Cassadaga: The South's Oldest Spiritualist Community. (Book Reviews).

Cassadaga: The South's Oldest Spiritualist Community. Edited by John J. Guthrie Jr., Phillip Charles Lucas, and Gary Monroe. The Florida History and Culture Series. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, c. 2000. Pp. xxii, 241. $29.95, ISBN 0-8130-1743-2.)

No matter how intriguing its subject, this collection of essays does not quite satisfy the historian of religion. Cassadaga is a Spiritualist camp established in 1893 in central Florida. Spiritualists believe, above all, in communicating with the spirits of the dead. The volume combines historical analysis with contemporary interview and photographic documentation, with mixed success.

In the first two essays Bret E. Carroll and John J. Guthrie Jr. describe the historical background of Spiritualism in nineteenth-century America and the early years of Cassadaga. Spiritualism emerged from the religious excitement of western New York in the antebellum period, combining connection to the spirits of the dead with an openness to experimentation and individual interpretation of the Bible and the spirit world. Camps developed in the late 1800s, and Cassadaga began as a fairly wealthy Victorian camping town, mostly for people from northeastern states. An essay by Sidney P. Johnston tours the camp's buildings, mostly Victorian vernacular homes, but does little to connect them to issues of Spiritualism.

In the most effective essay in the volume, Phillip Charles Lucas studies the core beliefs and worship practices, along with the variety of other beliefs and growing plurality of practices in today's Cassadaga. He finds widespread belief in an impersonal God, the survival of individual spirits in the next life, the ability of the living to commune with those spirits, aesthetic excitement in that communion, and efforts at moral improvement. Growing numbers of residents follow New Age practices of Native American rituals, meditation, and belief in reincarnation.

Throughout the collection, the authors are respectful of their subjects, sometimes to the point of reverence. They try not to treat them as abnormal people whose special interests need explanation. But, one could ask, doesn't everything deserve explanation? The book offers some explanation of the movement's historical roots, but the basic question of why some people believe they can commune with the dead goes largely unanswered. A long piece by Ann Jerome Croce and Paul Jerome Croce describes the varied backgrounds of Cassadaga residents, especially showing that they left numerous traditions to become Spiritualists. While the piece allows older Spiritualists to tell their own stories, it does too little to show why people outside this tradition joined it. An essay by a believer tells how a Spiritualist correctly predicted she would develop a relationship with someone whose name begins with "R." This patience-trying essay comes close to proselytizing and probably does not belong in a book of scholarly essays.

This volume is a worthy reminder of the religious pluralism of contemporary America and a sympathetic introduction to a movement unfamiliar to many scholars. But the reluctance to explain or contextualize will likely make the book disappointing to most historians of religion.

TED OWNBY
University of Mississippi