which have combined to bring about the spiritualistic renaissance, a prominent place may, I think, be given to the effect produced on the religious mind of Europe and America by the intensely animistic teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg, in the 18th century. The position of this remarkable visionary as to some of the particular spiritualistic doctrines may be judged of by the following statements from 'The True Christian Religion.' A man's spirit is his mind, which lives after death in complete human form, and this spirit may be conveyed from place to place while the body remains at rest, as on some occasions happened to Swedenborg himself. 'I have conversed,' he says, 'with all my relations and friends, likewise with kings and princes, and men of learning, after their departure out of this life, and this now for twenty-seven years without interruption.' And foreseeing that many who read his 'Memorable Relations' will believe them to be fictions of imagination, he protests in truth they are not fictions, but were really seen and heard; not seen and heard in any state of mind in sleep, but in a state of complete wakefulness.[1]
I shall have to speak elsewhere of some of the doctrines of modern spiritualism, where they seem to fall into their places in the study of Animism. Here, as a means of illustrating the relation of the newer to the older spiritualistic ideas, I propose to glance over the ethnography of two of the most popular means of communicating with the spirit-world by rapping and writing, and two of the prominent spirit-manifestations, the feat of rising in the air, and the trick of the Davenport Brothers.
The elf who goes knocking and routing about the house at night, and whose special German name is the 'Poltergeist,' is an old and familiar personage in European folk-lore.[2] From of old, such unexplained noises have been ascribed to the agency of personal spirits, who more often than not are
