Original Magic: The Rituals and Initiations of the Persian Magi - Michael M. Hughes 2018

Mrs. Satan: The Revolutionary Feminist, Who Spoke to the Dead
Witches and Occultists versus Kings and Nazis

The explosion of Spiritualism and mediumship in the mid-nineteenth century coincided with the rise of the movement for women’s rights. In that era women were discouraged from speaking publicly, as it was considered impolite and dishonorable to their husbands. The majority of Spiritualist mediums were women, however, which gave many women a voice in society for the first time. Spirits of great historical figures were being channeled through otherwise silent Victorian women, so men listened.

One of the more compelling figures in Spiritualism was Victoria Woodhull, an exemplar of early feminism and resistance to patriarchy. As a child, she believed she could communicate with her two dead siblings and her former caretaker as well as heal people magnetically (Mesmerism was all the rage in those days). Her spiritual guide was the ancient Greek orator Demosthenes, who advised her throughout her life and told her at an early age that she would be a powerful leader of her people (and the old Greek turned out to be right on the money).

Her séances and mediumistic skills were so renowned she became president of the American Association of Spiritualists in 1871.

Woodhull so impressed the millionaire Cornelius Vanderbilt with her stock tips from the other world that he made her head of a Wall Street brokerage (the first run by women). They were also rumored to be lovers—he called her “Sparrow” and she called him “Old Goat.” When asked about how he became fantastically rich, he is reported to have said, “Do as I do. Consult the spirits.” ¹¹

Vanderbilt helped Woodhull publish a weekly newspaper—one of the first run by women—in which she advocated for women’s suffrage, socialism, free love, vegetarianism, abolition of the death penalty, free education for every child, welfare for the poor, an eight-hour workday, labor unions, legalized prostitution, and birth control, among other radical ideas. “Free love” included the then-unheard-of notion that a woman should choose whom to marry and get divorced if she desired (and this in an era when women were supposed to be pure and sexless, and male doctors were performing clitoridectomies to rid women of the “dangers” of sexual arousal). The paper also did investigative journalism into corporate crime and published the first English translation of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto.

Woodhull ran for president in 1870 as a candidate for the politically progressive (and radical even for our era) Equal Rights party, which she helped organize, with the party nominating abolitionist Frederick Douglass as her vice-presidential candidate (Douglass, alas, was wary of Spiritualism and not on board with the idea). One only has to look at the blatant racism in response to Barack Obama’s election and the misogynistic attacks on Hillary Clinton to understand how mind-bogglingly radical the idea of a female president and a black, freed-slave vice-presidential candidate was in the late nineteenth century.

Woodhull was the second woman to address Congress, where she spoke for the suffragist cause to a nearly empty House Judiciary Committee (many of the committee members showed up late or not at all). One particularly appalled representative spoke up to say, “Madam, you are not a citizen.” Nonetheless, many newspaper reports noted the historical importance of her appearance and covered her arguments respectfully. ¹²

Her advocacy of free love put her at odds with other suffragette leaders, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. The press ripped her apart, with cartoonists depicting her as a literal devil and earning her the nickname “Mrs. Satan.” She was referred to—not surprisingly—as a witch. Woodhull insisted on wearing pants and was told if she appeared in public wearing them, she would be summarily arrested. The ensuing notoriety threw her life into turmoil to the point where she had difficulty finding a place to rent in New York City.

Her exposé of the adulterous affairs of the respected preacher Henry Ward Beecher (shades of recent televangelist and GOP sex scandals) generated an intense backlash that got her arrested on trumped-up obscenity charges, bankrupted her, and ruined her reputation. The patriarchy had won.

She moved to England, where she spent the rest of her life as an expat, returning to the United States to again run for president in 1892. She died in 1927, but her powerful advocacy of liberalism, freedom, and social welfare was far ahead of her time—and still rings true for spiritual resisters today. She said in her speech “The Naked Truth”:

Free love means nothing more and nothing less, in kind, than free worship, freedom of the press, freedom of conscience, free trade, free thought, freedom of locomotion (without a passport system), free schools, free government, and the hundred other precious, special systems of social freedom, which the great heroes of thought have fought for, and partially secured for the world, during this last period of the world’s growth and expansion. It is all one and the same thing, it is just freedom and nothing else. ¹³