Quaker Mediumship and the Search for a Peaceable Kingdom

Lindsay Dicuirci discusses Quaker activist Isaac Post’s 1852 publication Voices from the Spirit World: Being Communications from Many Spirits. A follower of Quaker separatist Elias Hicks, Post became interested in... [ view full abstract ]

Lindsay Dicuirci discusses Quaker activist Isaac Post’s 1852 publication Voices from the Spirit World: Being Communications from Many Spirits. A follower of Quaker separatist Elias Hicks, Post became interested in Spiritualism as a method of communication with the dead but also as a strategy for resolving present tensions on earth. While Post’s contemporaries, like painter Edward Hicks, envisioned a terrestrial Peaceable Kingdom as the culmination of Penn’s “Holy Experiment on earth, Post’s spirit-led pen recorded a different conclusion, one that unfolded the peaceable kingdom as a series of possible futures negotiated in liminal spaces. Post’s letters capture conversations he claimed to have with figures ranging from Quaker founder George Fox to George Washington to John C. Calhoun, exploring his belief in the continued evolution of the deceased and the possibility for an extraterrestrial resolution of social ills. For Post, the body of the medium is a divine space, and the division between heaven and earth a false binary. As the spirit of William Penn reveals to Post, “Present life is only an index to the volume;” just because one’s “mission on earth is finished” does not foreclose the possibility of further action. Comparing himself to a telegraph wire, Post viewed his body as a conduit through which the dead might join the living in achieving spiritual refinement and earthly peace.