a history of my life as a spiritualist
Aug. 14th, 2016 05:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lotesse(i don't know why i'm writing any of this; i'm going to post instead of deleting bc i want to be able to look back later and see if i can get a better grip on what's been going on in my head.)
I was born in a hippie-ass family in the Midwest. My relatives are white Swedes by extraction, but were early adopters of mid-century American countercultural appropriation; my grandmother was a great buyer, seller, and collector of Native American artifacts, she was in with the Navajo guys who somewhat improbably worked with the local Coast Guard in Northern Indiana. One of the things she took with her to the nursing home was a wall-mounted bow-and-arrow display, and now that she's wearing my grandfather's rings as well as her own her hands are weighted down with thunderbirds. They were in the first wave of U.S. hippies to get on the Eastern philosophy and Transcendental Meditation craze; I've got cousins who ended up at Maharishi during the 70s. There's also a substantial adoption of Far Eastern biomed traditions; we used to all get our doctoring in Chicago Chinatown, took herbs labelled with alphabet strings for Westerners. One of my aunts worked and studied for years under our doctor there, and has traveled to Tibet and China to learn more; she runs a nontraditional healing and acupuncture practice out of her home.
It is true that I would be uncomfortable doing many of these things, now, myself, because I would see them as culturally appropriative. It is also true that all of my relatives were informed by genuine contacts and mutual relationships with Americans of other cultural backgrounds, and so I am hesitant to judge them for it individually. But I don't know where that leaves me, and the second-hand lessons I had via my family while I was growing up.
The spiritualism actually goes further back than all that. It was the generation of my grandparents that really took off with it, my great-grandmother who was really the source of it. All my great-aunts and -uncles are hardcore astrologers, the types who can draw up the charts from scratch, do the calculations. Great-grandmother educated both of my grandparents, who were childhood sweethearts. She died when I was six; I don't have many clear memories of her, but I have been visited by her in dreams. I remember her funeral; it was not a Christian affair, and her body was donated to science.
I've never had a word for all this; it's not like I belong to some sort of church. Recently, I've started saying that my family are American Spiritualists, which is true, even if most of them would be more vague about it/don't think of themselves like that, strictly speaking.
I've always practiced in these ways. I've been reading tarot for 17 years now, and one of the things the healer I'm working with remarks on is how practiced and ready I am with visualization and energy-raising. It's what I've always done. My grandmother used to do transcendental visualization exercises with somatic anchors with us when we were little babies to help us go to sleep.
I haven't always been real public about it. I had a hard time living in dorms; I've always used magical objects to ward, define, and protect my spaces, and people *would* ask, and it wasn't like their Christian jewelry which is so normalized in the Midwest as to be invisible, it was obvious and transgressive even though, for me, there was no element of transgression. One of my best friends in middle school got heavy into tarot, and she knew I read, but she was the angry child of conservative Christian adoptive parents, and it got very weird and intense, and when a bunch of her schoolfriends and her started channeling archangels I was out, no sir.
It was really damaging, I think, doing Victorian Studies as the grandchild of spiritualists; debunking spiritualist charlatans is very in right now, and after the first conference panel I attended I realized that I couldn't deal with that discourse. I was respected to engage respectfully with, for example, George Eliot's Methodism, but scoffing at ACD and other period spiritualists, despite their real connections to the Victorian left, was a-ok and a good time to be had by all. In truth, I *do* have a hard time respecting people's Christianity, and it's one of the things that's making it hard for me to make faith-based claims now.
It's also an ongoing issue for me that I am snobby/angry about lots of pagan culture, because I cannot abide bad history, and they're swimming in it. I was mad at MZB for lying to me about Celtic history a long time before we knew she was an abuser; and I know it sounds horrible to conflate the two, but I'm sorry, building your historiomyth on deliberately distorted history is a Bad Thing To Do. She lied to me about important things - History is magic, you know, but only real history.
I think it also matters that my parents left the family seat and were much more low-key in the way they raised us. Mother has strong negative emotional responses to the concept of organized religion, and father is stubborn about spiritual purity. The family seat, which I'd got closer to myself as an adult, is pretty much broken up now.
I was born in a hippie-ass family in the Midwest. My relatives are white Swedes by extraction, but were early adopters of mid-century American countercultural appropriation; my grandmother was a great buyer, seller, and collector of Native American artifacts, she was in with the Navajo guys who somewhat improbably worked with the local Coast Guard in Northern Indiana. One of the things she took with her to the nursing home was a wall-mounted bow-and-arrow display, and now that she's wearing my grandfather's rings as well as her own her hands are weighted down with thunderbirds. They were in the first wave of U.S. hippies to get on the Eastern philosophy and Transcendental Meditation craze; I've got cousins who ended up at Maharishi during the 70s. There's also a substantial adoption of Far Eastern biomed traditions; we used to all get our doctoring in Chicago Chinatown, took herbs labelled with alphabet strings for Westerners. One of my aunts worked and studied for years under our doctor there, and has traveled to Tibet and China to learn more; she runs a nontraditional healing and acupuncture practice out of her home.
It is true that I would be uncomfortable doing many of these things, now, myself, because I would see them as culturally appropriative. It is also true that all of my relatives were informed by genuine contacts and mutual relationships with Americans of other cultural backgrounds, and so I am hesitant to judge them for it individually. But I don't know where that leaves me, and the second-hand lessons I had via my family while I was growing up.
The spiritualism actually goes further back than all that. It was the generation of my grandparents that really took off with it, my great-grandmother who was really the source of it. All my great-aunts and -uncles are hardcore astrologers, the types who can draw up the charts from scratch, do the calculations. Great-grandmother educated both of my grandparents, who were childhood sweethearts. She died when I was six; I don't have many clear memories of her, but I have been visited by her in dreams. I remember her funeral; it was not a Christian affair, and her body was donated to science.
I've never had a word for all this; it's not like I belong to some sort of church. Recently, I've started saying that my family are American Spiritualists, which is true, even if most of them would be more vague about it/don't think of themselves like that, strictly speaking.
I've always practiced in these ways. I've been reading tarot for 17 years now, and one of the things the healer I'm working with remarks on is how practiced and ready I am with visualization and energy-raising. It's what I've always done. My grandmother used to do transcendental visualization exercises with somatic anchors with us when we were little babies to help us go to sleep.
I haven't always been real public about it. I had a hard time living in dorms; I've always used magical objects to ward, define, and protect my spaces, and people *would* ask, and it wasn't like their Christian jewelry which is so normalized in the Midwest as to be invisible, it was obvious and transgressive even though, for me, there was no element of transgression. One of my best friends in middle school got heavy into tarot, and she knew I read, but she was the angry child of conservative Christian adoptive parents, and it got very weird and intense, and when a bunch of her schoolfriends and her started channeling archangels I was out, no sir.
It was really damaging, I think, doing Victorian Studies as the grandchild of spiritualists; debunking spiritualist charlatans is very in right now, and after the first conference panel I attended I realized that I couldn't deal with that discourse. I was respected to engage respectfully with, for example, George Eliot's Methodism, but scoffing at ACD and other period spiritualists, despite their real connections to the Victorian left, was a-ok and a good time to be had by all. In truth, I *do* have a hard time respecting people's Christianity, and it's one of the things that's making it hard for me to make faith-based claims now.
It's also an ongoing issue for me that I am snobby/angry about lots of pagan culture, because I cannot abide bad history, and they're swimming in it. I was mad at MZB for lying to me about Celtic history a long time before we knew she was an abuser; and I know it sounds horrible to conflate the two, but I'm sorry, building your historiomyth on deliberately distorted history is a Bad Thing To Do. She lied to me about important things - History is magic, you know, but only real history.
I think it also matters that my parents left the family seat and were much more low-key in the way they raised us. Mother has strong negative emotional responses to the concept of organized religion, and father is stubborn about spiritual purity. The family seat, which I'd got closer to myself as an adult, is pretty much broken up now.