VENTRILOQUISM - From Demon Possession to Magic Show

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From Demon Possession to Magic Show:

Ventriloquism, Religion, and the

EnlightenmentAs the project has proceeded, we've become interested in how religion is inscribed in bodies.

Diane Winstonhas reflected onthe role of costume in Salvation Army life.Marie Griffithpointedtohealing practices in Pentecostalism. AndRobert Orsiis looking at howCatholic practice

shaped children's experience.

In his work for the project,Leigh Eric Schmidthas been interested in how the senses--

particularly hearing--have shaped religious practice and ideas. In this article, from the June

1998 issue ofChurch History, Schmidt looks at how Enlightenment scholars and other assorted

skeptics used ventriloquism to illustrate how the ear can be deceived into believing in

supernatural voices.

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In Saducismus Triumphatus: Or, Full and Plain Evidence Concerning Witches and Apparitions(1681), Joseph Glanvill marveled at those so possessed by the devil that they became his

mouthpiece: "For Ventriloquy, or speaking from the bottom of the Belly, 'tis a thing I think as

strange and difficult to be conceived as any thing in Witchcraft, nor can it, I believe, beperformed in any distinctness of articulate sounds, without such assistance of the Spirits, that

spoke out of the Daemoniacks." By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,

ventriloquism, loosened from the confines of theological debates over demonology, had becomea salient category in rationalistic discussions of religion and had taken center stage as a form of

enlightened entertainment. This expanded construction of ventriloquy provided a tangible way of

thinking about revealed religion as rooted in illusion--that, indeed, various wonders of the devoutear such as divine calls, the voices of demonic possession, prophecy, mystical locutions, oracles,

and even the sounds of shamanic spirits had their origins in vocal deceptions that empiricists

could pinpoint and magicians could demonstrate. The new ventriloquism, in its sober appraisal

of all sectarian enthusiasm and religious credulity made suspect the very claim that God couldspeak to or through the human. In performative practice, the ventriloquist's art shifted the focus

of learned attention from the divine struggle over the soul to the protean malleability of personal

identity, the fears and attractions of imposture, and the sheer pleasures of amusement.1

Despite varied pressures of reform in the early modern world, magical practices proved highly

resilient, particularly in their old dance with natural philosophy. The Enlightenment did not somuch assault magic as absorb and secularize it; with the help of the market, legerdemain was
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transformed into a widely distributed commodity of edifying amusement.2

The enlightened

magician cultivated such newly codified arts as ventriloquism and the display of phantasmagoria,

turning the old juggler's repertory into an object lesson on religious illusion and epistemologicaltrickery (with the consequent need to hone technical knowledge and skeptical rationality). In the

expanding marketplace of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century entertainment--in

theaters, museums, inns, coffeehouses, and concert halls--magic was given renewed prominenceas a stage art explicitly allied with philosophical experiment rather than supernatural power. Theold forms of magic--alchemy, astrology, palmistry, healing, and treasure-seeking--persisted and

often enough even flourished, but, from the late eighteenth century on, the magician increasingly

appeared as one of the alluring celebrities of the Enlightenment, a wizard arrayed againstwizardry, an exposer of "supernatural humbugs." This skeptical pose became characteristic of

leading American illusionists from P. T. Barnum to Houdini to the Amazing Randi.3

Through closely examining the reformulation of ventriloquism from a demonological category to

a technique of enlightened magic, this essay circles around two larger points. First, it looks at

how rationalists went about creating a universal, naturalistic category for explaining (away)

religious phenomena, especially the "irrational" voices of popular Christian experience. It locatesthe formation and diffusion of such knowledge in the intersections of philosophy and

entertainment, scientific experiment and magical display, print and performance. For the learned,ventriloquism provided a grounds for suspicion and contest: knowledge of the art came to supplya ready-at-hand script for the performative exposure of the "superstitious" beliefs of others.

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Second, whereas most scholars, in keeping with the wider emphasis on the "ocularcentrism" of

modernity, have drawn attention to the optics of modern science, technology, consumption, andsurveillance, this essay foregrounds the "aural culture" of the Enlightenment. To the visual

moorings of modernity need to be added the complementary concerns with the disciplining of the

ear the science of acoustics, the voices of revelation and madness, the perceptual "illusions" of

hearing, the technologies of the auditory, and the aesthetics of sound. Amid the putative visualdominance of the modern sensorium, the sudden popularity of ventriloquism as both philosophy

and entertainment at the end of the eighteenth century gave expression to the continuing strength

of these aural fascinations among the learned. The assumed eclipse of orality by the visuality of

print has left hearing's complex history far more muffled than hearkened to, submerged under thereigning narrative of the eye's modern hegemony.

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What the enlightened strove, in particular, to contain was the explosive aurality of popular

Christianity--all the internal and external voices that beckoned the faithful from George Fox and

John Bunyan to John Woolman, Lorenzo Dow and Jarena Lee, all the "hearsay" of the demonicand the miraculous. As Tom Paine concluded with characteristic bluntness, "I totally disbelieve

that the mighty ever did communicate anything to man, by any mode of speech, in any language,

or by any kind of vision." To destroy the anathema of immediate revelation--what Ethan Allen

mocked as a "heavenly dictating voice"--the enlightened resorted to various devices: sometextual and historical (such as the attack on the biblical record or on the Sibylline prophecies),

some medical (such as the detailed pathologizing of enthusiasm or the delineation of the illusions

of the diseased ear), some acoustical (such as the wide-ranging pursuit of the mechanics and

technologies of sound), some political (such as the unmasking of the oracular impostures oftyrannical priests), and some playful (such as the use of rational amusements like ventriloquism

and the phantasmagoria). As part of this multilayered critique, the sportive magic of the
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Enlightenment was serious business, offering up the skeptical professions of the philosophes in a

performative and entertaining mode.6

AN ENLIGHTENMENT THEORY OF THE ORIGINS OF RELIGION: OR HOW TO

TURN SUPERNATURAL VOICES INTO AURAL ILLUSIONS

From late antiquity into the eighteenth century, ventriloquism was deeply embedded in Christian

discourses about demon possession, necromancy, and pagan idolatry. The term itself, in its

Greek and Latin derivations, meant literally one who speaks from the belly, and it long held aplace among many other specialized markers for different types of divination, prophecy, and

conjuring. As Reginald Scot explained in The Discoverie of Witchcraft(1584), "Pythonists" or

"Ventriloqni" speak in a "hollowe" voice, much different from their usual one, and are "such astake upon them to give oracles" or "to tell where things lost become." In demonological

discussions, such nomenclature to one who had "a familiar spirit," who spoke during trances or

fits an apparently diabolical voice, or who claimed soothsaying powers.7

Much of the formative discussion of ventriloquy in the Christian tradition focused on the story ofthe Witch of Endor recounted in Samuel 28 in which King Saul, who formerly had sought to

suppress all magical diviners, disguises himself and visits a sorceress in hope of summoning upthe ghost of Samuel and discerning the future of battle against the Philistines. With the help of

the necromancer, Sat hears the prophet Samuel speak from beyond the grave--an apparent

success for the soothsayer that made for considerable anxious commentary in the patristicliterature and long afterward.

8Whv would God allow necromancy, a practice repeatedly

abominated, to be used for divine purposes? Was this whole scene not accomplished through the

power of the devil? Was this apparitional voice of Samuel real and prophetic or only a diabolical

illusion created by the enchantress to trick a weakened Saul? The story bundled manycompelling theological issues together, but one of the most intriguing to centuries of interpreters

was the question of the ventriloquized voice, who was speaking and by what means or powers.

In the early modern versions of this debate about Samuel's ghost, interlocutors swung, as in the

larger controversies over witchcraft, between those who saw the power of the demonic and the

supernatural on display and those who supported increasingly skeptical explanations. ReginaldScot's work, a leading harbinger of dissent from long-standing demonic readings, shifted the

blame, comparing the woman's powers to that constant Protestant bugbear of Catholic "magic":

"Let us confesse that Samuell was not raised ... and see whether this illusion may not becontrived by the art and cunning of the woman, without anie of these supernaturall devices: for I

could cite a hundred papisticall and cousening practises, as difficult as this, as cleanlie handled."

Among Scot's lengthy explanations for the whole affair, he offered this image of magical

illusion: "This Pythonist being Ventriloqua; that is, Speaking as it were from the bottome of hirbellie, did cast hir selfe into a transe, and so abused Saule, answering to Saul in Samuels name,

in hir counterfeit hollow voice." In direct opposition Joseph Glanvill, who, as a member of the

Royal Society, was committed to establishing an empirical base for the defense of

supernaturalism against emergent mechanists and materialists, argued that it was "a realApparition" and thought that the ventriloquial explanation was nonsense: "It cannot certainly in

any reason be thought, that the Woman could by a natural knack, speak such a Discourse as is

related from Samuel, much less that she could from her Belly imitate his Voice, so as to deceive
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one that knew him as Saul did." For Glanvill--as with the Mathers, Henry More, and George

Sinclair--the contention that necromancers, witches, and demoniacs were mostly frauds was

"threadbare Sophistry." Diabolical as well as prophetic utterances were part of a biblical world ofspirits, apparitions, and wonders that Glanvill and his various allies stood ready to defend against

the incipient challenges of medical materialists and other skeptical debunkers of witchcraft.9

The scriptural debate over the Witch of Endor and the sources of Samuel's voice had its lived

counterpart in the "sacred theater" of possession that haunted seventeenth-century Protestants

and Catholic alike.10

In the context of such dramatic religious phenomena, ventriloquy was oneof the terms used to debate whether or not Satan was speaking through the possessed: was it a

"familiar spirit" who was making people roar out in low and unnatural voices, taunt ministers

and godly neighbors, or mimic the cries of animals in what amounted to an infernal menagerie

(dogs, cats, horses, or roosters)? Or, were those afflicted with such trances, voices, andbellowings fraudulent or diseased? As the Reverend John Whiting reported of a Hartford woman,

Ann Cole, in 1662, she "was taken with strange fits, wherein she (or rather the devil, as 'tis

judged, making use of her lips) held a discourse for a considerable time." One of the signs that

the devil was indeed speaking "vocally" in another New England woman, Elizabeth Knapp, wasthat she often uttered her "reviling" expressions without "any motion at all" of her mouth and

lips--"a clear demonstration," Increase Mather thought, "that the voice was not her own." Thosewho held on to the supernaturalist position heard in these "grum, low" voices from sometimesmotionless lips highly compelling evidence for the fearful presence of demons.

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Skeptics from Reginald Scot on were inevitably contemptuous of all such trickeries of the voice."This imposture of speaking in the Belly," Thomas Ady wrote inA Perfect Discovery of Witches

(1661), "hath been often practiced in these latter days in many places, and namely in this Island

of England, and they that practice it do it commonly to this end, to draw many silly people tothem, to stand wondring at them, that so by the concourse of people money may be given them,

so they by this imposture do make the people beleeve that they are possesed by the devil,

speaking within them, and tormenting them, and so do by that pretence move the people to

charity."12

InLeviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes, arguing for a naturalistic view of wonders andfor the prevalence of religious imposture, was predictably biting about ventriloquy, seeing such

vocal forms as part of the "false miracles" of enchanters by which they were "able to make very

many men believe" that their own voice "is a voice from Heaven." In the hands of philosophicalrationalists, ventriloquism was being fashioned into an anti-enthusiast weapon, another way of

exposing Christian wonders and delimiting superstition. "Some Counterfeits can speak out of

their Bellies with a little or no Motion of their Lips," the Anglican Francis Hutchinson explainedin 1718 in an essay attacking the reality of witches, apparitions, and possessions. "They can

change their Voices, that they shall not be like their own. They can make, that what they shall

say be heard, as if it was from a different Part of the Room, or as if it came from their own

Fundament." "Such persons are call'd," he said, "Engastriloques, or Ventriloquists."13

For all the sneering of writers from Scot to Hobbes to Hutchinson, these discussions long

remained torn. The lexicographer Thomas Blount captured this in his entry under ventriloquistfor his Glossographia (1656)--"one that has an evil spirit speaking in his belly, or one that by use

and practice can speake as it were out of his belly, not moving his lips." In the late 1740s John

Wesley, with his own firsthand encounters with the possessed, easily placed the term in a frame
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similar to Glanvill's, suggesting that those rationalistic critics were wrongheaded who saw mere

guile in the extraordinary manifestations of popular Christianity. Likewise, Methodist preachers

in the early republic, such as Solomon Sharp and William Swayze, still encountered demoniacswith altered voices and Satan-controlled tongues and hurried to pray over them. In one American

replay of the Scot-Glanvill divide in 1810, Frederick Quitman, a Lutheran minister who was

ashamed of lingering Christian "superstitions," suggested that the Witch of Endor be interpretedas "a ventriloquist, who could speak in a manner unobserved by the spectators." Anotherpreacher, Robert Scott, quickly countered Quitman's exegesis with a public rejoinder affirming

the divine reality of the apparition and the voice. The phenomenon of ventriloquism thus

remained embroiled in Christian debates about the diabolical and the revelatory even as theskeptical sought to turn it into a consummate example of staged religious imposture.

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The decisive turn toward the Enlightenment construction of ventriloquism was made in 1772 byJoannes Baptista de La Chapelle. That year La Chapelle--mathematician, encyclopedist,

inventor, and another member of the Royal Society--published his 572-page opus,Le

Ventriloque, ou l'engastrimythe. Part of much wider currents within the Enlightenment to

establish a natural history of superstitions, oracles, miracles, fetishes, priestly cheats, and piousfrauds, La Chapelle's treatise took its place in a stream of works by such writers as Bernard le

Bovier de Fontenelle, Antonius van Dale, John Trenchard, and Charles de Brosses and emergedas especially influential in the interpretation of vocal deceptions, revelatory voices, andmediumistic phenomena. Translated into Dutch (1774), Italian (1786), and Russian (1787) and

widely abstracted in the new encyclopedias, La Chapelle's tome provided much of the basic

analysis of ventriloquism across Europe and North America for the next century. It was the mainsource for the 1797 entry on the subject in the Encyclopedia Britannica (and its ensuing

American incarnation); it was used by Charles Brockden Brown as the background on the topic

for his major fictional creation of Carwin, the rogue ventriloquist, in Wieland(1798) and in the

serialized, fragmentary sequelMemoirs of Carwin the Biloquist(1803-1805); it provided all ofthe material for one of the first American expositions of the art, a small pamphlet published in

Morristown, New Jersey, in 1799; it influenced a mix of philosophic interpreters from Dugald

Stewart to David Brewster to Eusebe Salverte; and its stories even became staples of popular

how-to guides by the mid-nineteenth century. La Chapelle, more than anyone else, reinventedventriloquism as a general category for the rationalistic explanation of supernatural voices. He

gave it renewed currency as an idea; others would then turn his philosophic observations into a

system of rational recreation, a widely recognized form of stage entertainment.15

La Chapelle began in the thicket of the age-old Christian debate about the Witch of Endor andthe apparitional voice of Samuel, and then he cut through the whole tangle. Taking up the side

that the soothsayer was a studied impostor, who, through the art of ventriloquy, had the ability to

feign voices and to create the aural illusion of the supernatural, La Chapelle expanded this into a

blanket explanation for superstition that moved from the artifice of the ancient oracles tocredulity and fanaticism among his contemporaries. He moved the debate out of the biblical

narratives, the scriptural commentaries, and the theological territory of demonology into the

domain of experimentation, acoustics, and anatomy (it was the physiology of the mouth and

throat, not the belly, argued La Chapelle, that deserved attention for finding the "causes" of thisvocal phenomenon). Ventriloquism, he concluded, was an art, a practiced technique of

modulation, misdirection, and muscular control, which required neither supernatural assistance
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nor any special endowments of nature. Locating two contemporaries who had developed

ventriloquial skills for their own amusement--one a Viennese baron who dabbled in puppetry and

mimicry and another a nearby grocer named Saint-Gille who always enjoyed a good practicaljoke--La Chapelle built his explanatory framework on scientific report and empirical

observation, particularly of the grocer. Unlike previous writers, he anchored his attack on

imposture in experimental exhibitions; instead of going to view the possessed, he closelyobserved a magical performer. That was shift of perspective.16

La Chapelle insisted that Saint-Gille was an honest man and hence a source, but the grocercertainly had a roguish streak, confounding people with his amateur illusions time and again.

One story, aptly "Les Religieux dups," was particularly important for La Chapelle's purpose of

establishing his point that ventriloquism was a generative force of religious delusion, that it was

an important technique for creating "an appearance of revelation." Taking refuge in a monasteryduring a storm, Saint-Gille learns that the brothers are in mourning over the recent death of one

of their members; visiting the tomb in the church, he projects a ghostly voice of the dead friar--

one that laments the indifferent prayers of his fellows for his suffering soul in Purgatory. Soon

the ventriloquist has the whole community praying for forgiveness, falling on the floor in fearand astonishment, and trying desperately to make amends to their lost brother. Overawed by the

divine evidences he finds in the ghostly voice, the prior even tells Saint-Gille that suchapparitions effectively put to flight all the skeptical reasonings of the philosophers. But thenSaint-Gille, La Chapelle reports in all seriousness, lets the duped in on the trickery--telling them

that it had all been done by the art of ventriloquy, that he himself is the all-too-human source of

this oracle. In the consummate act of the enlightened magician, Saint-Gille takes the devout backto the church and turns it into the scene of their awakening from illusion, showing them his

techniques of mystification. La Chapelle, thus reaffirming the ease with which the senses are

deceived and the need for critical reason, drew out the doubled moral of the story, "The art of the

ventriloquists is then admirable for establishing and destroying superstition."17

That farcical story became La Chapelle's most renowned scene, reproduced from one

commentary to another, with its anti-Catholic dimensions taking on an added edge whenrepeated in Britain and North America. La Chapelle's formal experiments with Saint-Gille,

monitored by two other natural philosophers from the Academie Royale des Sciences, conjured

up similar conclusions. In one test, Saint-Gille's talents were employed to convince a credulouswoman that she heard the voice of a spirit, and then the researchers laboriously persuaded her of

the real source of her illusion (the gendered aspects of this exhibition-the men of reason, the

woman of superstitious faith-were all too transparent). The point to La Chapelle was that he hadfound one of the originating causes of religious phantasms and that now, so identified,

ventriloquism could be turned with delicious irony from being a buttress of superstition to a tool

of the Enlightenment. The study of nature had yielded up the secrets of the sorcerer's power as

well as the ancient springs of political and religious despotism, and now those demystifiedillusions could be turned into a Baconian exercise of enlightened entertainment, a didactic

amusement that would enact rationality's triumph over superstition and truth's routing of fraud.

Other writers on the subject would improve the details of La Chapelle's anatomy or augment his

acoustic precision, but most would repeat his basic conviction: ventriloquy was a primeval fontof religious illusion that was capable of being turned from the purposes of occult mystery to

modern eclaircissement.18


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With La Chapelle's expansive reformulation of ventriloquism, the art now illumined many of the

issues that were the lifeblood of eighteenth-century intellectual life. One was epistemology.

Predictably the Scottish Common-Sense thinkers, whose arguments for the reliability of humanperception were so prized for American Protestant didacticism, became especially concerned

about the art's apparent challenge to empiricism. Both Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart

addressed the issue in their massive philosophies of the mind, Reid briefly, Stewart at somelength, and both saw these vocal deceptions in the context of their larger efforts to discipline thesenses. The impressions that the mind received through the senses, Reid acknowledged, were

"limited and imperfect," but they were not inherently "fallacious," so empirical knowledge was

both widely reliable and also capable of ongoing refinement. Ever the enemy of skeptics, Reidaffirmed that the senses were not "given to us by some malignant demon on purpose to delude

us" but rather "by the wise and beneficent Author of nature, to give us true information of things

necessary to our preservation and happiness." Reid's confident pledge was that the drag of

credulity and the power of deception weakened as experience deepened and learning grew.Improving, training, and augmenting the senses were crucial parts of this Baconian enterprise.

19

The acoustic deceptions of ventriloquists (or gastriloquists, as Reid called them) were thought tobe containable within this framework. Writing in 1785, before ventriloquism had been

formalized as a stage performance or as "an engine for drawing money," Reid admitted that he(unlike La Chapelle) had not had "the fortune to be acquainted with any of these artists," buthazarded that the vocal illusions possible were "only such an imperfect imitation as may deceive

those who are inattentive, or under a panic." The powers of impersonation paled before the

minute discriminations of "an attentive ear," always "able to distinguish the copy from theoriginal"; human senses, if imperfect, emerged from these vocal tricks unscathed, perhaps even

sharpened in their discernment. As the editors of the 1797 edition of theEncyclopedia Britannica

assured, La Chapelle's study provided observers with a new "ground of suspicion." After habitual

study of Saint-Gille, La Chapelle gradually saw through his tricks, no longer hearing the voicesas if they came from rooftops or cellars; "our author, well acquainted with the powers of the

ventriloquist, and having acquired a new kind of experience, at once referred [the voice] directly

to the mouth of the speaker." Likewise, Dugald Stewart, who was able to frequent ventriloquists'

exhibitions and pined to see more (especially the celebrated Alexandre Vattemare), thoughtdeceptions of this variety finally had "but narrow limits," at least for the philosophically

disciplined viewer: "In the progress of entertainment, I have, in general, become distinctly

sensible of the imposition; and have sometimes wondered that it should have misled me for amoment." What Reid, Stewart, and their varied allies imagined was a fine-tuned discipline of

hearing, a carefully trained ear that would minimize the power of both "acoustic illusions" and

"wonderful relations," that would, in effect, keep people from hearing things in credulous ways.

The perceptual disciplines that the ventriloquists demanded would help further the aural cultureof a highly reasonable Christianity.

20

The immediate religious struggles on which such experiment observations fed were the battles

over what the enlightened like to cal popular enthusiasm and credulity. Dugald Stewart, for

example, placed his consideration of ventriloquism in hisElements of the Philosophy of the

Human Mind(3 vols., 1792-1827) at the end of a long section on "sympathetic imitation" inwhich he considered the human propensity for copying others and the weighty influence that the

imagination has on the the body. Here he took up "the contagious nature of convulsions, of


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hysteric disorders, of panics, and of all different kinds of enthusiasm" and the joined importance

of imitation and imagination in explaining "these various phenomena." Animal magnetism was

his leading example of the power of the imagination in rendering people susceptible to"theatrical representations," but that was part of a longer train of popular enthusiasms and

religious frenzies (such as the Quakers, the Camisards, and the Cambuslang revival) for which

sympathy, imitation, and imagination provided guiding categories of explanation. The ScottishEnlightenment was hardly any more moderate than the French when it came to retuning theresonances of popular Christian piety.

21

Ventriloquism was relevant to this discussion for Stewart because of the crucial role that "the

imagination of the spectator or of the hearer" played in the human susceptibility to both

deception and enthusiasm. Whereas some wanted to emphasize the formal acoustic dimensions

of vocal illusions, for Stewart the point was the way in which the ventriloquist "manages theimaginations of his audience" through misdirection, counterfeiting, and theater. Stewart accented

the complicity of the deceived, the ways in which their own imaginations were excited, making

up for any gaps in the artifice, finally yielding "without resistance, to the agreeable delusions

practised on [them] by the artist." The ventriloquist was thus like the mesmerist or the revivalistin bringing the imaginations of his spectators under his own skillful management. In hisLetters

on Natural Magic (1832), David Brewster, a tongue-tied Presbyterian minister turned fluentnatural philosopher, picked up on Stewart's point, attesting that the susceptibility of the humanimagination to fall for such vocal illusions was immense, the superstitious person being "the

willing dupe of his own judgment." "The influence over the human mind which the ventriloquist

derives from the skillful practice of his art," Brewster concluded, "is greater that which isexercised by any other species of conjuror." The ventriloquist had "the supernatural always at his

command," being able to "summon up innumerable spirits" and to make them "unequivocally

present to the imagination of his auditors." In between images of the ventriloquist's enormous

power to manipulate people's enthusiastic imaginations and the confident assertions thatventriloquism finally only advanced the rationalistic disciplines of modernity existed a core

Enlightenment concern: the triumphant progress of the new learning faced the obduracy of

popular religion.22

No one explored such tensile propositions about reason and religious voices with greater depth

than Charles Brockden Brown in Wieland; or, The Transformation and inMemoirs of Carwin,the Biloquist. Brown, like Tom Paine, had journeyed from a Quaker upbringing into deistic

skepticism, and Carwin's ventriloquist act is one emblem of Brown's religious disavowals. The

representation of Carwin partakes of La Chapelle's doubled perspective: this knowledge abettedthe Enlightenment's ambition for a new mode of hearing deaf to the sounds of supernatural

promptings and at the same time underscored the disheartening power of enthusiasm and the ease

of imposture. The Wieland family, steeped via their father in a long history of radical Protestant

sectarianism, proves an easy target for Carwin's deceptions after his arrival at their tranquilhome. Clara and her brother Theodore, for all their cultivation of republican virtue and

education, retain active religious imaginations and are all too ready to attribute supernatural

agency to Carwin's mysterious voices. The pious Theodore, after all, had long sought "the

blissful privilege of direct communication" with God, "of listening to the audible enunciation" ofthe divine will. Clara, somewhat more cautious, is torn by the appearance of the marvelous: "My

opinions were the sport of eternal change. Sometimes I conceived the apparition to be more than


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human. I had no grounds upon which to build a disbelief." Carwin, too late, will provide the

naturalistic grounds for presuming "auricular deception" through his learned exposition of

ventriloquy or, what Brown calls interchangeably, biloquism (aptly capturing the divided,"double-tongued" quality of this vocal trickery). Earlier Carwin, tipping his hand, had tried to

make the Wielands aware of "the power of mimicry," but they had remained impervious to his

"mode of explaining these appearances," incapable of absorbing such knowedge.

23

Similar credulity within Carwin's own family started him in the cultivation of this art. "A

thousand superstitious tales were current in the family," Carwin avers. "Apparitions had beenseen, and voices had been heard on a multitude of occasions. My father was a confident believer

in supernatural tokens. The voice of his wife, who had been many years dead, had been twice

heard at midnight whispering at his pillow." Seeing in such popular religious beliefs an opening

to manipulate his father, Carwin feels emboldened to move from simple mimicry and theventriloquizing of distant voices to feigning utterances of the dead and even God. Put to the test,

both his own family and the Wielands fail badly at suspicion; Carwin's studied art dupes them all

(with murderous consequences for the Wielands as Theodore is eventually thrown into such

madness by these "divine" voices that he murders his wife and children). The whole episode, theapparently repentant Carwin tells Clara as he reveals the technical knowledge of his enlightened

magic; provides a potent "lesson to mankind on the evils of credulity," on the fatality of religiousillusions.

24

Ventriloquism offered a playful way for rationalists and deists to scorn the continuing ferment of

enthusiasm and prophecy-all the innovative voices of evangelical awakening, all the personaldiscoveries of divine "calling" amid these outpourings of the Spirit. "No other instrument" but

deft ventriloquy was necessary to "institute a new sect," Carwin learns from a European mentor.

"Can you doubt these were illusions?" Clara's uncle asks her with appropriate skepticism afterhearing about the voices. "Neither angel nor devil had any part in affair." The philosophic

knowledge of ventriloquism provided an assumption of suspicion, a strategy of disenchantment,

a sardonic hedge against prophecy and demonism; it tendered a naturalistic vocabulary to sustain

such incredulity in the face of the clamoring voices of religious inspiration and the sweeping riseof revivalistic fervor. Yet, Brown always had it both ways: Enlightenment dreams that

philosophical experiments with ventriloquism would unmask popular "superstitions" blended

into the new masquerades made possible with such "rational" forms of recreation. Themesmerizing impostor Carwin was less interested finally in taming the enthusiastic imagination

than manipulating "the ignorant and credulous" for his own ends of wealth, power and pleasure.

In Carwin, Brown created the sort of charlatan who bared the "irrationality" hidden in LaChapelle's embrace of the illusionist Saint-Gille as a philosophical ally. In this juggling of the

Enlightenment and magic, reason easily slipped into humbug, and such subversions from within

made the natural philosopher's hope of containing the eruptive voices of democratized

Christianity all the more a pipe dream.25

The uses to which ventriloquial theory could be put ultimately extended far beyond such "local"

applications within European and North American Christianity. It provided a naturalistic lens onreligions across the board and came specifically to provide a way of making sense of indigenous

shamans encountered through colonial contact. La Chapelle and his varied heirs had all seen

ventriloquism as an ancient conspiracy of priests, as one of the chief means employed among


10/26

Egyptians, Greeks, and other pagans "to effect the apparition of their gods," but Dugald Stewart

made a significant extension of the construct by concluding his remarks on the subject in

Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mindwith an account of Captain George Lyon'stravels among the Eskimos. Lyon's story was then picked up by David Brewster in his Letters on

Natural Magic, quickly becoming part of the ventriloquist's echo chamber.26

Stewart and Brewster read Lyon's "curious" narrative of exploration with their new explanatory

tools, ready to incorporate these "savages" and their "male wizards" into their peculiar account of

superstition's natural history. Lyon himself had licensed this reading, finding "all the effect ofventriloquism" in the varied imitations that he saw enacted among the Eskimos by "an ugly and

stupid-looking young glutton." Speaking wryly of a diviner's possession by a spirit named

Tornga and the "hollow" voice that replaced the shaman's own, Lyon reported what he heard in

diction shaped by ventriloquial categories: "Suddenly the voice seemed smothered, and was somanaged as to sound as if retreating beneath the deck, each moment becoming more distant, and

ultimately giving the idea of being many feet below the cabin, when it ceased entirely."

Brewster, Stewart, and Lyon saw no mystery in this, no threat of difference, no hint of the

ecstatic or the demonic, only the natural curiosity of the ventriloquist's illusion, only what Euro-American stage magicians had by now rendered a harmless and humorous simulation. "The

Eskimaux of Igloolik," it turned out, were simply, as Brewster said, "ventriloquists of no meanskill." Philosopher and explorer thus joined together to make ventriloquism a vagrant hypothesisready to explain Eskimo "wizards" as readily as Delphic oracles or sectarian enthusiasts.

Decades later one of the major ethnographers among the Chukchees and Eskimos still included

in his massive field report a section on "ventriloquism and other tricks in his discussion ofreligious practices. "The Chukchee ventriloquists," he observed, "display great skill, and could

with credit to themselves carry on a contest with the best artists of the kind of civilized countries.

. . . [I]t is really wonderful how a shaman can keep up the illusion." Through the category of

ventriloquy, the learned were able to take "possession" of shamanism itself, to perform their owninterpretive sleight of hand of transforming the strange into the familiar, ritual into art(ifice).

27

Using ventriloquism as a way of interpreting religious wonders and advancing scientificrationality continued to expand after the excursions of Stewart and Brewster. In a lengthy tract

called Ventriloquism Explained(1834), with a laudatory preface by the Amherst chemist Edward

Hitchcock, the avowed hope was the further "diffusion of Scientific principles," the negation ofall the old marvels--ghosts, visions, voices, and prognostications--as well as the refinement of the

judgment of the young, so that they would avoid being deceived by the slippery talk of

mountebanks as well as the supernatural tales of "colored servants." Here, one more time, wereLa Chapelle's stories of Saint-Gille's duped monks and Dugald Stewart's appropriation of

Captain Lyon's travels. Some years later, in 1851, La Chapelle's accounts of abusive

ventriloquial pranks were given an even more explicitly racial spin in the anecdote of one

performer who supposedly disrupted a black revival meeting with a series of thrown voices,much to the consternation of the congregation. "Les Religieux dups" had become "Blitz and the

Darkies," though tellingly illumination is not offered to the "cullered bredderen." Instead, the

narrator invites his ostensibly white reader to share a good laugh at the irredeemably credulous;

the ventriloquist, having broken up the meeting, leaves them with "their eyes rolledheavenward." Though one of the earliest ventriloquists, Richard Potter, was possibly the son of a

slave mother and white master, stage ventriloquism remained a predominantly Euro-American


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technique, a theatric chiaroscuro in which the "white magic" of enlightened ingenuity was

regularly contrasted with "dark" superstition.28

The themes of priestly illusion and shamanistic deception were still sounded even in the bargain

how-to guides on ventriloquy that began to appear in greater numbers after midcentury, such as

Everybody a Ventriloquist(1856), Ventriloquism Made Easy (1860), The Practical Magician,and Ventriloquist's Guide (1876), orHow to Become a Ventriloquist(1891).29

Later still one

American writer, George Havelock Helm, offered in 1900 a translation of a French essay on

ventriloquism and prophecy by physiologist Paul Garnault that distilled in undiluted form thisEnlightenment theory of religion's illusionist origins: "In all ancient religions, in all primitive

religions that have survived unto this very day, ventriloquism has played and still plays a great

part." Roving from "primitives" in China and Africa back again to the Witch of Endor, the

American Helm echoed the French Garnault:

It is through the prodigy of the dead being able to speak, which could not have been rendered

patent and convincing except with the aid of ventriloquism, that people became imbued with a

belief in the conversations of the dead, in spirits, gods, in short, in everything pertaining toinspiration and revelation. . . Religious and artistic ventriloquism both represent a very ancient

illusion, and are the first source of the belief in prophecy and divination, and it is from this

source that all the superstitions and religions have grown out.30

La Chapelle's theorizing about religion and deception cast a long shadow among philosophersand popularizers alike ("many peoples are adepts in ventriloquism--e.g., Zulus, Maoris, and

Eskimo," the current on-line Britannica still reports). Such ideas were given materiality in the

actual performances of enlightened magicians; in these stage acts, such rationalistic views of

simulation were made democratic practices of suspicion.

"EVERY MAN . . . HIS OWN MAGICIAN": PERFORMANCES OF SUSPICION

In his vision of the model college for increasing "the knowledge of Causes, and secret meitions

of things" in the New Atlantis, Francis Bacon dreamed of magical performance becoming aninstrument of science. Not the gnostic occultist, but the common juggler would become part of

the advancement of empiricism:

We have also houses of deceits of the senses; where we represent all manner of feats of juggling,

false apparitions, impostures, and illusions; and their fallacies. And surely you will easily

believe that we have so many things truly natural which induce admiration, could in a world of

particulars deceive the senses, if we would disguise those things and labour to make them seemmore miraculous. But we do hate all impostures and lies.

In addition to these "houses of deceits," Bacon also pictured "perspective-houses" and "sound-houses," in which various visual and aural deceptions were demonstrated. "We represent small

sounds as great and deep; likewise great sounds extenuate and sharp;... We represent and imitate

all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices and notes of beasts and birds."31
http://www.materialreligion.org/journal/magic.html#28http://www.materialreligion.org/journal/magic.html#28http://www.materialreligion.org/journal/magic.html#28http://www.materialreligion.org/journal/magic.html#29http://www.materialreligion.org/journal/magic.html#29http://www.materialreligion.org/journal/magic.html#29http://www.materialreligion.org/journal/magic.html#30http://www.materialreligion.org/journal/magic.html#30http://www.materialreligion.org/journal/magic.html#30http://www.materialreligion.org/journal/magic.html#31http://www.materialreligion.org/journal/magic.html#31http://www.materialreligion.org/journal/magic.html#31http://www.materialreligion.org/journal/magic.html#30http://www.materialreligion.org/journal/magic.html#29http://www.materialreligion.org/journal/magic.html#28


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Bacon's utopian dreams found partial fulfillment in the new celebrity magicians of the late

eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Many of these illusionists expressly presented their

dexterous tricks as philosophical recreations and mechanical experiments, illustrative of naturalprinciples, not of occult powers or diabolic alliances. Their explanations of their own deceptions

were designed to destroy any lingering beliefs about magicians holding "intelligence with

supernatural beings"; as conjurers of the Enlightenment, they would help keep people from being"imposed on" by both charlatans and priests. The arts of the juggler were thus widely refashionedinto "a most agreeable antidote to superstition, and to that popular belief in miracles exorcism,

conjuration, sorcery, and witchcraft."32

Among the most renowned of these enlightened magicians were the operators of the

phantasmagoria or magic lantern ghost shows, such as the French magus Etienne Gaspard

Robertson who took a well-known technology and widely popularized it in the late 1790s. Madea spectacle across Europe, the phantasmagoria were quickly exported by various performers to

North America, flourishing in the United States in the first quarter of the nineteenth century (and

well beyond that through ongoing reinvention and improvement). Like Saint-Gille, Robertson

chose a cloistered chapel surrounded by the tombs of monks for one of his grandest displays ofsimulated apparitions, creating a sublime spectacle of both Gothic horror and demystifying

reason. As an 1802 playbill of one of Robertson's imitators proclaimed, "This SPECTROLOGY,which professes to expose the Practices of artful Impostors and pretended Exorcists, and to openthe Eyes of those who still foster an absurd Belief in GHOSTS or DISEMBODIED SPIRITS,

will, it is presumed, afford also to the Spectator an interesting and pleasing Entertainment." The

naturalistic implications of such displays were not lost on deistic debunkers of revealed religion.In The Age of Reason, Paine latched onto such shows to illustrate his larger attack on prophecy

and miracle: "There are performances by sleight-of-hand, and by persons acting in concert that

have a miraculous appearance, which when known are thought nothing of. And besides these,

there are mechanical and optical deceptions. There is now an exhibition in Paris of ghosts orspectres, which, though it is not imposed upon the spectators as a fact, has an astonishing

appearance." Deistic skepticism about the divine showmanship of miracles found performative

corroboration in the entrepreneurial showmanship of enlightened magicians like Robertson.33

Ventriloquism was the close ally of the phantasmagoria. Its rise as a stage art was coeval with the

ghost shows, coming into its own between 1795 and 1825. Before that, such vocal talents did notconstitute a distinct performative genre, but mingled with the assorted entertainments at fairs and

markets, the shows of acrobats, jugglers, mimics, freaks, musicians, mountebanks, and

puppeteers.34

The new performers of ventriloquism were adepts of mimicry, masteringimpressions of multiple voices, natural sounds, and animal cries (in effect, recreating the devil's

menagerie of familiars in secular form); they were also experts at "throwing" the voice, making it

seem to come from various distances and places (under the floor, from the ceiling, up a chimney,

out of a pocket or hat); they achieved such illusions through clever misdirection, precisemodulation, and well-nigh motionless lips or "speaking without appearing to speak"; they

cleverly played off these other voices and invisible beings, badgering, flirting, capering; and they

were also puppeteers, sometimes using wooden dolls and automata to create stage doubles (such

magical figures echoed the "puppets" used in witchcraft and foreshadowed the "dummies" thateventually became the sine qua non of vaudeville acts of the late nineteenth century). In all,

ventriloquists were masters at animating the inanimate; they were bearers of aural astonishment--


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of sounds uncertain, confounding, low, tremulous, intermittent, and bestial. "The modifications

of sound, which may be productive of the sublime," Edmund Burke concluded in his influential

aesthetics, "are almost infinite." Some of the early ventriloquists such as John Rannie, RichardPotter, George Sutton, Jonathan Harrington, and John Wyman achieved considerable reputations

in the United States, and a few adepts such as Alexandre Vattemare, William Love, and Antonio

Blitz were internationally celebrated, touring in Britain, Europe, and North America.

35

In the United States, ventriloquism became an established stage art m the first decade of the

nineteenth century and remained a popular staple of antebellum theater and entertainmentthereafter. One Boston physician, in bragging of his assiduous dedication to science in 1823,

suggested the scope of this rational amusement in the early republic: "Our constant devotion to

anatomical pursuits has prompted us to improve every opportunity of witnessing these

exhibitions, with the sole object of understanding the rationale." In his rounds he estimated thathe had gone to observe close to thirty different ventriloquists! Leading the way in this new host

of performers was John Rannie, a Scottish actor and magician, who, as the first ventriloquist to

tour the United States, put on innumerable American shows between 1801 and 1811. Like the

many ventriloquists after him, he crisscrossed the republic, making appearances from New Yorkto New Orleans, from Newburyport, Massachusetts, to Natchez, Mississippi.36

Much of Rannie's variegated act was the usual juggler's show of card tricks, knife swallowing,

and slack-wire walking, but he also stood out as an exemplar of stage magic's entanglement with

rational religion. He commonly presented himself as a magician of the Enlightenment cultivating

philosophical experiments, with ventriloquism as his most prodigious talent in that line.Ventriloquism, Rannie explained in a Boston advertisement in 1804, "is one of the most singular

phenomena that has been contemplated by the most enlightened sages." He described the

scriptural notion of familiar spirits and then informed his potential viewers that "when the witchat Endor raised the apparition of Samuel," it was "by the power of Ventriloquism" that the "artful

woman" occasioned "a voice to come from the Ghost, which Saul took to be the voice of the

prophet himself." How the woman "managed" this voice "as she pleased," Rannie promised,

would be "clearly demonstrated in the course of this evening's exhibition."37

Such propositions evidently did not sit well with some of Boston's Protestant faithful, longaccustomed as they were to opposing both players and jugglers as dissolute influences. By early

August, Rannie was lamenting in his advertising how hard it was "to remove the cobwebs of

imposition from the eyes of ALL mankind" and how his shows were being scorned by certain

"disciples of illiberality." Comparing himself melodramatically to Copernicus in hisconfrontation with reigning orthodoxies, Rannie insisted that he had come "before the public,

with both the ability and intention of exposing, and, if possible, exterminating the very dregs of

fanaticism," only to find that many in Boston had "the self-sufficience of an Ostrich" with their

unseeing heads stuck in a bush. Like any showman worth his salt, Rannie bravely played up thecontroversy; he offered these poor "contracted spirits" a few more opportunities "to clear away

the mists that have been cast over their understandings by the artful deceivers of antiquity," to

dispel for good "the clouds of superstition." Touring the eastern seaboard in 1810, Rannie wasstill playing the part of the enlightened magician, even boasting at one point of creating through

his vocal artistry the impression of a prophecy in Portland, Maine, in which the town would be

"swallowed up by an earthquake, in the course of 3 days." The credulous, Rannie rejoiced,


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supposedly left town in "great numbers." (Rannie shared this delight in religious roguery with

Europe's most sensational ventriloquist Alexandre Vattemare, a distinctly picaresque "voice of

reason," whose promotional biography presented him as famed for his offstage tricks, especiallyfor terrifying "superstitious rustics" with divine voices.) Rannie soon added optical phantasms to

his ventriloquial illusions, promising "to expose the practices of artful IMPOSTORS, pretended

MAGICIANS, and EXORCISTS, and to open the eyes of those who still foster an absurd beliefin GHOSTS, WITCHES, CONJURATIONS, DEMONIACS, &c." Rannie's concert-hallexhibitions gave performative expression to the biblical hermeneutics of Scot and the natural

philosophy of La Chapelle.38

One of the first American expositors of ventriloquism, having heard of Rannie's feats in and

around Boston, wanted to make sure that the right point was sinking in with the credulous: "The

intention of this work was not only to amuse and instruct," William Pinchbeck explained in oneof his two manuals on enlightened magic in 1805, "but so to convince superstition of her many

ridiculous errors,--to shew the disadvantages arising to society from a vague as well as irrational

belief of man's intimacy with familiar spirits,--to oppose the idea of supernatural agency in any

production of man." For Pinchbeck, who was a magical showman himself, there was clearly no"diabolical agency" in Rannie's voices (even if some of the benighted still wanted to hear them

this way), only well-learned technique and daring enterprise. "What is there a man cannotacquire by observation, assisted by good rules and proper application?" Pinchbeck asked ofRannie's effective voices. Surveying the widening array of enlightened magic on display in the

early republic--phantasmagoria, ventriloquism, automata, and even an "Acoustic Temple" that

revealed "how the Pagan priests by making use of tubes deceived the people" with oracles--Pinchbeck rejoiced in the progress of scientific ingenuity, "the parent of manufactories." His own

mission, he related after debunking the story of a churchyard apparition as just one more

chimera, was to "convince the world that in order to support wisdom, and banish folly, whenever

any uncommon sounds are heard, or any unnatural visions seen, it is indispensably necessary tosearch into the secret causes of such sounds and visions." Along with book peddlers and

publishers, such entrepreneurial magicians and their expositors became agents of the "Village

Enlightenment," blending illusionist performance with the business of print in the wider

democratization of experimental knowledge and critical reason.39

The lingering influence of enlightened magicians like Rannie and Pinchbeck was significant.That Yankee trickster and anti-Calvinist Universalist P. T. Barnum was only the most visible heir

in an extensive company. Barnum built his empire around one of the grand institutions of

democratized Enlightenment and entertainment, the American Museum, in which a major part ofthe spectacle was--as Neil Harris has shown--the question of how things worked, the hidden

operations of his attractions. (At one point, for example, Barnum made a sensation by claiming

Joice Heth, the supposedly 161-year-old nurse of baby George Washington, was actually an

automaton made to speak by a concealed ventriloquist.) Barnum's selling of hoax and illusion,including ventriloquism, was intimately connected to his inculcation of a healthy skepticism, his

desire to goad inquiry and expose credulity through respectable entertainment. Indeed, Barnum

opened his monumental chronicle ofThe Humbugs of the World(1866) with praise for an

illusionist who first "astonished his auditors with his deceptions" and then later showed "howeach trick was performed, and how every man might thus become his own magician." For

Barnum, as with Rannie before him, the performative exposure of "supernatural humbugs"-


15/26

whether mediums, ghosts, prophets, or oracles-helped put people on their guard, made them ever

ready to detect imposture, religious and otherwise. From Robertson and Philipstal, to Rannie and

Pinchbeck, to Barnum and Houdini, to Mulholland and Randi, magic was not a form of hermeticknowledge, not a spiritual quest for harmonial powers, but a playground of skeptical rationality

and bold enterprise.40

As with Captain Lyon's encounters with the Eskimos, such enlightened forms of magic often

ended up having a shaping influence on popular Christian exchanges. The new ventriloquy and

its allied knowledges supported habits of Suspicion and provided performative techniques for"exposing" the religious claims of others. The example of a preacher for the Disciples of Christ,

Jesse Jasper Moss, in his confrontation with Mormons in Ohio in the 1830s, is especially

revealing. Mormon claims of prophecy and miracle left Moss in spasms of incredulity, and he

sought through Enlightenment forms of natural magic to unmask Mormon supernaturalism as apious fraud. "About this time a new supply of preachers came on from New York," Moss related,

"with some of the witnesses to the Book of Mormon, among them Parley Pratt and Martin

Harris. Soon afterwards they began to have visitations of angels among them. I was suspicious of

these angels from the first." In stating "publicly my suspicions," Moss made a telling move--thatis, he performed them. "I said I had studied the black arts, or necromancy, and knew just how

their angels were made, and showed how it could be done." In another crowning moment ofencounter, one of Moss's colleagues, "who was something of a ventriloquist," disrupted anoutdoor Mormon meeting by imitating "the screams of a panther," scattering the group in terror,

some of whom then interpreted the strange sounds (with traditional piety) as an encounter with

the devil. "No wonder the Mormons hated us," was Moss's laconic conclusion after all theseharassments. As knowledge of "enlightened" magic became more widespread, it proved usable

by skeptics and evangelicals alike.41

Mormons were not the only ones vexed by didactic magicians. Catholics in their embrace of the

miraculous and the sacramental were always seen by a broad spectrum of Protestants and deists

as the perpetrators and dupes of various forms of magic. The anticlerical, antipapist polemic was

secured on the ingrained Reformation assumption that Catholic priests were essentially corruptmagicians, who were always performing some sleight of hand or false prodigy (the hocus-pocus

of transubstantiation for starters). With the twin lights of modern science and scriptural purity as

guides, a little Methodist Sunday school tract of 1848 typically recounted the fraudulentexorcisms, pretended miracles, and chemical illusions of Catholics. Specifically drawing on the

knowledge of natural magic offered up by writers such as David Brewster, the tract also dished

up a Protestant tale of Catholic ventriloquy--of Dominicans who threw their voices into imagesof Jesus and Mary to create religious impressions and gain earthly power. The unmasking of

Catholic priestcraft invariably entailed the exposure of magical trickery.42

The favorite target of illusionists, however, were Spiritualists, and various stage magicians madea popular show out of their exposure of mediums. In these contests, ventriloquism intruded as a

rationalistic explanation of spirit voices. By the 1850s mediums had far expanded their

communicative powers beyond telegraphic rapping; spirits played musical instruments,materialized in spectral form, and spoke (either through the trance of mediums or simply on their

own). The Davenport brothers, two of the most renowned and controversial mediums, were

regularly charged with being impostors. Ira Davenport, thrown into "a magnetic trance," would


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speak "not as from himself, or in his usual tone of voice or manner, but apparently as the forced

proxy of someone else." Of the "deep, sepulchral, unnatural" voices heard at the Davenport

seances, a defender admitted that "some will ask, Was not this ventriloquism? We answeremphatically, No." Such protestations aside, suspicions lingered. As one sympathetic biographer

admitted of the brothers' vocal gift, "The first thing that occurs to every one is that it was the

result of so common an art as ventriloquism." Even the father of the Davenports was reported tobe skeptical of "the spectral tongues" given vent through his sons' meetings: "He knew better. Noone could convince him that a disembodied man could talk like other folks.... Had he not heard

ventriloquists? Ay, that he had!" This sort of critique--that spiritualist raps and voices were

accomplished "by the ordinary acoustic method of the ventriloquists"--was prevalent enough thateven Madame Blavatsky dignified it with a biting response in Isis Unveiled.

43

When the charge of ventriloquism greeted female mediums, the battle became sharply gendered.As with other forms of stage magic, ventriloquism through the mid-nineteenth century was an

almost exclusively male profession; such wizardry, like Masonic ritual, was a distinctly

masculine preserve. "There have been few female ventriloquists," one guidebook (misnamed

Everybody a Ventriloquist) noted in 1856. "Effects produced by the female organs of speechhave always manifested a deficiency of power." When Harvard-educated Charles Page, who

fronted his name with "Professor" and followed it by "M.D., Etc.," set out to expose the Foxsisters, he called upon his joined understanding of acoustics and enlightened magic. As hewatched one of the girls, he was sure that she was cleverly misdirecting people's attention to get

them to think sounds were coming from where they were not: "Our knowledge of

ventriloquism," he said, "fortified us against this trick," and then he provided (via Brewster) anexcursus on the mechanics of such deceptions. Despite the fact that every leading illusionist of

the period was male and that the manuals insisted on the "lack of power in the female voice" for

gaining proficiency in the art, Page the acoustician nonetheless asserted that women were

especially capable of spiritualist "witchery." A woman, Page concluded, "is the first to beimposed upon and most apt to impose upon herself." In Page's scripting of these encounters, men

like himself had the authoritative knowledge of enlightened magic (and implicitly the option to

perform it for decent money); women had fraudulent gimmicks and sympathetic imaginations.

Within these apparent contradictions, a deeper cultural logic of gender was at work: whenventriloquism was seen as a biblical and spiritual form of deception, it was female; when it had

market value and philosophical interest, it was male. In the former physiology, it was associated

especially with women's bellies; in the latter, with the throat and the deep, potent voices ofmen.

44

Exposing the "imposture" and "priestcraft" of other faiths became something of a sport in

antebellum America, and the natural magic of the Enlightenment provided a common script for

these encounters, whether with Mormons, Catholics, or Spiritualists. In his travels in the 1830s,

Tocqueville was intrigued not only by the strength of Christianity in the United States, itscapacity to sustain the associational bonds that made democracy work, but also by the frailties of

that faith. Antebellum Americans were prone, Tocqueville noted, to an "almost wild

spiritualism," but they were also ever eager to "laugh at modern prophets," to arraign

supernatural claims at the bar of their own critical reason and individual judgment. The extensionof rationalistic suspicion threatened to taint the country with "an almost insurmountable distaste

for whatever is supernatural." Tocqueville feared, as Melville did later, that Americans were


17/26

given to "a sort of instinctive incredulity." Though these reservations in Tocqueville's account

would be easy to discount, it is important to recognize how widely Enlightenment forms of

knowledge and suspicion were diffused, how popular they could be. As the sphere of Christianitywidened, so too did the magic circle of the Enlightenment. In a Barnumesque culture in which

every man might . . . become his own magician," in which the widening knowledge of illusion

often fueled a harsh game of disenchantment, any new faith was hard won, built on a series ofincredulous disavowals, sustained amid a welter of exposures and counterexposures--a small raftin a sea of suspicion.

45

Ventriloquism's modern transformation points us to some other ways of thinking about theAmerican Enlightenment and its fate. The Enlightenment was an encyclopedia, a web, the reach

of which is hardly measured by the failure of organized deism, the success of evangelicalism, or

the Protestant absorption of Scottish moral philosophy. The lingering force of that vast network

of learning can be gauged in any number of cultural realms in the nineteenth-century United

States. Two quick sketches-one of medical psychology, the other of commercial entertainment-will have to suffice here to illustrate the rippling effects of the enlightened way of reimagining

the voices of popular Christian piety.

The fate of these altered voices echoed the larger process by which the travails of the soul

became matters of the self-one in which the divine struggle of demonic possession passed into ableak diagnosis of the divisibility of personal identity. As much as epistemological uncertainty,

this had been Thomas Reid's underlying dread, that the unity of the self was being fractured by

Humean skepticism. What Reid saw as the potentially "dangerous" abilities of the ventriloquist--

the powers of impersonation and doubling--were a cultural emblem of those splittings, thatsomeone might be "two or twenty different persons," that personal identity could be "shivered

into pieces" and hence the integrity of individual moral responsibility lost. The newventriloquism of the late eighteenth century imagined the final erasure of demons and spirits andtheir replacement by a profusion of naturalized voices, stark images of divided, multiple, or

counterfeited selves. The Enlightenment construction of ventriloquism helped broker the much

larger transition to hearing the voices of religious experience as psychological illusions 6rsymptoms of inner fragmentation. This interpretive construct was one small token of the growing

power of naturalism to translate the Christian drama of possession and vocal presences into the

delusions of double consciousness and the proliferating diagnoses of dementia-monomania,

hallucination, erotomania, and dissociation. As much as their British and French counterparts,antebellum American theorists like Amariah Brigham contributed to the pathologizing of

religious excitements and various forms of devotional intensity.46

Brierre de Boismont'sHallucinations, published in 1853 and offering what he called a "rational

history" or "medical history" of apparitions and religious ecstasy, serves as a good example of

these trends. "Hallucinations of hearing," he found, were the "most common," and he had

multiple cases and statistics to show this. "The voices emanate from the head, the breast, theepigastrium, the abdomen," Boismont noted, "and some patients have imagined themselves to

become ventriloquists." At other points "horrible phantasmagoria" were said to assault his

patients who saw demons and other fiends approaching them. The language of enlightened


18/26

magic--Boismont made considerable use of Brewster's Letters on Natural Magic--slid into the

medical case studies of the devoutly insane; the term illusion itself was moved from the domain

of the magical into the psychological. Writing of case XXX, Boismont sounded less like he wasobserving a patient than watching a ventriloquist's show: "Invisible voices may be external or

internal; they come from heaven, from neighboring houses, from the chimney, from wardrobes,

from mattresses." A starker example came from another early-nineteenth-century treatise on the"illusions" of the insane. A devout Catholic woman, called by her wardens "the 'Mother of thechurch,' because she spoke incessantly on religious subjects," found herself confined to an

asylum. "She fancied she had in her belly all the personages of the new testament," and out of

her belly even came voices dramatizing the crucifixion. "Nothing could dissipate these ludicrousillusions," her physician reported, and after she died he dissected her stomach and intestines,

searching for the anatomy of ventriloquism gone mad. The belly-speaking demons had been

renamed, the heavenly voices completely repositioned, and what was left was an uncontainable

welter of aural illusions and terribly divided selves.47

The second trajectory is that the new ventriloquism managed to submerge its oracular, demonic,

and Christian precursor within the expanding culture of commodified leisure. The illusionisttechnologies of the Enlightenment, like the phantasmagoria, helped lay the groundwork for a

whole complex of modern entertainments. Ventriloquism shared in this luxuriant growth; as acommercial amusement, it passed into vaudeville, cinema, radio (incongruously enough), andtelevision; it even became a pop culture icon with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. Within

this vast culture of showmanship, it takes something of an excavation even to discern the old

meanings of ventriloquism. As E. B. Tylor remarked of the naturalistic abandonment of ananimistic universe in his monumental study ofPrimitive Culture (1871), in "old times" the

ventriloquist "was really held to have a spirit rumbling or talking from inside his body"; now he

was a stage entertainer; no longer a shaman, he was a showman. "How changed a philosophy it

marks," concluded Tylor, "that among ourselves the word 'ventriloquist' should have sunk to itspresent meaning."

48The enlightened magician and his philosophical expositors made

ventriloquism an easy and entertaining trick, a show of mastered simulation, available for the

price of admission. In that, ventriloquism was indicative of the larger absorption of the sacred

into the mediated, spectacular, and domesticated forms of modern consumption.

The demonic voices and the divine locutions of the old ventriloquism looked incredibly tameonce turned into an amusement. Just how safe that medium had become is indicated by the

evangelical embrace of the art as an acceptable form of evangelistic entertainment over the last

several decades. Now "gospel vents" have crowded onto the stage with their older vaudevillecounterparts-stalwarts in a thriving evangelical subculture of entertainers, puppeteers, and

magicians. This convergence, stretching back at least to the 1950s with the formation of the

Fellowship of Christian Magicians, has even resulted in dozens of little tracts such as 111 Ways

to Use Ventriloquism in Church Work, The Gospel Ventriloquist, and Using Ventriloquism in

Christian Education. In the last-named pamphlet from 1976, pastor Robert Blazek tells the story

of how he "decided to pursue the knowledge and ability to use ventriloquism for Christ," how he

turned himself and his dummy "Little Joe" into a winning tandem of evangelists. Perhaps, as is

common in American religious history, the evangelicals are having the last laugh with the rise of"gospel ventriloquism," with the re-Christiainization of this Enlightenment amusement, but the

philosophes might well be laughing too at their success in turning a demonic struggle into a


19/26

didactic illusion.49

Like La Chapelle going to watch a magician instead of to pray over the

possessed, the spirits most familiar to modern culture prowl the cinema and Disney's Magic

Kingdom as much as the souls of saints and sinners.

1. Joseph Glanvill, Saducisorus Triumphatus: Or, Full and Plain Evidence Concerning Witches

and Apparitions (London: J. Collins, 1681), 2: 64. Ventriloquism's history has been told

primarily by practitioners. By far the best example of that genre is Valentine Vox,I Can SeeYour Lips Moving: The History and Art of Ventriloquism (North Hollywood: Plato Publishing,

1993). Ventriloquists also receive some notice in Hillel Schwartz's encyclopedic pastiche of

twins and simulations. See Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses,Unreasonable Facsimiles (New York: Zone Books, 1996), 132-37. Otherwise the scholarship is

dominated by critical theorists, who, interested in the polyphony of discrepant "voices" within

texts and in the problem of authorial voice, have taken up ventriloquism as a trope. See, for

example, Annabel Patterson, "'They Say' or We Say: Protest and Ventriloquism in Early Modern

England," inHistorical Criticism and the Challenge of Theory, ed. Janet Levarie Smarr (Urbana:University of Illinois Press, 1993), 145-66; David Goldblatt, "Ventriloquism: Ecstatic Exchange

and the History of Artwork,"Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51(1993): 389-98; andChristopher Looby, Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the UnitedStates (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 16-74.

2. For an especially evocative treatment of rational recreations and illusionist demonstrations in

early modem Europe, see Barbara Maria Stafford,Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment

and the Eclipse of Visual Education (Cambridge Mass.. MIT Press, 1994) For other important

treatments of the magical exhibitionism of the Enlightenment see Robert Darnton, Mesmerismand the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1968),

esp. 27-33; Grete de Francesco, The Power of the Charlatan, trans. Miriam Beard (New HavenYale University Press 1939) 229-49; Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge,Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 344, 64-76, 81; James W Cook, Jr.,

"From the Age of Reason to the Age of Barnum: The Great Automaton Chess Player and the

Emergence of Victorian Cultural Illusionism," Winterthur Portfolio 30 (Winter 1995) 231-57.

3. P. T. Barnum, The Humbugs of The World(New York: Carleton, 1866), 294. For

representative works in the rich tradition of skeptical magic see Harry Houdini,A Magicianamong the Spirits (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1924); John Muiholland,Beware Familar

Spirits (New York: Scribner's, 1938); James Randi, Conjuring(New York. St. Martin 5, 1992).

The Enlightenment side of the magical tradition, along with that of the stage, has generally been

bracketed out by American historians of religion and magic. For an overview of occu

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VENTRILOQUISM - From Demon Possession to Magic Show

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