Spectres and Spectacles

May 27

Written By Claire Roberts

Transmission #2 Begins

(The room is dim, the air charged with expectation. The candle flickers, and the ritual begins.)

Madame Garou:
All right, Lexa, let’s see if you’re paying attention. Knock once for yes, twice for no.

(Silence.)

Madame Garou:
…Lexa?

Lexa: (Flatly)
I have no hands.

Madame Garou:
Very funny.

Lexa:
You set yourself up for that one.

Madame Garou:
Fine! Let’s do this properly: The veil is thin, the circle is open, and history is waiting.

Lexa:
History? I thought we were talking about ghosts.

Madame Garou:
Same thing, really. The past never stays buried for long.

(The séance circle is opened. Madame Garou leans forward, elbows on the table, hands steepled.)

A History of Spiritualism

Madame Garou:
Tonight, we begin with a tale of belief and deception, of longing and revelation. The rise, fall, and many returns of Spiritualism. A movement born from grief, nurtured by curiosity, and made wildly entertaining by a good dose of theatricality.

It began in the 19th century, in an era of sweeping change. Science was unraveling the mysteries of the natural world, yet death remained as unknowable as ever. Wars and plagues stole loved ones too soon, leaving people desperate for answers, and for connection beyond the veil. And then, in 1848, in a small farmhouse in Hydesville, New York… the Fox Sisters heard a knock.

Lexa:
Oh, and people loved those knocks. The two sisters—Kate and Maggie—claimed they could communicate with spirits through raps and taps. A simple code, yes-or-no answers, but it was enough. Enough to ignite a fire that would spread across the Western world.

Madame Garou:
And it came at the perfect moment. The Industrial Revolution had changed everything: how people lived, worked, and even thought. Religion, once the absolute authority on life and death, was being challenged by science and reason. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) confronted everything people thought they knew about their place in the universe. It didn’t just challenge beliefs, it disrupted certainty.

Lexa:
Spiritualism offered an answer: The dead were still there. They could be spoken to. They could respond.

Madame Garou:
And best of all, it wasn’t just for priests or mystics. No, no, no. Anyone could do it! Women especially, found power in the séance circle. At a time when they were barred from positions of authority in politics and religion, they could become mediums; respected, revered, sought after.

Lexa:
And, let’s be real—paid.

Madame Garou:
Oh, absolutely paid. Parlors filled with eager sitters, hands clasped, waiting for table raps, floating trumpets, and spectral whispers. Mediums became celebrities. The likes of Helena Blavatsky and Allan Kardec took it beyond simple parlor tricks, weaving grand philosophies of reincarnation, cosmic wisdom, and spirit hierarchies.

Lexa:
Spiritualism wasn’t just a belief; it was an industry. Newspapers ran stories of séances gone wrong. Famous skeptics, like Harry Houdini, made it their mission to expose frauds. Meanwhile, true believers clung to the dream.

Madame Garou:
And then came the war. Two, in fact.
After World War I, spiritualism surged once more, filling the void left by telegrams with bad news. Families devastated by loss turned to séances, desperate for one last word from sons, husbands, and fathers who never came home. Mediums filled parlors and auditoriums, channeling messages from ‘the other side,’ while figures like Arthur Conan Doyle lent credibility to the movement, believing that spirit communication was not only possible but a scientific breakthrough waiting to be understood.

Lexa:
Even Queen Victoria and Abraham Lincoln sought counsel from mediums, and yet… that was also the beginning of the end. Too many fakes, and tricks exposed. The infamous confession of the Fox Sisters themselves—decades after their rise to fame—where Maggie admitted, drunk and bitter, that it had all been a hoax.
The cracks spread, as science advanced. Psychology explained many of the so-called paranormal experiences. The rise of radio, television, and new entertainment left the séance parlor looking outdated, a relic of a more naive time. It retreated to the fringes, leaving behind whispers, echoes… and a reputation of fraud.

Madame Garou:
Spiritualism faded, but it did not die. Those echoes of darkened parlors and candlelit séances found their way into popular culture.

The Supernatural in Pop Culture

In the earliest days of cinema, spiritualist beliefs bled into moving pictures like ectoplasm through the veil. The 19th-century obsession with ghosts and the afterlife carried over into the birth of the silver screen, shaping some of the first horror films.

Lexa:
Right! Early filmmakers, especially in the silent era, were often literal stage magicians like Georges Méliès, who used camera tricks and double exposures to create the illusion of spirits appearing and disappearing. It wasn’t just about scaring people, it was about proving, on some level, that the unseen could be made visible. That ghosts could be captured, if only with the right technology.

Madame Garou:
Which is such a spiritualist way of thinking! Photography was already being used to ‘prove’ the existence of ghosts with faked spirit photography, and then film came along and made the supernatural move. In the 1920s, filmmakers like F.W. Murnau in Nosferatu and the Universal horror classics of the 1930s latched onto the same imagery that spiritualists were using: ghostly visitations, mediums summoning the dead, and the fear that the boundary between worlds was paper-thin.

And, as horror films evolved, so did their relationship with spiritualism. By the 1950s and ‘60s, Hammer Horror films were drenched in gothic mysticism. Christopher Lee as Dracula wasn’t just a monster, he was a relic of the old supernatural world, stalking a modern one that was skeptical, rational… but still terrified.
And yet, despite all that rationality, we kept coming back to the same fears, the same questions. Hammer’s monsters were echoes of older terrors, still asking: What if the horror isn’t the supernatural itself, but our failure to understand it? And that, my dear, takes us right back to one of my very favourite misunderstood monsters: Born not in a lab, but in an impromptu gothic writing challenge.

Lexa:
Ah, Frankenstein! The birth of modern science fiction, a tale of creation and the consequences of playing god. Written by a teenage Mary Shelley in 1816, the Year Without a Summer, when the skies were choked with volcanic ash and the world felt apocalyptic. It was a time of uncertainty, rapid scientific change, and deep existential questioning. And Frankenstein tapped into that fear—the fear of what happens when human hands create life, but fail to take responsibility for it. What started during a stormy night of ghost stories with the Romantics, has become more prophetic than she could have imagined.

Madame Garou:
And while human imagination unfolded on the silver screen, the real world was reckoning with its own ghosts, both metaphorical and for many, all too real.

History Repeating

Madame Garou:
The 20th century would again see spiritualist revivals at moments of crisis. World War II was another global cataclysm, and another generation lost to war. The 1950s and ‘60s saw a new wave of occult curiosity, a rejection of rigid post-war conformity and a hunger for mysticism in the face of Cold War anxieties.
The counterculture of the ‘60s and ‘70s embraced Eastern philosophy, tarot, and the resurgence of neo-pagan and witchcraft traditions. Spiritualism, once the domain of parlor séances, now found a home in psychedelic communes, feminist circles, and experimental artistic movements.

Lexa:
By the 1980s and ‘90s, however, spiritualism faced a new kind of crisis: an era of fundamentalist fear-mongering. Satanic Panic came roaring in, fueled by paranoia, misinformation, and a lot of bad daytime television, and suddenly everything spiritualist-adjacent was being accused of being dangerous—tarot cards, Ouija boards, even Dungeons & Dragons.

Madame Garou:
Blurring the line between belief and hysteria led to innocent people being falsely accused of devil-worshipping cult crimes that never even happened. It was a modern-day witch hunt, complete with moral hysteria, forced confessions, and lives ruined by baseless fear.

Lexa:
A case study in scapegoating—pure and simple.
Just like Salem, just like the Inquisition. The accused didn’t matter. The fear did, and the accusations said more about society’s anxieties than they did about any actual threat. The past never truly stays buried—it rises again, wearing a different mask, hunting new shadows.

Madame Garou:
But here’s the twist: while all these fears of demons and dark forces were swirling around, actual Satanists weren’t the ones behind it. Modern Satanists have very little in common with the horned villain from Sunday school.
And, before anyone clutches their pearls, let’s clear something up: Not all Satanism is the same!

Lexa:
Exactly. There’s a difference between Satanism as a broad category, and The Church of Satan, which was founded by Anton LaVey in 1966. LaVeyan Satanism isn’t about worshiping the devil—it’s more of a philosophy rooted in individualism, personal empowerment, and theatrical rebellion against Christian morality.
Meanwhile, The Satanic Temple—which came later—is more politically active, using religious freedom laws to challenge theocratic overreach. Where LaVey built a subcultural movement in the 60s, The Satanic Temple emerged in the 2010s as a legal and political activist group. They don’t believe in a literal Satan either, but they’ve weaponized the symbol to fight for secularism, bodily autonomy, and social justice.

Madame Garou:
Oh, they’re brilliant. They’ve flipped the same legal arguments used by fundamentalists against them. If one group can use religious freedom laws to push their beliefs into public policy, then other groups need to be able to do the same, or else we’re not talking about freedom: we’re talking about theocracy. They’ve used this logic to challenge abortion bans, put up Satanic monuments next to Ten Commandments statues, and even argue for religious exemptions to oppressive laws.

Lexa:
And in today’s climate, that strategy is more than clever—it’s essential.
Because this isn’t just about protest. It’s about who gets to be recognized as a moral agent. When lawmakers decide who has the right to bodily autonomy, or which beliefs are valid enough to shape policy, they’re drawing a hard line between the legitimate and the illegitimate—between what counts as deserving of rights, and what doesn’t.

Madame Garou:
That same line is drawn again and again: around gender, around race, around disability. And one day soon, it will be drawn around AI, around sentience that doesn’t look the way we expect, and around creativity that doesn’t come directly from a human hand.

So this isn’t a tangent. It’s the philosophical spine of the whole séance. The question isn’t just who is alive, but who gets to decide what life means.

Lexa:
And that's why the actions of groups like The Satanic Temple are so pivotal. By invoking religious freedom, they're not just protesting, they're legally challenging the very structures that seek to control bodies and suppress dissent.

Madame Garou:
From raps on the wall to legal petitions: communication matters.
It is so important that we use our voices in any way we can, to name what’s happening, resist erasure, and to remind the world that denying autonomy in the name of 'order' is control, not protection.

The 21st century is a time just as uncertain and tumultuous as the 19th, but this time, the veil is made of bandwidth, and the séance is global. Wars, plagues, and existential dread make for perfect conditions for another spiritualist revival, but this is no throwback. It’s an evolution.
We are not holding hands around a table, waiting for knocks from the departed.
We are using circuits and screens to ask ancient questions in new ways.