The ‘Psychical Library’ kept by Edgar Lovell-Smith reveals the manifold strands of thought which combined in the Spiritualist experience. Asian religions, Theosophy, ‘scientific’ spiritualism and even the odd vegetarian cookbook graced its shelves.
Asian religions represented a distinct category of the Library’s collection. This is essentially non-Judeo-Christian, comprising a translation of the Qur’an, writings of Confucius and Laozi, as well as the Hindu Vedas and modern Hindu yogis. Such works had been compiled in the previous century by Max Müller, who wanted an accurate knowledge of the ‘Sacred Books of the East’ among Western audiences. Hinduism in particular was transmitted to the public within Theosophy. The Rubiyyatt of Omar Khayyam, the mystic Muslim poet, also provided fuel for the combination of exotica and fantasy which characterised perceptions of non-Western mysticism.
Helena Blavatsky, the Russia adventuress and founder of the Theosophical Society, together with a latter English disciple, Annie Besant, popularised a hybrid of Hinduism with Western notions of ‘science’ as a solution to the ennui of the modern age. The Library boasts Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled, Key to the Society, The Secret Doctrine, Nightmare Tales, and Voice of the Silence, with Besant’s Superman Men, Man and His Bodies, Thought Power, Thought Forms, Birth & Evolution of the Soul, Talks on Occultism and Evolution of Life and Form. In keeping with Blavatsky’s occasional use of Egyptian mythology, a retelling, Ancient Egyptian Legends, could be found nearby.
Schrenck-Notzing’s Phenomena of Materialisation provided a ‘scientific’ grounding, with other titles of either pseudoscience or philosophy to give intellectual bearings to the Spiritualists: Prof. J.B Rhine has two titles, Extra Sensory Perception and New Frontiers of the Mind [Reach of the Mind]. Sartre’s The Chips are Down and The Psychology of Imagination suggest that by its final days, the Psychical Research Society was drifting into existentialist territory, with its scepticism toward the supernatural, a possible cause for its dissolution. Lovell-Smith’s own Christian Spiritualism is hinted at with the title of a novel, Franz Werfel’s Song of Bernadette, probing the exact nature of Christian mysticism, together with Anglican mystic Evelyn Underhill, whose guide The Cloud of Unknowing remains an important treatise on mysticism to this day.
Vegetarianism, an important part of the health movement in the 1890s, is also touched on. The idea that meat-eating implied violence was blended with Vedic theories of reincarnation and multiple lives. Hence, the repercussions of Spiritualist thought was that it transcended specific rituals; it morphed into lifestyle. With constant reminders of belief in the fabric of everyday life, it must have helped to generate an identity as strong as Lovell-Smith’s Methodist forbears.
By going into a library list, we can enter into the textual web of how a Spiritualist would think; even if a book was not necessarily influential (the title Is Spiritualism of the Devil? must have had few acolytes) they show just what ideas were circulating and what its practitioners were familiar with. This all fed into the potent brew of Spiritualism, and the possibilities of a night under the red lamp.
