#fox sisters

[mettlearchive]

Georgiana Houghton (1814 - 1884, England)

[leasthaunted]

Episode 153: The Fox Sisters & The Beginning of Spiritualism

At long last we're going to start talking about Spiritualism! Just in time for Women's History Month! Hear how two young sisters in a haunted house sparked a religious movement that had far reaching repercussions. From a farmhouse in upstate New York, to shaping world events and politics, Spiritualism is a big topic. And it all starts with the Fox Sisters...

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[toastthefox]

Character sheet 3

ugh her proportions are really screwed but whtvr

[thearchivehermit]

Spooktober Celebrationⵈ🎃ⵈ Location | Seances

Seances have a rich history that dates back to the early 19th century, when interest in spiritualism began to flourish, particularly in the United States and Europe.

The Fox sisters, Margaret (1833-1893) and Kate (1836-1892), played a pivotal role in popularizing this movement after they claimed to communicate with spirits through mysterious rapping sounds in 1848. This sparked a wave of interest, leading to the establishment of spiritualist churches and the practice of seances as a means to contact the dead.

Prominent figures like Allan Kardec (1804-1869), who founded Spiritism and published "The Book of Spirits" in 1857, further developed these ideas, systematizing the beliefs surrounding spirits and their interactions with the living.

Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, seances gained notoriety through the work of mediums like Madame Blavatsky (1831-1891) and Harry Houdini (1874-1926), who both contributed to the dialogue around spirituality, the supernatural, and skepticism, respectively. This blend of mysticism and inquiry established seances as a cultural phenomenon that continues to intrigue and captivate people today.

[travsd]

On the Fox Sisters and the Birth of Spiritualism

The Fox Sisters were not a vaudeville sister act, nor were they related to vaudeville/stage performers like Harry Fox, George L. Fox, Will H. Fox, Imro Fox, Joe Fox, Della Fox, or The Foxy Grandpa. But their influence did find its way to vaudeville by way of the Davenport Brothers and Anna Eva Fay and others. The Fox Sisters were the ones who started the craze for Spiritualism that began in the…

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[comparativetarot]

The Moon. Art by Celeste Pille, from The American Renaissance Tarot.

“On this occasion of the Full Moon in Pisces, we've decided to unveil our lovely Moon card, an ode to the origins of Spiritualism in the United States. Those in the know might recognize the sisters Maggie and Kate Fox, the two teenagers who became Spiritualist icons following their much-publicized communication with a dead peddler in their home in 1848. From such unlikely beginnings, a culture of seances and mediumship was born, and quickly became a national craze. By some estimates, eleven million Americans took up the new religion in the mid-nineteenth century, many of them women who jumped at the chance to wield spiritual authority from the domestic space of the parlor.

We've replaced the crustacean that appears on the Moon card in the Waite-Smith Tarot with a scarab beetle; ancient Egyptians saw a scarab in the constellation of Cancer instead of a crab, so we feel the substitution is somewhat justified on esoteric grounds. But as this is a literary Tarot, our primary inspiration for the 'beautiful bug' that appears on the card is Herman Melville's delightful story, 'The Apple-Tree Table.' In the story, a superstitious protagonist discovers a colonial alchemist's lab in the garret of his new home, and rescues a table of apple wood from among the spooky relics. Soon, the table begins to 'tick,' much like the 'raps' heard by the first Spiritualists, causing the narrator's two daughters to shriek 'Spirits! Spirits!' throughout the story. At the story's climax, the source of the ticking is revealed to be a bug chewing through the dead wood of the table. But not just any bug: 'a beautiful bug — a...jeweller’s bug - a bug like a sparkle of a glorious sunset.' Whether the bug represents Melville's joke on the 'humbug' of Spiritualism, or a pleasant meditation on the wonders of the natural world, is left to the reader to decide. In the polysemous world of the Tarot, our bug might also represent the 'gold-bug' of the Edgar Allan Poe story of the same name, in which the folk-alchemy of a treasure-hunting expedition unfolds successfully under the influence of a gold bug. Perhaps the bug may stand in for Carl Jung's concept of 'synchronicity,' as one example Jung used to explain synchronicity was a patient who dreamed of a golden scarab. After the patient recited the dream to Jung, just such a bug scratched at Jung's window, and the uncanny coincidence prompted further thought on the signs and symbols in the outer world that reflect one's inner life. Synchronicity is not a bad term for summing up the actions of the Tarot's Moon. It can be easy to forget that the astrological sign associated with the Tarot's Moon is not Cancer but Pisces, the sign of both mystical insight AND self-delusion. To explain the meaning of this card I always ask people to remember their own experiences on the Full Moon: typically, some Full Moons are full of wonder and magic and the pleasure of the spooky, while others have you crying your eyes out, a victim of your own worst fears and illusory projections. While many people in the nineteenth century praised the sisters Fox as the harbingers of a new spiritual dispensation, an equal number reviled them as gimmicky charlatans. That the sisters later confessed to faking spiritualistic phenomena only complicates matters, as the 'confessions' were financially motivated, and only came after thousands of seances in which they connected the bereaved to their departed loved ones. Welcome to the wooly world of the Moon...” — Thea Wirsching

[ellupelluellu]

Mann

Junior’s business 2/2

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[generationexorcist]

The Fox Sisters: Spiritualism’s Unlikely Founders

Whether skeptic or believer, few Americans have been able to ignore the phenomenon known as spiritualism — the belief that spirits can communicate with the living, usually with the help of certain sensitive individuals called mediums. During the last half of the 19th century, some Americans believed that the strange rappings heard in early séances were a spiritual telegraph, the otherworldly equivalent of Samuel F.B. Morse’s new invention. Others insisted that the noises were a sleight-of-hand trick used to prey upon vulnerable mourners. Even so, the religious and social movement inspired child mediums, outraged American clergymen, infuriated scientists and, at its peak, attracted more than 1 million American adherents.

The origins of America’s first spiritualist movement began humbly, in the hamlet of Hydesville, N.Y., just a few miles outside the Erie Canal town of Newark, about 20 miles west of Rochester. There, during the winter of 1847-48, 15-year-old Maggie Fox and her little sister, Katy, 11 1/2, schemed to frighten their mother, Margaret Fox, by creating sounds that echoed through their farmhouse at night.

At first, the girls tied strings to apples, then repeatedly and rhythmically dropped them on the stairs to mimic ghostly footsteps. According to an interview Maggie gave the New York World 40 years later, she and Katy soon learned to make popping, cracking and thumping sounds on their own. While the exact method they used has never been fully explained, Maggie claimed that they did so by popping or cracking the knuckles of their toes or by snapping their big and second toes much as one snaps one’s fingers. Eventually the girls became so adept that they performed the trick in their stocking feet and even while standing in shoes. These rapidly repeated sounds were allegedly so loud that the elder Foxes had been awakened from their sleep.

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