Skip to main content

Séance Sights

The website for the Lily Dale Assembly, the official headquarters of the small town’s spiritualist community, lists forty-nine registered mediums. The photographer Shannon Taggart has spent nearly two decades documenting Spiritualist communities around the globe. She began in Lily Dale, New York, a small town near the western tip of the state that plays host to one of the largest Spiritualist communities in the world. Her photos allow viewers to glimpse the sacred rituals by which mediums (and curious customers) reach beyond the veil.

 

Table-tipping workshop with mediums Reverend Jane and Chris Howarth, Erie, Pennsylvania, 2014.

 

Medium Sylvia Howarth enters a trance, England, 2013.

 

Woman said to be overshadowed by either the spirit of her grandmother, the Voodoo priestess Marie Laveau, or her own doppelgänger, Lily Dale, New York, 2003.

 

Instrumental-transcommunication and smoke-scrying experiment outside the séance room, England, 2013.

 

Medium Sylvia Howarth conducts a trance spirit art demonstration in her home, England, 2013.

 

Séance trumpets with celebrity spirit guides, hand-painted by medium Sylvia Howarth, England, 2013.

 

Gretchen Clark laughs as her deceased brother Chapman interrupts a reading to tell her a joke, Lily Dale, New York, 2001.

 

Medium Kai Muegge emits an ectoplasmic hand, Basler Psi-Verein, Switzerland, 2018.

 

All photos from Shannon Taggart: Séance, published by Fulgur Press.



from The Paris Review https://ift.tt/34fFqRS
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Beautiful Faraway: Why I’m Grateful for My Soviet Childhood

At 10 I wanted to be an artist, practiced a hysterical form of Christianity, talked to trees, and turned a sunset at a local park into a visionary experience. My great-aunt lured me to Evangelical Christianity with the strangeness of Gospel stories where Jesus always ended up angry at his disciples’ failure to understand. I sympathized with being misunderstood, and latched on. Besides, Christianity was a forbidden fruit in Soviet Russia so I had to worship in secret. This was unnerving but also alluring. I was a breathless romantic who wanted to be surprised by a knight on a white horse. From the early ‘80s to the early ‘90s, my childhood was formed by the images, atmosphere, and allusiveness of Soviet songs. I grew up in an artistic family where emotions flew high. I was the kind of imaginative child who could spin an entire tale from an oblong stain on the kitchen table. But there’s more to it than that. My family was not always idealistic or romantic, especially not in New York in...
Post a Comment
Read more

Philistines

Welcome to Disney World! Photograph courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. 1. Once I had to go to Disney World with my small children. On the way to the airport our taxi driver exhibited signs of Obsessive Disney Disorder—when he found out where we were going he started obsessively describing and listing and explaining everything that had to do with Disney World, even though he was a grown man. We stayed at the Portofino Bay Hotel, a Disney-owned property that is a replica of the storied village on the Italian Riviera. There were imitation Renaissance churches and Mediterranean piazzas clustered around a fake harbor with old Fiats parked on the cobblestones and fishing boats moored in the fake bay. Outside cafés ranged on the harbor, serving espresso under green-and-white striped awnings. Italian cypresses were planted along the pools. If you didn’t know it was a Disney replica of a real place, it would have to be characterized as being extremely tasteful and lovely. So you did tend to ge...
Post a Comment
Read more

Portrait of the Philosopher as a Young Dog: Kafka’s Philosophical Investigations

Nicolas Gosse and Auguste Vinchon, Cynic philosopher with his dog (1827). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons . Franz Kafka’s story “Investigations of a Dog” might be retitled “Portrait of the Philosopher as a Young Dog.” In any event, Kafka did not assign a title to the story, which he left unpublished and unfinished. It was Max Brod who named it Forschungen eines Hundes , which could also be translated as “Researches of a dog,” to give it a more academic ring. But the term investigations has its fortuitous resonances in the history of modern philosophy. The dog’s investigations belong to a great line of theoretical endeavors, like Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations , with its retinue of animals, dogs included; or Husserl’s Logical Investigations , which launched his new science of consciousness, phenomenology; or Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom , even more to the point since this is how the dog’s investigations end, with the ...
Post a Comment
Read more