Lights and Shadows of Spiritualism

Scottish spiritualist DANIEL DUNGLAS HOME (1833-1886) may well have been the most famous celebrity medium of the Victorian world his hundreds of séances attended by some of the biggest names of his day. Though not everyone was a fan-Robert Brownings 1864 poem Sludge the Medium is a thorough lashing of Home-he remains renowned to this day for never having been exposed as a fraud. Its ironic then that this 1877 book is best remembered for Homes exposing of the false prophets and phony mediums of his day. But that doesnt come until the first third of the work. In Part I Home explores the spiritualism of the worlds oldest civilization from the faiths of the first pagans to the spiritualist beliefs of ancient Greece and Rome. And in Part II he discusses spiritualism in the Jewish and Christian eras including the spiritualism of the Bible and the great seers of recent centuries. Modern paranormal debunker James Randi has noted one instance of the mediums dishonesty: though published under his own name both this book and Homes 1864 autobiography Incidents in My Life were in fact ghostwritten by Homes lawyer W. M. Wilkinson. Whether Home was a fraud or not though this remains a fascinating is biased history of spiritualism.