ABSTRACT
This article
discusses different situations concerning the positioning of the
nineteenth-century Catalan spiritism towards violence: on the one hand, with
regard to capitalist's society's implementation of the industrial process; on
the other, in relation to the political use of violence – ‘terror tactics’ –
employed by certain anarchist sectors in Catalonia at the close of the century.
As we shall see, an understanding of said positioning reveals the spiritist
movement's ambiguity in this sphere. To interpret this ambiguity, one must take
into account the tremendous crossroads at which its followers found themselves,
midway between one society being destructured and another that, in statu
nascendi, was being prestructured.
INTRODUCTION
Catalan
spiritism is first mentioned in the correspondence that José Maria Fernández
Colavida established in 1858 with Léon Denizard Rivail also known as Allan
Kardec (1804–1869), the Lyon-born French educator who systemized European
spiritist theory and practice in 1857. Spiritism was firmly ingrained in
Catalonia from the 1860s to 1939 at the end of the Spanish Civil War, the
outcome of which triggered brutal repression against the movement's
associations and followers. Throughout that period, broad subordinate sectors –
in general, workers and artisans – devised a world's view, the organization of
social relations and the development of people that embraced all spheres of
existence. The presence of certain members of financial means made possible the
earliest translations to Spanish, clandestine editions and the diffusion of
Kardec's works, for example The Spirits' Book (Kardec 1963) (for an
overview of all aspects treated, see Horta 2001 and 2004). Spiritism – a
contemporary Western adaptation of possession through the forms of mediumship –
appeared as an integrally conceptual system which would provide the basis for
social projects of an emancipatory nature. The spread of the movement
throughout Catalonia can be seen in the intensity of its scope – cultural, political,
economic, and even legislative (in the First Spanish Republic) – and in the
existence of close to 100 spiritist centres by 1899 (Horta 2004: 321–323); and
over 120 during the Second Spanish Republic (Sànchez 1990: 110). One indication
of its vast following was the crowd of 7,000 that gathered in what is now
Barcelona's Ciutadella Park on October 9, 1899 to commemorate the auto de fe
held in the same place and on the same date in 1861. At a time when the citadel
was the Bourbon army's greatest fortification in Catalonia, 300 French
spiritist publications were burnt – confiscated in Barcelona's maritime customs
house – under the supervision of religious, civil and military public servants
(Barrera 1980: 7).
Undeniably,
many periods and societies have seen countless groups and collectives assemble
adaptive, legitimizing or transformational models of social order through
techniques associated with ecstatic body postures. Thus, through the practice
of mediumship, Catalan spiritism expressed the adoption of egalitarian
practices that nourished such incipient movements as feminism, antimilitarism
and cultural and cooperative associationism. The Barcelona-based spiritist
magazine La Luz del Porvenir (the Light of the Future) (1879–1936),
written and directed by women, became the mouthpiece of the struggle for sexual
equality. See the creation in 1891 of the Sociedad Autónoma de Mujeres de
Barcelona (Autonomous Society for Women of Barcelona) by spiritists, anarchists
and freemasons (Sánchez 1990). Only in appearance might it seem paradoxical
that, through apparently irrational uses of the body such as possession, models
of and for social action could be devised (Geertz 1990: 111–112), on the basis
of which the spiritists postulated their rejection of the prevailing
Catholic-bourgeois references. Among the subordinate classes, the explosion of
this truly popular force (Maffesoli 1990 [1988]: 90–91) conveyed the capacity
of spiritism to satisfy the needs of a broad social sector by using the only
tool at its members' disposal: their own bodies, within which faith was ‘above
all, an impulse to act’ (Durkheim 1987 [1912]: 434).
Recent
research has sought to overcome the inexplicable historiographical
invisibilization of Catalan spiritism by turning to countless written sources
of the movement (see Horta 2004: 314–320: about 100 books, newspapers and
magazines from 1863 to 1899 have been recorded) and its seminal action within
the freethinking, anticlerical context of the republican, democratic, and
federalist left of the nineteenth-century anarchist movement. An attempt has
been made then to rationalize human behaviours that seemed ‘incomprehensible’
(Lévi-Strauss 1961: 17); and furthermore to establish the rational thread that
runs through spiritist yearning by empirically proving the viability of the
communication of the living with the spirits of the deceased – and, in parallel
fashion, the conceptual integration (of Gnostic origin within the Christian
milieu) between faith and reason, – by following collectivist social
guidelines. Together with estrangement from the world, the Gnostics of the
early centuries of the Christian era maintained that knowledge meant the road
to freedom, as opposed to ignorance, which turned human beings into slaves. It
was in this form of Christianity promulgated as a space for social justice that
the spiritists justified their claim, and hence they referred to Gnosticism in
their writings.
When Tylor
(1981), one of the forefathers of anthropology, described the new scientific
discipline as ‘essentially, a reformer's science,’ in his Primitive Culture
in 1871, it coincided with the publication, in March of that same year by the
Barcelona free-thinking weekly La Humanidad (Humanity), of a letter
submitted by a group of spiritists from the Revista Espiritista. Diario de
Estudios Psicológicos (Spiritist Magazine. Diary of Psychological
Studies) of Barcelona (founded in 1869). The latter defined their movement
not as religious but rather as the expression of a ‘new science’ that sought ‘social
reform through that of the individual.’ The same nineteenth-century Quaker
Puritanism that assumed the principle whereby reason and mystic experience were
not opposed but complementary, would be reflected both in Tylor (raised in a
Quaker family and familiar with the work of Böhme, Leibniz, Milton and Plato),
and in European spiritism, and in the vindications of rationalism that were
made. Robert Lowie would harshly accuse Tylor of being ‘rationalist’ in 1924
(Lowie 1976 [1924]).
The slogans
of the movement, ‘Towards God through faith and reason’ and ‘Towards God
through charity and science,’ differed since ‘by enjoying science one falls
into incredulity, yet by soaking it up one returns to the faith.’ In the words
of Amalia Domingo Soler, of Catalan-Andalusian background (1835–1909), who
settled in Barcelona's Gràcia district and was taken in by the Llach family
(workers and spiritist members), and became, in the last 30 years of her life,
the world's leading propagators of the doctrine in Spanish, in the face of
extreme material hardship (Domingo Soler 1990). By merging categories such as
spirit and matter, faith and reason, spiritism was established as the
foundation of a rationalist utopia developing a project that offered an
alternative to religion, economics, education, the relationship between the
sexes, the socialization of children, medicine and so on. Through a rational
linking of means, ends and contexts it challenged the relations between capital
and labor (bourgeoisie and proletariat), European political-administrative
borders, states, monarchies, the role of the Catholic Church, the use of force
in Europe's relations with non-Western societies and in the settling of
conflicts between countries, and, of course, it challenged the society in which
financial gain became an absolute reference. And the world responded to the
mediumistic call by means of otherworldly entities as monstrous as they were
beautiful. Yet, unlike the outside world, in the spiritist centres or in their
homes – sheltered from institutional persecution (particularly harsh in
Catalonia), its members could engage in dialogue with conflict through
encounters with embodied supernatural powers (at the same time symbols of all
the moral and social categories): a dialogue was produced in which such
confusion was ordered according to a logic of its own. Earthly and heavenly
planes were joined through conflict, understood as a dynamic means to bring
about individual and collective change, since the spiritists assumed the role
of guardians of the universal principle of erraticity, mobility and the
continuous regeneration of different spheres of creation. Thus, it can be said
that, through sometimes contradictory coalescences and dispersions, the
guidelines for another type of social evolution were set. This explosion of
energy took place within everyday life, meaning that, behind the precepts of
homogeneity and centralization of liberal modernity, ‘another’ liberal
modernity was emerging, one that was focused on the plurality, multiplicity and
heterogeneousness represented by the ‘polytheism’ of the spiritist pantheon,
and by the confederal and horizontal nature of the centers, in contrast to the
strongly hierarchical structure of the occultist organizations. Availing itself
of all these conceptual categories, the Catalan spiritist movement sought to
transcend the prevailing social order. Hence it did not justify the use of
violence as a means to rise above the social structure, but strove instead for
a ‘responsible moral development’ that had to take place within every person –
‘Only we ourselves can save us’ (Domingo Soler 1990: 33) – which, in
turn, would direct the acceleration of urgent social reform processes. As they
stated, it was a question of saving the individual, not society: that
‘bastardised system of a world that was mere sham.’
One early
paradox involving the use of violence arose with the aborted attempt to restore
Catalonia to statehood in 1873. Spiritist support for the federalist movement
and democratic and republican principles was exemplified in the public
announcement by the Spiritist Centre of Sabadell, according to which all of its
members had placed themselves at the disposal of the Junta of Armament and
Defence (Castells 1975: 13). A defence the freemasons had already made in
France in 1871 through their backing of the Paris Commune during the military
conflict (Lissagaray 1971 [1876]: 331–333). However if, particularly in the
1860s and 1870s, the social component of Catalan Spiritism differed
substantially from its Spanish counterpart – which had a far greater presence
of the wealthy and aristocratic and, comparatively speaking, a certain absence
of women. Amalia Domingo Soler, who spent some years in Madrid before finally
settling in Catalonia, described the Castilian spiritists as follows:
Who are the men taking part in the propaganda efforts? The majority belongs
to the leading social classes, and includes aristocrats from Castile, generals,
engineers, doctors of renown, famous lawyers, eminent writers and distinguished
diplomats. These men have not experienced poverty; they have yet to know that
among the poor there are souls longing for light and who have splendid intuitions:
the attendance at the sessions is truly aristocratic, with barely six women
dressed as simply as ourselves. And in terms of the men, do remember how, once
when a man came in wearing overalls, they all turned to each other in surprise.
Being spiritists does not mean we have to abandon the milieu in which we have
always lived. This is why the spiritists from here do not heed me as you would
like, because the barrier of our different social positions stands between them
and me (Domingo Soler 1990: 114).
The
membership of military top brass was curious indeed: General Joaquín Bassols
was the honorary chairman of the Progress-spiritist Society of Zaragoza in the
early 1870s; and in 1871, the Progress-spiritist Society of Madrid consisted
for the most part of officers from the artillery corps, including Bassols
himself and the Catalan Viscount Antonio de Torres Solanot, an active
participant in the Revolution of 1868 and secretary of the Revolutionary Junta
of Huesca (see Abascal 1990: 147; Roca 1986 [1908]: 20). Although no sources
have been found that would show opposition to military presence in spiritist
ranks, one later discovers radically antimilitarist stances adopted by the
movement in Catalonia. The victory of General Martínez Campos's pronouncement
led to the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1874 and to the renewed
repression toward spiritism that burgeoned during the six-year period of
democratic revolution known as the Sexenio Democrático. Within this
context, the spiritists continued to challenge the prevailing rules, and here
one finds the structuring sense of spiritism versus the consubstantially anomic
process (Durkheim 1995; Duvignaud 1990) which distinguished the Industrial
Revolution.
The current
historical era offers thinking men a situation that is terrifying to consider.
A period of transition and transformation, of renewal and abrupt upheavals, it
has all the characteristics of one of those formidable crises that have placed
the lives of societies in imminent danger by expelling every one of mankind's
Genesiacal days on earth. The struggle of the world being born with the world
that is dying; the interests of the future with the secular interests of the
past, of ideas budding radiantly toward the fecundating heat of progress with
old worn-out ideas, now powerless to fulfil the just aspirations of human
understanding. It seems rather that those of us who have been born are being
called to witness the outcome of the great drama in which the fates of coming
generations are engaged.
A deep
malaise that all see, that all feel, that begins in the individual, renders the
family asunder and takes perturbation and disorder to the heart of societies,
extending its baleful influence over the peoples in which civilization has
planted its seeds. The individual seeks his own happiness, and pinning it on
practical egotism, finds he is isolated (El Buen Sentido [Good Sense], No.
1, Lleida, V–1875).
The
spiritists warned of a violated civilization, the results of which were not
remote from the historical role played by the Church. The spiritist Josep Amigó
wrote from Lleida in 1879:
Jesus Christ drove the merchants from the temple with a whip; yet the
temple has been invaded once again, this time not by sellers of doves, but by
those who, calling themselves heirs and continuers of the mission that brought
the founder of Christianity into this world, have made the Gospel the
inexhaustible source of their own dominance and profit. Leaning on a doctrine
based completely on humility and poverty, they are arrogant and powerful;
invoking the kindness and abnegation of He who gave His life for the good of
others, they are persecutors and egotists: priding themselves on being the sole
authorised interpreters of a purely spiritual religion and its most loyal
followers, they have emerged into a cult rich in outer trimmings and
ceremonies, one that captivates the senses without improving men's moral
conditions (Amigó i Pellicer 1879: 3).
Apart from
the fact that no spiritist text consulted questions Christ's use of force in
driving the merchants from the temple, another paradox in terms of the
discourse concerning the rejection of violence, and also in terms of its
practical or theoretical legitimization, emerges within the sphere of relations
with the Catholic Church itself. As heirs to the gnostic and later protestant
contestation of the rites and ceremonial worship, of the places of worship,
liturgies and sacramental formulas, the formalism of which was perceived as a
refutation of ‘the inner adoration of the Supreme Cause’ (La Unión Espiritista
[The Spiritist Union], Year II, No. 4, Barcelona, IV–1897), the spiritists
rejected the Catholic clergy's monopolization of the ritual efficacy of its
acts as the link between the divine order and earthly ordination. Nor did they
accept that the efficacy of the sacraments should be based, not on the symbolic
level, but rather on the real, on that of nature itself. In accordance with
Weber's postulation, the confrontation between the stasis of sacred law with the
dynamism of sacred conviction, a process that Delgado (2001) examines in depth
concerning the Spanish iconoclastic context of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. This marks a departure from the iconoclastic interpretation of
anti-ritualism proposed by Mary Douglas (1978 [1970]), to the explanation
focused on anti-sacramentalism particularly by Gregory and Mary Bateson (1994
[1987]).
In his Efemérides
Leridanas (Lleida Milestones), Pleyan de Porta provided an eyewitness
account of how, on 2 October 1879, an anticlerical spiritist demonstration
stood waiting for a group of pilgrims returning from montserrat at the Lleida
railway station: the spiritists assaulted and dispersed the catholic group by
ringing cowbells and jeering, ‘Beeeee, Beeeee, Beeeee!!! (‘Well done, well
done, well doooooone!’). Circumstantially, they did so despite persecutions,
prohibitions, the closing of centers and publications, fines, episodes of
censorship and the banishing of their most outstanding members of the period.
Nonetheless, over and above this precise context, one gains an inkling of the
pressing urgency with which the Catholic use of religion was challenged,
inseparable from a Reform that reverberated in Spain with centuries of delay.
The aggressiveness of spiritist texts toward Catholicism, and vice versa, was
deeply rooted. One need only glance at this excerpt from one of the papers
discussed and approved at the ‘First International Spiritist Congress’, held in
Barcelona in 1888 and attended by 70 delegations from all across Europe and
America:
The altar of divinity stands in the conscience, in the very soul, in the
conscious self and the responsible self. Progress is a moral law that
gravitates over us all, constantly, precisely and evenly, and we shall never
study it thoroughly enough despite its being based on the loftiest principles
of justice and wisdom, constituting, as it were, the faithful in the balance of
creation, and thus, of unquestionable influence on peoples and humanities; on
societies and men of all times, all ages, all eras and all generations;
contrasting with the thousands upon thousands of positive religions for the
benefit of the powerful, to whom they promise further reward. Hence, according
to this latter perspective, it is not only unsatisfactory, but also false in
all the falseness of the law, and likewise its religious and social principles.
[...] If the God we accept is the one described, albeit vaguely; if His
temple is the entirety of the work of universal creation, and if the altar
stands in one's innermost being, then there is a need to do away with those
places of indifference forever, be they temporary or perpetual, that relegate
souls to the neglect of the true God (First International Spiritist Congress
1888: 155–156).
Through the
destiny of the soul, the symbolic proposals of the spirits – according to the
spiritists, sources of their own theorizations – would emphasize the
experiential universe and the categories of thought to the extreme of
justifying the physical disappearance of churches.
LIMINALITY:
BODIES THAT CREATE, BODIES THAT DESTROY
Understanding
spiritist faith and reason to be an impulse that triggers action brings to mind
Spinoza's notion of bodies and minds acting together to recognize love in
reason and thus detonate political squalor completely. Applying Buxó's
approaches to passion to the purpose of this study, it was from such a passion,
‘producer of joy and misery, pain and pleasure,’ that the spiritist medium
invalidated the dichotomies of ‘mind and body, soul and matter, thought and
action,’ because this passion flourished as an ‘incentive to satisfy the
deepest desires,’ closer to ‘inner feelings than to moral standards’
prevailing, rationalizing what reason would understand to be ‘contradictory and
incomprehensible.’ A passion that conferred ‘heroes, sages, mystics’ – and also
possessed – inhabitants of ‘the earth with invisible powers, miracles and the
marvellous’ (Buxó 2000: 9–11), which Duvignaud calls for as an affirmation of
life or a pathway for death, the immensity of an infinite virtuality, or also
the space of the power that justly places human beings in the world. As Güyük,
the Great Khan of the Mongol Empire wrote to Pope Innocent IV in 1246, ‘If man
is not the power of God, what might he do in this world?’ (Hell 1999: 7).
Strength of God is in the bodies of the world, repositories of human passion
are constituted in factors of destruction and creation. Perhaps, for this
reason Walter Benjamin observed in his Writings that ‘Only when in
technology body and image so interpenetrate that all revolutionary tension
becomes bodily collective innervation, and all the bodily innervations of the
collective become revolutionary discharge, has reality transcended itself to
the extent demanded by the communist manifesto’ (in Vinyes 1989: 98–99). A
person died in the medium to be reincarnated as another being: throughout the
process of separation, threshold and aggregation in the form of rebirth, he
might tremble, shout, speak in other languages: in the passage from society to
the body being released, ‘One dies into nature to be reborn from it’ (Turner
1988: 532), shaking off his social conditions and, thus, his social
determinants (nature knows neither forms, nor concepts and hence no species, as
Nietzsche would postulate). That is what the ‘danger’ of mediumship consists
of. What then is the space of liminality? These are two parallel societies in
mutual confrontation, one being prestructured, the other being destructured,
both convulsively, in a state of perennial instability. The principle of
existence lies in evolution, which embraces opposites: Quoting Hegel, Turner
observes, ‘in “yes” and “no” all things consist’ (Turner 1999 [1967]: 107).
This expression of the spiritist mystic principle, which almost led to the
public burning of Jacob Böhme in 1625 for having affirmed that heaven and hell
dwelled in each of us, would show the extent to which trembling became the
spiritists' social place. Hence the dialectic of passage oscillates between
maintaining systems of thought and social models and, moreover, its own
clarification: perpetual openness toward a life in which the old and new would
synthesize, the fruit of an ongoing, progressive crystallization, which, out of
discord and fission, would aspire to other harmonies, new fusions tending to be
unstable and elusive at all times, marked by agitation. Practicing spiritists
linked the perpetual mutations to which the universal, mediumistic and human
planes were subjected, completely interdependent. To the extent that handling
conflicts with the spirits became a guideline for acting with regard to earthly
conflicts, the resulting transformations operated on three levels: in the space
of the spirits themselves; in that of the spiritists' interior, and in that of
their public and private social action. How to expel violence from all these
social ebbs and flows? During the First International Spiritist Congress in
Barcelona in 1888, Huelbes Temprado, one of the speakers at the third session
prompted ‘hearty applause’ by stating:
And moreover, spiritism, as you well know, is not only religious. It is
complete, revolutionary, more revolutionary than all that is considered
revolutionary in the world, because it includes them all. Pacific, yes;
bloodless, that is true; yet spiritism's action in the spheres that existence
embraces must be sweeping, overwhelming; we would like to smash this society
and organize it again (First International... 1888: 242).
Following
the premise that society, at the moment of self-awareness, was conceived as
something sacred, and that a fetichization came about in social relations also
turned toward change – deepening the ties that bind the individual and society,
there where God appeared as the figurative expression of the latter – the
spiritist effervescence denoted the self-transcending capacity of vast
collectives through knowledge and experience. Each spiritist center set up a
library and gave classes so that workers could learn to read and write. Renewed
language, situated in the origin of thought, would generate other ways of
‘conceiving the world’. This was the driving force behind the movement, these
were the reasons for its success: it responded to the need to formulate
transformations concerning reality – let us recall Durkheim's premise according
to which beliefs are not active if not shared. According to the spiritists,
knowing oneself meant seeing oneself in the experiences of others: if the path
of every person is autonomous, their common destiny unites them: transforming
themselves in order to transform the world. Hence the relevance of Mannheim's
asking, ‘Must it be assumed that only that is politics which is preparation for
insurrection? Is not the continual transformation of conditions and men also
action?’ (Mannheim 1987 [1929]: 181) Herein lies the meaning that enabled the
shift from individualism to collectivist social projects to take place.
Those latter
years of the nineteenth century saw the unleashing of a profound crisis in
social integration; society was shifting from a past surmounted to a future as
yet unconquered, and yet it lacked a common system of ideas that would solidify
and establish the identity of the collective in separated societies – also on
an intra-European scale between the colonized and the colonizing. Nevertheless,
faced with a desacralized environment, in which the social system did not
recognize the sacred, the compensation for the profane, which is the sacred,
continued to exist in the everyday world. Through the conceptual spiritist
system, a significant part of society could potentially clarify itself, and
situate its beginning and end in order to maintain itself as a shared system.
The images tossed into the spiritist arena were not, of course, those of the
totem, but rather of the spirits that came into contact with the mediums,
responding to the spiritist call to society (particular varieties of general
operations: classifying reality from its different levels). There were mediums
(and charlatans and fakes) everywhere – at least in the making – the demand for
the exceptional was extraordinary, and in heaven the spirits ebbed and flowed
en masse, at times with great violence. According to the spiritists, it was the
same violence that, stoked by egotism, caused people to tear each other apart
so as to obtain a gain understandable only in social spaces in which everything
was apt to be commodified. The ‘cooperative republic of work’ and the
‘adoration of the golden calf’ became exclusive paths that magnified the
tragedy. Social disintegration was caused more by this irreconcilable
antagonism, in the breakdown of the cultural environment of a proletariat
subjected to extraordinarily intense processes of dizzying change, from the
country to the city, from the farm to the factory (Polanyi 1989 [1944];
Duvignaud 1977), than in an economic exploitation of extremely violent scope.
To understand the scope of the implicit costs (material and household
precariousness, malnutrition, sickness, death) in the development of the urban
phenomenon in Barcelona within the context of the Industrial Revolution, see
two classics of the nineteenth: Laureà Figuerola (Estadística de Barcelona
en 1849 / Statistics of Barcelona in 1849) and Ildefons Cerdà (Estadística
de la clase obrera en Barcelona en 1865 / Statistics of the Working Class in
Barcelona in 1865). Regarding the theory of this in relation to
working-class wages and women's labor conditions, see Borderías (2001).
Balcells (1984) certifies the increase in the child mortality rate in Barcelona
from 1857 to 1882 by 7 per cent (up to 36 per thousand, higher than the Spanish
average) owing to boys and girls as young as six years of age being forced to
work 10- to 13-hour days in factories, workshops, foundries and mines, thus
infringing legislative enactments such as that of 1873.
In contrast,
the God of the spiritists was not violent, unlike the periods in which first
Catholicism and later Protestantism and Calvinism had exerted an iron-like
social grip, identifying the presence of spirits with evil, in a context in
which God appeared as an angry, resentful deity (which would guide the
accusations of witchcraft by the Inquisition). In contrast, the spiritist claim
that God was a god of love and not of vengeance, from whom rage and ire must be
mitigated, would imply ‘that the spirits of the dead were attributed with an
essentially benevolent nature’ (Wilson 1970: 171). In fact, the spiritists
themselves maintained that ‘The God who accepts spiritism is He who creates
souls for Progress, not that vengeful God who hurls them into hell’ (First
International... 1888: 151). And, despite this, a space was reserved in the
spiritist corpus for the ‘basest, most maleficent’ entities, those that occupied
the lowest point on the scale of evolution, ‘impure’ souls clinging to earthly
planes even after ‘becoming disembodied.’ In fact, both Kardec and his French
and Catalan continuers of the nineteenth century and the different European
propagandists of the twentieth century reported the ‘dangers’ of the ‘perverse
uses’ of spiritism and the ominous connotations of violence. By establishing a
parallel between the gods of a pantheon and the spirits that empowered mediums,
it might be worth saying that the invisible entities would work ‘as signals
which in their reciprocal relations, have for meaning a set of categories by
means of which men represent to themselves their own society’ (Sperber 1988
[1974]: 17). The specific moral categories attributed to spirits were
simultaneously applied to mediums and practising spiritists in general, on the
one hand as a dynamic reflection of society, and on the other as a
manifestation of the temporal and evolutional state of every being, from which
he must forge his own path, ‘True life lies in erraticity,’ wrote one of the
most outstanding Catalan mediums of the nineteenth century, the Catalan native
Miquel Vives (1903: 87). In short, it was a question of ordering the
relationships of the supernatural powers (souls and spirits) with human beings,
which in itself constitutes the dominance of religious action (Weber 1993
[1922]: 330), in the spiritist case with an overwhelming dynamism.
Taking up
Sperber's argument (1988) that a context has to be interpreted in the light of
the symbolic phenomena surrounding it, one might wonder why so few mediumistic
communications have been found that goad one to literally ‘smash society’ –
often, that same content is expressed otherwise – in order to erect a new
society in its place and why, in contrast, the acceptance of the spiritist
militancy is massive when these words are pronounced. Perhaps because of many
meanings and functions that the devotees gave to the communications: that very
multiplicity that lies at the base of symbolic action, even more if understood
that symbols alone would have neither definition nor meaning, since it is the
meanings surrounding something that make it a symbol. Hence the spiritist
reflection that ‘All men, whatever their condition and reciprocal
relationships, can make rules of exceptional purity and wisdom in spiritist
doctrine. Our social stagnation is merely the consequence of the moral malaise;
good laws do not exist, morality is nothing more than a fiction, a dogmatic
artifice’ (Vives 1903: 167). Within a framework extolling tolerance (‘How can
we love our brothers if we don't even want to tolerate their opinions?’) (Ibid.),
social energy strives to head in an unquestionably transforming direction. The
social environment is the Western world itself, the historical revelation of an
appalling journey, a compulsive social museumification of horror, something
that takes on a variety of implications here. If the task of trying to
understand how people's innateness is expressed proves complex, ‘his aptitude
for constructing, transforming and reprogramming’ (Buxó 1988: 54), it is
unsettling to witness the violent displays of such constructions,
transformations and reprogrammings, occasionally highly destructive.
Over the
earth, blotted with crimes, wafts a halitus of hatred, of anger, of cursedness.
In the dark caverns of crime, hearts, like volcanoes, vomit forth streams of
lava and each head is a dynamite bomb. Shrapnel lies hidden beneath the skulls.
In the subsoil of societies lie ghastly galleries opened by those dreadful
miners of hatred. Now and then violent shocks are felt accompanied by muffled
stampedes. It is the beast that stirs in the depth of its cavern, Cerberus who
barks, Satan who roars (La dinamita social (Thanatosis) [Social Dynamite
(Thanatosis)]. Supplement XVI to Los Albores de la Verdad (The Dawn of Truth),
Propaganda Committee of ‘La Buena Nueva de Grácia’, Barcelona, XII–1904, 1).
VIOLENCE: IN
HEAVEN AS IT IS ON EARTH
Spirits also
roar. And fiercely, even too fiercely (at least for some). In 1896, France saw
the publication of J. Bouvéry's book Le Spiritisme et l'anarchie devant la
science et la philosophie (Paris, Chamuel), in which the author called for
brotherhood, love of goodness and regeneration, yet maintained that ‘spirits
have the right and the power to annihilate each other.’ The idea of a sliding
towards devastating violence in the heavenly world that would be reflected in
earthly action was contested by spiritists in Barcelona and Minorca, who
described the proposal as a ‘capital error’ (Revista de Estudios
Psicológicos [Journal of Psychological Studies], Barcelona, XI–1896?; La
Estrella Polar [The Polar Star], Year II, No. 19, Maó, XII–1896). And yet
it was those very spiritists who defined the greatest harm, the most painful
wound that could be inflicted on a person, to be depriving him ‘of following
the impulses of his conscience and the dictates of his reason in terms of his
relations with the divine’ (La Estrella Polar, Year II, No. 19, Maó,
XII–1896). Later, when the presence of associations that blended anarchism and
spiritism began to burgeon in different areas of Occitania (Lyon, Carcassonne,
Narbonne, and Marseille). In 1887, the weekly Journal des Morts began to
be published with Marie Adrien at the helm; in 1890 Le Christ Anarchiste,
by Ernest Ferroul, the same person who in 1907 raised the black flag at
Narbonne City Hall during the rebellions of wine growers in which the police sub-station
went up in flames (for French spiritism, and the references given here, see
Ladous 1992 [1987]: 61–65), which roaring spirits did these men follow? Where
were those roars directed? Trapped in the leap into the unknown involved in
moving either towards God or the Revolution, their action was decisively
undertaken towards a vertigo that was conceived as less risky than a poorly
attempted social normalcy accumulating existences pre-condemned wandering owing
to the morbid establishment of misery and exploitation. That vertigo contained
the germs of the new world, the real world they would announce with messianic
overtones, for example, through the following mediumistic communication
transcribed in the spiritist journal La Cabaña:
Signs of decrepitude in customs and
laws that are no longer in touch with modern ideas can be seen everywhere. The
old beliefs, slumbering for centuries, seem to wish to be awakened from their
secular torpor and are amazed to see themselves surprised by new beliefs emanating
from philosophers and thinkers of this century and the previous one. The
bastardised system of a world that was mere sham is crumbling before the dawn
of the real world, the new world. The law of solidarity has shifted to the
inhabitants of nations to vanquish the entire earth; furthermore this law, so
sage, so progressive, this, in a word, divine law has not limited itself to
this one result; creeping into the hearts of great men, it has taught them that
not only is it necessary for the improvement of your mansion, but must also be
extended to all the worlds of your solar system, to be spread from there
throughout all the worlds of infinity.
This law of universal solidarity is
beautiful because it contains this sublime maxim: All for one and one for all (La
Cabaña [The Cabin], Year I, No. 6, Barcelona, VI–1887).
That apology
for cosmopolitism and universal solidarity, capable of citing the very Solar
System, was based on a principle that took on greater relevance in view of the
Western evolutionary context: ‘There are no savages,’ proclaimed the spiritists
in their repeated condemnation of state borders and legal-administrative limits
imposed by force:
Everything, then, encourages us to love and protect one another: the need
for progress; for opening our souls to every great and noble aspiration; the
solidarity that unites us; the need we all have of it; our heart, our reason,
even our interest. [...]
In Progress's fight against ignorance, superstition, pride, scepticism, the
barbarian attacks by outmoded, decaying institutions, the dogmatism of the
official Science, the intolerance of the constituted Churches, the invectives
of the foes of freedom of conscience, the taunts of the ignorant and envious,
the vile arts of the wretches who spread distrust and hatred between nations,
between brothers... (First International... 1888: 156, 161–162)
Catalan
spiritism repudiated institutionalized social violence. Yet at the same time it
was also faced with a dilemma: though it did not oppose the organized
anarchistic response to the economic and military despotism of the bourgeois
state over society, it continued to find points in common with the motivations
of libertarian activists. The bonds between spiritists and anarchists had been
building in Catalonia – also by fits and starts – from the act of faith of 1861
to the post-Civil War period in the twentieth century (question addressed in
Horta 2001 and 2004; see Barrera 1980 and Reyes 1933 – for the links among
spiritism, freemasonry and anarchism, Sànchez 1990 is essential reading).
During that prolonged period, the spiritist siren songs with respect to the
libertarians were many:
When I am away from here and meet anarchists, Fenians and nihilists,
instead of combating them, I tell them, ‘Come to us; you will find in us the
strength you are lacking, the only logical bridge between the abstract reason
that moves you and the practical application of your wishes’. [...] to all of
the lowly, to all of the disenfranchised, to all of the outlawed, to all of the
dreamers we open our arms; our feeling is that he who most suffers is he who
most needs our doctrine, because he is most in need of love and solace (First
International... 1888: 242–243).
It was the
gut despair, the structural disconsolation of a large part of the Catalan
proletariat that explained the use of violence advocated by certain anarchist
sectors in the 1890s: libertarian violence sprang up from the merciless
situation of impoverished, brutally repressed popular environments. In the 1860s,
the development of anarcho-syndicalism among Catalan workers would gradually
intensify (in 1867 worker groups in Barcelona sent a message of support to the
Second Congress of the International Workers Association (IWA) in Lausanne;
three years later the Spanish Regional Federation of the IWA (AIT) was founded
in Barcelona): the workers' labor demand was put forward as a means to fight
for social revolution, merging Bakuninist thought and social action. In the
1890s, the theoretical and practical structuring of anarcho-syndicalism was
incontestable: one postulated apoliticism (rejection of parliamentary action),
direct action (negotiation without intermediaries between the forces of capital
and labor), and the use of general strike and mobilizations in order to
establish a classless society (the bases that explain the creation of the
newspaper Solidaridad Obrera (Workers' Solidarity) in Barcelona in 1907,
by the Regional Confederation of Labour of Catalonia of the General
Confederation of Labour of Spain, in 1910, and by the National Confederation of
Labour (CNT) within a year. The recurrent use of violent actions by certain
libertarian sectors responded, more than to ‘propaganda for its own sake,’ to
its powerlessness with respect to social realization of the revolution in a
ferociously repressive milieu in which the exploitation of the proletariat was
despotic and their villainous conditions for survival, seeing their most basic
demands quashed (it is no coincidence that the etymology of the term ‘terrorism’
refers to an action by the State). Here, we might quote Núñez Florencio (1983:
190–197) in reference to the ‘terror tactics’ that Catalan anarchists employed
as early as 1884. Of the many actions undertaken in the final decade of the
nineteenth century in Barcelona, a few of the most significant were those taken
against General Martínez Campos (September 24, 1893), wounded by a bomb thrown
by the lithographer Paulí Pallàs, who was executed by a firing squad in the
fortress at Montjuïc (October 15, 1893); against the audience seated in the
stalls of the Liceo opera house (November 7, 1893) by Santiago Salvador,
executed in the same manner and in the same fortress together with six of the
27 comrades put on trial (November 21, 1894); and against those attending a
Corpus Christi procession (June 7, 1896). All this prompted fierce repression
against the worker activists, many of whom were imprisoned in that fortress –
targeted for the systematic bombing of Barcelona throughout the nineteenth
century as a reaction by the government to the populace's many demands. One of
the Catalan anarchists imprisoned in 1893, despite expressing his antipathy to
violent action, was the writer and typographer Josep Llunas i Pujals (founder
of the Catalan-language libertarian magazines La Teula in 1880 and La
Tramontana from 1887 to 1895, author of different pamphlets on the pressing
need for social revolution, linked in certain periods to the theatre, music,
and acrobatics and gymnastics). Llunas had previously shown, in 1890, his
rejection of the actions of the early 1880s which the government authorities
attributed to La Mano Negra or The Black Hand the supposed existence of
which justified the arrest of 6,000 Andalusian day laborers by 1884, despite
there being no proof of their belonging to the supposed organization, which
would lead to its being considered by many to be a police frame-up job (see
Kaplan 1977: 153–154, regarding the contrasting interpretations by G. Waggoner
and C. Lida with respect to the existence of La Mano Negra), which he
felt jeopardized the struggle by the Federation of Workers of the Spanish
Region, which banned these actions in 1883.
The
legislative of the repression took shape in 1896 in the Law for the
Repression of Anarchism promulgated by the Spanish government, which
occasioned what became known as the Montjuïc Trial: over 400 arrests, tortures
(the intensity of which triggered a bitter popular outcry) and the promulgation
of eight death sentences, three of which were commuted. The libertarian
reaction took place in 1897: the Spanish Prime Minister Antonio Cánovas del
Castillo, was assassinated to avenge the executions, and in Barcelona an
attempt was made on the life of Narciso Portas, a lieutenant in the Civil Guard
in reprisal for the torture he had inflicted on the prisoners. The spiritist
protest against these executions was absolute, and the revulsion in Europe,
widespread:
[Capital punishment] goes against God's Law which states: THOU SHALT NOT
KILL. It runs contrary to civilisation and proper conduct, which oppose it. It
is contrary to justice, because capital punishment involves carrying out
precisely what it prohibits. It is inhumane, because it denies forgiveness,
even though through repentance and mending his ways, the prisoner may be worthy
of it. And it sows the seeds of hatred and destruction in society; because the
act of vengeance involved in carrying out capital punishment can only stir up
violence, by virtue of natural laws, although occult and not well enough
known.
[...] are the execution of the wretched Silvestre Lluís, on the 15th of
last month and the firing squad shootings of 4 May going to bring about a
lowering of the crime rate and calm, peace and serenity to consciences? History
and experience would indicate the contrary.
For the good of progress, for the love of mankind and justice, let us
propagate the need for the abolition of the death penalty and of all
irredeemable punishments. Let us hate the crime, yet pity and protect the
criminal (La Unión Espiritista, Year II, No. 7, Barcelona, VII–1897).
This was a
perception that arose from positions adopted years before. In 1880, Catalan
spiritists protested that capital punishment removed its victim from the order,
preventing him from evolving and being reintegrated into society, doing away
with the possibility of his undergoing ‘a regime of purification, of reparation
through struggle, work, abnegation,’ since – according to spiritist doctrine –
one did not die, meaning that the karmic nature of reincarnation would cause
any problems not solved in earlier lives to materialize once again in new
existences (La Luz del Porvenir, no. 32, Barcelona, 30-xii-1880).
Spiritist support of the disadvantaged was backed by the prisoners – whose
conditions for survival in the jails were harshly criticized in the movement's
publications; for example, on March 31, 1891 (the 23rd anniversary
of Allan Kardec's death) 54 inmates of tarragona prison who received la luz
del porvenir free of charge sent a letter to the magazine's editorial
board, announcing their support of the spiritist cause (Domingo Soler 1990:
237–250, reproduced the complete text).
The loss of
Spain's overseas colonies and the return in piteous condition – many mutilated
– of urban and rural workers forced into combat, condemned to a survival as
uncertain as it was precarious, revived the spiritist denunciation of slavery,
wars and the terrifying violence involved in them. The response by most of
Catalan society to the forced mobilization and the war of Cuba was significant:
the spiritists organized and took part in public acts together with the
progressives, republicans, democrats, federalists, anarchists and freemasons,
and through their publications. In 1896, The Universal Brotherhood spiritist
society, in Sabadell, called on the Spanish government to end the war, and also
on the Peace Arbitration League – founded in Barcelona in 1891 under a similar
name, as will be immediately seen – for it to intervene so as to resolve
conflict through dialogue. The ‘First International spiritist Congress,’ held
in Barcelona in 1888, had unanimously approved the project of statutes to
create the International Arbitration and Peace Association with the intention
of settling conflicts between countries through the use of dialogue (Horta
2004), setting the organizational bases to develop the Catalan pacifist and
anti-military movement. On April 14, 1889, with the presence in Barcelona of
European progressive representatives (among them, English and Italian
parliamentarians), spiritists, anarchists, freemasons and the country's
political left assembled in the Novedades Theatre. The spiritist Torres Solanot
acted as vice-chairman of the organizing committee, and a freemason, Rossend
Arús, as chairman. Amalia Domingo Soler and the aforementioned Josep Llunas i
Pujals were also present. A crowd packed the hall to overflowing: the meeting
called for the abolition of permanent armies, the establishment of arbitration
to settle international conflicts peacefully, the constitution of a federation
of free peoples in Europe for the harmonic development of all individual and
collective interests. Moreover, the International League for Peace and
Universal Brotherhood was created, ‘the most outstanding players were the
anarchist and spiritist sectors’ (Sànchez 1990: 340). The spiritists understood
that the popular classes, ‘the great mass of labour,’ were the principal
victims of the war, forced to act on behalf of the ambition of dominance and
exploitation of the minorities that promoted the war, ‘The crowds will be
forced to distinguish what kills from what lifts up’ (‘Contra la guerra’
[Against War] in La Unión Espiritista, Year II, No. 2, Barcelona, II – 1897).
In the words – reproduced in Catalan spiritist publications – of Cuban
spiritist members, involved fighting for Independence and in denouncing the
Catholic Church's role as yet another colonizing force:
War on war! As spiritists we must all repeat in unison, and do our utmost
for the restoration of peace. [...]
To those who take pleasure in war, let us call for peace. We are all
brothers so, for God's sake, let's not destroy each other! Let's not destroy
each other. [...] Those of you, who are fighting on one side and the other, lay
down your fratricidal arms; wave the flag of peace. Be Christian, be human
beings, be men and embrace each another as brothers (La Revista Espiritista
de La Habana, Havana, 1-I-1897).
While rejecting
war by defying government repression, the spiritists defended the creation of a
Society of Nations that settled conflicts through dialogue and recognized all
peoples' right to be free. In 1899, the spiritists of the Barcelona Centre for
Psychological Studies took up a petition requesting that the mayor of the city
‘ensure a pension for the capital's repatriated citizens rendered incapacitated
for work, and jobs for the partially incapacitated’ (La Unión Espiritista,
Year IV, No. 4, Barcelona, IV–1899). Given Barcelona City Council's silence,
the response by La Unión Espiritista was firm, ‘How unfortunate it is
that matters of this nature do not deserve the attention of our representatives
and yet they prove so diligent with regard to other matters of no importance
whatsoever. That is why everything goes so well.’ The demand for insurance for
those home from the overseas colonies was part of the spiritist project of
organizing mutual aid and development societies as an economic model. Today
this is a spiritist labor cooperative in Catalonia and another in Andalusia:
the former succeeded the spiritist association La Voz del Alma (The Voice of
the Soul), founded in Barcelona in 1904. But, returning once again to the
spiritist perception of violence and its many manifestations, Josep Costa, a
spiritist member from Capellades, summarized the question thusly in 1897, ‘We
cannot understand how, as long as the disastrous divorce between capital and
labour exists, the true peace and harmony can be possible, which engender that
longed-for happiness.’ According to Costa, ignorance (‘a moral shadow causing
individual and collective darkness’), the economic yoke (‘which robs the worker
of his dignity’), wars (‘Blots on humanity, products of hatred’), political-administrative
borders (‘the reason for divorce between peoples’), and the separation of
capital and labour (‘making peace and harmony impossible’) (Josep Costa i
Pomés, ‘Les nostres aspiracions’ [Our Aspirations], La Unión Espiritista,
Year II, No. 11, Barcelona, XI–1897), it was all real and, yet, could be
surmounted by individual and collective action. In the words of Rogelio
Fernández Güell, ‘Those official massacres known as wars have their ardent
defenders, and those who are horrified by the explosion of a bomb [by anarchist
attacks] burn with eagerness to find out the details of a bloody battle.’
Reflecting a feeling that could be extended to the Catalan spiritists on the
whole, ‘There are anarchists who neither preach hellfire nor throw bomb,’ while
other criminals, protected by the law, are guilty of practising another type of
what he describes as ‘terrorist anarchism.’ Who?
The millionaire who quibbles over giving a beggar a crust of bread [...].
The miser who prevents money from circulating [...]. The priest who neglects
the teachings of the sublime master and covers himself with glory by exploiting
people's gullibility [...]. The judge who sells his conscience for a handful of
coins [...]. The head of state that deprives his citizens of their freedom and
squanders public funds [...]. [And, unquestionably, opposition to violence
included violent anarchist enterprises]. A dynamite bomb may explode; yet
society merely goes on; events follow their natural course. Give the chariot of
progress the speed of light; humanity will have fallen behind, and it is she
who you must overtake.
It is not dynamite that makes peoples move forward. There is no more
powerful combatant than the sister of charity nor is there any more sublime
revolutionary than the schoolmaster [...]. Humanity will not be saved by shouts
of anger or explosions of hatred (La dinamita social [Thanatosis],
1904: 1–2).
A few months
after the publication of this text, in May 1905, a failed assassination attempt
against King Alfonso XIII took place in Paris; and in Madrid on 31 May 1906,
Alfonso XIII and his bride Victoria Eugenia were the targets of a bomb attack
from which they emerged unharmed. Both actions were blamed on the Catalan
anarchist Mateu Morral, who was aided in his escape from the police by the
republican journalist José Nakens, born in Seville but a resident of Madrid.
Nakens was sentenced to nine years in prison and issued a pardon after two
years. Both the historiography of anarchy and that of a more general slant fail
to mention that Nakens was a former collaborator of the Christian-Spiritist
circle of Lleida and its mouthpiece El Buen Sentido, in addition to
writing regularly for republican and Catalan publications such as La Campana
de Gràcia and La Publicidad (see Horta 2004).
CONCLUSIONS
In Catalan
spiritism one witnesses the rebuttal of violence in all its forms: state,
economic, individual, and also heavenly: hence the disagreement between
spiritists in Barcelona and Minorca with respect to the affirmation by
anarcho-spiritist members in Occitania concerning the spirits' powers to
annihilate each other. At the same time, in terms of the use of violence by
libertarian groups, the understanding of their reasons – since their acts took
place and were the result of an environment rife with injustice, – and the
staunch defence of their authors once imprisoned. Yet the breaking away of a
sector of anarchism towards violent actions would be counterbalanced by the
spiritist call to abandon them, even though the actors themselves would be
supported in that, despite fulfilling themselves socially through expressions
of anger and hatred, at the same time they would be the first victims of a
society founded precisely on anger and hatred. What may be useful, when
interpreting the libertarian violence and that which arose within the margins
of state monopoly, is the proposal synthesized by Delgado (1999: 85–91), who
conceives violence as an available cultural option, and indeed as a social tool
for a new sociability. Obviously, the spiritists did not assert their view of
anarchist violence in such terms, in other words, they did not state that
violence might become a potential factor for generating social change; on the
contrary, they believed that it would delay the transformation processes. Even
so, they established a causal link between a social environment based on
violence and the resulting actions by certain anarchists, and then found an
explanatory framework for that very libertarian practice which they eschewed.
To render
such a degree of complexity understandable, perhaps greater insistence should
be made on the use of trance configuring the cults of possession in the
spiritist mediumship as a complete and integral social fact, which because of
its nature could perform as many functions as the structural processes of the
society being projected. The dynamic of Catalan spiritist trance would take
those functions and structures to inconceivable limits: does not smashing
society and organizing it again echo the ‘all or nothing’ slogan of the anomic
manifestation, thus challenging all that has been instituted? The spiritists
reproached the political parties for having only sought to modify people's
‘earthly’ conditions, whereas they intended to continue the transformations,
even in the ‘heavenly’ states of existence. The smashing of society, thus,
would not refer to nihilism, but rather to the creative force of destruction.
Are not the demands of the Russian anarchist Bakunin, initiated in freemasonry,
the same as those of the Murcian-Catalan anarchist Anselmo Lorenzo (Sánchez
1985: 25–33) and influenced by perceptions concerning time and eternity
originating in ancient Gnostic contexts, which have so nourished Slavic
culture?
A movement
with followers who belonged to the army (in Spain) ended up becoming the
vanguard of antimilitarism; those who rejected the use of arms placed
themselves at the disposal of the Junta of Armament and Defence in the name of
federalism, social conquests and democracy; one provided support so that those
whom the State deemed ‘delinquent anarchists’ could be socially reintegrated
and one worked side by side with the libertarians in the different fields of
the social sphere, calling on them to take part in the very spiritist movement.
It might be said that in anthropological terms, violence, like reason,
appeared, not as an immutable substance, but rather as a means to an end, the
symbolic expression of the intersection point of an evolutionary path...
whatever it might be, perhaps another. Out of the magnitude of that ambiguity
and out of the complexity with which countless maskings of contemporariness
concealed heterogeneous forms of violence, one might gather that the Catalan
spiritists glimpsed, perhaps inadvertently, that in the last analysis violence
would mean an atrocious yet effective and unquestionably real link among
members of society. A link that would have to be reversible, in accordance with
its fraternal conceptions, although living dramatically in its present and in
theory temporarily, yet a link nevertheless. Surmountable only through a
non-violent smashing of society in order to build a new world. The fruits of
their action would emerge vehemently in the Second Republic, which, despite its
renewing its victory in the election of 1936, only an unconstitutional military
uprising would, once again, defeat. Among its victims, once again, spiritists
and anarchists, or the chronic impossibility of Spain's being capable of
integrating, peacefully and democratically, ‘another’ sociability.
