Erik Seeman's impressive book is one of the best revisionary histories currently available. Elaborating and expanding on an article he published in Church History in June 2019, Seeman shows conclusively that when mass spiritualism emerged like rapid fire in 1848, Euro-American Protestants were, in fact, a prepared people. He produces massive evidence to support his argument and explores its contours with pithy attention to detail. He also supports it with theoretical depth and nuance, using the work of Robert Orsi to challenge the old saw that Catholicism is a religion of presence and Protestantism one of absence.

Orsi's Between Heaven and Earth (Princeton University Press, 2005) famously explored the relationships cultivated by Catholic women, men, and children who leaned on heavenly protectors in the midst of often suffering and diminished lives. For these devotees, the presence of the Virgin and the saints was real and constant—never theoretical, always practical and a continuing source of comfort and strength. Religion for them, argued Orsi, was not about theology. Instead it concerned a network of relations that united, one by one, members of a community in earthly pain with the abidingly faithful inhabitants of heaven.

In his own broad-ranging and meticulously documented exploration, Seeman begins with Orsi's work and then goes on to demonstrate that his Catholic subjects were hardly alone in nurturing heavenly relationships. To do so, Seeman spends careful time on the Middle Ages with its foundational doctrine of purgatory and asks, significantly, what happened for Protestants when it vanished with the Reformation. Was there an unbridgeable divide, exacerbated by Calvinist predestinarian beliefs, that kept European-descended American Protestants from interaction with departed loved ones? Was heaven totally about the ecstatic vision of God that rewarded the blessed? Not so, argues Seeman. Despite what official theological doctrine taught and preached, something else was afoot even from the sixteenth century. Both Protestant ministers and laity believed in ghosts, even if ministers—to align with their anti-Catholic theology—mostly attributed them to the delusions of the devil. In emerging American cultural changes, however, women especially forged new bonds that joined the living to the departed. Thus, the dead became cherished partners in a growing form of practical religion. Protestantism, contra conventional opinion, showed itself to be a rich source of religious materiality and not mostly a religion of creeds. Still more, despite the official doctrine of predestination among Calvinists, lay people almost never considered their loved ones to be inhabitants of hell. Instead they actively anticipated after-death reunions with those who were closest to them. All of this meant subtle but strongly significant changes in the everyday religion of American Protestants, culminating in what Seeman calls the nineteenth-century “cult of the dead.”

In chapter after chapter, Seeman systematically examines a set of practices that advance his case, while at the same time pursuing a more or less chronological trajectory as he works through his sources. He scans elegiac writing practices, showing that Puritan New England funeral poetry oftentimes either addressed the dead directly or portrayed the departed as addressing the living, softening a harsh Calvinist theology with an imagined heavenly home for dear ones. Moving to the less literary and more concrete, he looks at the culture of gravestones in ways different from the work of earlier scholars, deeming the markers to be “talking” because of the messages they many times inscribed. In other words, instead of analyzing chiseled images, here he seeks to study epitaphs. In some, the dead speak to those who pass by, while others address surviving loved ones, and still others depict the living addressing the departed. With more attention to literature, too, Seeman probes the messages of both ghost stories and Gothic fiction for their affirmations of a permeable line that enables the living and the dead to interact. Beyond these, he explores an ambitious and imaginative set of material sources—from parlor songs to mourning embroidery to Protestant “relics” of the deceased in locks of hair taken from the corpse of a loved one and encased in special jewelry. As he works through this material, Seeman broadens his scope from Puritan New England to a larger canvas as the evidence allows.

One of the most interesting of Seeman's discoveries—well before Emanuel Swedenborg's announcement that the souls of the dead in heaven became angels—is his evidence that American Protestants held a similar belief. Little children, especially, became angelic beings and even something like Catholic guardian angels. To invoke Swedenborg, moreover, is to encounter Seeman's survey of denominational homes in which incipient spiritualist beliefs flourished—predating those of the middle nineteenth century. In a survey of Swedenborgians, Shakers, and Mormons, he details how each denomination became involved in contact with the dead in an era before full-blown séance spiritualism arrived. For Swedenborgians, Swedenborg himself was the gifted individual who traversed heaven and hell to report on conversations with their inhabitants, even if others were discouraged from following suit. For Shakers, contacts in the late 1830s and early 1840s particularly, culminating in “Mother Ann's (their founder's) Work,” made interactions with spirits almost part of Shaker daily fare. For Mormons, the practice of baptizing the dead—while not as direct in its interaction with spirits—occupied a ritual space that was, shall we say, hauntingly close.

Hence, when mass spiritualism emerged in 1848 and thereafter, trance mediums—mostly women as in previous Protestant dealings with the dead—did not arise out of nowhere. The burden of Seeman's book is that there was a slow and easy glide that finally took dramatic shape in the séances of the period and that became even more widespread after the Civil War with its massive battlefield deaths. In supplying the evidence that makes the point, Seeman is performing a revisionary service not simply for the emergence of séance spiritualism. Rather, he is modeling for historians how change actually happens, how—even when a cultural “eruption” appears to be puzzling or hard to explain—it is one possible result of a demonstrable process that was building over a period of time. The largest lesson to take away from Seeman's work is that populations and cultures are always, as noted earlier, prepared.