Searching for Summerland: Spiritualist Women, Edenic Nostalgia, and Eco-Utopian Communalism in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This article concentrates on the work of women connected to the Occult revival, examining narratives of interspecies harmony so as to suggest an interpretation of spiritualist communes as possibly proto-ecofeminist spaces. In order to do so, focus is first placed on how the notion of Summerland, or the spiritualist afterlife, inspired the development of anti-hierarchical cosmologies that would sustain reformist activism in spiritualist discourse. The utopian overtones of Spiritualism are traced back to the syncretic roots of the movement, which drew strongly on the desire to recover a lost Edenic bond between humans and nature. In these ways, by means of female leadership, vegetarianism, and agrarian self-sufficiency, occultist communal life developed a unique form of Utopianism, one which combined esoteric beliefs with a desire to reach the anti-industrialist Paradise announced by the spirits.