Spiritualism's Place: Reformers, Seekers, and Séances in Lily Dale
In Spiritualism's Place, four friends and scholars who produce the acclaimed Dig: A History Podcast, share their curiosity and enthusiasm for uncovering stories from the past as they explore the history of Lily Dale. Located in western New York State, the world's largest center for Spiritualism was founded in 1879. Lily Dale has been a home for Spiritualists attempting to make contact with the dead, as well as a gathering place for reformers, a refuge for seekers looking for alternatives to established paths of knowledge, and a target for skeptics.
This intimate history of Lily Dale reveals the role that this fascinating place has played within the history of Spiritualism, as well as within the development of the women's suffrage and temperance movements, and the world of New Age religion. As an intentional community devoted to Spiritualist beliefs and practices, Lily Dale brings together multiple strands in the social and religious history of New York and the United States over the past 150 years: feminism, social reform, utopianism, new religious movements, and cultural appropriation.
Podcasters and historians alike, Averill Earls, Sarah Handley-Cousins, Elizabeth Garner Masarik, and Marissa C. Rhodes each identify one site in Lily Dale and one theme that its history illuminates. They use those sites and themes to approach Lily Dale not as debunkers but as inquisitive researchers and storytellers. At the same time, they also reflect on their own relationships contending that it's never quite possible to separate grief, hope, faith, and friendship from understandings of the past. Spiritualism's Place breaks myths, unveils unexpected stories, and finds new ways to contemplate Spiritualism's role in American history.
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Community Reviews
“Lily Dale is a place that, as it always has, invites faithful and skeptic alike to come, listen, think, and perhaps learn something interesting as hell.”
Spiritualism is something that I have read a couple books about but none that involves a deep dive into Lily Dale. I knew only a little bit about Lily Dale before starting this book so I was very interested to learn more about this town of Spiritualists.
This book is split up into six chapters, each written by a different author, that focuses around different buildings in Lily Dale and various aspects of spiritualism history. This doesn’t just talk about the founding of this town or the spiritualist movement though, it also covers the suffrage movement, women’s rights, temperance movement, and cultural appropriation of Native American culture, and how it was all intertwined.
For the most part I did enjoy this book. It was informative and an interesting look at a part of history I don’t know a lot about. I never realized how spiritualism intersected with the suffrage movement or various other movements. I did know about cultural appropriation but this went into more detail than I knew. I did have some issue with the inconsistencies in the use of Native American, Indian, and Native in chapter six.
My biggest issue with this was that it was a bit dry and repetitive sometimes. I could clearly tell the different writing styles for each chapter and some chapters were a bit more dry than others. Also the author’s belief in spiritualism really showed through in this and at times I wondered how it was biasing their writing on the topic.
TW: colonialism; cultural appropriation; genocide; sexism; racism; death; alcoholism; death of a parent mentioned;
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