{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.019574175824175824, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0027472527472527475, 'mean_word_length': 5.696551724137931, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy by Roger Luckhurst (review)

autumn 2014 examines the early development of the theosophical Society, an organization formally established in 1875 by american journalist Henry Steel Olcott, Irish occultist William Quan Judge, and the Russian mystic Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, who served as the Society’s secretary. Lavoie pays close attention to Blavatsky’s controversial role as the spiritual head of the theosophical Society and presents the organization’s early years, as well as Blavatsky’s brief career as a spiritualist medium, in painstaking detail. discussing formative connections and alliances among members of the theosophical Society and various spiritualist organizations in operation during the late nineteenth century, Lavoie calls attention to important and frequently neglected figures in the early Society, such as the British-born spiritualist Emma Hardinge Britten. more problematic, however, are Lavoie’s claims concerning theosophy as it was envisioned by Blavatsky. His primary contention is that the theosophy envisioned by Blavatsky and the Society’s cofounders was merely a reformed version of spiritualism. In making this claim, Lavoie draws on evidence from contemporaneous journalistic accounts that confuse the two movements. He also details allegiances between prominent spiritualists and theosophists, describes Blavatsky’s early dalliance with spiritualism and later repudiation of spiritualist phenomena, and cites moments of ideological inconsistency in the development of Blavatsky’s ever-evolving doctrine. the strength of the book — its attention to historical alliances and schisms between the two groups as well as to the formation of heterodox spiritual belief at the end of the nineteenth century — is the very thing that compromises its principal argument. Late nineteenth-century spiritual culture was rich and complex. In many ways, Lavoie’s insistence that theosophy was merely a reformed branch of spiritualism fails to account for this complexity. modern spiritualism was a movement defined by practice. Blavatsky and the theosophical Society did more than simply enlarge upon this practice. While there were similarities between the two movements, such an observation seems unremarkable, particularly for such a spiritually diverse period. to cast the theosophical Society as little more than a sect of the spiritualist movement, one must disregard the Society’s complex and at times chaotic philosophy, one that was as thoroughly saturated with orientalist and occult sympathies as it was influenced by the heady potential of life beyond the grave. despite the limitations of Lavoie’s argument, his research nonetheless makes a valuable contribution to scholarship about this particular historical moment and the arguments that shaped spiritual self-definition. L. anne delgado Indiana University, Bloomington