The Specter of the Indian unveils the centrality of Native American spirit guides during the emergent years of American Spiritualism. By pulling together cultural and political history; the studies of religion, race, and gender; and the ghostly, Kathryn Troy offers a new layer of understanding to the prevalence of mystically styled Indians in American visual and popular culture. The connections between Spiritualist print and contemporary Indian policy provide fresh insight into the racial dimensions of social reform among nineteenth-century Spiritualists. Troy draws fascinating parallels between the contested belief of Indians as fading from the world, claims of returned apparitions, and the social impetus to provide American Indians with a means of existence in white America. Rather than vanishing from national sight and memory, Indians and their ghosts are shown to be ever present. This book transports the readers into dimly lit parlor rooms and darkened cabinets and lavishes them with detailed séance accounts in the words of those who witnessed them. Scrutinizing the otherworldly whisperings heard therein highlights the voices of mediums and those they sought to channel, allowing the author to dig deep into Spiritualist belief and practice. The influential presence of Indian ghosts is made clear and undeniable.

Ebenezer Howard (1850-1928) is famous worldwide for founding the Garden City movement, and he continues to be frequently cited by planners and theorists. When he was dying, he urged his prospective biographer to remember that 'the spiritual dimension' had always been central to his life and work. He wanted this to be prominently brought out in any biography. Almost a century after his death, Ebenezer Howard: Inventor of the Garden City is the first book that does justice to that wish. Frances Knight has written a very readable biography, the first since the 1980s, with a properly contextualized analysis of Howard's religious views. Shaped in the world of London Congregationalism, he became a keen seeker after unity and peace. He grafted new religious ideas, particularly from spiritualism, and later from Theosophy, into his biblically-informed, Protestant faith. Prone to spiritual epiphanies, he believed that he had been raised up to preach the 'gospel of the garden city' and to tackle the housing crisis by beginning to build the New Jerusalem in the Hertfordshire countryside. Although he sometimes appeared naïve, he was astute, and highly skilled at combining different, and sometimes conflicting, ideas in a way that built consensus and gained support from people across the social and political spectrum. As well as explaining the remarkable sequence of events that led from the publication of his ideas to the foundation of Letchworth as the world's first garden city, just five years later, this book investigates other neglected aspects of Howard's life including: the years he spent in America, his career as a shorthand writer, and his relationship with his first wife Lizzie - herself an important garden city pioneer. Howard wanted his garden cities to be places of spiritual exploration, and as this book shows, early Letchworth certainly lived up to those expectations.

Critical attention to the Victorian supernatural has flourished over the last twenty-five years. Whether it is spiritualism or Theosophy, mesmerism or the occult, the dozens of book-length studies and hundreds of articles that have appeared recently reflect the avid scholarly discussion of Victorian mystical practices. Designed both for those new to the field and for experts, this volume is organized into sections covering the relationship between Victorian spiritualism and science, the occult and politics, and the culture of mystical practices. The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult brings together some of the most prominent scholars working in the field to introduce current approaches to the study of nineteenth-century mysticism and to define new areas for research.

The volumes in this set, originally published between 1974 and 1992, draw together research by leading academics in spiritualism, and provide a rigorous examination of related key issues. The collection examines spirituality from a broad range of disciplines, from the spirituality in the Christian church, spirituality in Africa, and Afro-American religions, as well as examining the areas of channeling, mediumship and spirit possession. In this 3-volume set, there are two incredibly unique and insightful bibliographic source collections, examining both primary and secondary source listings across the subject of spiritualism and one volume providing field research into spirituality in the Christian church and in the occult. This collection is an incredibly useful tool for researchers examining the broad area of spiritualism and will be of interest to researchers, academics and students of anthropology, religion and sociology.

Originally published in 1992, Channeling is a comprehensive bibliography on the subject of channeling. The book defines channeling as any message received or conveyed from transcendent entities and covers material on the history of channeling, those that have claimed to transcend death, contact with UFOs and contemporary channeling groups. The book acts as a research guide and seeks to outline the historical roots of channeling, explaining its major teachings and considers its significance as a spiritual movement. It provides sources from books, booklets, articles, and ephemeral material and offers a comprehensive list of both primary and secondary materials related to channeling, the bibliography takes the most diverse and useful sources of the time. This volume although published almost 30 years ago, still provides a unique and insightful collection for academics of religion, in particular those researching spiritualism and the occult.