Thomas Carlyle in the Spirit-World

In 1869, the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle horrified legions of spiritualists with a letter, printed in the American Scotsman, that described the new religious movement as a “Liturgy of Dead Sea Apes”. Carlyle enlisted a favorite insult: a fable held that when a wayward tribe, who lived by the Dead Sea, refused to listen to the wisdom of Moses, they were transformed into apes, “gibbering and chattering very genuine nonsense”, as Carlyle narrated in Past and Present (1843).