“According to his spirit, Napoleon Bonaparte was full of regret” (1). So Emily Suzanne Clark begins her book, signaling to readers to expect the unexpected from the start. She does not disappoint. At once intimate and ambitious, A Luminous Brotherhood studies a small group of Afro-Creole Spiritualist men known as the Cercle Harmonique in Reconstruction-era New Orleans and their communiques with spirits as a way into much broader conversations about American Spiritualism, Creole Catholicism, race and religion in the nineteenth-century South, and revolutionary upheavals across the Atlantic. Clark's research is rooted in her close reading of the Cercle Harmonique's séance records, which amount to over 7,000 handwritten pages archiving conversations with a diverse array of the dead, including former slaves, ex-priests, Catholic saints, Confederate generals, republican revolutionaries, and more. (Even Confucius and Pocahontas appear in the book's helpful “Index of Spirits,” which once again indicates that this is not your average American religious history.) The book both provides a meticulously detailed view of life in New Orleans amidst the rise and fall of the Reconstruction and intervenes in historiographical debates that extend far beyond the Crescent City's borders.

“This book contends,” as Clark outlines in the introduction, “that the Cercle Harmonique created and inhabited a religious world that intertwined political activism, social reform, and a moral vision for a more egalitarian United States. Through their communication with an authoritative yet democratic spirit world, the Cercle Harmonique envisioned the proper social, political, and religious ordering of the material world” (4). This proper ordering of the material world was modeled on what Clark calls the “spiritual republic,” a society organized around “the Idea—a concept that meant humanitarian progress, equality, egalitarianism, brotherhood, and harmony” (5). Here A Luminous Brotherhood is on somewhat familiar ground and fits well alongside books on the intersection of nineteenth-century Spiritualism and progressive reform such as Ann Braude's Radical Spirits (Indiana University Press, 2001) and Bret Carroll's Spiritualism in Antebellum America (Indiana University Press, 1997).

Where Clark breaks new ground is in who she studies. As black New Orleanians from Catholic backgrounds, the Cercle Harmonique “challenges the racial, geographic, and denominational assumptions about American Spiritualism” (10). Chapter 1 walks readers through “the Creation of the Cercle Harmonique” and introduces Afro-Creoles in New Orleans. Afro-Creoles tended to be free, educated, lighter-skinned people from French-speaking and Catholic families, and thus, Afro-Creole Spiritualists complicate a number of narratives that dominate studies of American Spiritualism. They deployed a white liberal religious tradition as a critique of “the white supremacist, southern, slaveholding oligarchy” (12). As a mixed-race community engaged in regular conversation with both black and white spirits, Afro-Creole Spiritualists complicate the black-white binary that so often defines discussions of religion and race in the American South. And, since Afro-Creole men largely comprised the Cercle Harmonique, A Luminous Brotherhood further expands our tellings of nineteenth-century African American religious history that tend to be about (non-Creole) black Baptist and Methodist women.

The book's remaining four chapters and conclusion spiral out from the Cercle Harmonique in “a series of concentric circles,” each with its own set of interventions (18). Chapter 2, “The Disharmony of New Orleans City Life,” takes us from the séance table out into the streets of New Orleans. Here, Clark recreates in riveting fashion the promise and precariousness of black life in the wake of the Civil War, when Afro-Creole Spiritualists held out hope that their spiritual republic might materialize and witnessed their joy turn to ashes as mobs restored white rule with bloody coups. Chapter 3 sets “Spiritualism and Catholicism” side by side, illustrating the ways in which the Cercle Harmonique simultaneously “pushed off Catholicism to shape their own religious and social identity” and used “Catholic language, ideas, and, most notably, Catholic spirits” to do so (84). Chapter 4 moves beyond New Orleans to explore “The Spiritual Republic and America's Destiny.” Reminscient of Edward Blum's Reforging the White Republic (Louisiana State University Press, 2007), this chapter explores Afro-Creole Spiritualist dreams of a nation based not on racial hierarchy but on “its Declaration of Independence promise that ‘all men are created equal’” (116). And finally, chapter 5 situates “The Spiritual Republic in the Atlantic Age of Revolutions” and, in so doing, challenges the U.S.-centric reading of American religious history writ large and Spiritualism in particular. The French and Haitian Revolutions (and the French revolutionary cry of “Liberté! Egalité! Fraternité!”) were at least as influential in shaping the Cercle Harmonique's concept of the spiritual republic as their American counterpart, if not more so.

What really makes Clark's book stand out, though, is how she writes about spirits. A Luminous Brotherhood provides one of the first close examinations of séance practices and Clark's creative use of archival material allows readers to sit at the séance table, so to speak, imbuing the spirits with as much life as the men who commune with them. The absence of the infamous “as if” clause is among the greatest strengths of the book. Afro-Creole Spiritualists did not act as if the spirit of Thomas Jefferson appeared to them in Clark's telling. Rather, spirit-Jefferson is given a life of his own. In this way Clark applies a lived-religions sensibility to the study of Spiritualism. Ironically, one of the things that makes the book so fascinating to read, its treatment of spirits as spirits rather than figments of the imagination, does at times become problematic. The spirits consistently confirm the perspectives of those around the séance table. Even those who held views contrary to the spiritual republic in life return to the Cercle Harmonique in death to renounce their former selves and beg forgiveness. All spirits, it seems, find themselves agreeable in death. One wonders whether Clark could have forged a middle path, maintaining the “really realness” of the spirits while also offering a more critical reading of the relationship between the desires of Spiritualists and the sentiments the spirits conveyed.

All in all, A Luminous Brotherhood is an important and expansive work that will prove a must-read for anyone interested in nineteenth-century American religious history, Spiritualism and other “metaphysical religions,” the varieties of African American religious experience beyond “the Black Church,” transnational histories of religion in the Americas, and Catholicism in New Orleans. The lives of those in the Cercle Harmonique do not adhere to the neatly prescribed boundaries that too often define the academy, and so Clark's book rightly pushes past them to produce a book that is inventive and instructive. Scholars would do well to follow her lead.