Expressions of the Soul: Decoding Spiritualist Language and Art (Swedenborg, Scott, De Morgan)
Publication information:
Abstract
The paper I would like to present during the 2025 conference is a result of my archival research devoted to spiritual (-ist) angelology and materialism. The aim of my presentation is to show how spiritualism was influenced by and based on the variety of arts: poetry, painting, statuary, music, and different spiritual practices from India, Egypt, China, and Indigenous beliefs. Major figures who shaped American and British spiritualism referred to Swedenborg, Wordsworth, and different artistic practices. During my presentation I will show how art became a medium of spiritualism, its personal and theoretical practices decoding religious and non-religious narrations on spirituality. I argue that spirituals language is pictorial and expressive, based on geometry, repetition, colors and sounds, and this is why spiritualist diction deeply influenced hermetic painters. During my presentation I will discuss Scott’s, Jackson’s, and Emerson’s writings, and confront it with spiritualist paintings by Evelyn de Morgan, an influential British painter, and a member of well-known psychic family.
Presenter Biography
Kucab is a PhD Canidate in Comparative Literature, and a 2023/2024 Fulbright Junior Researcher affiliated with Amherst College (Amherst, MA). They are currently working on a comparative project devoted to an ecocritical and post-secular reading of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Kucab would like to show how the relationships of man, the environment, and the divine portrayed in the poems can reshape the religious imagination toward a larger community. They are interested in American poetry, Transcendentalism, spirituality and ecology, and have published in Polish and American journals.