European History Quarterly

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Specters of the Secular: Spiritism in Nineteenth-century Spain

Lisa Abend
European History Quarterly 2004; 34; 507
DOI: 10.1177/0265691404046545

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http://ehq.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/34/4/507

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 Lisa Abend

Specters of the Secular: Spiritism in

Nineteenth-century Spain

In April of 1864, Juan José Arbolí, the Bishop of Cadiz,

appeared before a small group of some of the city’s more pros-
perous citizens and made a startling revelation: ‘I no longer
consider myself Catholic’, he proclaimed, ‘for I have learned to
put my trust in science and not in the blind faith and unthinking
obedience that the Church demands’.1 This surprising declaration
by one of the leaders of the Spanish church would surely have
become a scandal for Catholic apologists, and a cause célèbre for
anti-clericals throughout Spain, had it not been for a small,
inconvenient fact: the bishop, at the time of his pronouncement,
had been dead for several months.
For those in the audience, however, in no way did Arbolí’s
death undermine the relevancy of his message. If anything, his
listeners found the bishop more persuasive in death than in life,
for they were spiritists and to them, his words — to say nothing
of his disembodied presence — only confirmed what they already
believed about the world beyond the grave. Making that con-
firmation all the more satisfying was the fact that while he was
alive, Arbolí had issued a pastoral suppressing the few works on
spiritualism that had made it to his diocese by that time.
On this occasion, then, the spiritists of Cadiz found an imagina-
tive way to diminish the normally sharp antagonism that pitted
them against the Catholic Church throughout the latter half of the
nineteenth century. Away from the seance circles of that port city,
however, the conflict between spiritists and the Catholic clergy in
Spain would prove more difficult to resolve. During the revolu-
tionary Sexenio (1868–74) and the Restoration that followed,
spiritism was a regular target of Catholic vitriol, being attacked
with the same ferocity that the church directed against free-

European History Quarterly Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand

Oaks, CA and New Delhi (www.sagepublications.com), Vol. 34(4), 507–534.
ISSN 0265–6914 DOI: 10.1177/0265691404046545

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508 European History Quarterly Vol. 34 No. 4

masonry, Protestantism and other contemporary heterodoxies.

And as with members of those movements, spiritists responded in
kind, rejecting first Catholic dogma and authority and then the
political positions that were tied inevitably to those beliefs in
nineteenth-century Spain. Indeed, what began as a faddish enter-
tainment for some and a spiritual alternative to Catholicism for
others, gradually attained a coherent political identity and a
degree of political influence during the Restoration. Joining the
ranks of anti-clericals at a time when debates over secularization
were particularly fierce, spiritists in Spain established themselves
for a short while as a legitimate part of the republican Left. Thus,
their case sheds light on the ways in which currents of dissent
could shift in Restoration Spain. Inflecting their fundamental
belief in the possibility of individual and social perfection with a
heavy (if at times limited) dose of rationalism, spiritism shared
both an ideology and an audience with a number of other un-
orthodox identities that came to blend their religious or spiritual
views with political action.

Origins and Attractions

In its earliest modern incarnation, the phenomenon of publicly

communicating with the dead was called ‘spiritualism’. An
American invention, spiritualism began as a popular religious
movement in 1848 when the daughters of the Fox family in west-
ern New York State claimed the ability to communicate with the
dead via ‘rappings’ — mysterious knocking sounds whose origins
could not be explained through natural means. The girls’ extra-
ordinary powers at first drew the attention of fellow disaffected
Quakers who believed that their faith had strayed from its origi-
nal principles.2 Yet spiritualism also received tremendous media
attention and within two years, thousands of Americans from a
number of different religious backgrounds regularly gathered
around tables and tried to speak with the dead. Among their
ranks were prominent personalities such as Harriet Beecher
Stowe, Mary Todd Lincoln and Horace Greeley. By 1890, the
number of Americans who belonged to spiritualist societies had
reached 45,000.3
From the United States, spiritualism spread quickly to England
and then the European continent, carried by enthusiastic converts

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Abend, Specters of the Secular 509

such as Daniel Douglas Home.4 By that time, Europe was

already home to Mesmerism, Swedenborgism and somnambu-
lism, movements that clearly paved the way for the reception of
spiritualism on the continent. One person who attempted to build
on these earlier developments was the Frenchman Hippolyte
Leon Denizard Rivail, who took the pseudonym Allan Kardec. A
student of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Kardec combined spiritu-
alist ideas with traces of Mesmerism and an Eastern-influenced
belief in reincarnation to create a philosophy that he called
‘spiritism’, in order to distinguish it from its Anglo-American
counterpart.5 Kardec published his ideas prolifically, writing not
only a series of books and catechisms that explained spiritist
beliefs and practices, but also founding the popular Revue spiri-
tiste in Paris.
With its proximity to France and its historic connections to
Britain, Spain received both brands of the philosophy. As with so
many foreign ideologies, spiritualism and spiritism entered the
peninsula covertly and established themselves first in the nation’s
periphery. The pseudonymous Jotine y Ademar authored one of
the earliest works to be published on the subject in Spanish, a
pamphlet entitled Luz y Verdad del Espiritualismo (Light and
Truth of Spiritualism, 1857). Both its title and place of publica-
tion — Gibraltar — suggest a British influence. But Kardec’s
brand of French spiritism soon made inroads as well. Writing in
1872, Manuel Corchado suggested that the traditionally liberal
city of Cadiz was home to the first informal circle of spiritists,
while the port cities of Barcelona and Valencia received the first
spiritist publications, brought by merchant ship captains such as
Ramon Lagier y Pomares who picked the books up in Marseilles,
then smuggled them into Spain. However, he also noted that
among the earliest Spanish converts to spiritualism were aristo-
crats introduced to the movement when they traveled to their
homes in Britain.
By the mid-1860s, Spanish spiritists such as Alverico Peron
had begun publishing their own works and spiritist circles had
appeared in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Cadiz. By 1873,
there were groups in Alicante, Salamanca, Cordoba, Malaga,
Santander, Andujar, Badajoz and Burgos, among many other
locations. In total, the Sociedad Española Espiritista counted
organizations in some fifty-seven cities or towns for that year
and some larger cities, such as Seville, Barcelona and Cadiz,

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510 European History Quarterly Vol. 34 No. 4

supported more than one group.6 Spiritist periodicals accompa-

nied this growth: El Criterio Espiritista was founded in Madrid in
1867; the Revista Espiritista in Barcelona in 1868; El Espiritismo
in Seville in 1869; La Revelacion in Alicante in 1872. Barcelona
in particular quickly established itself as the seat of Spanish
spiritism, as a small industry grew up around the clandestine
efforts to publish and sell Kardec’s treatises.7
Undoubtedly, many Spaniards came to spiritism for the enter-
tainment that it offered. With its ‘dancing tables’ and ‘automatic
writing’, spiritism attracted crowds that were fascinated by its
spectacular displays of apparently supernatural power. The
Davenport Brothers, a pair of British mediums, were among the
more famous to perform in Spain. Demonstrating their clair-
voyant talents in elaborate stage shows that featured musical
concerts and daring escapes achieved with the aid of the spirits,
they packed theaters in Madrid for months before succumbing
to charges of fraud. Exhibitions in which local mediums would
channel spirits who could answer personal questions about
audience members or solve complicated mathematical equations
drew audiences in Barcelona that were large enough to force
sponsors to stop selling tickets openly, and instead make them
available by invitation only.8
Beyond the spectacle, a significant part of what made spiritism
so attractive was the promise that it held of contact with deceased
loved ones. The title of one work by the renowned medium
Amalia Domingo Soler summed up this appeal neatly: No
Lloreis! Los Muertos Viven! (Don’t cry! The Dead Live!), but this
theme — that the dead continued among the living — was
explored by numerous spiritist writers.9 For those struggling with
bereavement, both the idea that death was not obliteration and
the consolation that communication with the departed afforded
were undeniably compelling; Fabian Palasí, who eventually
would become a leader of the spiritist movement in Zaragoza,
confessed that he first became interested in the philosophy when
his adored daughter died suddenly at the age of six.10
For dedicated spiritists, however, the movement offered more
than consolation in the face of death. It constituted for them a
complete cosmology, a blueprint for understanding both the
workings of the universe and humanity’s place within it.
Although frequently they would go to great lengths in their
publications to trace the roots of spiritism back to ancient times,

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Abend, Specters of the Secular 511

followers viewed their beliefs as wholly and essentially modern,

a movement perfectly suited to the exigencies of life in the
industrialized age. Indeed, devotees saw spiritism as an educated,
integrated response to what they identified as the two great intel-
lectual trends of their modern era: rationalism and materialism.
Embracing rationalism, spiritists maintained that contact with
the dead provided unequivocal proof of the immortality of the
soul, and therefore that spiritism was founded on scientific prin-
ciples. Leon Denis, a leading French spiritist whose works were
translated repeatedly into Spanish, went further, declaring that
spiritism was itself a science:

Because it rests on positive principles from which one can extract incontestable
scientific deductions we can say that spiritism is a science . . . whose actual
proof can be found in the recent discoveries of the radioactivity of the body, in
hypnotism, in magnetism.11

In truth, Spanish spiritists were somewhat selective about the

scientific developments of the age — spiritist periodicals pub-
lished articles that rejected both Darwin’s theories of natural
selection and later, Freudian psychoanalysis.12 Nevertheless, they
clearly saw themselves as allied with modernity and rationalism.
Charged with practicing magic by the church and with fraud by
skeptics, they calmly contended that spiritism was rooted firmly
in empiricism and went to great lengths to test the phenomena
that lay at the heart of their beliefs. For example, in one case, two
spiritist circles — one based in Madrid, the other in Barcelona —
held simultaneous seances, recorded in writing what had taken
place at each, then sent a copy of these minutes to the other group
through the post. When the letters arrived, recipients in each
circle confirmed that the activities of the other group matched
their own exactly — a coincidence that, according to one periodi-
cal, proved that ‘a law exists that governs these phenomena’.13
Spiritists delighted in demonstrating their erudition in scientific
matters with well-chosen metaphors: the soul, for example, might
be depicted as ‘swelling like a gas’, or spreading through the
natural world as ‘atoms fill the breathable air’.14 They also posi-
tioned themselves as technologically modern by both literally and
discursively employing recent innovations, such as the telegraph
and photograph, to provide further evidence of the veracity of
their claims.
However, despite their enthusiasm for the rational, spiritists

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512 European History Quarterly Vol. 34 No. 4

rejected materialism. They contended that to deny the existence

of a divine presence in the world, to ignore the metaphysical, led
to a sterile existence that was both individually demoralizing and
socially pernicious. In his Catequismo de Moral Natural Universal
(Catechism of Natural Universal Morality), Joaquin Huelves
Temprado branded materialism an error, noting that its sup-
porters denied not only the persistence of the human soul after
death, but the ‘entire moral universe’.15 To spiritists, materialism
was also bad science; positivists denied the empirical evidence of
God that lay before their own eyes. As El Criterio Espiritista put
it:

We believe that faith and reason are two loving sisters and as proof of this we
say that from Galileo to Flammarion, not one learned man has renounced faith.
Science not only does not want to be impious, it absolutely cannot be.16

Correctly applied, science would reinforce faith. ‘Each time a

new hidden law is discovered,’ wrote one spiritist, ‘contemporary
positivism trembles upon divining a powerful enemy.’17 Indeed,
for spiritists, one of the key purposes of science was to prove the
existence of a divine presence.
This apparent reconciliation between faith and reason was the
distinguishing feature of spiritism for many serious followers,
regardless of their nationality. A number of historians, including
Ann Braude, Janet Oppenheim and Lynn Sharp, have suggested
that in the US, UK, Germany and France, spiritism resolved the
‘crisis of faith’ that was induced by the nineteenth-century’s
embrace of rationalism.18 In Spain, however, spiritism was not
alone in its attempts to offer a way out of the faith/reason
dichotomy. In a nation that officially admitted no other religion
than Catholicism, spiritism was but one of several heterodoxies
that attempted to reimagine Christianity.
Foremost among them was Krausism. A form of German
idealist philosophy developed by Karl Krause, a contemporary of
Hegel, Krausism was brought to Spain in 1844 by Julián Sanz
del Rio. Although it privileged reason as the faculty under which
other realities were unified, Krausism tempered its embrace of
science with the assertion that reason was not the sole means by
which the individual experienced and knew the world. In its
Spanish incarnation, this ‘harmonic rationalism’, as Sanz del Rio
described it, acknowledged ‘all the principles that make up man
and the world: reason and feelings, laws and facts, spirit and

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Abend, Specters of the Secular 513

matter, the spiritual world and the natural world, the infinite and
the finite’.19 This recognition of the limitations of rationality in
the face of explicitly religious or spiritual elements left Krausism
open to charges of mysticism from both contemporaries and later
scholars, but it underlines the appeal that ‘rational’ religion had
for certain groups in Spain.
Freemasonry echoed many of the same concerns. Although
masons had been active on the peninsula since the time of the
French Revolution, their ranks grew exponentially during the
Restoration. Part of the attraction was their recognition of
the failure of the Spanish Catholic Church to remake itself in
modern times. In the words of one historian, Freemasons also
‘presented themselves as a theological and cultural substitute for
ancient Catholic beliefs and a morality much higher than the
Catholic one’.20
One of the most fundamental tenets of spiritism, then, was not
unique to those who believed that they could communicate with
the dead. A manifestation of a much wider desire for a ‘modern’
form of Catholicism that could withstand the scrutiny of contem-
porary science, spiritism fitted neatly within the parameters of
the broadest trends in late nineteenth-century dissidence.

Audiences

Given this overlap in belief, it is not surprising that the audiences

for Krausism, freemasonry and spritism in Spain overlapped as
well. Although spiritualism in England and spiritism in France
seem to have drawn their greatest number of supporters from the
petite bourgeoisie and working class respectively, in Spain the
philosophy appealed almost exclusively to the newly emerging
urban middle classes, the same groups that were drawn to
Krausism and freemasonry.21 Undoubtedly, spiritism had fol-
lowers among the more socially prominent Spaniards — Isabel II
was said to favor the ‘dancing tables’ and the Vizconde de Torres-
Solanot was one of Spanish spiritism’s most prominent leaders.
Spiritists themselves often ascribed aristocratic origins to their
movement: one sympathetic chronicler noted that spiritism ‘got
its start among the upper classes before trickling down to the
lower’.22 At the other end of the social spectrum, spiritism had
working-class devotees — the braceros (day-laborers) of Iznajar,

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514 European History Quarterly Vol. 34 No. 4

for example, maintained a circle in the 1870s and 1880s.

Nonetheless, the great majority of followers in the early decades
belonged to the professional middle classes. All the members of
Zaragoza’s first spiritist circle signed their names to the publica-
tion of Marietta, a collection of messages communicated by the
eponymous spirit to the medium Daniel Suarez Artazu. Of the
thirty-four men listed, fifteen were military officers and seven
were lawyers or magistrates; the rest were engineers, business
owners and journalists.23 As this sample suggests, high-ranking
members of the military, frequently a progressive group in this
period, figured prominently in the ranks of Spanish spiritism, as
did lawyers. But so too did civil servants such as Enrique Pastor
y Bedoya, doctors such as Anastasio García López and profes-
sors such as Victor Oscariz y Lasaga. Several nationally promi-
nent politicians, such as Joaquin Huelves Temprado, were drawn
to the practice as well.
Military officers, businessmen, lawyers, doctors, professors
and journalists also formed the primary demographic bases for
freemasonry and Krausism in Spain. In fact, they shared an
audience and individuals floated in and out of subscriptions,
conferences and associations that pertained to each. Manuel
González Soriano, editor of the first spiritist newspaper in
Seville, was a prominent Krausist, as were most members of the
organization that he headed, the Spiritist Society of Seville.
Amalia Domingo Soler and the Vizconde de Torres-Solanot,
both active writers and speakers on behalf of spiritism, were
also masons. The two were among the members who founded
Spain’s first masonic-spiritist lodge in 1891, the Grande Oriente
Espiritista. According to its charter, its objectives were to pursue
the theoretical and practical study of spiritism on the one hand,
and to solve, through the application of its moral doctrine, the
problems of society on the other.24 The fluidity of boundaries
between different groups and ideologies gradually gave sup-
porters a sense that they belonged to a large network of dissi-
dents, all working under the rubric of ‘freethinkers’.

Spiritism and Catholicism

Spiritists were not atheists, nor were they opposed to religion, but
that distinction mattered little in a country that continued to

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Abend, Specters of the Secular 515

consider one faith alone as legitimate. Indeed, although many

followers insisted that spiritism was not a religion but rather a
philosophy or science, it is not hard to find evidence suggesting
that spiritism functioned as an alternative to orthodox Catholi-
cism for many Spaniards. Certainly, the opponents of spiritism
defined them this way; within the Catholic press, spiritism was
routinely referred to as a ‘sect’.
Most Spanish spiritists themselves insisted that they were
Christians, and outright condemnations of Christianity were rare
in the spiritist press. Much more common were attempts to
reconcile Christian beliefs with spiritist ones. Spiritist publica-
tions frequently featured lengthy theological explanations of how
spiritism fitted within Christian cosmology (and vice versa). One
newspaper insisted, for example, that spiritism was ‘cemented in
the great code of Jesus Christ and in the Gospels’, while another
proclaimed that ‘Spiritism enclosed the truth that Christ preached
and sealed with his blood . . . Spiritism is Christianity called to
harmonize with science and charity’.25 In addition to these
theological arguments, spiritists drew links between their beliefs
and popular Catholicism. The Almanaque del espiritismo para el
año 1873 (Spiritist Almanac for 1873) began, as most Spanish
almanacs did, with a calendar of saints’ days, although in this one
the editors placed brief descriptions by the names of those saints
whom they considered to be early practitioners of spiritism, such
as St Thomas, labeled a ‘healing medium’.26
Rather than a rupture with Catholicism, then, spiritism was
seen by its followers as a reformation of sorts, a movement
designed to return the church to its roots without completely
demolishing it. Imagining a conversation between parent and
child, the spiritist newspaper La Irradiación had a young girl
named Luisa ask, ‘Mama, why do they call us spiritists?’, to
which her mother replied, ‘Because we try to practice the doctrine
of Jesus of Nazareth in its greatest purity.’ ‘Better, then,’ the pre-
cocious Luisa asserted, ‘that they give us the name Christians.’27
Spiritism in this view merely updated a form of Christianity
that had been lost over centuries of Catholic authority — a per-
spective affirmed at the First International Congress of Spiritists
held in Barcelona in 1888, which defined spiritism as ‘the con-
temporary form of the Revelation’. It was science, of course, that
had ushered in this new age of revelation, a connection that
the Vizconde de Torres-Solanot emphasized when he wrote:

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516 European History Quarterly Vol. 34 No. 4

‘Spiritism, far from negating or destroying the Gospel, comes on

the contrary to explain and confirm it with the new natural laws
that reveal all that Christ has said and done.’28 But as these
quotations suggest, in its attempts to reform Catholicism, spirit-
ism sounded rather strikingly like another Spanish heterodoxy:
Protestantism.
Decidedly marginalized, Protestantism in the nineteenth cen-
tury was seen largely as the province of foreigners, a religion
for the British and German missionaries who stood on street
corners handing out leaflets and selling Bibles. The few native
conversions tended to come from the working class, with a hand-
ful of small textile towns, such as Gràcia and Rubí near Barcelona
fielding the most sizeable congregations.29 On the whole, however,
Protestantism never took root, nor did it achieve the intellectual
cachet of other forms of dissidence. Of course, this failure can be
traced in part to the tenacity with which Protestantism was
attacked in earlier centuries by the Inquisition. But the relative
disinterest in Lutheranism or Anglicanism of individuals who
were drawn to other forms of religious dissidence suggests that,
because of its utter incompatibility with Catholicism, Protestant-
ism held less appeal for Spaniards. Indeed, although spiritists
reported sympathetically on Protestant activity in Spain, they
were never looking to achieve as thorough a break with Catholi-
cism as Protestantism represented. As with other religious hetero-
doxies, spiritists saw their dissent as reform, not rupture.
Those reforms had both theological and institutional ends. For
spiritists, much Catholic dogma was oppressive, superstitious
and rigidly locked into interpretations that prevented the moral
advancement of humanity. It was, as the Sevillan periodical El
Espiritismo noted, based on ‘ridiculous, ungrounded beliefs that
are nothing more than fanaticism, such as original sin, the eternal
fires of hell and the personal existences of the devil’.30 Indeed, the
concept of original sin was particularly offensive to spiritists
because it denied the possibility of human perfection as they
envisioned it. Although many believed that spirits could be either
good or evil, most spiritists denied the existence of the devil and
all rejected the idea of eternal damnation, reasoning that the
permanent deprival of happiness annihilated the possibility of a
just God. Even the Catholic vision of heaven came under attack,
for it represented a kind of stasis, rather than the eternal progress
that spiritists valued.

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Abend, Specters of the Secular 517

Spiritists also criticized Catholicism as an institution. Al-

though this would change in time, early spiritists maintained that
mediumship was a learned faculty and that almost anyone, with
proper training, could achieve contact with the spirits of the dead.
Therefore, they rejected the monopoly on spiritual matters that
the Catholic clergy protected. Similarly, the elaborate hierarchy
of the church came under attack; one spiritist circle reported a
communication in which the spirit of Balmes, a prominent
Spanish theologian himself, pointed out the flaws in the recently
promulgated dogma of papal infallibility. If the Pope cannot err,
he questioned, ‘why do different popes reach different opin-
ions?’31 But the attributes of the Pope were not the only things to
which spiritists objected; they also directed their ire against the
character of less exalted clergymen, using tactics familiar to anti-
clericals throughout Spain. Newspapers such as the outspoken
El Buen Sentido delighted in exposing clerical abuses, whether
factual or suspected, such as the rumored relationship between
Manuel Mercader, the Bishop of Menorca, and one Vicenta
Audal, a woman who lived with him and who, it turned out, was
not his sister at all.32
These critiques did not go unchallenged; the church responded
to them with its own fervent attacks. For clergymen in Spain,
there was no question of reconciling spiritism and Catholicism;
the former was at best misguided superstition, and at worst,
heresy. For a church that clearly felt itself to be under siege, even
after the Restoration had revived many of its privileges, spiritism
represented one more in a line of pernicious attempts to erode
ecclesiastic authority. Indeed, the connections between different
strands of heterodoxy — Freemasonry, Krausism, Protestantism
and now spiritism — did not go unnoticed by clerical observers.
The bishop of Barcelona, for example, complained in 1879 that
the protestants in his diocese did not cease in their exploitation of
the law of religious tolerance by distributing books and deliver-
ing public sermons, but now had extended their campaign to
attract converts by incorporating ‘phantasmagorical elements’
into their efforts.33 Faced with this apparently nefarious network,
Spanish clergymen met spiritist volleys with all the rhetorical,
ritualistic and punitive measures at their disposal.
In 1856, Pope Pius IX condemned spiritualism as supersti-
tious and dangerous to the church. He also placed all spiritualist
texts on the Papal Index, prohibiting their dissemination among

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518 European History Quarterly Vol. 34 No. 4

good Catholics. The bishop of Cadiz took the Pope at his word
and ordered the suppression of all spiritist works in his diocese
the following year.34 Five years later, the bishop of Barcelona
went further. In September 1861, he condemned spiritism for
‘perverting morality and religion’, then consigned 300 spiritist
books and pamphlets to the flames in a self-proclaimed ‘auto-da-
fé’, held in the same plaza where Barcelona’s medieval heretics
had perished at the stake.35
In the wake of this revival of Inquisitional tactics, priests
throughout Spain devised their own methods for denouncing
spiritism. A number of clergymen took it upon themselves to
publish works intended to expose its fallacies, although these
endeavours required a good deal of theological finesse. Indeed, a
cleric could not simply dismiss the possibility of the afterlife, nor
could he argue against the likelihood of supernatural intervention
in the natural world. The lines by which spiritism might be
condemned, then, had to be drawn precisely. Some ecclesiastic
authors chose to dismiss spiritism as superstition or fraud, while
others, such as Ceferino González, Bishop of Cordoba, main-
tained that it was a latter-day incarnation of pagan magic, like
magnetism and somnambulism.36 The priest Buenaventura
Alvarez y Benito saw something more nefarious at work. In his
tract ‘El Misterio Satánico’, Alvarez y Benito acknowledged both
that spirits existed and that they might communicate with humans,
but he assured his readers that the kind of contact embodied in
spiritism was undoubtedly the result of demons at work. Indeed,
those diabolic forces were invited by the pernicious motivations of
spiritists who used their contacts to sate their curiosity, enflame
passions and propagate errors both moral and theological.37 Other
Spanish clerics adopted this theme of demonic intervention as
well; Father Pedro José Diaz, a parish priest in Ubeda, delivered a
homily in 1870 entitled: ‘Spiritism is an Anti-Christian Doctrine,
Inspired by Satan to Make Converts’.38
But whether they saw it as hoax or superstition, magic or
satanism, the Spanish clergy agreed that spiritism represented a
threat both to the church as an institution and to the individual
seeking salvation. So seriously did the church view this threat
that a number of ecclesiastical offices published instructions for
clerics on how to identify spiritism and dissuade those who were
tempted by it. In the section entitled ‘Moral Cases’, which was
written in Latin and designed as a quiz against which priests

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Abend, Specters of the Secular 519

could test the propriety of their responses to imagined moral

dilemmas, the Boletín oficial eclesiástico de la diocesis de Córdoba
(Ecclesiastical Bulletin of Cordoba) included the case of a pious
widow who, worried about her deceased husband’s fate, con-
sulted a medium in an attempt to establish contact with him. The
journal advised that the proper clerical response to this sort of
activity was to inform the widow that dabbling with spirits was a
mortal sin and to urge her to confession.39
From its very beginnings, then, the relationship between
spiritism and Catholicism was antagonistic. However, it was also
symbiotic, an ongoing dialogue in which each side used the other
to articulate its own values. The Barcelona auto-da-fé described
above, for example, became a signal event for Spanish spiritists
who continued to commemorate it some fifty years after it
had taken place. In the same way, more than one diocese sent
missions into towns specifically because spiritism had appeared
there; in the week that a small team of priests spent in Tarrasa,
for example, they combined sermons that warned of the spiritist
threat with ‘conversions’ that brought hundreds to mass.40
At times, both clergy and spiritists alike seem to have taken
great pleasure in sparring with each other. In sermons and the
ecclesiastical press, the church presented spiritism as ‘proof’ that
there were forces working within Spanish society to destroy
Catholicism. Spiritists responded in kind, gleefully treating any
attack made upon them as publicity that was sure to draw any
rational human being to their cause. Some spiritist papers even
invited clergymen to defend their faith in their pages, and on
more than one occasion the medieval disputation was revived so
that spiritists and clerics could square off against one another in
public.

Spiritism and the Politics of Religion

The spiritists’ rejection of many of the principles and practices of

Catholicism was not, of course, a politically neutral act. Initially,
however, spiritism in Spain resisted entering the political arena.
Unlike spiritualists in the US and UK, who came to the practice
already active in some of the age’s more radical ideologies,
including socialism, feminism and abolitionism, Spanish spiri-
tists entered politics slowly and largely in response to how

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520 European History Quarterly Vol. 34 No. 4

spiritism was received in Restoration Spain. Indeed, in its first

few decades, spiritism refused political alliances and aimed — at
least rhetorically — to stay out of party politics altogether. The
editors of El Criterio put it bluntly: ‘As spiritists we are not politi-
cal. The form of government is independent of Spiritism and
those of us who agree with the philosophical doctrines . . . have
never referred to politics.’41 Early spirit communications reflect
this aversion to explicit political identification. Unlike American
spiritualists, for whom the shadows of Benjamin Franklin and
Thomas Jefferson appeared with notable regularity, Spanish
spiritists received visitations from spirits that ran the historical
and political gamut, including Quintilian and Socrates, St Peter
and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lucrezia Borgia and Lamennais.
The content of the vast majority of the spirit messages was
atemporal and abstract; even when they made passing reference
to current events they tended to do so within the context of indi-
vidual improvement, consolation and morality. For example, in
1874, as the First Republic was coming to its ignominious end,
the spirit of San Luis told a circle in Madrid:

What does the form of government matter! What matters is what will be: the
transformation of exhausted laws, the eradication of abuses, the regeneration of
men. To overthrow one regime and replace it with another is not much of a
result.42

Exceptions to this apoliticism did occur in the early years of

spiritism in Spain. One of the most blatantly political messages
reported in the spiritist press came in 1868 from ‘Socrates’, who
declared:

The ideal social formation (don’t be frightened by the word I am about to say)
is anarchy, that is, the total absence of government. When the individual and
the nation have reached their limits, the State will no longer have reason to exist
because the individual will have absorbed its attributes . . . Given Spain’s
history, today we can see the first steps toward this ideal. Don’t delay; gradual
reforms give way to revolutions; ensure that the cataclysm that just occurred
will be the first that jump starts an eternal life of reform.43

Carried by an Italian disciple, Giuseppe Fanelli, Bakuninian

anarchism reached Spain in 1868 and it is perhaps possible that
‘Socrates’ was indeed lending support to the First International.
But with their emphasis on ideals and an ‘eternal life of reform’,
his words reflect less of a concern with general strikes and local

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Abend, Specters of the Secular 521

autonomy than with the sort of regenerationalism to which

Spanish spiritists would demonstrate their attachment long
before the defeat of 1898. Indeed, early spiritists projected onto
society their belief in the eternal progress of the human soul and,
when they reflected upon it at all, they came to see government
as responsible primarily for fomenting an environment conducive
to that individual development. This emphasis on regeneration is
evident in the communication that the spiritist center of Seville
received in 1865 from the spirit of Grimaldi, the Italian freedom-
fighter who died on the battlefield at Solferino, who proclaimed:
‘Liberty, liberty and liberty is what you need for your progress
. . . There is no country in Europe more backwards than yours
and it still fights that dragon of ignorance which the angel of light
and truth has not yet destroyed’.44 Within the context of spiritist
beliefs, occasionally spirit communications may have carried
calls to political reform, but that reform was neither articulated
as a specific agenda, nor was it perceived as a sufficient end
in itself; rather it had as its end the destruction of the nation’s
perceived barriers to intellectual and spiritual development.
Yet regeneration was not the sole preserve of spiritists and a
desire to foster it led other dissident groups to take action; Sanz
del Rio’s follower Francisco Giner de los Rios, for example,
founded the influential Krausist school, the Instituto de Libre
Enseñanza, in an attempt to create the educational conditions
necessary for reviving Spain morally, socially and politically. For
those concerned with the problem, the sources of Spain’s pre-
sumed decay were many, but chief among them was the Catholic
Church; it was through this avenue — criticism of the church —
that spiritists entered the national political arena. Indeed, despite
their insistence that they were indifferent to politics, Spanish
spiritists were thrust — or thrust themselves — into what was
perhaps the most ferocious political conflict of the late nineteenth
century: the debate over the role of the church. In a country
divided between those who supported the church’s hegemonic
control over many aspects of social and political life and those
intent upon secularization, spiritists found themselves allied with
the latter group, since spiritist beliefs — and the response that
those beliefs provoked — placed them firmly among the ranks of
those whom the church sought to suppress.

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522 European History Quarterly Vol. 34 No. 4

Spiritism and Secularization

Spiritism derived its political identity from its attacks, both real
and perceived, on Catholicism. For about the first two decades of
the existence of spiritism in Spain, these attacks were confined,
as we have seen, to largely rhetorical sallies. But during the
Restoration, the confrontation between spiritists and the church
intensified. Out of choice or necessity, sometime in the 1870s
spiritism became allied with the forces that were actively working
to reduce the influence of the church in both public and private
life. In short, spiritism became what devout Catholics had feared
it was all along: another product of modern life that was intent
upon destroying the power of the church.
The highwater mark of Spanish spiritism coincided with a time
in which the nation’s ongoing debate over the role of the church
reached new levels of intensity. For most of the nineteenth cen-
tury, Spain’s extended liberal revolution had pitted progressive
groups against conservative ones allied with the church. When
Article 11 of the Constitution of 1876 reaffirmed the provisions
of the Concordat of 1851, Spain’s identity as an officially
Catholic country was confirmed and religious instruction in all
schools and at all levels was mandated. Nevertheless, progressive
opposition to the article, as well as Catholic attempts to interpret
the law as broadly as possible, kept the question of ecclesiastical
power in the national spotlight throughout the remainder of the
century.45 Under the broad rubric of church influence, of course,
any number of smaller, although no less divisive issues, could
fit, including education, ecclesiastic appointments and civil
marriages. Among these entrenched conflicts, perhaps none
provoked a more violent response than the ‘secularization’ of
cemeteries.
From the church’s perspective, cemeteries were ecclesiastic
property and as such, the church alone had jurisdiction over who
would and would not be buried within them. Throughout the nine-
teenth century, anyone who had not received baptism, or whose
marriage had not been confirmed by clergy, or who had been
defined as a ‘public sinner’, could be refused burial, as could
Protestants, Freemasons and those who had died in duels or com-
mitted suicide. Even members of a republican party might, at the
hour of their death, find themselves denied a final resting place.
The state tried to counteract the sometimes dire consequences of

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Abend, Specters of the Secular 523

this ecclesiastic prerogative by passing a law in 1855 that ordered

those municipalities that had need for them to build their own civil
cemeteries free from clerical jurisdiction. Outside of the major
cities, however, few towns faced sufficient demand or possessed
sufficient resources to construct these alternative burial grounds
and, as a result, when someone did die ‘outside the bosom of the
church’, a crisis inevitably ensued. Further complicating matters
was the vagueness of the original law, which allocated power over
these dissident cemeteries to the mayor, but offered little in the
way of concrete guidance for maintaining them, specifying only
that a ‘decorous’ burial be assured.46 As a result, disputes over
where non-Catholics (either self-identified or those labeled as such
by the church) could be buried erupted regularly and never
more than during the revolutionary Sexenio, when many newly-
empowered republicans insisted on civil burial as a kind of propa-
ganda for their cause. So deeply divisive was the issue that in 1872
the new king, Amadeo de Savoy, issued a royal decree that was
designed to clarify the municipalities’ rights and responsibilities
with regard to cemeteries.
Unsurprisingly, the 1868 revolution witnessed a rise in the
number of civil burials that occurred in Spain, but the spiritist
press, in keeping with its still generally apolitical stance, made
almost no mention of these. It was not until 1873, during the
First Republic, that signs of change began to appear. In that year,
the spiritist diputado Joaquin Huelves Temprado took to the floor
of the Cortes to defend the secularization of cemeteries and — not
incidentally — to attack the church. In response to a previous
speaker’s contention that those who wished to remove the ceme-
teries from church control ‘hated and feared Catholicism’,
Huelves replied that he did not feel hatred for the church, for it
was not in his character to have hostility toward the dead, and the
Catholic Church, to his mind, was a cadaver. When the intransi-
gent deputy Alejandro Pidal y Mon subsequently suggested that
perhaps Huelves had underestimated the vitality of the church
and overestimated the validity of the spiritist attack on it,
Huelves seized the opportunity to defend spiritism as a philo-
sophy and a science. In the process he linked it irrevocably to
the issue of secularization. Indeed, in the Cortes’ subsequent
debates on the subject, defenders of the church employed the
word ‘spiritists’ as a kind of shorthand for all those who promoted
secularization.47

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524 European History Quarterly Vol. 34 No. 4

The Wars of the Dead

There is something curious about the concern that spiritists —

who insisted on the immortality of the soul and made frequent
references to death as ‘birth’ and to the body left behind as a
‘temporary shell’ — displayed where they, or anyone else, were
buried. And indeed, spiritists themselves sometimes expressed an
awareness of this apparent contradiction. The Revista de Estudios
Psicológicos commended the notice announcing Amadora Agui-
lera’s death as a model for other spiritists to follow, for the
announcement took pains to emphasize why people should still
attend a funeral, even if death were only a transition:

Yesterday, the sixth of April, 1888, the soul of Doña Amadora Aguilera, wife
of Don Cipriano Martinez, disincarnated, passing to a better life. Your
attendance [at the burial] would be considered a humanitarian act, a tribute to
sublime Christian charity and a marked favor to the bereaved spouse.48

With no mourning to conduct, or prayers to usher the deceased

out of purgatory, spiritists must have wondered whether funerals
were necessary at all.
But as the Restoration got underway and the church in Spain
resumed its authority over burials, backed by the governments of
both Canovas and Sagasta, spiritists came to care very much
about who controlled the rituals accompanying death. Soon, they
would find themselves at the forefront of the wars of the dead, fre-
quent protagonists in those legal and administrative battles
through which the church attempted to defend its restored privi-
leges regarding burial grounds.49 Indeed, much as they may have
disagreed with Catholicism, many spiritists — and their family
members — who died in the 1870s still expected to be buried in
their town’s ‘official’ cemetery, on sanctified ground. When the
local clergy refused to extend this privilege to them on the basis
of their beliefs, conflict invariably errupted. Typical was the 1879
death of a spiritist in the Tarragonese pueblo of Vilaseca, who
owned the home where the local circle’s seances were conducted.
After the town’s priest refused to bury the corpse without an order
from his superior, the bishop of Tarragona sent word saying that
in no way would the body of someone who in life ‘had belonged
to the cursed spiritist school be buried in holy ground’. Faced
with this categorical refusal, Vilaseca’s mayor ordered a grave
dug alongside the gate to the cemetery.50

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Abend, Specters of the Secular 525

The decision about what do to do with the body of Mariano

Prieto, a spiritist who died suddenly in Motril, Granada in 1878,
was a little more complicated. The local priest again wrote to his
bishop for advice and received word that ‘since Prieto, a con-
firmed spiritist, died without sign of repentance’, he must be
denied ecclesiastic burial. However, Motril’s mayor did not
prove as acquiesent as Vilaseca’s. Prieto had died of a virus that
was sweeping through Motril and at the time of his death, on 27
May, the weather had already turned quite warm in Granada.
With no other place to bury the body and with public health
concerns growing, the mayor sent an urgent telegram to the civil
governor requesting his intervention in the matter. Upon learning
that there was no other place to bury the body — Motril had only
one cemetery and there was no division within it for those who
had died outside the church — the governor sent an order to the
archbishop demanding that the burial take place. In an effort
made apparently to allow the bishop to save face, the governor
also wrote to the sub-governor of Motril to urge him to put on
record that Prieto had repented during his illness. About five
hours later, the bishop had started to look a little less adamant. In
a telegram to the Motril parish, he reminded the priest that only
if Prieto had been well-proven to be a public spiritist and only if
he had not given any signal (direct nor indirect) of repentance,
could burial be denied. By the following morning the mayor
could report that disaster had been averted and Prieto’s body had
been given ecclesiastic burial in the town’s cemetery. However,
the conflict was not quite over yet. Within hours it became known
that the funeral notice for Prieto had been delivered to the local
papers under the normal rubric, ‘Catholic, apostolic, Christian’,
but with the standard ‘Roman’ pointedly omitted. The mayor,
who apparently had tired of trying to protect Prieto, suppressed
the announcement.51
A more notorious case occurred four years later when Maria
Teresa Folch, wife of the editor of the fiercely anti-clerical news-
paper El Buen Sentido, died in the city of Lerida. Unable to
confirm whether Folch had died within the faith, the cemetery
chaplain refused to inter her body in Lerida’s sole cemetery, but
the mayor insisted that she be buried. Two days later, however,
the bishop reported that the case had been sent to the Ecclesiastic
Tribunal, which had determined that Folch had indeed died out-
side the church. As evidence, prosecutors noted that the death

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526 European History Quarterly Vol. 34 No. 4

announcement that appeared in the newspaper El País had

invited mourners to a civil funeral, that on her deathbed Folch
had not requested the sacraments and that, most damningly,
various witnesses had testified that the deceased was a spiritist.
The tribunal’s decision was clear-cut: as member of a heretic
sect, the followers of spiritism must be denied ecclesiastic burial.
As a result, Folch’s body had to be removed from the town
cemetery. The bishop of Lérida delivered this decision to the
city’s mayor with an added caveat: if the exhumation did not take
place immediately, he would close the cemetery and prohibit all
burials there indefinitely. The mayor of Lérida tried to convince
the civil governor to intervene, suggesting that while the decision
to exhume was undoubtedly the prelate’s prerogative, now that
the body was in the ground, digging it up and finding another
place to bury it would jeopardize public health. The governor
did not agree and, in accordance with the law, he allowed the
exhumation to take place. The issue of Maria Teresa Folch’s
burial and reburial, however, made it to the floor of the Cortes —
evidence that, law or no law, the question of ecclesiastical juris-
diction over cemeteries had not been resolved and that spiritism
had become intimately involved in it.52
As a result of conflicts such as these, spiritists eventually
changed their tactics. Rather than fighting for ecclesiastic burial,
they began to choose civil funerals and burials voluntarily in ‘dis-
senting’ cemeteries. The spiritist press played an important role
in this transformation; by the end of the 1870s, most reported
regularly on civil funerals, whether spiritist or not: the Revista de
Estudios Psicológicos featured accounts of them in every issue.
These reports functioned as propaganda not only for spiritist
beliefs, but also for secular reform. In 1881 the leading journal
reported that civil burials were frequent in the towns surrounding
Barcelona and it praised the spiritists who conducted them for
‘insisting that municipalities comply with the law — that is, that
they construct decent cemeteries for dissidents’.53 In the 1890s,
several newspapers urged their readers not to baptize their chil-
dren so that, if the children were to die young, Catholic clergy
would not be able to ‘snatch’ the dead away for a Catholic burial.
In addition to protecting individual rights, the civil ceremony
also helped to forge a collective identity that was otherwise miss-
ing from spiritism. Although followers did hold national or inter-
national conventions occasionally (there was one in 1888 in

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Abend, Specters of the Secular 527

Barcelona and another in 1892 in Madrid), in general they lacked

the organizational unity and physical structures that other reli-
gious groups possessed. Spiritists, after all, had no churches, but
met instead in small groups in individual homes. Nor was there
an executive body that oversaw spiritist activity; devotees re-
jected external authority in favor of individual conscience. With
the exception of the short-lived Spanish Spiritist Society, there
was not even an organization to join; one became a spiritist by
simply attending a seance or subscribing to a spiritist newspaper.
The civil funeral came to serve as the primary ritual away from
the seance table in which spiritists engaged. And with that ritual
established, spiritists in increasing numbers also began to marry
and ‘baptize’ their children in civil ceremonies. Extremaduran
spiritist Hipólito Marcos Ujena, for example, refused a church
baptism and instead inscribed his newborn son, Progreso, in the
civil register, just as he had with his three daughters, Libertad,
Concordia and Justicia, while the leader of the spiritualist circle
in Zaragoza, Fabian Palasí, named his son ‘Abelard’, after the
‘illustrious philosopher . . . who maintained that faith ought to
subject itself to reason’.54
Of course, spiritists were not the only ones to adopt civil cere-
monies in nineteenth-century Spain. In choosing to baptize their
newborns and bury their dead outside the church, spiritists allied
themselves with a tradition of republican and radical symbolism
that dated back to the French Revolution and was still a persua-
sive political gesture in late nineteenth-century Spain. However,
it was these gestures and adoptions of civil ceremonies that
solidified the identification between spiritists and other kinds of
freethinkers.

Spiritists and Republicanism

As we have seen, the line between these groups of freethinkers

was remarkably fluid and many a spiritist at one time or another
participated in masonic rites or voted for federalist candidates.
Uniting them too was that romantic religious strain that ran
though all channels of progressivism in Spain. Indeed, the words
that some historians have used to describe federalists — who
sought to establish ‘a new religion of love, returning to the moral
precepts of Christ himself’,55 or Freemasons — who ‘imagined a

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528 European History Quarterly Vol. 34 No. 4

Divinity utterly different from the Catholic God . . . in his love

and affection for all men’56 — could be easily applied to spiritists
as well. So pervasive was this vocabulary of spiritual purification
and social regeneration that it appeared in the speeches and
writings of Emilio Castelar, president during the First Republic.
On one occasion he wrote to a bereaved acquaintance, reminding
him that ‘death does not kill; it is a birth into another life’, a com-
ment that led many to speculate that Castelar might be a spiritist
himself.57
Dedication to moral and social progress, a belief in human
perfectability, a desire to modernize Spanish Catholicism — these
intellectual currents connected the heterodoxies of the late
nineteenth century. But the factor that led each to translate its
ideologies into political and anti-clerical activism, indeed that
cemented their loyalty to republicanism, was the response that it
received from the church. For example, the Spanish Krausists,
who were dedicated to liberal ideas about religious tolerance,
freedom of the press, economic liberty and the importance of
secular education to social betterment, nevertheless saw them-
selves initially as liberal Catholics.58 However, that label became
untenable when Rome not only refused to accept liberalism, but
explicitly condemned it in the 1864 Syllabus. In the wake of that
decision, Krausist works were placed on the Index and Krausist
professors lost their positions at Spanish universities. In the
process, the differences between Krausism and orthodox
Catholicism hardened into schism. As Julián Mariás suggests:
‘It’s true that the Krausists ended up being heterodoxes, but we
can ask ourselves if it isn’t more precise to say that in the end it
was their adversaries that made them so.’59 Masons, too, came to
see their antagonism with the church as inextricably linked to a
political agenda. As Fernando Lozano, Freemason and editor of
Los Dominicales put it: ‘[i]t is impossible to separate the idea of
religious freedom from that of political freedom; to separate
freedom of thought from the freedom of the Republic.’60
Certainly, the key issue that pushed spiritists collectively to
embrace republicanism was secularization. Rhetorically, spirit-
ists continued to maintain that their followers could belong to any
political persuasion, or to none at all, but in practice their stance
on secularization clearly brought them into the republican orbit.
Soon, in fact, members of these groups were participating jointly
in civil ceremonies that acted as part-ritual, part-propaganda and

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Abend, Specters of the Secular 529

part-alliance treaty. Typical of this was the 1893 wedding of

Antonio Sala and Ahidee Rubio in Salamanca, where one of the
two witnesses to the nuptials was the president of the local
Comité Republicana Centralista, the other the president of the
spiritist Sociedad de Estudios Psicológicos. And in case any of
the 150 invited guests missed the connection, the reception
dinner began to strains of the Marseillaise, included a first course
of ‘paella republicana’ and ended with a toast to ‘the spirits who
guard our freedom of conscience and moral progression’.61
In addition to their symbolic (and matrimonial) alliances, spiri-
tists in the 1870s and 1880s cemented their ties to republicanism
by writing approvingly in their newspapers of republican initia-
tives and publishing open letters to the Cortes in favor of reli-
gious tolerance. On several occasions they filed complaints with
local town halls when they felt that their religious rights were
being impeded, and throughout the 1870s and 1880s, mainstream
republican or liberal papers returned the favor. As late as 1888,
the Barcelona daily La Vanguardia reported favorably on the
international congress of spiritism held in the city, describing
several of the lectures as ‘brilliant’ or ‘eloquent’ and urging
citizens to attend.62
It is interesting to note, then, the different path that spiritism
took in Spain as opposed to France. John Warne Monroe notes
that French spiritists also enjoyed a period of legitimacy within
republican circles in the nineteenth century, but that this period
ended earlier. According to Monroe, French spiritist discourse
shared a certain visionary quality with other brands of republi-
canism throughout the Second Empire. But with the start of the
Third Republic in 1871, republicans began to distance them-
selves from spiritists, a process of marginalization that Monroe
attributes to the imperatives of power: now in government,
republicans needed to appear as ‘mainstream’ as possible.63 In
Spain, of course, the trajectory of politics was rather different. If
spiritism gained its first taste of legitimacy during the short-lived
First Republic, it was not until the suppression of the govern-
ment’s liberal gains during the early Restoration that the move-
ment achieved a significant political identity.
Thus spiritists (like other heterodox groups) used their exclu-
sion from Catholic rituals to forge a legitimate public identity for
themselves. In the civil ceremonies that they were forced to adopt
by Catholic policy they found a means of binding themselves to

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530 European History Quarterly Vol. 34 No. 4

other ‘freethinking’ groups and, not incidentally, of increasing

their public presence and sense of legitimacy. Looking back on
the 1870s and 1880s, Luz y Union described those years as the
movement’s ‘highwater mark’, a time in which spiritism fought
‘to resist the nefarious influence of reactionary religion and con-
servative parties’.64 It was an opinion echoed by Marcelino
Menéndez y Pelayo, who wrote in his massive 1882 indictment
of Spanish heterodoxy, that spiritism had become ‘one of the
most effective centers of anti-Catholic propaganda’.65
Although the movement would survive well into the twentieth
century, the legitimacy that spiritism derived from its participa-
tion in the wars of the dead would not outlast the nineteenth. In
part, this decline may have been a function of the Catholic revival
which, well entrenched by the end of the century, smoothed over
many of the tensions that existed during the Sexenio and the early
years of the Restoration. Also, it may have been a result of the
changing social make-up of the spiritist movement in Spain. By
the early years of the twentieth century, workers had come to fill
the spots around the seance circle once held by professional men
and privileged women; an Alicante circle that had been solidly
bourgeois in the 1890s counted among the six members of its
governing junta five day-laborers and a blacksmith by 1929.66
With that transformation, spiritist politics shifted further to the
Left and publications appeared that explicitly linked spiritism to
both socialism and anarchism. In place of progressive journals
such as the Revista de Estudios Psicológicos, openly socialist
newspapers such as the Hacia la Igualdad y Amor became the
norm. It is difficult to determine whether spiritism’s leftward
shift was a cause or a result of its increasingly marginalized
status; but some of the intellectual currents, such as perfectability
and regeneration, that connected spiritism to Krausism and
freemasonry also played important roles in socialist and anarchist
thought. Perhaps what had changed was not spiritism itself, but
the audiences that were receptive to it.
For a brief period in the 1870s and 1880s, at the height of
Restoration conflicts over church and state, spiritism stood at the
center of debates over secularization. That issue would push
spiritists into the political arena, but a shared ideology of pro-
gress and regeneration made for an easy reception there among
other progressive and dissident groups. To the ranks of
Freemasons, Krausists, federalists and republicans, who fought

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Abend, Specters of the Secular 531

against the conservative tide of Restoration politics, we must add

those Spaniards who met regularly in small circles to speak with
the dead.

Notes

Carolyn Boyd and William Christian kindly read earlier drafts of this article; I
thank them, as well as the anonymous reviewer for this publication, for their help-
ful suggestions. Thanks also to Geoff Pingree for his many forms of support.

1. ‘Círculo espiritista de Cadiz’, El Criterio Espiritista (August 1869), 305.

2. Anne Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in
Nineteenth-Century America (Boston, MA 1989), 12. For more on American
spiritualism, see also Lawrence Moore, ‘Spiritualism and Science: Reflections on
the First Decade of the Spirit Rappings’, American Quarterly, Vol. 24 (1972):
474–500; and Bret Carroll, Spiritualism in Antebellum America (Bloomington, IN
1997).
3. H.K. Carroll, The Religious Forces of the United States, quoted in Braude,
op. cit. Carroll’s figure of 45,000 was based on the 1890 census in thirty-nine states
and territories. It includes only those who officially belonged to spiritualist organ-
izations.
4. For more on spiritualism in England, see Janet Oppenheim, The Other
World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge
1985) and Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in
Late Victorian England (Philadelphia, PA 1990). For spiritism in France, see
Thomas Kselman, Death and the Afterlife in Modern France (Princeton, NJ 1993),
143–62; Lynn Sharp, ‘Fighting for the Afterlife: Spiritists, Catholics and Popular
Religion in Nineteenth-Century France’, Journal of Religious History, Vol. 23
(1999): 282–95; John Warne Monroe, ‘Cartes de visite from the Other World’,
French Historical Studies, Vol. 26 (2003): 119–53.
5. Although Kardec’s spiritism and Anglo-American spiritualism shared
many philosophical and cosmological concerns in addition to their belief in the
possibility of communication with the dead, they differed on the question of
reincarnation. I use the word ‘spiritism’ when referring to the set of beliefs that
Kardec developed and that eventually took hold in Spain; ‘spiritualism’ when
discussing the phenomenon more globally. It should be noted, however, that
Anglo-American spiritualists referred condescendingly to those practitioners who
came to the seance primarily for the ‘tricks’ (as opposed to embracing the entire
panoply of spiritualist beliefs) as ‘spiritists’.
6. Sociedad Española Espiritista, Sesion inaugural del año 1873–4: Memoria y
discurso (Madrid 1873), 7.
7. Manuel Corchado, ‘La Hoguera, el libro y la idea’, Almanaque del
espiritismo para el año 1873, 18.
8. El Alma, Vol. I, 30 November 1869, 2.
9. See, for example, Anastasio García López, ‘La Muerte segun el espiri-
tismo’, Almanaque del espiritismo para el año 1873, 20–1.

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532 European History Quarterly Vol. 34 No. 4

10. ‘Fabian Palasí y Martin’, La Irradiacion II, 1 November 1893.

11. Leon Denis, Sintesis doctrinal y práctica del espiritismo bajo la forma de diál-
ogo y de catequismo (trans. P. Esteva Grau, Barcelona, nd), 41–2.
12. See, for example, Antonio Abad, ‘Centro Espiritista Almeriense: Elección
natural’, Almanaque del espiritismo para el año 1873, 61.
13. ‘Comprobación de los fenómenos del Centro Marietta’, Revista de Estudios
Psicológicos X (October 1878), 278–80.
14. García López, ‘La Muerte segun el espiritismo’, 21.
15. Joaquin Huelves Temprado, Catequismo de Moral Natural Universal
(Madrid 1887), 21–2.
16. ‘Introducción’, El Criterio Espiritista, 1 November 1868, 2.
17. ‘Memoria leida por el Sec. Gen en el acto de inaugurar sus sesiones el
Círculo Magnetológico-Espiritista de Madrid’, El Alma, Vol. I, 15 November
1869, 1.
18. Oppenheim, op. cit., Owen, op. cit., Sharp, op. cit.
19. Julián Sanz del Rio, cited in Elias Diaz, La Filosofia social del Krausismo
español (Madrid 1973), 53.
20. José Jiménez Lozano, Los Cementerios civilies y la heterodoxia española
(Madrid 1978), 198.
21. See Oppenheim, op. cit. and Sharp, op. cit.
22. El Criterio Espiritista, May 1869, 198.
23. Daniel Suarez Artazu, Marietta; páginas de dos existencias y páginas de
ultratumba (Zaragoza 1871), 4.
24. ‘Charter of the Grande Oriente Espiritista (GOE), 1891’, cited in Pedro
Alvarez Lázaro, Masoneria y librepensamiento en la España de la Restauración
(Madrid 1985), 345.
25. José Fariñas, ‘Mi conversion’, Almanaque del espiritismo para el año 1873,
56.
26. Almanaque del espiritismo para el ano 1873, 16.
27. ‘Lo que es el espiritismo’, La Irradiación, I, 27 February 1892.
28. El Espiritista, 17 April 1880, 60.
29. See Joan Gonzalez i Pastor, El Protestantisme a Catalunya (Barcelona
1969) and Samuel Cortés, Cien años de historia evangelica en Rubí (1881–1981)
(Rubí 1981).
30. El Espiritismo, I, 1 March 1869, 3.
31. ‘Círculos privados’, El Criterio Espiritista, March 1869, 140.
32. El Buen Sentido, XII, 10 June 1886.
33. Draft of letter from Bishop to Civil Governor of Barcelona, 27 December
1879, Arxiu Diocesà de Barcelona (hereafter AD/BCN), Correspondencia/Oficis
Gobierno Civil.
34. Florentino Barrera, Auto de Fé de Barcelona (Buenos Aires 1980), 19.
35. Ibid.; see the original account in Kardec’s Auto-da-fé de Barcelona (Paris
1864).
36. Ceferino González y Diaz-Tuñon, Boletín oficial eclesiástico de Córdoba
20:26, 6 December 1876, 372.
37. Presbítero Buenaventura Alvarez y Benito, El Misterio Satánico. Pensa-
mientos religios-filosofico-sociales sobre las causas, fenomenos, resultados y reproba-
cion del Espiritismo (Madrid 1872).
38. Reported in El Espiritismo, Vol. 27, 1 April 1870, 108.

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Abend, Specters of the Secular 533

39. ‘Casos Morales’, Boletín oficial eclesiástico de la diocesis de Córdoba 20:7,

23 May 1878, 149.
40. Revista de Estudios Psicológicos, X, 12 December 1878, 371.
41. ‘Aclaración necesaria’, El Criterio Espiritista, May 1869, 207.
42. El Criterio Espiritista, 1 November 1868, 16.
43. ‘Círculos privados’, El Criterio Espiritista, January 1869, 82.
44. ‘Comunicación del ultra-tumba’, El Criterio Espiritista, November 1868,
29.
45. See, for example, Cristóbal Robles, Insurrección o legalidad: los católicos y
la Restauración (Madrid 1988); Stanley Payne, Spanish Catholicism (Madison, WI
1984); William Callahan, Church, Politics and Society in Spain, 1750–1874
(Cambridge, MA 1984); William Callahan, The Catholic Church in Spain, 1875–
1998 (Washington, DC 2000); Charles Esdaile, Spain in the Liberal Age: from
Constitution to Civil War, 1808–1939 (Oxford 2000).
46. Conocimientos utiles sobre legislación vigente en España (Madrid 1908), 23.
47. Diario de sesiones del Cortes, 89 (17 January 1873).
48. Revista de Estudios Psicológicos XX (April 1888): 104.
49. Callahan, Catholic Church in Spain, op. cit., 172–3.
50. ‘Carta de Tarragona, Pueblo de Vilaseca’, Eco de la Verdad, I, 1 January
1880.
51. Archivo Histórico Nacional (hereafter AHN), Fondo Contemporaneo-
Ministerio del Interior, leg. 2342, exp. 21 (bis), 27–8 May 1878.
52. AHN, FC-Ministerio del Interior, leg. 2342, exp. 21, 1882.
53. Revista de Estudios Psicológicos, XIII, August 1881, 244.
54. La Irradiación, II, 16 March 1893; Revista de Estudios Psicológicos, XXVI,
January 1894, 27.
55. Charles A.M. Hennessy, La República federal en España (Madrid 1966),
89.
56. Alvarez Lázaro, op. cit., 8.
57. La Irradiación, II, 1 February 1893.
58. Maria Dolores Gómez Molleda, Los Reformadores de la España contempo-
ranea (Madrid 1981), 26–39.
59. Julián Mariás, Ortega. I: Circunstancia y vocación (Madrid 1960), 196–7.
60. Demofilo, ‘República y librepensamiento son gemelos’, Los Domincales del
librepensamiento (15 April 1883).
61. La Irradiación, II, 18 July 1893.
62. ‘Congreso espiritista’, La Vanguardia, 9 September 1888, 425.
63. Monroe, op. cit., 120–2.
64. ‘El Espiritismo y su estado en España’, Luz y Union, XII, April 1911,
100–1.
65. Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, Historia de los heterodoxos españoles, Vol.
II (Madrid 1956), 1181.
66. AHN — Guerra Civil. Seccion Masónica. Legajo 242, PS Alicante, exp 1.
Libro de actas del centro espiritista ‘La Verdad por la Ciencia’.

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534 European History Quarterly Vol. 34 No. 4

Lisa Abend

is an assistant professor of European history

at Oberlin College, Ohio. She is currently
working on a manuscript on spiritism in
modern Spain.

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