3

“Soft Warm Hands”

Nineteenth-Century Spiritualist Practices and the Materialization of Touch
michelle morgan

T
hough it is often relegated to secondary status as a basis for knowledge, touch
is a common subject in religious material culture. Jewish religious practices
use a yad—which literally means “hand” in Hebrew—to point to and follow
the scriptural lines of the Torah, ensuring that human flesh does not contaminate
sacred scrolls while still signifying the possibilities of touch and contact. In Muslim,
Hindu, and Kabalistic practices, the hamsa, or Hand of Fatima, works as an amulet to
ward off the evil eye. Images of hands pressed together in prayer are a common Chris-
tian motif, reproduced everywhere from chalkware statuettes to bumper stickers.
Each of these hands points, figuratively and literally, to a sum larger than its parts. If,
as religion historian David Chidester, argues, “religious tactility is ultimately [about]
the capacity to handle the challenges of living in the world, especially the challenges
posed by what cannot be seen or heard,” the hand and its representative correlates are
chief vehicles for representing this touch-based capacity for religious belief and
knowledge.1
In the United States during the nineteenth century, Spiritualism incorporated
hands into its material practices as a means to convey a theory of touch. At its core,
Spiritualism advocated direct contact with the spirit world, making, perhaps, its touch-
centric practices less surprising.2 Still, few scholars have taken Spiritualist touch seri-
ously as a subject of inquiry. In his landmark study of Spiritualism, R. Laurence Moore
claims that its downfall as a religious movement came from its lack of a philosophy.3
Yet Spiritualists did have a philosophy—one not only embedded in belief and prac-
tice or simply a form of spiritual-scientific empiricism but one concerned with the
body, the senses, materiality, and human perception as they participate in the pro-
duction of religious knowledge. In fact, Moore quotes contemporaneous writers on
Spiritualism, who repeatedly attested to the “sensuous materialism” and “truth by the

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 testimony of the senses” that functioned as Spiritualists’ operational framework, and
he notes that theirs was a “religious faith based on seeing and touching.”4 Despite this
apparent acknowledgment of Spiritualism’s sensory-based theoretical claims, histori-
ans of Spiritualism have not often examined the material and sensory cultures that
shaped that faith, more often stressing, at the expense of these embodied and sensory
concerns, the technological, “scientific,” and industrial objects and metaphors, such as
the telegraph, that marked many Spiritualist practices and metaphors.5 Yet sensory
perceptions—in this chapter, touch specifically—were not simply the means through
which belief and proof of the spirit world were made manifest materially but also
functioned, with their attendant material cultures, as the very “stuff ” of which that
philosophy about the spirit world was constructed. Indeed, as Robert Cox argues, at
the “core of Spiritualist experience . . . social boundaries of all sorts were conceived of
and experienced with reference to the body and physical and emotional sensation.”6
These physical sensory frameworks cannot be separated so easily from the technologi-
cal emphasis that figures prominently in both Spiritualists’ practices and the second-
ary literature on the history of Spiritualism.
Spiritualism as most scholars recognize it was born in 1848 when Margaret and
Kate Fox, two young girls living in Hydesville, New York, heard a series of rappings
emanating, they claimed, from a murdered peddler who had died in their home.7
Over the course of the nineteenth century it became a national and transnational
movement and attracted millions of followers.8 As in the case of any popular belief
system, the reasons for Spiritualism’s appeal and swift development are numerous,
with cultures of sentimentality figuring prominently. Molly McGarry argues that
Spiritualism tapped into and mediated tensions in the sentimental cultures familiar
to most nineteenth-century people. In her view, increasing urbanization and industri-
alization during the nineteenth century made sentimental cultures of mourning—
wearing black, braiding the deceased’s hair into jewelry and other memento mori,
and, not least, the expectation that people would move through the grieving process
relatively quickly—inadequate for dealing with the pain those left behind felt after a
loved one’s death. With industrialization fragmenting communities that had previ-
ously shared the burden of mourning collectively, individuals found themselves lack-
ing a wider support system and ill equipped to deal emotionally with the loss of family
and friends.9 Spiritualism offered the possibility that the dead had not completely de-
parted but had simply crossed a threshold into another world.10 Communication with
this other world and those inhabiting it was the key tenet of Spiritualist practice.
Reaching across the space that separated this sphere from the next meant finding new
ways to facilitate contact; touch was foremost among Spiritualists’ strategies.
This chapter charts the “stuff ” that facilitated that contact as it appeared over
the course of the century, looking at a variety of sensory materials that foregrounded
touch and did so using the human hand as its instrument. Reports in newspapers,

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 magazines, and Spiritualist books discuss otherworldly hands manifesting visually but
also in a variety of touch-centric ways. Even in vision-centered spirit photographs,
touch and hands commonly appeared. At midcentury, the planchette, a material ob-
ject on which people would place their hands to facilitate communication with spirits,
became the focus of a virtual media frenzy. Later in the century, William Denton’s
1875 experiments at Paine Hall in Boston ushered in another touch- and hand-centered
form through the materialization of paraffin spirit hands. Across this wide range of
evidence, the sense of touch in Spiritualist practices demonstrates the relationship be-
tween sensory practices and materiality in the nineteenth century.

“Soft Warm Hands”: Spiritualist Manifestations of Touch

Of all the images and objects left in the wake of Spiritualism, spirit photography has
garnered the most scholarly and popular attention.11 The ghostly images captured on
photographic plates signified both a fascination with new technologies and concerns
over the “other side.” The possibility of proving the existence of spirits and commu-
nicating with them was not limited to the photographic medium, however. Samuel
Morse’s single-wire telegraph also became a metaphor for communication, and lead-
ing Spiritualist weeklies, such as the Spiritual Telegraph, made explicit the connec-
tions between technology and contact. Even the rappings that ushered in the era of
Spiritualism were understood within the terms offered by Morse code.12 While the
historical literature on the relationships among photography, technology, and Spiri-
tualism is rich, however, shifting attention to hands—a decidedly human instrument
—allows us to focus on the undertheorized sensory material components of Spiritual-
ist practices that coexisted in a framework parallel to explicitly technological ones.
In The Book of Touch, sensory history scholar and anthropologist Constance
Classen writes: “Touch is not just a private act. It is a fundamental medium for the ex-
pression, experience and contestation of social values and hierarchies. The culture of
touch involves all of culture. Yet at the same time we live in a society of the image, a
markedly visual culture, in which, while there may be many representations of touch,
there is often nothing actually there to feel.”13 Many nineteenth-century Spiritualists
would have disagreed with Classen wholesale. Hands and touch were often figured in
spirit photography and thus seem to confirm Classen’s claim that Spiritualists required
visible proof of the tactile (Figure 3.1). But this interpretation of spirit photography
fails to listen to the voices of Spiritualists themselves. Epes Sargent, a prolific writer on
all matters pertaining to Spiritualism, explicitly states the importance of hands and
touch to Spiritualism, writing in the aptly titled The Proof Palpable of Immortality
(1876): “One of the most common of the phenomena of Modern Spiritualism has
been the appearance of hands, believed to be materialized by spirit power, and there-
fore called spirit-hands.” Briefly discussing spirit hands molded from paraffin wax in

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 figure 3.1. William H. Mumler,
Ella Bonner, 1862–1875. Albumen
silver print, 315/16 × 21/4 inches. The
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

Denton’s experiments in Boston (to which I will return later in this chapter), Sargent
continues: “The experiment is a step in the same direction with spirit-photography, of
the reality of which we have ample proof.”14 Sargent, in other words, noted that the
“proof ” of spirit photography was but one component of many other proofs—those
that the manifestation of hands made both literally and figuratively “palpable” through-
out the history of Spiritualism.
Even when Sargent is offering a deceptively straightforward account of the vision-
privileging medium of spirit photography, touch figures centrally. He writes:

Professor W. D. Gunning (1867) relates an instance in which a spirit-hand

appeared on the photograph of a young girl. He says, “While sitting before
the camera, she was smitten with partial blindness. She described it to me
as ‘a kind of blur coming suddenly over her eyes.’ She spoke of it to the art-
ist, who told her ‘to wink and sit still.’ In developing the plate, he noticed
an imperfection, but did not observe it closely. He sat the girl again, and
took a sheet of eight tintypes. She felt no blur over her eyes, and there was
no blur on the pictures. The artist now examined the first sheet, and found
hands on the face and neck of every tintype, eight in all!”15

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 “Smitten with partial blindness,” the young girl in this narrative loses the sense most
linked to the process of photography—vision. Her blurry vision is repeated or paral-
leled in the testimony of the photographer, who notices an “imperfection” on the
original plate but remains, correspondingly, “blind” to it until later in the process of
developing the image. What results are images of spirit hands touching the girl’s face
and neck, again in repetition. Touch and a concomitant loss of vision manifested in
spirit photography through the hand are the constitutive proof, moreover, of the exis-
tence of spirits. Indeed, as art historian Michael Leja notes, many Spiritualists be-
lieved that it was not simply the presence of spirit hands in a spirit photo but precisely
the figure of the spirit touching the sitter that proved to mid-nineteenth-century audi-
ences that spirit photographs were not frauds.16
Beyond photography, nineteenth-century accounts of spirit hands are filled
with examples of the felt, embodied, sensory qualities of tactile communication with
those who had departed to the other side. Emma Hardinge Britten, a Spiritualist and
the first historian of the movement, offers in Modern American Spiritualism: A
Twenty Years’ Record of the Communion between Earth and the World of Spirits (1869)
countless descriptions of haptic spirit contact. In fact, during the moment of Spiritu-
alism’s “founding,” she tells us, the Fox sisters were grasped by “cold hands.”17 From
this early example in Hardinge Britten’s compendium of spirit manifestations, de-
scriptions of hands touching believers proliferated exponentially.18
Instead of looking to spirit photographs of hands as evidence of communication
between this world and the next, however, Hardinge Britten accumulated and retold
stories of séances she gleaned from both the Spiritualist and the mainstream press, such
as one reported by the Hartford Times on March 18, 1853. In this account of a séance, a
spirit asks a group of six people in attendance, “How many hands are on the table?”
When they answer, “Twelve hands,” the spirit replies that there are, in fact, thirteen:

And there, sure enough, on that side of the table which was vacant, and
opposite to the medium, appeared a thirteenth hand! . . . To make sure
that we were not deceived or laboring under a hallucination, we counted
our own hands, which were all resting in sight upon the table. There it
was, however, an arm and a hand, the arm extending back to the elbow,
and there fading into imperceptibility. . . .
The hand . . . was seen to take the bell from the table and place it in
the hands, first of one, and then of another of the party. At length it was
placed in mine; but, slipping my hand over the bell, I grasped the hand that
held it, desiring some more tangible knowledge of its character than that
afforded by sight. It was a real hand—it had knuckles, fingers, and finger-
nails; and what was yet more curious (if possible) it was soft and warm, feel-
ing much like the hand of an infant, in every respect but that of size.19

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 Virtually every component of hand manifestation and tactile contact is present in this
account—the hand is “real” but not real, it is soft and warm, it can be touched and
felt, and it visually fades. Most important, the author “desires more tangible knowl-
edge than that afforded by sight.” Rather than trust a visual “hallucination,” the narra-
tor must touch the hand presented to the group. Vision is presented as either in-
adequate or untrustworthy in matters of spiritual proof; although vision initially suffices
(the séance’s participants all see the hand, and speak of it, to “assure” each other of its
“reality”), ultimately it is touch that must meet the material physicality of the hand.20
In other accounts, spirit touch manifests in conjunction with dazzling visuality.
Leah Underhill (née Fox) wrote of an experience she had during a séance with Robert
Dale Owen in which a female figure materialized, holding or illuminating from her
palm a brilliant box of light. After requesting that the spirit touch her, she describes
feeling a “human hand laid on my head”; moments later, she states: “I felt, and simul-
taneously heard, just behind the point of my [left] shoulder, a kiss imprinted. I could
not, for any physical fact, obtain the evidence of three senses—sight, touch, and hearing
—more distinctly than in this case I did.”21 The spirit figure remained ultimately in-
discernible in face and personality to Underhill in this particular séance, drowned out
from her visual field by the light emanating from its hand, but nonetheless it proved
all the more real to her with its tactile, embodied contact.
If most spirit hands seemed quick to appease human desire for communication
in relatively pleasant ways, others were not always so congenial. Hardinge Britten re-
prints several instances of spirit hands slapping, pinching, and hitting people, posi-
tioned in her text as a kind of spiritual tomfoolery but perhaps less welcomed by those
whose bodies were painfully touched by these unearthly hands.22 One story that made
the print circuit, about the well-known Ohioan farmer-cum-medium Jonathan Koons,
is representative. As in many nineteenth-century séances, the spirit hands at Koons’s
séance were asked to write. While watching the hand write with “a rapidity that no
mortal hand can equal or come near to,” one particularly intent séance participant
held his head so close that the spirit rapped him on the nose with the pencil before
continuing. The séance came to an end with “the hand . . . presented to each one in the
room, and shaken by all save one, who was too timid to receive it. As before, it was
deathly cold, but firm, and as solid . . . as a human hand.”23
Words and images were also “written” on the bodies of mediums, though in
these cases the hand that produced the writing was never visible, and neither were
sensory perceptions beyond vision. Hardinge Britten tells of an individual whose
friend had been shot through the heart; the friend asks “Miss Coggswell,” a medium
from Vermont, to help communicate with the departed: “There stood out boldly,
raised above the ordinary surface of [her] arm, the figure of a human heart, clearly de-
fined and painted in blood! But what was most remarkable of all was the very distinct
appearance of a wound in the heart, as if made by a bullet.”24 The narrator of this ac-

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 count assures readers that “this medium has no disagreeable sensations in the produc-
tion of these writings; and, if I mistake not, she has no peculiar sensations at all.”25
Hardinge Britten’s most fascinating example of spirits writing on mediums’
bodies involves an “illiterate” house servant who manifested on her arm a picture of a
shackled slave kneeling and praying, surrounded by the words “A Poor Old Slave”;
this occurred in the presence of an individual the reader is meant to presume was
Frederick Douglass.26 Unlike the soft and warm (or, alternately, cold and solid) hands
of spirits, and also unlike the temperamental pokes, pinches, and raps on the nose, the
drawings and words do not appear to cause most of Hardinge Britten’s mediums any
harm or unpleasant sensations. This form of touch, in other words, is “senseless.” It is
the hand itself or its interaction with material objects that offers the physical resis-
tance necessary to experience; words and images are hardly the only medium for the
formulation of religious belief in Spiritualist practice.

Planchette; or, the Despair of Science

Spirit writing, of course, was not usually executed on the Spiritualist’s actual body. In
many instances ghostly hands penned messages from the spirit world while hovering
over séance tables. Spirit writings also manifested through the mid-nineteenth-
century explosion in the use of the planchette. Epes Sargent began the first of his his-
tories of American Spiritualism, Planchette; or, the Despair of Science (1869), with the
following claim: “The future historian of the marvelous cannot well avoid some men-
tion of the planchette or ‘little plank.’ For his benefit, we will remark that the year
1868 witnessed the appearance of the planchette, in great numbers, in the booksellers’
shops of the United States.”27 Twenty years after the Fox sisters realized a method for
communicating with spirits through raps (which, of course, are another tactile, as well
as auditory, phenomenon), the planchette arrived to facilitate further contact.
At first glance, the planchette (Figure 3.2) appears to be as exactly what it is: the
precursor to the Ouija board plank used, in the popular game, since the turn of the
twentieth century.28 In this more contemporary form, as a plastic play piece in a chil-
dren’s game, this small board garners scant attention. During the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury, however, the planchette caused considerable consternation and debate in both
Spiritualist and scientific circles. According to Kate Field’s Planchette’s Diary (1868), a
daily record of the author’s early experiences with the planchette, it came to the pub-
lic’s notice in the United States through the English author and women’s rights activ-
ist Henrietta Camilla Jenkin’s novel Who Breaks, Pays (1861).29
Indeed, reports on the subject of the planchette proliferated throughout 1867–
1869. The first mention in the American popular press appeared on November 30,
1867, in Every Saturday: A Journal of Choice Reading. The article, titled simply “Plan-
chette,” details the author’s encounter with the “heart-shaped board” while vacation-

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 figure 3.2. Planchette. From Scientific American (July 8, 1868).

ing in Scotland; the friend who introduced the author to the board claimed to have
brought it “from America, where, he said, it was not only common, but was by many
implicitly believed in as something preternatural.”30 This suggests (the author’s igno-
rance notwithstanding) that the planchette had not yet garnered much attention in
the mainstream press but was widely known in some circles. Every Saturday avoided
passing judgment regarding whether the planchette could write out messages from
the spirit world. However, this was not the case in the next report on the planchette,
“A Three-Legged Impostor,” which also appeared in Every Saturday.31 From this point
forward, the planchette found “her” way into scientific as well as popular circles, with
an ambivalent article appearing in Scientific American ( July 1868), a “five column . . .
serious consideration” titled “Planchette: What Is It?” in the Boston Journal of Chem-
istry (September 1868), a tongue-in-cheek account of its “evil” intentions in the San
Francisco Daily Morning Chronicle (November 1868), a skeptical piece in the Ladies’
Repository (November 1868), a relatively positive review in the Round Table (Decem-
ber 1868), an “objective” account of its merits and demerits in Putnam’s (December
1868), an admonishing and probably fictionalized account—presented as first-hand
reporting—of its inherent capacity for fraud and deception in Harper’s New Monthly
Magazine (December 1868), and a nine-page diatribe against “superstitious” Catholics
—who invested too much energy and concern in both Spiritualism and the planchette
—in Hours at Home: A Popular Monthly of Instruction and Recreation (February
1869).32 By the 1870s, a notice in Every Saturday remarked that the planchette had
spread to India, where, the author surmised, “if it domesticate[s] itself as a god . . . it

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 would not be at all surprising.” Following that lead, The Eclectic Magazine of Foreign
Literature used the planchette’s supposed popularity in China as early as 1843 to argue
that it was Chinese in origin (and that hence nothing good could originate from
China).33 This concern with the planchette is outlined here not to belabor the point
that it achieved popular presence in public conversation during these years but to de-
lineate the diversity of opinions about and frameworks within which the planchette
was received, discussed, examined, and used.
Though its French and feminine suffix -ette caused most commentators to claim
that the planchette probably came from France, what mattered to many nineteenth-
century Spiritualists and non-Spiritualists alike was not necessarily its origins but the
remarkable abilities it manifested. What matters for contemporary scholars of the
sensory and material cultures of religion is the window the planchette provides into
nineteenth-century Spiritualist beliefs about sensory perception and materiality. It
was almost universally described as “heart-shaped,” with two “pentagraph” wheels
(the latest development in industrial technology, which allowed it to move quickly
and with barely any force across a sheet of paper) and a hole (sometimes lined with
India rubber) through which a lead pencil was placed, and much attention was given
to the materials from which the board was made. Oak, mahogany, ash, pine, cedar—
no wood seemed inadequate to the task at hand, and indeed, some reports mentioned
that the diversity of materials from which it could be made allowed families in all in-
come brackets to afford “a household god” (or “diabolical oracle”) of their own, in
some cases manufacturing planchettes out of “cigar-box lids.”34 As a human organ–
shaped vessel made of organic material wedded to pentagraph wheels, the planchette
embodied the simplest of handicrafts melded with sophisticated production tech-
niques. Crucially, it was a heart-shaped instrument of writing and communication,
mediating spiritual and textual contact between worlds. And, perhaps most impor-
tant, the heart-shaped planchette functioned in Spiritualist religious practice as a ma-
terial object that communicated not with Deity but with others like the users who had
passed on.35
Yet something unique occurred with the planchette, anomalous to it out of all
the instruments developed in Spiritualist practice to communicate with spirits during
the nineteenth century and separate from the messages it scrawled out (moodily and
petulantly at times, foolishly and inanely at others, and usually correct only half of the
time, according to Spiritualists and skeptics alike). This simple board was, repeatedly
and persistently, personified as a human entity and even accorded agency.36 Field’s in-
troduction in Planchette’s Diary set the tone for what presented itself over and over
again as an anthropomorphic reading of the object: “Planchette emerged from her
box. Mr. N. was no less curious than myself, and very soon we sat like two idiots, gaz-
ing intently upon the absurd creature, each with a hand upon her back.”37 In one
newspaper article, the author tells us that he “purchased the fair siren . . . and even

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 gave a little dinner-party in her honor.”38 And in almost every instance, regardless of
genre, the planchette was not introduced by the article the in front of the noun but
was usually named, like a female person, minus the article: simply “Planchette.”
“Planchette,” as the press reported widely, required not just the touch of human
hands to work, however, but also the concerted will and intellectual effort of those
near it. More specifically, it responded to individuals in ways quite distinct from the
spirits themselves. Spirits might manifest, they might appear in photographs, they
might even cause objects to move independent of any human faculty. Indeed, they often
inhabited the planchette itself and scrawled out messages in various handwritings, de-
pending on whatever spirit personality was possessing the board at any given minute.
But the planchette was singular in that it not only required a confluence of all other
Spiritualist phenomena to work—it served, that is, as the ultimate “instrument”
bridging the agency of spirits, the agency of humans, and the agency of objects into
one particular field of perception—but it was also repeatedly treated as an individual
separate from the spirits working through it.
For example, planchettes were known to choose owners, working for some me-
diums and not others, usually developing attachments to individuals like prized pets.
At times this led to awkward syntax and confusion for authors writing about the
board as they struggled to keep the planchette’s “identity” separate from that of
the spirit speaking through it and the person touching it. In Spiritualist practice the
planchette became something more than an object—it became a person, a thing with
subjectivity and moods of its own, with distinctive calligraphies independent of the
medium’s; it was, again, heart-shaped, an “absurd creature” humanized by touch, de-
pendent, even, on the human hand and thought to move and become an animate,
even at times a thinking, object. The planchette, in other words, set and “conditioned”
the limits of Spiritualist practice as it engaged and “sympathized” with materiality—
not simply as evidence or proof of the materiality of the other side but as proof of the
dependence on materiality to mediate that communication on this side as well.39
Sargent claimed as much, writing about materiality and spirit in Planchette; or,
the Despair of Science:

We know just as much about spirit as we do about matter. It is true that

we know nothing of the essence of spirit: it is equally true that we know
nothing of the substance or essence of matter. But perhaps the reader will
say, “We cannot see spirit, and, therefore, we know but little about it.”
“Did it ever occur to the reader,” asks a scientific writer, “that we cannot
see matter either? When we look at any object, it is not the object, after
all, that we see, but merely the image of it formed on the retina of the eye.
When I look at a house a mile distant, the object that I really see is not a
mile distant, but within the eye. I do not see the house at all, but I see an

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 image of light representing the house. Thus it appears that matter is just as
invisible as spirit. We know some of the properties and laws of spirit, and
this is precisely the extent of our knowledge of matter.”40

Though in some ways Sargent’s words sound like standard Spiritualist rhetoric de-
signed to counter scientific claims about the lack of “evidence” Spiritualists provided
for their beliefs, I take seriously here what Sargent has to say about spirit and matter,
particularly because it occurs in a text that names the planchette in its title and ques-
tions the primacy of vision. Sargent rightfully questions the meaning of matter itself,
positing that the privileging of sight and vision has led people to believe that they are
seeing a real “thing” in the first place. Indeed other, more “scientifically minded,” Spir-
itualists echoed his thoughts on spirit and matter in similar terms. The most promi-
nent chemist of the antebellum period, Robert Hare, wrote and published extensively
on the existence of “ponderable and imponderable matter,” positing that spirits con-
sisted of a form of matter beyond the grasp of current scientific understanding but
not entirely beyond experiential witnessing through mediumship and other practices;
Hare came to his conclusions after a much-publicized and (to the scientific community)
scandalous conversion to Spiritualism.41 Yet for most Spiritualists, it was the immedi-
acy of touch, in conjunction with various manifestations of materiality, that estab-
lished proof of the other side. Sargent’s use of the planchette in a text ultimately only
peripherally concerned with it further suggests the important role touch played in es-
tablishing a theory of matter, sensory perception, and religious or spiritual belief.
The question remains as to why the planchette was anthropomorphized to the
extent that it was. The answer lies with industrialization and processes of production
and commodity fetishism emerging during this period, particularly as they acted in
conjunction with the Spiritualist aim to make contact with the dead. Moore warns
against using “social and economic change” during the nineteenth century as an ex-
planation for the rise of Spiritualism, arguing that although both “characterized the
decade in which the Fox rappings first aroused public interest, [they] characterized all
the other decades of the nineteenth-century as well.”42 It nonetheless seems that the
anthropomorphizing of the planchette was part of a material- and sensory-based pro-
cess that helped orient nineteenth-century individuals to these changes, especially as
they met the challenges of producing, consuming, and using material goods and ques-
tioned the superficiality and glib cultures of sentimentality around death. Sentimen-
tal commodities were also produced, after all, because they were meant to signify out-
wardly what was largely an inward experience.43
For example, though supposedly more than “200,000” planchettes were manu-
factured and sold in the United States, they were also repeatedly presented as objects
not of mass production but of craftsmanship.44 To understand the significance of this,
recall Field’s animation of the planchette as an “absurd creature” upon whose back she

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 and Mr. N. placed their hands. In her analysis of the “interior structure of the artifact,”
Elaine Scarry argues that “we routinely speak of certain artifacts as ‘expressing the
human spirit,’ a statement that would be impossible to formulate in terms of bodily
location . . . [since] many inventions exist that have no specifiable precedent in the
body.” Inversely, she tells us, the “shape of the hand and back” in Marx’s work must
also “be centrally described in terms of the bodily capacity for labor.” Finally, Scarry
argues that “by transporting the external object world into the sentient interior, that
interior gains some small share of the blissful immunity of inert inanimate object-
hood; and conversely, by transporting pain out onto the external world, that external
environment is deprived of its immunity to, unmindfulness of, and indifference to-
ward the problems of sentience.” Such projection, Scarry claims, aims “to deprive the
external world of the privilege of being inanimate.”45 This transference or projection of
indifference and unmindfulness onto an external object might help explain, in part,
why the planchette was so often described as responding to questions in a silly, rude,
or apathetic manner—as though the object was taunting people for their concerns in
an increasingly commodified and commodity-filled existence. But it also demonstrates
the remarkable adaptability of nineteenth-century users in imagining a hand- and
touch-based communication that resisted the stressors of mass production and the
commodification of sentimentality, grief, and mourning. Mediating between multi-
ple worlds, the planchette represents the sensory and material practices of a belief sys-
tem that was held in dynamic tension with the demands of a world many feared would
become increasingly anonymous vis-à-vis mass production and commodification.

Wax Hands, the Thermodynamics of Touch, and Outward Contact

What happens, however, when the hands in question are physical, residual material
objects or artifacts left behind by a spiritual entity? Turning to a body of materials
closely aligned with spirit hands but given less focused attention in the Spiritualist
press—paraffin or wax molds of spirit hands produced by nineteenth-century medi-
ums—allows us to focus on relatively permanent artifacts of “proof ” as they directly
engage hands and touch. These iterations of hands are an associated but divergent
form of the manifestation of spirit hands and the use of human hands for spiritual
purposes, as seen in the hand contact needed to make the planchette function. Indeed
it seems as though the longer Spiritualism persisted, the more it required palpable,
material “proof ” of the veracity of its claims.
Well known in the annals of Spiritualist manifestations are William Denton’s
experiments. Through the medium Mary Hardy, Denton conducted an experiment
on the stage of Paine Hall in Boston in January 1875 during which a pair of spirit
hands was created out of paraffin. When Denton took the stage, he aimed to publi-
cally demonstrate something new—spirit hands molded of wax.46 Denton was an ac-

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 complished geologist, and his early work, as explicated in his text The Soul of Things,
focused on “reading” the “panorama” of distant locations and times by placing relics
and geological specimens of those places and times in the hands of mediums who did
not know the origins of the pieces they were holding.47 By touching and holding these
geological specimens in their hands, Denton’s mediums—most notably his wife and
sister-in-law—were able to visualize the histories of the places from which the speci-
mens originated. Prior to his work in wax, Denton claimed to “have seen spirit-hands
over and over again” and had even “taken impressions of them in flour and putty and
clay.”48 But on this night, he produced via the medium Hardy what were touted as the
first pair of spirit hands in wax.
Part of the allure of wax spirit hands was not only the residual proof they left in
the wake of their manifestations—here, indeed, were material objects that could be
exhibited and wondered over—but the supposed blending of spirit and medium that
inhered in these molds. Functioning as veritable tactile portraits of contact between
the spirit and profane worlds, wax hands were the culminating Spiritualist product of
a theory of sensation and materiality developed over the course of the nineteenth cen-
tury. The process by which spirit hands were molded is interesting, because it attests
to the texture, detail, and thermal qualities of both the casting process and the result-
ing casts. Two buckets were set next to each other, one filled with hot water and one
with cold, and paraffin was placed in the hot water in order to melt it. Alternately dip-
ping a hand into the hot and then the cold water caused cumulative layers of wax to
build up and harden, leaving a paraffin glove behind when the hand was removed
from the mold. The Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology (1920) claimed that
it took twenty minutes for a mold to be made thus, and that for preservation purposes
the molds would be filled with plaster.49 Finally, to discern the idiosyncrasies of any
given mold, the wax was melted from the plaster, leaving the impression of the skin’s
surface—the inside of the wax mold and ostensibly the epidermal pattern unique to
the owner of the hands—preserved on the outside surface of the cast hand. Holding a
plaster cast of a spirit hand would produce a textural mingling of skin surfaces similar
to that which would arise from holding hands with another living human.
In manufacturing spirit molds, the Encyclopedia asserted, “normal production”
methods were “defied.” Unlike the relatively straight fingers of human casts, in casts of
spiritual hands “fingers are bent, wrists show, and the mould is fine and delicate,
whereas those obtained from living hands are thick and solid.” The production of
spirit hand molds was also “remarkably quick.” In the Denton experiment specifically,
“the dish of paraffin was weighed before the mould appeared and after,” a control test
that apparently proved satisfactory, since “the difference corresponded to the weight
of the mould.” The writer of the Encyclopedia entry further remarked that “the plaster
casts show a blend between the organism of the medium and the organising force
which produces the materialization.”50 The ramifications for a theory of the sense of

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 touch are profound. Not only dynamically melding spirit and material beings into
one, the processes involved both hot and cold water as well as wax and made explicit
the parallel thermal qualities repeatedly mentioned in earlier descriptions of the
warmth and coldness of spirit hands. The interplay of interiority and exteriority made
itself felt—the inside literally became the outside, with the resulting texture of the
plaster further open to interpretation as individuals could touch and run their finger-
tips over the cast hand’s veins, fissures, and bumps.

This sensuous play of spiritual contact and communication—in this case of external,
objective physical existence if not internal, subjective, certitude—is even more poetic
when set in contrast to traditional Christian iconographies of hands. Outside of
Spiritualist practices, Christian iconography typically represents hands clasped to-
gether in prayer. The image of the praying hands holds its own kind of poiesis, as the
sense of touch doubles back on itself, inwardly directing the palm against the palm,
even as it signifies an outward reach toward God. But in Spiritualist iconographies of
the hand, touch almost radiates outward, connecting to others both in the séance cir-
cle, as participants grasp each other’s hands in a circle and maintain contact, and in
the casts of spirit hands, where the material and the spirit are wedded to form one
entity. Spiritualist touch is, in fact, a deeply outward-oriented process.51 As Eve Sedg-
wick tells us in Touching Feeling, “Even more immediately than other perceptual
systems . . . the sense of touch makes nonsense out of any dualistic understanding of
agency and passivity; to touch is always already to reach out, to fondle, to heft, to tap,
or to enfold.”52 The nineteenth-century Spiritualist seemed to credit, through mate-
rial objects of touch that joined hands to spirit, a theory of sensory perception that
attested to individuals’ relationships to matter, spirit, and one another.
This philosophy of the sense of touch separated Spiritualists sharply from the
empirically driven scientists of their day, even as they partook in the same positivist
framework. While Spiritualists clearly engaged in a “religion of proof,” their world
was also one frequently engaged with the sense of touch in ways that incorporated
touch as proof and not outside of it. Spiritualist touch, indicated and experienced
through hands and various material mechanisms associated with hands, explained the
most intimate details of Spiritualist practice and belief. More than smell, more than
sight, more than taste, and more than sound, touch ordered the material world, ani-
mate and inanimate, and served as a bridge that connected virtually every experience
Spiritualists had between this world and the next. Touch allowed nineteenth-century
Spiritualists to reach back temporally, making “histories and bodies touch across
time”; it offered a reading of the surface of the external world even as it enveloped and
incorporated external phenomena inwardly through the very same actions and move-
ments.53 The sense of touch, most importantly, offered religious proof of another
world; as Yi-Fu Tuan writes, “Touch is the sense least susceptible to deception and

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 hence the one in which we tend to put the most trust. For doubting Thomas, seeing
was not believing; he had to touch the wounds of the resurrected Christ to believe.
The real, ultimately, is that which offers resistance. The tactile sense comes up against
an object, and that direct contact, sometimes felt as harsh impingement, is our final
guarantee of the real.”54 Forging a philosophy of materiality and the sense of touch,
Spiritualists “proved” the existence of the other side through material objects and a
theory of sensory contact in ways that differed fundamentally from those in the vision-
driven, “empirical” world around them.

notes
1. David Chidester, “The American Touch: Tactile Imagery in American Religion and Pol-
itics,” in The Book of Touch, ed. Constance Classen (New York: Berg, 2005), 62. For an account of
similar representational strategies as they appeared in medieval thought and culture, see Marjorie
O’Rourke Boyle, Senses of Touch: Human Dignity and Deformity from Michelangelo to Calvin
(Boston: Brill, 1998).
2. Spiritualism’s clearest antecedents germinated in the pseudosciences of animal magne-
tism and mesmerism, the revivals of the Second Great Awakening, and Swedenborgianism. On
Mesmerism generally, see Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in
France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968). For mesmerism in the United States,
see David Schmit, “Re-Visioning Antebellum American Psychology: The Dissemination of Mes-
merism, 1836–1854,” History of Psychology 8, no. 4 (2005): 403–434.
3. R. Laurence Moore, In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and Ameri-
can Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 36.
4. Ibid., 19.
5. Ibid., 18, 28. See also John Lardas Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2011), 15, 222–223 279–301. Though Modern rightfully suggests that
we should understand American spirituality as a “depend[ence] upon the promises of immediacy
in an increasingly mediated world,” and though he even ties this to phrenology and a “way of the-
orizing affect” (13), he nonetheless largely bifurcates Spiritualist sensory, material, and technolog-
ical practices. The exception is Robert Cox, who examines the intersection of affect and physical
sensation in Spiritualist practices in Body and Soul: A Sympathetic History of American Spiritual-
ism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003). Cox illustrates the kinds of “impres-
sions” and embodied contact made possible by sympathetic communication between the spiritual
and the mundane world, as well as the heightened acuity of touch in some subjects as vision and
hearing receded, but he does not explore the cosmological significance of touch in depth.
6. Cox, Body and Soul, 80.
7. The Fox sisters are typically credited in contemporary histories with ushering in Ameri-
can Spiritualism, but contemporaneous texts considered earlier origins. Emma Hardinge Britten
noted the case of Nelly Butler, an apparition who conversed with people and demonstrated what
appear to have been early Spiritualist phenomena in Maine in 1880. See Hardinge Britten, Nine-
teenth Century Miracles: Spirits and Their Work in Every Country of the Earth (New York: Lovell,
1884), 487–495. An 1851 pamphlet names the previous inhabitant of the Fox cabin, “Mr. Michael
Weekman,” as the true progenitor of spirit communication. See J. B. Campbell, Pittsburgh and
Allegheny Spirit Rappings, Together with a General History of Spiritual Communications through-
out the United States (Allegheny, PA: Purviance, July 1851), 8–9. Several authors claimed that at

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 least twenty-two years before the Fox sisters “founded” Spiritualism, the “Seeress of Prevorst” in
Germany had outlined the same basic tenets; a succinct account of this view can be found in Epes
Sargent, Planchette: or, the Despair of Science (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1869), 141–152.
8. Anne Braude and Molly McGarry argue that the lack of a central organization and a di-
versity of practices make it is almost impossible to tell how many individuals claimed to be Spiri-
tualists during the nineteenth century. I see that fluidity as productive rather than problematic
because it expands the number of historical actors affected by its tenets. See Anne Braude, Radi-
cal Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Bloomington: Indi-
ana University Press, 1989), 25–31, and Molly McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and
the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2008), 3.
9. McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past, 21–28. Both Braude and McGarry attest to the femi-
nist and human rights components of Spiritualist practices, as well as their appeal. Future re-
search would be well served to investigate the relationship between the Spiritualist movement’s
radical politics and what Candy Gunther Brown argues are the “empathetic” and “compassion-
ate” components of touch that have been traditionally ignored in studies of American religions,
particularly around healing and therapeutic cultures. See Gunther Brown, “Touch and Ameri-
can Religions,” Religion Compass 3–4 (2009): 770–783. Alternately, Russ Castronovo argues
that Spiritualist practices “stag[ed] interiority” in a way that “engendered an ideal citizenship
supposedly free of material considerations” and “popularized the suspension of historical aware-
ness.” While Castronovo’s argument is compelling, he primarily examines representations
of Spiritualism in fiction. See Castronovo, Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public
Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001),
104–105.
10. Shaker practices functioned similarly. See Sally Promey, Spiritual Spectacles: Vision and
Image in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Shakerism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).
11. Jennifer Tucker, Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science (Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Cox, Body and Soul, 2003); Clément Chéroux,
Andreas Fischer, Pierre Apraxine, Denis Canguilhem, and Sophie Schmit, eds., The Perfect
Medium: Photography and the Occult (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005); Cathy
Gutierrez, Plato’s Ghost: Spiritualism in the American Renaissance (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2009); and Michael Leja, Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to
Duchamp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). For work on Spiritualism, sound, and
hearing, see Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlighten-
ment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
12. For a nineteenth-century account using this analogy, see William Crookes, F.R.S.,
Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism (London: J. Burns, 1874), 95. See also Jeremy Stow-
low, “Techno-Religious Imaginaries: On the Spiritual Telegraph and the Circum-Atlantic World
of the 19th Century,” Working Papers of the Institute on Globalization and the Human Condi-
tion, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, March 2006, http://globalautonomy.ca/global1/
servlet/Xml2pdf ?fn=RA_Stolow_Imaginaries; Werner Sollors, “Dr. Benjamin Franklin’s Celes-
tial Telegraph; or, Indian Blessings to Gas-Lit American Drawing Rooms,” American Quarterly
35, no. 5 (Winter 1983): 459–480; and Cox, Body and Soul, 87–89.
13. Constance Classen, “Fingerprints: Writing about Touch,” in The Book of Touch, ed.
Classen (New York: Berg, 2005), 1–2.
14. Epes Sargent, The Proof Palpable of Immortality; Being an Account of the Materializa-
tion Phenomena of Modern Spiritualism. With Remarks on the Relations of the Facts to Theology,
Morals, and Religion (Boston: Colby and Rich, 1876), 220.

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 15. Sargent, Proof Palpable, 139. This story was repeated much later, in James Coates’s Pho-
tographing the Invisible. Coates does not repeat the blurred vision of the sitter but describes the
hands that touched the girl’s face and neck in some detail: “a pair of hands clasped round the sit-
ter’s neck, the right hand coming on the chin and the left partly thrust under the girl’s collar. The
hands are shown up to the wrist, and then fade away.” See Coates, Photographing the Invisible:
Practical Studies in Spirit Photography, Spirit Portraiture, and Other Rare but Allied Phenomena
(Chicago: Advanced Thought Publishing, 1911), 153.
16. Leja, Looking Askance, 35–41.
17. Emma Hardinge Britten, Modern American Spiritualism: A Twenty Years’ Record of the
Communion between Earth and the World of Spirits (New York: Self-published, 1869), 38.
18. Indeed, there is an auspicious absence of discussion about the role of spirit photogra-
phy in her text. Hardinge Britten treated Mumler’s photographs many years later, in Nineteenth
Century Miracles. My hunch is that she sought to distance herself from the spectacle wrought by
Mumler’s photographs and subsequent fraud trial; this hunch is substantiated by Sargent’s discus-
sion in Proof Palpable, where he notes that different editions of his book will track his shifting
thoughts on the veracity of Mumler’s photographs, at first expressing skepticism, then redacting
that skepticism, and so on. Hardinge Britten appears to have held Sargent in high regard. She re-
printed a lengthy and laudatory review of Sargent’s Planchette; or, the Despair of Science from the
British periodical Spiritualist in her Nineteenth Century Miracles. See Hardinge Britten, Nine-
teenth Century Miracles, 463–464.
19. Hardinge Britten, Modern American Spiritualism, 106, italics in original.
20. It is difficult to imagine these spectacles outside of our contemporary ideas about
“phantom limbs,” but although the phenomenon was well known long before the advent of Spiri-
tualism, S. Weir Mitchell did not give that particular sensation its name until the Civil War. See
N. J. Wade, “The Legacy of Phantom Limbs,” Perception 32 (2003): 517–524, and Daniel Heller-
Roazen, The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation (New York: Zone, 2009), 253–270.
21. Leah Underhill, The Missing Link in Modern Spiritualism (New York: Thomas R. Knox,
1885), 349–351.
22. Hardinge Britten, Modern American Spiritualism, 268, 376.
23. Ibid., 314–315. For other examples of spirit hands, see John W. Edmonds, George T. Dex-
ter, and Nathaniel P. Tallmadge, Spiritualism (New York: Partridge and Brittan, 1853), 23; Sargent,
Planchette, 36, 45, 59, 89, 117, 127, 134, 139, 206, 207, 231, 286, 395; and Robert Dale Owen, The Debat-
able Land between This World and the Next (New York: G. W. Carelton, 1871), 351–353, 376–380.
24. Hardinge Britten, Modern American Spiritualism, 172.
25. Ibid., 172. Another medium, Mr. Foster, also was known to manifest words on his arms.
He is treated at length in Owen, The Debatable Land, 386–390, as well as in Sargent, Planchette,
119–120. Hardinge Britten includes an anecdote in Nineteenth Century Miracles, 539–540, re-
garding a young female medium who would manifest bite and teeth marks—painfully—on her
upper arms.
26. Hardinge Britten, Modern American Spiritualism, 196. This story is also recounted in
Cox, Body and Soul, 20. Douglass was familiar with Spiritualism and, as one scholar has noted,
made prominent use of Spiritualist metaphors of communication in his writing. See Paul Gil­
more, Aesthetic Materialism: Electricity and American Romanticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2009), 111–142.
27. Sargent, Planchette, 1.
28. “Fads and Fancies: The Ouija Craze,” Current Literature 10, no. 3 ( July 1892): 417; “A
Fortune Telling Apparatus: Ouija, the Latest Craze in Paris, Brings Queer Spirit Message,” Wash-
ington Post, October 27, 1907, M2.

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 29. Kate Field, Planchette’s Diary (New York: J. S. Redfield, 1868), 81–83, and Henrietta
Camilla Jenkin, Who Breaks, Pays (Philadelphia: Frederick Leypoldt, 1863), 168. Field’s claim that
Jenkin introduced American audiences to the planchette is corroborated by an August 1868 arti-
cle in Lippincott’s Magazine. See “My Acquaintance with Planchette,” Lippincott’s Magazine of
Literature, Science and Education 2 (August 1868): 217–218.
30. “Planchette,” Every Saturday: A Journal of Choice Reading 4, no. 100 (November 30,
1867): 691–692.
31. “A Three-Legged Impostor,” Every Saturday: A Journal of Choice Reading 5, no. 126
(May 30, 1868): 696–699.
32. “What Is Planchette?” Scientific American 19, no. 2 ( July 8, 1868): 17–18; The Boston
Journal of Chemistry 3 (September 1868), n.p.; “Planchette,” Daily Morning Chronicle (San Fran-
cisco), November 18, 1868, 2; “Planchette; or, Spirit-Rapping Made Easy,” Ladies’ Repository 29
(November 1868): 369–371; “Planchette,” Round Table 203 (December 12, 1868): 385–386; Sid-
ney Hyde, “Planchette in a New Character,” Putnam’s Magazine 2, no. 12 (December 1868): 724–
732; Charles H. Webb, “The Confessions of a Reformed Planchettist,” Harper’s New Monthly
Magazine 38, no. 223 (December 1868): 99–107; and “Planchette at the Confessional,” Hours at
Home: A Popular Monthly of Instruction and Recreation 8, no. 4 (February 1869): 346–354.
33. “Foreign Notes,” Every Saturday: A Journal of Choice Reading 2, no. 24 (December 14,
1872): 672, and Herbert A. Giles, “Mesmerism, Planchette, and Spirtualism in China,” Eclectic
Magazine of Foreign Literature 29, no. 4 (April 1879): 490–496. Sargent mentions the use of the
planchette in China in the year 1843 as well. See Sargent, Planchette, 398.
34. “Planchette,” Daily Morning Chronicle, 2, and “Planchette at the Confessional,” Hours
at Home, 347.
35. For a discussion of the correspondence between hearts, stones, materiality, and com-
munication, see Sally Promey, “Hearts and Stones: Material Transformations and the Stuff of
Christian Practice,” in American Christianities: A History of Dominance and Diversity, ed. Cath-
erine A. Brekus and W. Clark Gilpin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011),
183–213.
36. Field, Planchette’s Diary, 27–28, 42, and “A Three-Legged Impostor,” Every Saturday,
697.
37. Field, Planchette’s Diary, 9.
38. “A Three-Legged Impostor,” Every Saturday, 697.
39. My thinking about the animation of objects and the correspondence between materi-
ality and human sympathy is shaped by Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (Au-
tumn, 2001): 1–22.
40. Sargent, Planchette, 195.
41. Robert Hare, Experimental Investigation of the Spirit Manifestations (New York: Par-
tridge and Brittan, 1856), 368–396. See also Robert Hare, Letter to the National Intelligencer,
Robert Hare Papers, American Philosophical Society, Mss.B.H22, undated Box 4. Hare’s
thoughts on slavery and that topic’s relationship to Spiritualism are briefly treated in Cox, Body
and Soul, 146–161.
42. Moore, In Search of White Crows, 102.
43. See, for example, Lori Merish, Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture,
and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).
44. Sargent, Planchette, 398; “My Acquaintance with Planchette,” Lippincott’s, 3.
45. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1985), 283–285, italics in original. David Chidester also posits that the

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 “principal theorists of modernity,” Marx and Freud, “were theorists of tactility . . . in touch with
resistance.” See Chidester, “American Touch,” 61.
46. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle claimed that a paraffin mask was made, while Epes Sargent
claims that it was a pair of hands. See Doyle, The History of Spiritualism, vol. 2 (New York: George
H. Doran, 1926), 165, and Sargent, The Proof Palpable, 220. Lewis Spence also notes that it was a
pair of hands. See Spence, The Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology (New York: Dodd,
Mead, 1920), 716.
47. William and Elizabeth M. F. Denton, The Soul of Things; or, Psychometric Searches and
Discoveries (Boston: Walker, Wise and Company, 1863).
48. Sargent, Planchette, 134.
49. Leslie Shepard, ed., Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology, vol. 2 (Detroit: Gale
Research Company, 1978 [1920]), 716.
50. Ibid. Hereward Carrington, a member of the Council of the American Society for Sci-
entific Research and the Society for Psychical Research in London, published a text in 1907 de-
tailing the methods whereby various Spiritualist claims to materialization could be debunked.
Like the wax hands that served as “proof ” of the existence of spirits, Carrington’s descriptions
outline the multiply tactile and sensory qualities he deployed to expose them as frauds—testimony,
perhaps, to the fact that science is not yet completely held to the regime of the eye. See Car-
rington, Physical Phenomena of Spiritualism (Boston: Herbert B. Turner, 1907), 225. The ways
Spiritualists used unveiling fraud as part of their operational logic has recently received fascinat-
ing treatment. See David Walker, “The Humbug in American Religion: Ritual Theories of Nine-
teenth-Century Spiritualism,” Religion and American Culture 23, no. 1 (Winter 2013): 30–74.
51. This outward orientation might be more in keeping with the Jewish and early Chris-
tian orans posture, though no direct relationship, to my knowledge, exists.
52. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 14.
53. Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Post-
modern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 2–3.
54. Yi-Fu Tuan, “The Pleasures of Touch,” in The Book of Touch, ed. Constance Classen
(New York: Berg, 2005), 78, italics in original.

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