
wet sheets of paper, for the exhibition of the hand.

THE MANIFESTATIONS COMMENCE.—THE SPIRITS PLAY ON DRUMS,

HARPS, FRENCH HORNS, ACCORDEONS, AND TAMBORINES.

Koons’s Room, June 19, 1855.

1511. Between eight and nine o’clock, Mr. Koons and his son
Nahum went into the room and closed the doors and shutters, for
the purpose, they said, of inquiring of King, the presiding spirit,
whether he would attend that evening, and what time he would
commence; this they always do, and they were told to get ready in
twenty minutes. We went into the room. Mr. Koons took his seat
with his fiddle and tuned it; I took my seat by his side, and my wife
next to me, our chairs setting close to each other, and the chairs and
benches in the room were all filled. The window-shutters and doors
were now closed, and Mr. Koons put out the light, and immediately
there came a startling blow upon the table that made the room jar,
and almost brought me to my feet. “Well, King,” said Mr. Koons, “you
are here,” and commenced playing a lively tune. As soon as Koons
began to play the fiddle, the bass and tenor drums began to play
with such power and energy as to frighten me; the whole house was
on a jar and vibrating in perfect time with the music; and I know no
mortal hands had hold of the drumsticks, and for the time the
thought was irresistible and constant that spirits controlled them.
After two or three tunes on the drums, the tamborine was taken up
and beat with such violence, that I expected every moment it would
be dashed to pieces, at the same time it was making rapid circles in
the room and dashing from one place to another, and occasionally
thrust almost in my face, so that I was afraid it would hit me. Then
the French harp would be played, and then the drums, harp, and
accordeon altogether; then a strange kind of unearthly noise would
sing in concert with the music. Interspersed between the tunes upon
the harp was talking through the horn, the horn frequently passing
through the room, over and around us at the same time.

THE MANIFESTATIONS CONTINUE, AND THE HEAD SPIRIT WRITES A

COMMUNICATION.

1512. At one time there was talking around the room, so as to

disturb those that were anxious to hear every thing, when suddenly
there came a shriek that was truly terrific; such a sound as Milton
might suppose would be made by an imp of the infernal regions.
The horn then said: “Keep silent.”
1513. Koons talked some time with the voice in the horn and
harp; then asked him to write a communication for me. We then
heard the rattling of paper, and the phosphorus began to show itself,
was taken up in a hand, showed the hand. It then got a pencil, took
some paper, and laid it on a table close before me, and wrote on it,
making the same sound that a pencil always makes in rapid writing;
then made some flourishes on the paper below the writing, threw
down the pencil, handed the paper into my hand, and threw the
phosphorus on the floor in front of Mr. Koons, who took it up and
handed it to the hand again; it then threw it in the corner of the
room, and said, “Good-night,” when Mr. Koons lighted a candle. I
examined the paper that the hand had given me, and found it was
my paper, which I had placed on the table, with a private mark on it.
There were four lines written on it in a good legible hand, and
following the ruled lines on the paper as follows:
1514. “Well, friend, we return our regards to you for the interest
you have manifested in our presence and performance; we now take
our leave. Farewell.
King.”
At Koons’s, Thursday, June 21.
1515. We have much more of a performance than usual, and one
highly satisfactory. Among other things, after they had finished
playing a tune, Mr. Schenick, who sat next to me, and who plays the
violin very well, said, “King, won’t you hand me the other fiddle?” It
was taken up and handed to him over my head, thumbing the
strings as it passed. “Yes,” it said, “I will give you the fiddle; you do
not want the bow, I suppose.” “Oh, yes,” said Schenick, “I want the
bow, too.” The horn said, “Can’t you get along without it?” Schenick
answered, “I can’t play very well with my fingers.” Then the bow
was handed to him, the horn named a tune, and both fiddles began
to play, accompanied by the drums and the accordeon, and a
number of voices sang, something like human voices.
1516. Then the tamborine was played with much spirit, and
passed rapidly around the room. At the same time it made stops in
front of a person, touched them gently on the shoulder, head, or
somewhere else, playing all the while; then passed to another, and
so on. It passed me, and dropped into my wife’s lap. It then flew
over Van Sickle’s head, made a great flourish, lit on it, and began to
press down; and Van says, “Bear down; I can hold you up.” He then
said there was the weight of a large man put on his head; it also
passed to a number of others, and pressed down on their heads. Mr.
Koons then asked him to lay the tamborine on my head, which it did
immediately, bearing down, I should think, with a weight of twenty
pounds: I raised up my hand and took hold of it, when it started up,
and I held on as fast as I dared for fear of breaking the Tamborine;
it then passed around and came to my wife, and pressed gently
against her head. This, she said, she mentally requested it to do, as
she did not want it to bear down hard on her.
1517. Mr. Koons then said, “King, it is very warm here; won’t you
take Mrs. Gage’s fan and fan us?” But before he had finished
speaking, the tamborine began to fly around the room like lightning,
breathing a strong current of wind, and fanning all in the house.
Then the phosphorus was taken up and darted around the room like
flakes of lightning, and a hand began to develop. We talked with the
voice while this process was going on, and tried to urge our spirit
friends to write a communication for us. When the hand was formed,
it passed around the room and shook hands or touched the hands of
many of us. It took hold of my hand, and then of my wife’s. We both
felt the shape of a hand distinctly. It then got some paper and a
pencil, and laying the paper on the table, right in front of us, began
to write with great rapidity; covered one side of the sheet; turned it
over again, wrote five lines, signed it, filled the rest of the page with
flourishes, folded it, and placed it in my wife’s hand. It then flew
around the room, darting from the table up to the ceiling, there
making three or four distinct knocks, and darting down and up,
repeating the knocks a number of times in succession; it then
passed all around the room, stopping and showing the hand to all
that wanted to see it. It then commenced darting around the room
again, and snapping its fingers as loud as a man could do. It then
threw the phosphorus in the back corner of the room, said “Good
night,” and was gone. Mr. Koons then lighted the candle, and my
wife read the paper which was given her by the spirit hand, as
follows:

THE SPIRIT’S LETTER.

1518. To the Friends of this Circle: After various inquiries made at

this circle, we deem it highly necessary to reply by stated reasons,
why our presiding spirit declines to give the names of the spirits
present during our performances at this room:
1519. 1st. Let the inquirer conceive himself entering a
congregated promiscuous assembly of persons, who are all anxiously
awaiting his approach under the discharge of some important and
general mission, in behalf of those in attendance. On entering the
assembly, he looks around upon his anxious inquirers, and sees
them attended with their respective safeguards, such as he never
saw before. In the discharge of his official duty, however, he is
necessitated to exclude himself from the direct view and intercourse
of the safeguards, so as to be brought into a nearer relation to the
corresponding parties. The interlocution accordingly takes place,
when each one in turn begins to interrogate the speaker in his
excluded position, on subjects relating to their excluded guard, of
which the speaker knows but little or nothing, except the cognition
of their presence on his arrival; and in order to acquaint himself with
the circumstances and matters inquired after, so as to answer
correctly, the speaker has to disencumber himself at every inquiry,
and not only so, but would also fail to perform his devolved duty by
submitting himself to the scrutiny and criticism of the corresponding
parties. Which, then, of the two requirements would be of the most
consequence—to discommode the general interest of the assembly
and that of his own official duty, or to omit the latter and attend to
the discharge of a more important and higher duty, by which the
peace and consoling riches would be augmented to the fulness of
their cup?