In When Old Technologies Were New (1988) Carolyn Marvin wrote that nineteenth century electrical communications offer a 'keenly focused view of the process of social adjustment around new technology'. This process included fantasies, hopes and anxieties about the body and the community: the electric telegraph, telephone and wireless changed ideas about what individuals and societies might be able to achieve. Scholarly engagement with this issue has tended to focus on the imagined and actual consequences of electrical communication on physical health, social mobility, urban transformation, global trade, diplomacy and international politics. However, comparatively little systematic attention has been paid to the ways in which debates about electrical communication proved so fertile for fantasies about, and attempts to produce scientific evidence for, obscure powers of the mind and body such as telepathy. For some, these cultivation of these powers foreshadowed a 'brotherhood of man' even more sublime than those in utopian fantasies of electrical communication.

This paper looks at the ways in which electrical communication can help develop current understanding of the cultural places of nineteenth and early twentieth century beliefs and practices commonly grouped under the terms 'occult' and 'esoteric'. It traces the complex uses to which mesmerists, spiritualists, psychical researchers and proponents of Modern Theosophy appropriated the new languages, concepts and practices of electrical communication. Analogies between the electric and the 'celestial' or 'spiritual' telegraph, and between psychic and wireless telegraphy, were just some of the ways in which scientific credibility was sought for occult forms of communication. But electrical communication was also important to critics of these ideas: for example, some British and American physicists and electrical engineers saw electrical theories or 'brain wave' theories of telepathy as a way of rendering this alleged mental faculty less 'spiritual' and 'occult', and more an exciting direction in which to extend physical theories. All too often studies of these occult borrowings (such as Jeffrey Sconce's otherwise excellent Haunted Media (2000)) see the traffic between electrical and occult communication as uni-directional. This paper concludes by suggesting that occult communication may have provided fertile material for exploring the possibilities of its better-known electrical counterpart.