Automatic drawing was adopted by early surrealists who essentially stole the idea from crazy mediums

HERE’S THE INTERESTING PART

Art snobs love praising the surrealists for unlocking the raw subconscious, but they just ripped off Victorian housewives. Spiritualists had already been furiously scribbling chaotic, trance-state doodles for decades, claiming dead people were forcefully moving their hands.

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Automatic drawing was adopted by early surrealists who essentially stole the idea from crazy mediums — STACKY / Myths & mysteries

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Myths & mysteries

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Automatic drawing was adopted by early surrealists who essentially stole the idea from crazy mediums

A bigger world.One discoveryat a time.

Keep exploring

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes, the ultimate fictional champion of logic and deductive reasoning, but in real life he was a massive gullible mark for spiritualist mediums and mystical hoaxes.

Free love was championed by 19th-century mediums

Spiritualist mediums routinely employed literal magicians to design their fake ghost cabinets

John Murray Spear was a nineteenth-century spiritualist who claimed that the ghosts of famous inventors like Benjamin Franklin were telepathically instructing him to build a mechanical messiah.

Spiritualism gained massive popularity largely because the Civil War created a high death toll

Margaretta and Kate Fox inadvertently launched the massive Modern Spiritualism movement in 1848 by claiming they were communicating with a murdered peddler's ghost through mysterious knocking sounds in their farmhouse.

A bigger world.
One discovery
at a time.