M.J. Rose

Have you heard of Lily Dale, New York? The spiritualist community of the Modern Spiritualist movement? If séances, crystal balls, mediumship demonstrations, lectures, and private appointments with mediums sounds like a dream come true to you, search no more – you have found your ideal vacation spot…

Here’s a HuffPost piece about Lily Dale…

Lily Dale: Where Mediums, Healers And Spiritualists Summer

By Kathleen Poliquin

“The lobby and the wide front porch of the Lily Dale’s Maplewood Hotel are typical of a place built in 1888, except for the sign that reads “No readings, healing circles or seances in this area please.”

The sign’s not out of place here. It’s posted among the hotel’s vintage furnishings as well as its paintings and tapestries, said to have been created with help from the spirit world. The Maplewood, with about 40 guest rooms but no air conditioning, televisions, telephones or elevators, is the social hub of Lily Dale, a gated community of about 500 Spiritualists in southwest New York, on the east shore of Upper Cassadaga Lake.

For 133 years, Lily Dale has been home to the Lily Dale Assembly, a religious organization of mediums and healers who claim to communicate messages from those who have passed on to those still living on the Earthly plane…

For the rest, click here.

More about Lily Dale here and here.

The glorious Atlas Obscura offers this interesting piece about a group of monks from Japan who died in the ultimate act of self-denial…and ultimately became relics –

Sokushinbutsu of Dainichi temple

The self-mummified monks of Japan

(Atlas Obscura)

“Scattered throughout northern Japan are over two dozen mummified Japanese monks known as sokushinbutsu. Followers of shugend?, an ancient form of Buddhism, the monks died in the ultimate act of self-denial.

For three years, the priests would eat a special diet consisting only of nuts and seeds, while taking part in a regimen of rigorous physical activity that stripped them of their body fat. They then ate only bark and roots for another three years and began drinking a poisonous tea made from the sap of the urushi tree, normally used to lacquer bowls. This caused vomiting and a rapid loss of bodily fluids, and—most importantly—it killed off any maggots that might cause the body to decay after death. Finally, a self-mummifying monk would lock himself in a stone tomb barely larger than his body, wherein he would not move from the lotus position. His only connection to the outside world was an air tube and a bell. Each day, he rang a bell to let those outside know that he was still alive. When the bell stopped ringing, the tube was removed and the tomb sealed.

Not all monks who attempted self-mummification were successful. When the tombs were finally opened, some bodies were found to have rotted…”

For the rest, and many photos, click here to visit to Atlas Obscura.

We don’t know about you, but we’re thinking that any book that claims to “to paint in earth’s dull colours the forms clothed in the living light of other worlds,” and that deals specifically with Victorian occultism and the mysterious phenomenon of synesthesia, is worth a look-see…

…and so, behold –

Victorian Occultism and the Art of Synesthesia

“Grounded in the theory that ideas, emotions, and even events, can manifest as visible auras, Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater’s Thought-Forms (1901) is an odd and intriguing work. Benjamin Breen explores these “synesthetic” abstractions and asks to what extent they, and the Victorian mysticism of which they were born, influenced the Modernist movement that flourished in the following decades.

Thought Forms The music of Mendelssohn.“The music of Mendelssohn” – Source.

“I have always considered myself a voice of what I believe to be a greater renaissance — the revolt of the soul against the intellect — now beginning in the world,” wrote William Butler Yeats to his mentor, the Irish nationalist John O’Leary, in 1892. Yeats believed that magic was central not only to his art, but to a dawning epoch when spirituality and technology would march together toward an uncertain future.

Thought-Forms, a strange, beguiling, frequently pretentious, utterly original book first published in 1901, emerged from this ferment of late-Victorian mysticism. It was written by Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, erstwhile members of the London Theosophical Society alongside Yeats, and it features a stunning sequence of images that illustrate the book’s central argument: emotions, sounds, ideas and events manifest as visual auras.

The book’s grand ambitions are evident from the first page. “To paint in earth’s dull colours the forms clothed in the living light of other worlds,” Besant laments, “is a hard and thankless task.” She insists that the images in the book “are not imaginary forms, prepared as some dreamer thinks that they ought to appear.” Rather, “they are representations of forms actually observed as thrown off by ordinary men and women.”

– See the rest, here, courtesy of one of our favorite sites: The Public Domain Review.