Calling the Spirits is an engaging read that provides a compelling overview of Spiritualism and its practice of seance-sitting. This work is remarkable in its scope, covering everything from necromancy in the ancient world to nineteenth-century mediumship and psychical research on both sides of the Atlantic. Morton begins the book with a history of “calling the spirits,” taking the reader back to ancient Egypt and telling the story of Apuleius’ classic, The Golden Ass, a tale in which Zatchlas “an Egyptian priest and ‘a prophet of the first rank,’ is asked to restore the murdered Thelyphron to testify against his killer” (27).
Morton then moves from the Egyptians to the Greeks, citing the Odyssey (700–650 BC) as being “the single most famous example of necromancy in literary history” (28). To illustrate this, the author describes a scene in The Odyssey when Odysseus and his men “enact the ritual to...
University of California Press