Benjamin David Mitchell is currently completing his PhD in Science and Technology Studies at York University, Canada. His doctoral study is concerned with Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea of the Übermensch as developed from his engagement with nineteenth century science and scientific popularization, particularly from Nietzsche’s understanding of physiological aesthetics, self-regulation, vivisection, and the physiology of the will. Benjamin is also interested in the relationship between science, literature and the occult in the nineteenth century. He is the editor of Beyond Borderlands: A Critical Journal of the Weird, Paranormal, and Occult.
Scholars such as Bernard Lightman, Steven Epstein, and Sheila Jasanoff have shown the ways in which knowledge is coproduced through the interactions between experts and amateurs in the history of science. Yet this also highlights the similarities between how authority is contested in the history of science and the occult. The tensions which exists in occult thought between the exoteric knowledge of the many and the esoteric, secret knowledge of the few became even more pronounced with the advent of the age of mass communication. Improvements to the printing press in the nineteenth century and the boom of popular journals meant that audiences that had hitherto remained disparate or inaccessible were now being given a new sense of solidarity and common cause, provided that their interests were successfully maintained by some canny editor. All of these movements came to a dramatic front in the pages of Borderland, edited from 1893 to 1897 by the radical journalist William Thomas Stead (1849-1912).
A complicated iconoclast, Stead is often considered to be one of the fathers of modern investigative journalism. He was the first editor of the Review of Reviews to employ female journalists and his series of articles on “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” played a major part in the raising of the age of consent in the UK from thirteen to sixteen. He was also a passionate peace activist who was nevertheless friends with the now notorious imperialist Cecil Rhodes. In the 1890s he became interested in spiritualism and allied occult phenomena, and the journal Borderland grew out of these interests. In attempting to “democratize the study of the spook”, he was continuing his larger political project of international unity. As has been noted by Roger Luckhurst in his essay on Stead’s exploration of telepathy: “Through telepathy, Stead could hope to bind the world psychically, technologically, and affectively to the imperial centre, stabilizing it within the flux of modernity”. This description of telepathy could just as easily be made of Borderland in relation to the entire realm of occult thought. Before publishing the first issue, the veteran journalist called on an array of religious, scientific, literary, and public figures to offer their views on the scientific study of occult phenomena. He also echoed his reminder in the Review of Reviews that the general public should “guard against the mistaken assumption that it is only ladies and gentlemen of leisure and culture who can render valuable service” to the periodical.
One of the underlying principles of the journal was that there was nothing inherently unscientific about the study of the occult, “borderlands” of nature. Stead frequently referred to Thomas Henry Huxley’s defence of the role of agnosticism in science and Isaac Newton’s sense of wonder to argue for the importance of leaving no stone unturned in the search for knowledge, especially in unconventional places. However, in part because of this use of his name, Huxley and his student Edwin Ray Lankester harshly criticized Stead’s work, seeing it as part throwback to outdated modes of religious thinking, and part unprofessional train wreck of scientific practice. Yet this emphasis on professionalization, and the ever expanding authority of experts struck Stead as being the worst kind of obscurantism, on par with the religious exclusionisms practiced by the Indian Brahmin caste. This is particularly evident in his dealings with the London based Society for Psychical Research (SPR).
Tensions between Stead’s populist project and the SPR were evident even before the first issue of Borderland reached print. In his early enthusiasm in the Review of Reviews, he offered “to help the Psychical Research Society in their most useful and suggestive inquiries, and […] make an appeal to the half-million readers whose eyes will fall upon this page in all parts of the habitable world”. However, by 1894, instead of emulating the work of the society, he was attempting “to do in a popular and catholic form that which is done in a more or less doctrinaire and exclusive way by the Brahmins of Psychical Research”. By 1895, he went further to observe that “there is about the Psychical Research Society a fatal air of sniffiness [sic], as if they were too superior persons to live on the same planet with ordinary folk”.
While some members of the SPR tentatively supported Stead’s efforts, few were entirely comfortable with them. Max Dessoir, a member of the SPR whom Stead referred to as a “Brahmin of the Brahmins”, protested the folly of the Borderland project. “In the first place,” Dessoir commented, “scientific knowledge in most cases gains absolutely nothing by the co-operation of persons of varying education”. The presumptions of Borderland’s readers, the limitation of their knowledge base, and the radical difference in their powers of observation would render them unable to obtain reliable results “from such heterogeneous material”. Worse still, the study of the occult presented a very real danger to the sanity of those researching it, and was best left to professionals. Dessoir warned Stead that: “You will cultivate a dangerous amateurism, and the spectre you raise you will never be able to lay”.
Despite this, Stead was able to create an interdisciplinary space of mutual respect among some psychic researchers, theosophists, and spiritualists. Reflecting on the work of the journal shortly before its indefinite “hiatus” in 1897, he claimed that his great “experiment in periodical literature” had helped to: “dull the edge of sectarian antipathies, and to convince everyone that the spirit of charity and tolerance is as much needed in the Psychic as in the Ecclesiastical field”. His populist and universal image of public knowledge cut through existing occult and scientific demarcations separating the masses from elite practitioners. While the strategy that he adapted from The Review of Reviews won him few friends among this elite, he did succeed in creating a Borderland community. The Borderland’s circle helped to establish a shared set of practices through Stead’s vision of how the scientific study of the occult should be performed, and the existence of Borderland could be held up as an example of an established community, diffusing accusations of insanity, ignorance, and duplicity.
Stead’s successes were quite remarkable, yet the foundations of his project were constantly under pressure from both scientific and occult professionals with a conflicting view of the relationship between expert and amateur participation in the creation of knowledge. Indiscriminately referring to them as Brahmins, he saw himself as standing at the intersection of “reason” and “mysticism”, refusing to draw a distinction between what he saw as the same kinds of professional arrogance. While Borderland turned out to be as unstable and mercurial as its editor, it serves as an excellent example of the difficulties inherent in any simplistic notion of the dichotomy between exoteric and esoteric knowledge and should serve to sow uncertainty between the borders of the occult and empirical presuppositions of modern science.
In doing so, it leads us back again to the Borderland.
(For those with institutional subscriptions, Borderland can be accessed online at the Victorian Popular Culture database under the heading “Spiritualism, Sensation & Magic”.)
© Benjamin David Mitchell
B.D. Mitchell’s Academia.edu profile: https://yorku.academia.edu/BDMitchell
