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Darrell, John. A True Narration of the Strange and Grievous Vexation by the Devil of Seven Persons in Lancashire. London: n.p., 1600.
Dee, John. A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years between Dr John Dee and Some Spirits. Edited by Meric Casaubon. London: n.p., 1659.
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THE NAUGHTY LITTLE CHILDREN: THE PARANORMAL AND TEENAGERS
Renaud Evrard
1. Introduction
In his novel Théorie de la Vilaine Petite Fille (Theory of the naughty little girl), the French writer Hubert Haddad1 described several episodes from the tumultuous lives of the Fox sisters, the ‘mediums’ attributed with launching American spiritualism. Surprisingly, he never explained the origin and associated issues signified by his title. His use of it is also peculiar because it was only 50 years after the events that occurred around the Fox family that this theory took its name. Indeed, this theory was coined by Frank Podmore (1856–1910),2 one of the principal and most sceptical investigators of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), founded in Cambridge in 1882, who developed this interpretation in 1886, using the phrase in a response to reviews of the work of Andrew Lang and Alfred Russell Wallace in 1899.3 During the 79th general meeting of the SPR in April 1896, presided over by the famous physicist William Crookes, Podmore explained the results of his investigation into 11 cases of ‘Poltergeists’, each of which he concluded was a fraud.4 The frauds involved a girl eight times and a boy three times. He added that in almost every case, the young ‘agent’ was physically or psychologically abnormal. Although this theory was criticized by some members of the SPR, it still remained central to the ongoing discussions on the place of the teenager within the hauntings, suggesting they were the privileged agents of fraudulent manipulation or mediumistic personalities with the associated signifiers of somatic and mental troubles. All things considered, it was deemed that the children deserved special attention.
To understand the implications of this theory, it is necessary to look more closely at the studies that link adolescence, occultism and parapsychology, with an especial focus on one case that highlights the main issues involved as published by Dr Joseph Grasset in 1904.
2. Adolescence and Occultism
In many ways adolescence and occultism are moving categories arbitrarily defined as the product of socio-historical constructions. It is not so unsurprising then that they have become so commonly associated in works of popular culture that express our deepest anxieties, such as fantasy and horror movies or – which is possibly more disturbing though increasing prevalent – discourses warning against the evils of young people and occult practices.5 However, real-life experiences can offer a different interpretation of the interaction between teenagers and occultism. As such, it is by listening to teenagers engaging with occult practices (speaking tables, objects moving by thought, investigation of haunted houses etc.) or developing understandings of the expression of adolescent problems through occultism that psychologists seem able to replace reactionary discourse with more appropriate approaches. Consequently, although role-playing games (RPGs), heroic-fantasy universes and heavy metal music are often denounced as precursors of cult membership and/or morbid activities, these discourses on our ‘little horrors’ are not sufficient to exhaust the question of the relationship between teenagers and the paranormal as they do not sufficiently consider what psychological panaceas adolescents can find in these practices and beliefs.6
Auguste Comte gave one of the first descriptions of adolescence in the age of metaphysics, in his ‘Law of the three states’ defined in the Course of Positive Philosophy (1832–40).7 Comte saw adolescence taking an intermediate position in the three periods of human life, one that he matched with a particular moment in the evolution of the human mind. Adolescence expressed a quest for meaning that we cannot expect from religions or from positivist science, a category which Comte thought supported the great philosophical issues of humanity. With its innocence, which is no longer that of a child, and its rationality, which is not even that of the adult, adolescence is thus placed between a belief and objectivity (or science), which reflects the principles of occultism. While the natural curiosity of the teenager, as was believed, made them more open to the occult and magic, it made them equally more inclined to suggestion because of the incomplete development of their rational abilities (as was similarly believed about women, and even more so for young ladies, at that time).
An important example in France, before the onset of spiritualism codified by Allan Kardec, is that of Angélique Cottin. She was 14 in the spring of 1846, when the first events occurred, which lasted for 10 weeks.8 A simple glove weaver in the village of Bouvigny in the Orne, Angélique apparently attracted or repulsed objects around her in an inexplicable manner. Her nickname, ‘the electric girl’, was based on the first hypothesis put forward to contradict the demonic
