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 Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...
Post a Comment
Read more

Re-Covered: Living Through History

  A woman sips a cup of tea after her street is struck by a German bombing raid, 1940 Since the beginning of lockdown, I’ve sought refuge in sagas set during the Second World War. There is something deeply comforting about reading stories in which people are trying to live their lives against the backdrop of an intense global crisis, not least because it’s given me a much-needed sense of perspective. It’s so easy to become caught up in the myriad horrors of the contemporary moment, one sometimes forgets that the darkest days of the Second World War would have been just as depressing and desperate as the period we’re living through right now. Of the many books on the subject I read, Blitz Spirit: Voices of Britain Living Through Crisis, 1939–1945 —a brilliant new compendium of extracts from wartime diaries compiled from the Mass Observation Archive by the anthologist, editor, and literary agent Becky Brown—has stuck with me. Mass Observation (MO) was set up in 1937 by the anthr...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Historical Future of Trans Literature

  Whatever happens against custom we say is against Nature, yet there is nothing whatsoever which is not in harmony with her. May Nature’s universal reason chase away that deluded ecstatic amazement which novelty brings to us.  —Michel de Montaigne If you were trying to get anywhere in the late thirteenth century, the Hereford Mappa Mundi would not have been particularly helpful; the map is rife with topographical omissions, compressions, and errors—the most egregious of which is perhaps the mislabeling of Africa as Europe and vice-versa. Of course, as any medievalist will tell you, mappa mundi were not intended for cartographic accuracy anyway. Rather, they were pictorial histories, encyclopedias of the world’s mythological and theological narratives, records of medical fact and fable. Notable places—Carthage, Rome, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Jericho—appeared, but their placement on the map emphasized their symbolic import, rather than their geographical specificity. Thus, ...
Post a Comment
Read more