In the 1920s, Gilbert Seldes wrote The Stammering Century as a rationalist’s good-riddance epitaph for the last vestiges of America’s ridiculous magical-thinking 1800s. Psychics and séances had a revival—the young wife of a Boston socialite physician became an illustrious medium, in part because she often disrobed during séances—but spiritualism was definitively debunked during the 1920s by Houdini and other skeptics. Nearly all of the big spiritualist communities that had sprung up during the late 1800s disappeared. Theosophy, a hot turn-of-the-century American mishmash of occultism,
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