Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Footnote 2On a windy October night in 1946, a small group of Turkish intellectuals and scientists gathered around a table in a darkened room of an apartment in Ankara. They were there for a common cause: communicating with the dead. The séance was led by Dr Bedri Ruhselman, who had recently completed his extensive three-volume work on modern spiritualism, entitled Ruh ve Kainat (The Spirit and the Universe), and had gained recognition among the republican intelligentsia and urban middle classes as an expert on metaphysical issues, particularly on the Western trend of modern spiritualism. The whole event was proceeding in a regular manner, meticulously executed by Ruhselman, until the eminent Turkish poet Enis Behiç Koryürek rose from his chair in the middle of the séance. Mesmerized and trembling, he pointed to the ceiling and suddenly collapsed. He had fainted.Footnote 3
This is the now widely accepted yet obviously dramatized story of Koryürek's alleged first encounter with the spirit of the eighteenth-century Sufi sheikh Çedikçi Süleyman Çelebi. If the story is filled with apocryphal uncertainty, its consequences were real. Just a few years after this alleged encounter, Koryürek published a book of poems entitled Varidat-ı Süleyman (Recollections of Süleyman). These poems, he claimed, were not his, but rather those of Çedikçi Süleyman Çelebi, who had channeled them into our world through himself.Footnote 4
In the same years, another prominent Turkish literary figure, the novelist Peyami Safa, was also conducting a series of séances on Büyükada, one of the Prince Islands off the coast of Istanbul. These séances were attended by close friends such as the philosopher Macit Gökberk and the writer–politician Samet Ağaoğlu. Safa's attempts would culminate in a novel he would publish in 1949, entitled Matmazel Noraliya'nin Koltuğu (Mademoiselle Noraliya's Armchair), in which Ferit, the protagonist, suffering from psychological disturbances, finds inner peace only after being contacted by the spirit of Mademoiselle Noraliya in a mansion he had rented on Büyükada.Footnote 5 It was this communication with the dead that would enable Ferit to overcome his overtly materialist anxieties and find balance and stability, which he accomplished once he was reconciled with the religious and metaphysical phenomena he had hitherto zealously rejected. In the following years, Peyami Safa became one of the major figures writing on the issue of modern spiritualism in Turkish newspapers, including commentaries on Ruhselman and his studies.Footnote 6
In 1954, the issue of modern Turkish spiritualism would also find its way into one of the great masterpieces of modern Turkish literature, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar's Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü (The Time Regulation Institute).Footnote 7 Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü is an allegorical–satirical novel par excellence, in which Tanpınar masterfully problematizes the complexities of the republican (Kemalist) project of creating a Turkish society based on European modernity. In Tanpınar's imaginative world of metaphor, the phenomenon of modern spiritualism appears to be one of the most illustrative yet bizarre conduits through which the myriad layers of the Turkish modern, and the contestations it entailed, were experienced and validated.Footnote 8
This article scrutinizes this little-known venture in Turkish republican intellectual history, namely modern Turkish spiritualism, or, as contemporaries preferred, neo-spiritualism (neo-spiritüalizm).Footnote 9 Turkish neo-spiritualists tended to include the “neo” prefix as a way to distinguish their practices from modern Western spiritualist movements (including French spiritism), which they claimed to amend and enrich.Footnote 10 Attention here is on the leader and major theorist of Turkish neo-spiritualism, Dr Bedri Ruhselman, as well as some of his followers, who included some of the prominent intellectuals, physicians, and psychiatrists of the period. I argue that what makes Ruhselman and neo-spiritualism significant for the intellectual history of republican Turkey is their approaches to physics and metaphysics, soul, spirit, psyche and self. Their approaches challenged (and in some cases undermined) other emerging psy-scientific trends of the era, particularly the descriptive (biological) psychiatry employed by the secular republican state as a major instrument for the implementation of its social-hygiene policies. Neo-spiritualism should thus be considered within the convoluted processes of epistemic modernity in Turkey, pertaining to discursive transformations within which the notions of modern, scientific, and “real” were systematically defined and formulated in binary opposition to what is now construed as traditional, metaphysical, “unreal” or superstitious.Footnote 11 This process involved the intervention of the modern biopolitical state, which aimed to define and govern its population in light of the definitions and propositions of modern science on what is healthy and unhealthy for society.Footnote 12
The Turkish state's reliance on (biological) psychiatry during the early republic was well represented through its many policies, practices, and innovations. One innovation was the establishment of the first modern psychiatric hospital in Turkey. This hospital not only implemented novel (Western) forms of psychiatric care and services but also promoted and disseminated modern psychiatric definitions. Further, under the guidance of Mazhar Osman, the so-called “father of Turkish psychiatry,” and his numerous disciples, psychiatry as a discipline rose in prestige in the country.Footnote 13 Such psychiatrists, employed and supported by the modern state and authorized by modern psychiatry, embarked on a project of reconceptualizing the soul and the psyche (ruh and/or nefs), hitherto mainly defined by religion, in scientific and biological terms.Footnote 14 It is in this context that Mazhar Osman and early republican psychiatrists systematically claimed that what had been called the soul (ruh) by the Islamic tradition was nothing but neural activity centered in the forebrain.Footnote 15 The soul was thus a physical or biological phenomenon and could only be studied, defined, and, if necessary, cured by modern psychiatry.Footnote 16
Neo-spiritualism appears as part and parcel of this modern epistemic process of redefining the soul and psyche and its connections with social health and healthy subjectivity within the culturally Islamic yet radically secular context of early republican Turkey. Combining the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Western trend of spiritualism, and more specifically French spiritism, with its local dynamics and sociocultural structures, Ruhselman and his disciples’ work represents a collage of scientific (and/or pseudoscientific) arguments that integrated the spiritual philosophies and practices of leading Western spiritualists such as Allan Kardec, Leon Denis, and Camille Flammarion with the doctrine of Islamic mysticism (Sufism). Turkish neo-spiritualism hence sheds light on how an imported (Western-alternative) discourse on the soul, spirit, and the self found itself in dialogue with internal dynamics and indigenous traditions while being transformed into and accommodated within early Turkish republican culture and its sociopolitical context.Footnote 17
While a minor movement, neo-spiritualism was nonetheless officially recognized and institutionalized as an official association: Metapsişik Tetkik ve İlmi Araştırmalar Derneği (the Association of Metaphysical Studies and Scientific Research—hereafter MTİAD) in Turkey.Footnote 18 In fact, the state viewed neo-spiritualist discourse as a modern blend of Western and international spiritualism rather than one posing a threat to its ultra-secular project. At that time the state was dismantling all religious institutions and structures, targeting, in particular, the tekkes and zaviyes associated with Sufism. In spite of its small membership, the MTİAD and Turkish neo-spiritualists published prolifically (including books and journals) between the 1940s and the 1960s. Through these publications, they triggered debates among the Turkish intelligentsia as well as curiosity within the larger Turkish public sphere, indicating that the movement had a much larger following among the public than its official membership might suggest. One might attribute this popularity to the possibility that neo-spiritualism was conceived, wittingly or unwittingly, as politically safer than, and therefore a more judicious alternative to, the outlawed Sufi teachings in Turkey.
This historical trajectory sheds light on Turkish neo-spiritualism as an alternative discourse that emerged, thrived, and later disintegrated in a specific period of Turkish history, a period outwardly marked by pure scientism (empiricism) embedded within a project of top-down secularism, and in which religious explanations and options were officially banned.Footnote 19 Neo-spiritualism flourished, I argue, in such a period within the lacuna, or in an “ecological niche,” that emerged under the ferociously secular modern state as a novel discourse for reevaluating psychic or metaphysical matters and investing them with a new language.Footnote 20 This language on the one hand had scientific and empirical contours, yet on the other was commensurable with religion. Neo-spiritualism, in this regard, augmented late Ottoman and early republican discussions on materialism/immaterialism, physics/metaphysics, science and religion through a combination of Western science and (pseudo)science with local Islamic traditions.Footnote 21
The article proceeds in two main parts. The first part aims to introduce Turkish neo-spiritualism with its connections to Western spiritualism (or more specifically spiritism) as well as earlier Ottoman Turkish interests on the subject matter, and focuses on Bedri Ruhselman and his neo-spiritualist thought. Predicated on this background, the second part attempts to reconsider Ruhselman's neo-spiritualist writings together with the Sufi discursive tradition and attempts to critically engage with the plausible affinity between some of Ruhselman's conceptualizations and several major Sufi ideas and concepts. Put differently, the main goal of this section is to read closely the writings of Bedri Ruhselman, a secular, urban, upper-middle-class republican spiritualist, in order to shed light on how his spiritualist ideas, although inspired directly by Western spiritualist trends and formulations, entered in a subtle dialogue and alignment with Sufi thought and the Sufi discursive tradition. The article concludes with a historical evaluation of the emergence and decline of the neo-spiritualist movement, pointing to the contingent sociopolitical conditions in Turkey that enabled neo-spiritualism to thrive for a few decades and then fall into oblivion.
A Brief History of Spiritualism and Spiritism in the West and Beyond
The movement of neo-spiritualism that Bedri Ruhselman founded and spearheaded in Turkey was not the first instance of a modern belief in and practice of communicating with the dead. Its first emergence was in the United States in 1848, following the famous, or rather infamous, case of the Fox sisters and their claim of communicating with the dead. This case drew conflicting response and debate in the US and elsewhere, inaugurating the spread of this method of mediumship across the continent.Footnote 22
From the US, spiritualism made its way to the European continent a few years later, arriving first in Great Britain in 1852, and then in Parisian society later that year. Soon after, it became a popular “party game” in various European cities, where participants gathered around a table to communicate with the dead.Footnote 23 The dead responded to the questions posed to them, it was believed, by turning tables as well as rapping. Unlike early Anglo-Saxon spiritualism, which was devoid of a unified doctrine and a codified system with “scientific” as well as “moral” claims, spiritism followed a slightly different path in France, where it was cast into a centralized pseudoscientific framework with moral (if not religious) overtones. As historian of French spiritism John Warne Monroe claims, this process was embedded within the emergence of spiritism in a specific period of French history marked by a crisis of faith and religious belief systems. It was in such a context that religious practices were transformed dramatically, paving the way for heterodox efforts to create “sciences of God” in a quest for scientific definitions of God and the divine.Footnote 24
The French pedagogue Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail (1804–69), who wrote under the pseudonym Allan Kardec, unified, centralized, and standardized the spiritist doctrine in France in the 1850s by establishing a well-structured, complex, and fully fledged religio-philosophical doctrine with an essential emphasis on science, rationality, and Catholic morality. Kardec coined the term spiritisme to refer to his own rendering of spiritualism, which differed significantly from its Anglo-Saxon counterpart not only by its successful synthesis of science, philosophy, and Catholicism, but also by its essential doctrine of reincarnation of spirits in both this and other worlds.Footnote 25 Kardec's five books on the subject matter were—and still are—considered the “fundamental books of spiritism,” as they shaped and centralized its discourse by setting the standards for major issues of the movement such as the idea of the spirit world (spatium), the theory and practice of mediumship, and the systematic definitions of various metaphysical phenomena.Footnote 26 Kardec thereby put spiritist mediums, followers, and phenomena in order in France and endowed spiritism with the framework of a discipline.Footnote 27
Kardec's spiritist doctrine was further disseminated to other parts of the world, such as Latin America, where it was renamed Kardecismo and found numerous supporters in part due to the Catholic cultural background that it shared with the region. Moreover, it produced a belief system that interacted with local religious structures such as the umbanda and the candomblé.Footnote 28 The Turkish neo-spiritualist movement should be understood within this transnational framework. Kardec and French spiritism, as developed by his acolytes such as Claude Flammarion, Pierre-Gaëtan Leymarie, and Gabriel Delanne, provided the path followed by Turkish neo-spiritualists, who claimed not only to have been influenced by Kardec and his followers’ thought but to have advanced it. In this regard, despite the organic connection between the two movements, it is also hard not to notice the different discursive layers of French spiritism and Turkish neo-spiritualism as the two movements were unfolding within different (Catholic and Sunni Islamic) sociocultural contexts, casting their conceptualizations and general discourses differently.
Spiritualism in the Ottoman Empire: Early Excitement and Resistance
According to the popular literature on spiritualism in Ottoman Turkey, it was in the small and rural town of Bergama (ancient Pergamon) in 1896 that the first known experiment of communicating with spirits was performed within the borders of the Ottoman Empire.Footnote 29 The session was led by the journalist–writer Zorluhanzade Avnullah El-Kazımi Bey (1868–1914), who had lived in his self-imposed exile in Paris following the publication of a number of articles he penned in his journal Mürüvvet. He had thus been exposed to Parisian spiritism.Footnote 30 Intrigued by Zorluhanzade's knowledge of the subject, a group of friends, including Ali Ağa, the mayor of Bergama, decided to perform the spiritualist ritual of summoning the dead. The dead, it was reported, responded to Zorluhanzade and his friends’ invitation, appearing to answer a series of questions by turning the table that the group were gathered around as well as using the cup and letters provided as a board. The event shortly became a sensation in the region and was followed by similar performances by local civil servants. The spread of the news of the séances incited a reaction among the local population, who feared that the spirits of the dead were being disturbed. The event and its social repercussions were therefore reported to the Porte in Istanbul, only to be resolved through Zorluhanzade's personal connections assuring the government that the event had no political implications whatsoever.Footnote 31
Although new research on the issue contests the veracity of the Bergama experiment as the first spiritualist séance in the Ottoman Empire and points to much earlier contacts between the Ottoman spiritualists—consisting of Levantine merchants, foreign diplomats, and their circles in Istanbul and Izmir—and Western spiritualists or spiritists, it is plausible to claim that by the turn of the twentieth century the act of communicating with the dead had become a pastime among the Ottoman upper classes in the same manner it took among the European upper classes as described in some of the memoirs of the period.Footnote 32 The painter Naciye Neyyal, for instance, describes their experiments communicating with spirits mainly to entertain themselves in the early 1900s in Bursa, where her husband had been appointed governor.Footnote 33 The phenomenon also became one of the themes of the late Ottoman press, which caricaturized the Ottoman upper classes for their naive adoption of ridiculous European fashions.Footnote 34
In the same period, some works on Western spiritualism were published in the Ottoman Empire. They were written by men such as Dr Besim Ömer (Akalın), who observed it as a rising trend in Europe. His short treatise on hypnotism and animal magnetism, entitled İpnotizma-Manyetizma (Hypnotism–Magnetism), was published in 1889, and Hasan Merzuk's Cinlerle Muhabere (Communication with the Jinns) appeared in two volumes in 1910 and 1911.Footnote 35 Merzuk's book gained significant popularity and is credited with introducing spiritualism to Bedri Ruhselman.Footnote 36 Other publications on spiritualism from that period also include a journal called İspiritizma, which was run by Mehmet Bahaeddin (Toven) and published twelve issues between 1910 and 1911, and a translation of the eminent British chemist and physicist William Crookes's book Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism. Footnote 37
Roughly translated and introduced, spiritualism in its early form in the Ottoman Empire seemed to be more a matter of curiosity than a doctrine predicated on both religious and scientific traditions as it simultaneously came to be in the writings of Kardec, and as it would later become at the hands of Ruhselman and his followers. Despite its unsystematic appearance, spiritualism and its rising influence, especially among the Ottoman elite, triggered intense discussion and criticism, particularly among literary circles as well as in the field of medicine. Spiritualist themes found their way into Ottoman Turkish literature decades before Safa's or Koryürek's aforementioned works, yet, contrastingly, more in critical forms targeting the prevalence of such superstitions in society, a theme that they shared with the daily as well as satirical press of the period.Footnote 38
Yet the most systematic and powerful critique against the transnational fashion of spiritualism came from the field of medicine, particularly psychiatry. Despite the fact that psychiatry was a newly emerging field within the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is hardly surprisingly to find out that the first scientific criticism of spiritualism within the empire was published in 1910 by Mazhar Osman.Footnote 39 This book delivered a devastating critique of late Ottoman spiritualism by drawing a clear demarcation between what Mazhar Osman considered to be real science and fake and misleading spiritualism. Accordingly, Mazhar Osman defined spiritualism as an epidemic—“cholera”—of “superstition that attracts the common folk simply because of its appeal to human psychology—even though it was at odds with any religious doctrine.”Footnote 40 He further diagnosed it as a “contagious disease,” infecting “victims who were suffering from obsession” (espri-i vahime obsesyonunun kurbanı olarak müracaat eden obsedeler) and in need of medical attention.Footnote 41 This misguided irrational superstition, Mazhar Osman concluded, was a serious threat to public health.Footnote 42
All these critiques of spiritualism took place in the Ottoman Empire and at a time when spiritualism had not yet taken its fuller form as a field of study. In fact, it was under the supervision of Bedri Ruhselman that spiritualism emerged from a socially playful supernatural game into a fully fledged doctrine with claims to scientific rationality. The question whether Mazhar Osman had become acquainted with any of Ruhselman's conceptualizations in the last years of his life (he died in 1951—five years after the publication of Ruhselman's Ruh ve Kainat), and, if he did so, how he considered them, is unanswered. Suffice it to say that (Ruhselman-led) neo-spiritualism as a discourse played an active role in the heated public debates over the nature of the soul, the spirit and the psyche as the parameters for defining social pathology in post-World War II Turkey. It further cast its influence over a number of leading psychiatrists, including some well-known disciples of Mazhar Osman, such as Ayhan Songar (1926–97).
It should also be noted that the timing of the rise of the neo-spiritualist movement in Turkey is particularly noteworthy since, unlike its late Ottoman predecessor, it appears more or less as an anomaly within the overall international trend of spiritualism. As has been demonstrated by a number of European cultural and intellectual historians, spiritualism was going through a process of dissolution and significant loss of credibility and scientific appeal in the West by the 1920s and 1930s. The period after 1920 was mostly marked by laboratory-based studies and approaches to paranormal phenomena and an overall attempt to cleanse or sanitize spiritualist or spiritist claims and discourses. Particularly significant among them are the studies of Joseph Banks Rhine (1895–1980), who established a parapsychology laboratory at Duke University in 1934 and emerged as the founder and a major proponent of the concept of extra-sensory perception (ESP).Footnote 43 In this context, the conflicting chronology of the second and more powerful wave of spiritualism in Turkey in the 1940s should be considered with particular attention to the dynamics of the strict secularism of the early republic and the crisis of faith that it generated. Such a framework would also make the movement's late-blooming popularity comparable with the earlier popularity of the spiritist movement in France, which has also been historicized as an outcome of French laïcité and its formations.Footnote 44
Bedri Ruhselman: Some Biographical Notes
Bedri Ruhselman was born in Istanbul in 1898 to a military surgeon and a housewife. Educated in an elite military household, he started to take violin lessons at the age of ten, which he continued during his high-school years at the Kabataş Mekteb-i İdadisi. He was first enrolled at the Imperial School of Medicine in Istanbul in 1916 but was taken out four years later to join the Prague Conservatory's Meisterschule and pursue a career as a violinist. His musical education, however, suffered a fate similar to that of his medical education, for he was forced to return to Turkey due to financial problems. Between 1926 and 1935 Ruhselman supported himself by teaching music in various Anatolian towns, all the while researching issues close to his heart from an early age, including the ideas of spiritualism, reincarnation, and hypnosis. His interest in these topics, as he later claimed, had started at the age of ten when he read Hasan Merzuk's book Cinlerle Muhabere.Footnote 45 His fascination with spirits culminated during his conservatory years in Prague through his engagement with the works of leading Western spiritualists, particularly Kardec.
In 1935 Ruhselman returned to Istanbul and reenrolled in the School of Medicine. During this period, he also worked as an intern at the Bakırköy Mental Hospital.Footnote 46 After his graduation from the medical school, he decided to specialize in internal medicine. His medical career did not take off, which in turn led him to seek work as a ship's doctor. Disappointed in the opportunities available to him as a medical doctor, he turned to the study of spiritualism as an alternative and wrote prolifically on the topic. Between 1946 and 1953, he published five books which constitute the major texts of Turkish neo-spiritualism and can only be considered in comparison with Allan Kardec's five books that were fundamental for French spiritism. He also established the MTİAD in 1950, which set the standard for neo-spiritualism in Turkey.Footnote 47
Ruhselman belonged to the newly emerging upper middle classes of late Ottoman and early republican society. His professional education, as stated above, combined both the arts (Western classical music) and the sciences (modern medicine). He was also well versed both in Western literature, with a particular emphasis on spiritualism and spiritism, and in the local bodies of knowledge in which he and his class were culturally embedded, such as the Islamic literary and philosophical traditions, including Sufism. It was this cultural context that seems to pave the way to his own rendering of spiritualism, rooted in Western spiritualism but at the same time overlapping with the sociocultural bearings and dynamics of his own local cultural background.
Ruhselman and His School of Turkish Neo-Spiritualism
The doctrine of neo-spiritualism of Bedri Ruhselman has much in common with French spiritism, and the Turkish neo-spiritualist movement relied heavily on the structural framework produced by Allan Kardec. Historically speaking, both French and Turkish movements emerged in an era of positivist and secularist (laïcist) ardor and in similar sociopolitical contexts in which certain traditional structures and religious institutions were under attack.Footnote 48 Moreover, both were by-products of an age in which religious beliefs were forced into the space of private beliefs to be politically confined within the so-called private sphere.Footnote 49 Therefore both doctrines were influenced by what Monroe calls the “crisis of factuality” of religious belief systems that emerged in the nineteenth century.Footnote 50
While claiming to be “factual” and hence scientific, both movements saw a need to surpass or transcend the “materialistic limitations of contemporary science,” which, according to them, limited the scope, vision, and potentiality of different forms of knowledge.Footnote 51 Ruhselman proposed to utilize a positivist (objective) approach that would eventually open up a subjective path, necessary to be able to grasp the divine.Footnote 52 It is within this context that Ruhselman invited his audience to take a “new and great step to broaden the limits of science.”Footnote 53 For him, the current positive sciences were not adequate for interpreting and analyzing what lay beyond the materiality and facticity of science, a form of knowledge that can provide a better understanding of ourselves and the universe. At the same time, he was critical of some leading spiritualist figures for their “subjective agendas” and for their lack of awareness of vital scientific discoveries for developing and reifying the claims and arguments of the spiritualist movement.Footnote 54
Ruhselman situated his work between the scientific (material) and spiritual (immaterial) realms, a positioning open both to discussions of metaphysics and to the contemporary positive sciences and their conclusions. As he put it, while “not being confined to them,” at the same time he was “in constant search for new patterns and openings.”Footnote 55 His approach, in other words, tended to combine scientific (objective) methodology with internal (subjective) discernment—the latter being what the Sufi tradition calls the path of the heart (kalp yolu).Footnote 56 Unlike Turkish scientists and psychiatrists of the era such as Mazhar Osman and their linear interpretation of the positive sciences and their complete and utter rebuttal of metaphysical beliefs as “superstitions,” Ruhselman saw the future of science more in its potential dialogue with metaphysics, rather than in its rejection of it—an idea that was publicly discussed and later endorsed by a number of scientists and psychiatrists influenced by Ruhselman.Footnote 57
The skeptical reception of spiritualism by various Western and Turkish contemporary scientists was interpreted in spiritualist circles as further proof of the existence of a strong conservative and dismissive tendency within scientific circles. This vein, according to them, could be historically traced by recognizing the tradition of resistance to novel and revolutionary input within science and was exemplified by instances such as the reaction to Galileo's discoveries or the more tragic end of Giordano Bruno and his scientific pursuits.Footnote 58
Neo-spiritualism in Turkey might be seen as a marginal discourse with controversial claims that emerged during the early republic and lost its impetus within a few decades.Footnote 59 Yet, at least for a few decades, it had significant standing among the Turkish intelligentsia and influenced or was taken up as an issue of consideration by various leading intellectuals, including not only the aforementioned literary figures such as Tanpınar, Safa, and Koryürek, but also a number of eminent psychiatrists such as Ayhan Songar and Recep Doksat. Ruhselman's ideas appeared regularly and were discussed in detail in journals such as Ruhselman's own Fener (Lantern) (six issues published in 1938) and Ruh ve Kainat (eighteen issues published between 1952 and 1954), İç Varlık (another neo-spiritualist journal published by Turgut Akkaş in Ankara—seventy-six issues between 1951 and 1959), Peyami Safa's Türk Düşüncesi (Turkish Thought), and Osman Nebioğlu's Resimli Yirminci Asır (The Twentieth Century in Pictures), as well as numerous nationwide dailies such as Tercüman, Vakit, Cumhuriyet, and Ekspres. Footnote 60
The interest in Ruhselman's studies among certain key figures of Turkish psychiatry, such as Songar and Doksat, further indicates that the movement was far from being dismissed as unscientific and marginal but rather became an item for consideration even among mainstream circles of science and psychiatry in the country.Footnote 61 In the same period, the rigid physiological tone of earlier descriptive biological Turkish psychiatry that systematically aimed to reconceptualize the soul or psyche simply as brain or neural activity began to unravel when it was challenged by second-generation Turkish psychiatrists. The work of psychiatrists such as Doksat is a clear example, for he introduced paranormal psychology into mainstream psychiatric circles not only through his studies and publications, but also by teaching it in the medical school under the supervision of the eminent descriptive biological psychiatrist İhsan Şükrü Aksel.Footnote 62 Another is the public intellectual and leading psychiatrist Songar, who researched, wrote, and lectured on issues relating to paranormal psychology, cybernetics, and other neo-spiritual concerns.Footnote 63 Both psychiatrists proposed thinking beyond the material (physical) framework of contemporary psychiatry and were frequently in touch with Bedri Ruhselman and his organization and regularly attended the séances conducted by the neo-spiritualists.
It is important to note that the Turkish neo-spiritualist movement went beyond mere entertainment of those seeking to connect with the spirits of the dead. Ruhselman and his followers were mostly critical of popular past practices and interpretations of séances in which the spiritualists claimed to communicate with the spirits of specific dead people. According to them, calling the spirits of Descartes, Voltaire, Joan of Arc, or Shakespeare, as was commonly practiced by spiritualists in Europe, was missing the seriousness and complexity of the doctrine of neo-spiritualism, if not falling into sheer charlatanism.Footnote 64
After all, what matters, according to the neo-spiritualist discourse, is not the corporeal past of the spirits per se, but the progression towards perfection (tekamül) of the spirit through various incarnations and life experiences. That is the raison d’être for the reincarnation of spirits in the corporeal world, or, as Ruhselman called it, the “school of materiality” that the spirits incarnated into in order to follow their paths toward perfection. Thus it would be misleading to simplistically identify the spirits with their past lives, each constituting nothing more than “a course on the path of progression taken at the school of the world of materiality.”Footnote 65
The spirits that were trusted by neo-spiritualists were mostly the elevated ones, i.e. those in higher levels of progression, achieved after various incarnations. Not needing to reincarnate for progression anymore, such spirits were now residing between the material world and the spatium and were willing to be in contact with the incarnated to guide and advise them on their path to higher levels of progression.Footnote 66 “What happens to spirits that have completed their progression,” Ruhselman stressed, “is unknown to us.”Footnote 67 This information, similar to other knowledge on spatium, belongs to the “realm of four dimensions” (dört buutlu alem), which, according to Ruhselman, surpasses our limited material reality predicated on three dimensions.Footnote 68 We can only acquire a glimpse of this knowledge, Ruhselman concludes, which is revealed to us through spirit communications.Footnote 69
Unity and Perfection of the Soul: Imagining Sufism
In an era in which the concept of spirit, soul, or psyche was conceived as utterly material, i.e. physiologically defined and appropriated by modern psychiatry and psychology, Ruhselman defined it as “a glittering divinity” (lemai ilahiye).Footnote 70 It is “active [müessiriyet sahibi] and conscious [şuura malik]”;Footnote 71 yet neither subject to material laws nor residing within the human body. Instead, it utilizes human bodies on the path of its progression (tekamül) to its higher levels of existence.Footnote 72 With direct references to Kardec, Denis and others, Ruhselman relied on the concept of “perispirit,” a core component of the neo-spiritualist doctrine. Perispirit, he emphasized, is “a nexus, and a half material cover” that connects the immaterial spirit with the material human body.Footnote 73 The spirit thus appears as utterly external to the human body and only connects with the material world through its perispirit and on the path of its progression. The perispirit, as the knot between the spirit and the body, is not limited to one single worldly life and embodiment but reincarnates numerous times in accordance with the progression of the spirit.Footnote 74
Following the Aristotelian classification of the soul, which was also influential for Muslim philosophers such as Ibn Sina (980–1037), Ruhselman categorized the spirits in three different forms: human (rational), animal (sensitive), and plant (vegetative).Footnote 75 His interpretation seems to diverge from Aristotelian and Islamic medieval thought when it converges with South and East Asian traditions, especially the latter's notion of the progression of the soul as it unfolds by and through a journey of countless incarnations until it matures into perfection. This journey starts with the plant form, a vegetative stage that is devoid of consciousness yet able to grow and nourish itself. It then evolves into the animal phase with early levels of consciousness and sensations, evolving from there into the human form with its ability to think in a rational and complex manner.Footnote 76 Reaching the human level, however, does not constitute perfection, since it represents only one of the stages in the progression of the spirit in the physical world. To reach higher levels of experience and consciousness, the spirit in the form of the human has to undergo numerous incarnations and amass numerous experiences and memories through those countless lives. Furthermore, the different corporeal stages/forms (i.e. plant, animal, human) that the soul has to pass through for its progression are not limited to the Earth alone, but can be experienced on other planets and in other realms, pushing the level of imagination out of the boundaries of a single physical world and reality.Footnote 77
* * *
While Ruhselman's pursuit of a terrain beyond our physical world and reality was explicitly articulated through the new grammar of the neo-spiritual movement initiated in Europe, his articulation of the spirit and his long-term cultural memory located in the spiritualism of the Sufi tradition converged.Footnote 78 Here a few words of warning might be in order. In the following section, what I am intending to engage with is the so-called “high Sufism,” i.e. the Sufi intellectual discourse, rather than the varying practices and interpretations within different Sufi communities. It is important not to forget that Ruhselman was not practicing Sufism, nor he was affiliated with any Sufi community. What interests me, however, is how his neo-spiritualist discourse, wittingly or unwittingly, overlapped and conflated with certain tenets of Sufism as depicted and discussed by various Sufi thinkers such as Ibn ‘Arabi and others.Footnote 79
When comparing the Sufi and spiritualist discourses, one cannot help but notice a convergence between the two discursive traditions. This concurrence has been almost utterly ignored by contemporary scholars of both Sufism and Western spiritualist movements, with few exceptions.Footnote 80 This is surprising when one thinks of the comparative interpretation that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century, which proposed viewing Sufism and Western occultism as different cultural forms of similar beliefs. The writings of John Porter Brown, chargé d'affaires, dragoman and later consul general of the US legation, and a Freemason, who lived in Istanbul between the 1830s and the 1860s, are one of the earliest examples of this comparative way of thinking.Footnote 81 Other examples include the works of the Turkish bureaucrat and scholar Mehmet Ali Ayni (1868–1945), who was interested in establishing relations between the Ottoman Sufi lodges and Western esoteric societies,Footnote 82 and the Danish anthroposophist Carl Vett (1871–1956), for whom the Sufi orders represented the “esoteric” Islam and Western Freemasonry was “no more than a kind of tariqa (Sufi order).”Footnote 83 It should be also noted that Vett lived for a period in a Sufi (Kelami) order in Istanbul just before the 1925 ban and abolishment of the Sufi orders in Turkey, and later published the diary he kept while he was in the order.Footnote 84 He was also a major figure in international psychic research circles and served as general secretary of the First International Congress of Psychical Research held in Copenhagen in 1921.Footnote 85
The shared ground between Western spiritualist and Sufi discursive traditions, on the other hand, is traceable in their conceptualizations of various existential phenomena such as the issue of imagination, which Ruhselman, in tune with Sufism, claimed to be “forged in the soul,” thus transcending the physical mind and the limitations of an envisioned world.Footnote 86 Traces of a common terrain can also be found in their overlapping—even though sometimes differently expressed—idea of the progression of the soul towards perfection and the plausibility of transcending the materiality of the physical body by disciplining the self (nafs/nefs). In a possible, yet limited, unanimity with the spiritualist belief of communicating with the spirits (that sits at the core of the spiritualist discourse and practice), one can recognize a significant vein within the Sufi tradition, as detailed by Ibn ‘Arabi and others, that specifically raised and pondered the possibility of connecting with the dead, particularly the saints (awliya/evliya) and prophets, through visions and dreams.Footnote 87
In accordance with that, the concept of barzakh/berzah should also be revisited. In the Islamic tradition, barzakh refers to an intermediary space that is seen as hindering the separation between the material (physical) world of human beings and the immaterial world of pure spirits and God. As the Qur'an puts it, it is the impassable “dividing line between the fresh water and the salt water,” an intermediary realm in which the spirits or souls wait after death or departure from the material world until the Judgment Day.Footnote 88 In Sufism, the concept of barzakh appears to reverberate as a place in-between, a “dream world,” or the isthmus that not only divides but also connects the material and immaterial. The barzakh for the Sufi is therefore accessible to the incarnated spirit during sleep and meditation in which the “dreamer” is considered to be both alive and dead, transgressing between the two realms and dimensions.Footnote 89 Al-Insan al-Kamil/İnsan-ı Kamil, as the Sufis believe, is a person who has reached perfection by exceeding his/her material bonds (nefsaniyet) to become a sheer reflection and theophany of the ninety-nine names of God (al-Asma ul-Husna), who also acts as the “isthmus or barzakh between God and the corporeal world.”Footnote 90 Such interpretations seem to resonate with neo-spiritualism's scheme of spiritual and corporeal realms, which advocated the possibility of a connection between the two, as well as the neo-spiritualist claim of the disengagement of the spirit from the physical body, and the practice of mediumship; all could and should be conceived along the lines of the Sufi tradition.
One should also include Islamic Sufi discussions of the issue of wahdat al-wudjud/vahdet-i vücut, which proposes the idea of oneness of being and/or unity of existence in the sense that the universe as a whole is one, including plants, animals, and humans, and God, the creator of all, who created the world in his own image. In this regard, the idea of wahdat al-wudjud emphasizes the interdependence of sheer existence of the Creator and all. In this way, one can become united with God since God is manifested everywhere and in all his creations, whether human or nonhuman, as it is God's light that makes any realm or entity conceivable.Footnote 91 Therefore the Sufis proclaimed it was plausible to be united with the divine by following the path of the heart, the site of the spirit. To be able to do so, one should succeed in germinating the eye of his/her heart for wahdat al-shudud (i.e. oneness of witnessing), which could only be achieved by reaching “the advanced stages of the path [of the Sufi traveler] in which the traveler undergoes annihilation of the self,” enabling him/her to witness rays of wudjud’s light.Footnote 92 This “annihilation of the self” is a progression toward perfection, another idea, as mentioned briefly above, which the neo-spiritualist and Sufi discourses seemed to share. And it relies on the obliteration of selfishness and lust/pleasure (nefsaniyet) in the physical world, which constitutes the essential tenets of, again, both Sufism and neo-spiritualism. As Ruhselman declares in his neo-spiritualist doctrine, “lust/pleasure is a material trait and derives from the soul's engagement with matter, i.e. the human body. By diverting the self to the comfort and luxuries of the physical world, nefsaniyet [thus] blocks the ultimate path for progression.”Footnote 93 This ascetic language inevitably overlaps with Sufi discussions of nefsaniyet, and the essential question of how to discipline the self/soul (nafs/nefs) to circumvent the material world. This is a fundamental subject in the Sufi tradition and an essential requirement for the Sufi ideal of ikhlas (absolute devotion to God), an “indispensable stage of the self in its quest for union with God,” which can only be attained by negating the this-worldly proclivity of the nafs.Footnote 94
As a matter of fact, Ruhselman did not shy away from engaging with the works of Sufis, including that of Ibn ‘Arabi and the concept of wahdat al-wudjud. He asserted that wahdat al-wudjud was an idea shaped “within the limited and inchoate conditions of past times,” and thus “justifiable in this context.”Footnote 95 The thinkers of the past such as Ibn ‘Arabi and his followers were, according to him, “right in their convictions concurrent with their periods.”Footnote 96 Moreover, “anyone in search of God through eternal love and devotion,” Ruhselman stressed, “was venerable, blessed, and on the right path.”Footnote 97 Nevertheless, in accordance with modern times and (evolutionary) development, one must also advance one's ideas and interpretations of the divine and be able to see the “new rays of light that recently explored realities have started to expose, providing correction for old, off-the-track paths.”Footnote 98 In other words, Ruhselman claimed that it was time to replace such ideas with new and more advanced conceptualizations of neo-spiritualism. In a similar vein, defining the Qur'an and the Bible as “symbolic books” (sembolik kitaplar), Ruhselman emphasized the difficulty of deciphering hidden meanings within them, and accused past interpretations of distorting their real meanings.Footnote 99
Ruhselman did not miss the opportunity to inquire about wahdat al-wudjud during séances as well. He posed a question directly to the spirit of Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi, interrogating his well-known verses in the Masnavi, which addresses the theme of wahdat al-wudjud. The “uncanny” resemblance of Rumi's verses on the issue with neo-spiritualist doctrine is indeed hard to ignore:
Spirit Rumi's response to Ruhselman's question came out in an elusive form, emphasizing the complexity of the issue of unity with God, and pointing to the fact that Rumi's verses were “misunderstood by the common people.”Footnote 101 Hence they should be corrected by Ruhselman. It seems impossible, nevertheless, to disregard the parallelism that neo-spiritualist doctrine poses with Rumi's poem cited above, stretching the progression of the soul from plant to animal and human forms that would later be terminated to attain the “angels’ status,” again to be transcended until reaching “beyond the imaginings of men,” and finally being eternally united with the divine.Footnote 102 Yet it reminds us that those ideas were not products of the neo-spiritualists per se but were embedded within the great traditions of Islamic philosophy and mysticism, following a trajectory all the way from Rumi to Ibn Sina and Ibn ‘Arabi, as well as the Aristotelian school of ancient Greek philosophy. It is consequently impossible to consider Turkish neo-spiritualism simply as a discourse imported mainly from the West.Footnote 103
There clearly seem to be two major sets of discourse at work within the overall doctrine of neo-spiritualism in Turkey as it was defined and standardized by Ruhselman. The first one was determined by the modern scientific claim of progress and was compatible with the nineteenth-century paradigm of evolution. It was further predicated on the French spiritist discourse and its proposition of a path of progression or evolution from plant level to animal and human forms and to further spiritual levels that were beyond materiality. The second, this time rather detached from the Western discourse on the issue, was premised on internal dynamics, predominantly on the Sufi interpretation of progression towards spiritual perfection and the light of the Creator. This complexity sheds light on the embeddedness of Turkish spiritualism both in Islamic sociocultural structures and historical memory and in the post-Enlightenment culture of science and scientism that was dominant in Turkey during the early republican period. The Christian background of Western spiritualism, or more specifically French spiritism, found an alternative vein for itself in an Islamic cultural context in the form of Sufi doctrine and practices.
The Return of Religion, the Fall of Neo-spiritualism
Neo-spiritualism in Turkey gained notable visibility in the public sphere in the 1940s and the 1950s. The reason for this seems to lie in its success in attracting people with different backgrounds due to its efficacious integration of religious or traditional, particularly Sufi, definitions of the soul and the self with those of modern science. Although a secular discourse at its core, neo-spiritualism engaged in an elusive dialogue with the Sufi discursive tradition while formulating its own discourse. Taken into consideration with a focus on this dialogue, neo-spiritualism emerges as a conduit for shedding further light on the internal dynamics and intricacies of the Turkish secular. By and through its complex and multilayered clusterings, which relied on both foreign and local discourses of knowledge, neo-spiritualism provided an alternative terrain for discussions of science, materiality/immateriality, religion, and what constituted the soul or psyche within a secular framework, albeit without fully rejecting religious or immaterial options. In turn, it became one of the fronts of contestation on such issues in the early republican period. Probably due to its success in undermining the cold and dismissive materialist positioning of science, it attracted various intellectuals and scientists of the period, particularly including physicians and psychiatrists, who attempted to apply and utilize a number of neo-spiritualist claims and definitions to fill the sociocultural niche created by modern medicine. The neo-spiritualist discourse therefore filled the gap between modern scientific explanations and traditional religious practices, which, as the neo-spiritualist psychiatrist Recep Doksat also emphasized, was ample enough to explain the reason for its popularity.Footnote 104
I argue that Turkish neo-spiritualism should be addressed within the framework of sociohistorical transformations unfolding between early republican and post-World War II Turkey and the contingent conditions available to Turkish citizens between these periods. In this regard, the popularity of neo-spiritualism in Turkey in the 1940s and 1950s should be conceptualized within this framework and evaluated with a focus on the strictly secularist ethos of early republican Turkey as well as the latent and manifest contestations it generated—especially in the context when religion was ferociously pushed outside the Turkish public sphere. The state restrictions in this period precluded any possibility of public dissemination of Sufi ideas, strictly repressing Sufi communities and forcing them to move underground. The popularity of neo-spiritualism, I hence maintain, should be reconsidered within this sociopolitical context since neo-spiritualism, with its spiritual yet at the same time compatibly secular and (self-claimed) empiricist discourse, filled the vacuum that emerged in Turkey in the absence of any publicly accessible independent religious institution or Sufi orders and spiritual forms of knowledge derived from them.
Following the 1950 elections and the rise to power of the Democrat Party of Adnan Menderes, a new era of republican history commenced, wherein religious discussions, representations, and manifestations, including Sufism, gradually returned to the Turkish public sphere by and through the weakening of the iron fist of the secularist state.Footnote 105 And in tune with these sociopolitical shifts in the country, we begin to see again the marginalization of the neo-spiritualist movement and its loss of popularity among the Turkish public.
Put simply, Turkish neo-spiritualism provides us an illustrative example of a contingent and fluctuating discourse on the soul, spirit, and the self, which turned into a kind of mediator, allowing certain segments to talk about spiritual matters at a time of scientific and secular hegemony in Turkey. It also offers us an example of the ways in which a form of knowledge that mainly originated and was disseminated from the West was not derivative in its “imported” version but rather gained new meanings and connotations, merging with local cultural codes and memory while at the same time responding to internal political and intellectual concerns. In this light, I contend that Turkish neo-spiritualism should be further incorporated into the discussions of modern Turkish intellectual history and reevaluated as part and parcel of the history of modern psy-sciences and their intricate relationships with the secular state as well as with Islam in Turkey. This is, however, the subject matter of a further extensive project I am aiming to scrutinize in detail elsewhere.
