Response to Bettelheim.

Judith Bettelheim raises some interesting questions in response to my article on the Indian altars of the Spiritual Church. The purpose of the initial article was to fill a significant lacuna in the existing scholarship on the Spiritual Churches by identifying persistent themes and aesthetics in Church practice which can be linked to central African antecedents. I note numerous resonances between Spiritual Church altars and New World Kongo-based systems: Cuban Palo Mayombe, Haitian Petwo or Bizango, and American Conjure or Hoodoo. Through what channels and in what company these Kongo elements arrived on American shores is a welcome question for later speculation, and Dr. Bettelheim has boldly taken up the gauntlet.

Bettelheim's identification of Kardecian Spiritism as a primary source (or at least a primary vehicle) for the visual and operative arts associated with New Orleans Indian altars is extremely problematic, however, and must be addressed. The aesthetic similarities between Caribbean Spiritist altars and contemporary New Orleans Spiritual Church altars are obvious, pointing to a number of influences held in common and suggesting recent interplay between the two systems. Whether these similarities indicate a clear vector of origin is another matter entirely, and I must strongly question Bettelheim's untempered assertion that the altar traditions of the Spiritual Church necessarily derive from versions of Kardecian Spiritism.

While space does not permit a complete point-by-point refutation of Bettelheim's argument, I will concentrate here on what I believe to be the most significant flaw in her response: the tacit assumption that the diverse influences which unite in Indian altar traditions (for the sake of this discussion, Kongo or Kongo-derived metaphysics, Folk Catholicism, Spiritualism, and Indian imagery) are first brought together by Kardecian Spiritists in the Caribbean. Bettelheim's casual dismissal of the importance of American Spiritualism is a grave error, largely arising from her limited awareness of the movement and its history. Although the specific denomination of Spiritualism known in New Orleans as the Spiritual Church was not established as such until 1920, with the founding of Mother Leafy Anderson's Eternal Life Christian Spiritualist Church #12, all of the elements which define its visual and ritual traditions met and mingled in New Orleans and other parts of the American South well in advance of the origin of Kardecian Spiritism.

Scholars and believers alike consider the modern Spiritualist movement to have originated in Hydesville, New York, in 1848, with the celebrated Fox sisters. Spiritualist circles, demonstrations, churches and publishing houses sprang up in almost every region of the U.S. (including New Orleans), as well as in most of Europe, within two to four years of the Hydesville phenomenon (Britten 1870; Nelson 1969; Braude 1989; Pimple 1995). Allan Kardec (the spiritual name of French skeptic-turned-Spiritist Leon D.H. Rivail) published his first Spiritist book, Le livre des esprits, in 1857, almost a decade later. Kardecian Spiritism as such, to say nothing of offshoots like Espiritismo Cruzado and Umbanda, simply did not exist prior to 1857.

In contrast, there are published accounts of an extremely active American Spiritualist community in New Orleans as early as 1852-53. Spiritualist historian Emma Britten writes: "Many excellent mediums were found among the colored [sic] population ... either the noble Creoles are determined to take Spiritualism by storm, or the spirits are determined to take them ... there are elements enough in New Orleans to spiritualize the entire South" (Britten 1870:425).

Nor should one assume that American Spiritualism in the South was only influential among educated whites and free blacks. Most Spiritualists were outspoken abolitionists and often engaged in fiery polemics against slavery at lectures and seances. Others, as conductors on the Underground Railroad, were more directly and subversively involved in securing freedom for slaves (Braude 1989:218).

In its pre-Caribbean manifestation (circa 1857), Kardec's Spiritism lacks any specific reference to Indian spirits or their images. It must be emphatically pointed out that this is not the case with Kardec's predecessors in the United States. Since the earliest days of the movement, Indian spirits have been an essential part of the beliefs and practices of American Spiritualists and have been associated with a host of generic, stereotypical behaviors and visual arts. Early Spiritualists write of mediums speaking in Indian tongues. Indian spirits were (and still are) frequently depicted by painting or drawing mediums (Braude 1989). Documents in Indian letters were received by automatic writing and kept as untranslatable but tangible proof of Spirit presence. In Spiritualist periodicals like the Telegraph Papers and Banner of Light, Indian spirits were quoted, written about, and depicted in illustrations. We can be certain that Indian spirit beliefs, behaviors, and imagery were an important facet of Spiritualist practice in New Orleans and throughout the South (as in the rest of the U.S.) from 1852 onward.

As a prime example of the direct intersection of Spiritualist Indian beliefs with a slave community, we may cite this instance of a white child medium ministering to a host of slaves on a Kentucky plantation in 1854: "Suddenly she claimed to be acting under the direction of an invisible chemist ... and an Indian chieftain.... She then demanded to see every patient on the plantation, young and old, in a Negro family of over one hundred souls, for each of whom she prescribed as if with a full knowledge of the art of medicine (Britten 1870:413; italics mine).

We know from the remainder of the narrative (too long to quote here) that the sick folks accepted the medium's prescriptions, drank her magnetized water, and allowed her to set broken bones. Were they humoring a crazy white girl? Waiting for coded messages about escape routes? Or were they reading her embodiment of the Indian spirit as an act of Conjure, resonating with memories of healing forces from a Kongo past? All are possible, even likely.

The elaborate altar traditions characteristic of both the Spiritual Church and Kardecian Spiritism in the Caribbean owe a great deal of their aesthetic to the opulence of Baroque Roman Catholicism. Bettelheim suggests the Spiritist mesa blanca altar traditions as a probable source for Spiritual Church altars, without taking into account the Catholic ancestry common to both. Sicilian Catholics, present in New Orleans since the 1840s, erect magnificent, three-tiered, white draped altars in honor of St. Joseph, adorning them with food offerings, candles, flowers, lucky beans, rosaries, statues, vials of blessed oil, and other Catholic sacramentals. Considerable scholarship treats the relationship between these Folk Catholic practices and their cognates in the Spiritual Church (see Estes 1987 or Kaslow 1979). The Spiritual Church almost certainly acquired its Catholic aesthetics directly from the source, rather than through the mediation of another hybrid system (like Espiritismo), whose presence and influence in New Orleans has yet to be established. The arrangement of water goblets on Spiritual Church altars is not unique to Kardecian Spiritism either, as it originates with the magnetic practices of Franz Mesmer, popular in the U.S. in the early nineteenth century. Goblets of magnetized water were used for healing or as conductors of spirit by American Spiritualists long before the movement reached the Caribbean.

Years before Kardec put pen to paper, New Orleans was the locus of intense interaction and exchange between Spiritualist, Catholic, and Creole communities. Throughout the South, Spiritualists carried messages of liberation and hope to enslaved blacks. It is impossible to believe that none of the Creole or "colored" mediums in antebellum New Orleans viewed their Spiritualist practice with its attendant Indian spirits through a Kongo or Kongo-based lens. If, as Robert Farris Thompson asserts, Kongo and Angolan captives made up the majority culture among the slaves of New Orleans and South Carolina, can we doubt that the initial interplay between Indian imagery and Spiritualist and Kongo metaphysics occurs in the American South, long before the development of Espiritismo? Like many scholars, Bettelheim is willing to accept the resourcefulness and creativity of Afro-Cubans and Afro-Brazilians in syncretizing Spiritism with Catholic and African spiritual systems. Are we to believe that Afro-Americans in the Southern U.S. are somehow less resourceful and creative than their Caribbean cousins? That confronted with the comparable images and ideas they could not create a comparable bricolage? I, for one, find it difficult to imagine so.

I am not at all unwilling to admit the possibility that Espiritismo or some relative thereof entered New Orleans before or after the 1921 founding of the Spiritual Church. Nor am I unwilling to admit it as one of many influences on the contemporary practices of the Spiritual Church. I object, rather, to the shaky thesis that Kardecian Spiritism is the origin of Kongo and Indian themes in Spiritual Church practice, or that one can so easily dismiss the role of Mother Anderson (who was originally trained and ordained in Chicago in North American Spiritualist traditions) in the development of Indian beliefs and altar traditions (Bettelheim's point 10).

Contemporary Spiritual Church clergy, particularly those who do client work or make their living as spiritual readers and consultants, consciously absorb and adapt the tools and techniques of other Afro-Atlantic spiritual systems, which may include Espiritismo and its relations. Church members have ready access to popular and ethnographic writings on these traditions, from Carlos Montenegro to Jim Wafer and Henry Drewal. One clergy member with whom I've worked keeps a well-thumbed copy of Migene Gonzales-Wippler's Rituals and Spells of Santeria on the front seat of his car. One can easily argue that any perceived Kardecian Spiritist influence is as likely to be the result of modern innovation as it is a retention from past contact.

I look forward to Dr. Bettelheim's forthcoming writings linking Indian images in Mayombe and Espiritismo to central African material. Further exploration in this area is certainly welcome, and ultimately supports my initial contention that the Kongo-Indian link is an essential part of Spiritualist traditions throughout the African diaspora, and therefore cannot be ignored in any discussion of the material and ritual arts of the New Orleans Spiritual Church.

(1.) The religious practice I describe here is known as Spiritism in English and Espiritismo in Spanish. A similar but not identical practice in the United States is known as Spiritualism, and the New Orleans institution under discussion is followed by members of the Spiritual Churches in that city.

(2.) The Frenchman Allan Kardec (1804-1869) was born Hyppolyte Leon Denizard Rivail, and his book of orations, Le livre des esprits (The book of spirits), published in 1857, has been translated, and reprinted endlessly. He published The Book of Mediums in 1859 and The Gospel According to Spiritism in 1864. By 1868 he had published six books related to Spiritist studies. Kardec's ideas initially attracted European and Latin American intellectuals and urban elites but quickly filtered through into other sectors of society. By the 1860s his work was available in Cuba and Puerto Rico, and throughout the 1880s it became the topic of various publications concerning psychological and theological studies in both countries.

(3.) The Ten Years War, 1868-78; The "Little War," 1879-80; the War of Independence beginning in 1895 and continuing until the official Spanish-American War of 1898. It was during the Spanish-American War that U.S. troops first occupied both Cuba and Puerto Rico, and it was also during this period that interchange between Cuban and Puerto Rico increased.

(4.) Joe Boyd, founder of Hannibal records, as quoted in the New York Times, July 1, 2001.

(5.) In The Spirit of Black Hawk (University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, 1995), Jason Berry, relying on information obtained during interviews conducted by the Federal Writers Project after her death, notes that Mother Anderson wore a "mantle" bearing the image of Black Hawk, and that Black Hawk had first come to her in a vision while she was working in Chicago (p. 58). Yet the only specific Black Hawk Spiritual Churches are in New Orleans. I wonder if this "mantle," as described by her disciples in the Church, resembled the "costume" worn by the Mardi Gras Indians of New Orleans, which is often adorned with a beaded image of a generic Indian (see photograph, circa 1929, of her disciple, Mother Catherine Seals, wearing such a mantle in Berry, p. 74).

Stephen C. Wehmeyer
Ph.D. Program, Folklore and Mythology
UCLA