Fourteen - (In)Audible Sound and Spiritualist Acoustemologies

Summary

Introduction

Experiment Eleven: Sit still and listen. Learn to think less and less of material and trivial things and more and more of the spiritual. Listen deeply, divinely, not for sounds or voices, but gentle whispering of the spirit loved ones. Value and learn to value spiritual blessedness above material pleasures. Go often into the still woods, or the hills and mountains where crowds and vulgar sights never obtrude. Extract the spirit from too close association with the physical senses. Love purity and truth above money. Avoid arguments and so never dispute. Avoid music which, in a subtle way lures the spirit from the silence. Joy in loneliness, if in it saints visit you and minister unto you. Then your loneliness will be ensphered by heavenly and rapturous voices of dear ones gone before. Never doubt but that you will hear. Be of good faith. The deaf shall hear, for spirit can and will commune with spirit.

J. C. F. Grumbine's 1911 booklet, Clairaudience, was an instructional manual for those who wished to hear the dead. Clairaudience offered students of Spiritualism lessons in the mechanics of spiritual hearing. Each lesson came with experiments like the one above, designed to help readers hone their practice. In his writing, Grumbine explained how direct, independent spirit voices were made audible to seance sitters by the use of the medium’s body and energy. He also explained how spirit voices maintained a certain vibrational frequency which made them audible only to the inner ear, or the “etheric ear.” Listening with this oracular organ was a skill that had to be learned and practiced and should be, Grumbine insisted, accompanied by an internal, spiritual development.

Experiment Eleven demonstrates a particular way of listening based on an understanding of sound that developed in North America over the course of the latter half of the nineteenth century. Theories of spiritual sound and the inner ear far predated Spiritualism's emergence in the 1840s. Spiritualists linked the newly occurring acousmatic sounds they heard to Swedish scientist- theologian Emanuel Swedenborg by way of the “Poughkeepsie Seer,” Andrew Jackson Davis. Listening practices and theories about the production of mysterious sounds solidified into general rules for conducting seances and spirit communication. From the first days of the Rochester Rappings, practitioners created their own methods for interpreting the knocks and raps heard throughout the seance room.