Fox sisters

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Margaret, Catherine and Leah (from left to right)

The Fox sisters , Leah, Margaret (Maggie) and Catherine (Kate) Fox, were American necromancers. They claimed to be able to stimulate the deceased as media in séances to knock signals from the afterlife. Eventually, it turned out that they were producing the tapping with their toe joints . Nevertheless, they brought a modern religious and spiritualist movement on the way. These events are often associated with the emergence of modern spiritism .

Marketing of spiritual phenomena

Since 1847, an intermittent knock has been heard in the Fox family home in Hydesville . Using a kind of Morse code, the sisters wanted to find out that a traveling merchant had once been murdered in their house and that his spirit was now communicating. The news of this type of ghost communication spread rapidly in the United States and was soon exploited financially by them. In 1849, however, the Fox sisters began performing in Rochester, New York . Eventually they gained fame, traveled Europe and had numerous imitators. Margaret Fox had a liaison with Elisha Kent Kane .

Imitators

Elisha Kent Kane

A short time later, other “media” appeared in a publicly effective manner in order to coin the trend. By 1855, two million Americans are said to have believed in the truth of the phenomena observed.

revocation

In 1888, Kate and Margaret Fox publicly admitted the hoax, having made the knock marks with their toe joints. This dealt a severe blow to the spiritist movement and soon many other alleged spirit communications turned out to be fraud.

literature

  • Marcus Hahn, Erhard Schüttpelz (Ed.): "Trance media and new media around 1900" Transcript / media upheavals Volume 39
  • Earl Wesley Fernell: The Unhappy Medium: Spiritualism and the Life of Margaret Fox . University of Texas Press, Austin, 1964.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ R. Laurence Moore: Spiritualism and Science: Reflections on the First Decade of the Spirit Rappings , American Quarterly, Vol. 24, no. 4 (Oct. 1972), pp. 474-500
  2. ↑ a b c d Kocku von Stuckrad: What is esotericism? Beck, Munich 2004, p. 201.
  3. ^ R. Laurence Moore: The Spiritualist Medium: A Study of Female Professionalism in Victorian America , American Quarterly, Vol. 27, no. 2 (May 1975), p. 219