#Southern spirits series

Many of our long distance loyal customers are thrilled to travel to us due to our vast variety of products and reasonable pricing. It's our Team Members who make Southern Spirits & Liquor shopping experience so special. Our tremendous buying power and special relationships with producers, importers and wholesalers bring us considerable savings, which we pass on to our customers. We're also committed to having the lowest prices on wine, spirits and beer every day. Our store also carries Fine & Rarely allocated Bourbons and Scotches from America‘s most popular & foreign brands to hard-to-find within the region, and more than 500 different spirits in every style and price range. Our store carries more than 2,000 different liquors, wines & beers from different regions in the world. So we are committed to offering the nation's best liquor, wine & beer selection, with an emphasis on fine Bourbons & Wines. Meet the researchers who, in their attempt to be scientific, immersed themselves in the world of spirit photography, materialisations, ectoplasm, and a foolproof psychic cure for bed-wetting.We're passionate about customer satisfaction, and know many of our customers feel the same way. Under the red light of the séance room, meet aristocratic outlaws, a former Prime Minister and pioneering feminist, believers and sceptics. So come with us, into the hidden world of Spiritualist Christchurch. Alternative beliefs could have powerful echoes, deep in the South Pacific. Beginning in the fin de siècle, it intensified as world war, cultural crisis and economic depression took hold. Nonetheless, this small flowering offers a unique episode in the history of Western culture. It would be a mistake to see these systems as dominant in their era scientific rationalism and Christian orthodoxy both took a dim view of these beliefs, and constantly warned against them. Hermeticism, following a minor pursuit in Renaissance Europe, spawned a number of secret ‘lodges’, where Late Antique mysticism was imbibed. Theosophy, a blend of Tibetan Buddhism and Hellenistic Hermeticism, was developed by the Russian adventuress Madame Blavatsky in the United States, and had small but concentrated followings worldwide in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the quest for alternative spirituality shaken loose from traditional religion, Spiritualism had fellow travellers.

By the nineteenth century, Swedenborgianism had spawned less structured ‘contacts’ with the dead in Britain and America, beginning with the Fox sisters in Upstate New York in the 1850s, and spreading out to parlours across the Anglosphere. For those in the spirits industry, we also offer private label, co-packaging, and contract production.

#Southern spirits series

Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish minister who later emigrated to Britain in the 1780s, developed the idea that the souls of the dead were placed in a series of heavenly spheres which could be contacted. Operating one of the largest state-of-the-art distilleries in the Southeast, we are conveniently located right off the interstate on I-77 at the I-40 crossroads and we welcome guests for tours & tastings daily on our beautiful 20-acre farm. Biblical bans on the occult notwithstanding, it was during the Enlightenment that a belief hitherto considered superstition surfaced. Amidst this discourse emerged Edgar Lovell-Smith, Violet Barker, Lily Hope and an array of other enthusiasts, attempting to gauge Spiritualist belief and practice by empirical means.Ĭontacting the dead has been a long, persistent undercurrent in Western culture, from Renaissance legends of black magic and necromancy to mystical visions of paradise. Never completely mainstream, Spiritualism did succeed in unsettling the academic and religious networks of New Zealand society, while the Spiritualists themselves were confident that a new age of enlightenment and spiritual contentment was about to dawn. Rather, the aim is to reconstruct the culture of Spiritualism, a combination of religious disaffection, pseudoscience and wartime death, which made Spiritualism a rising force in New Zealand between the 1920s and 1950s.

We do not investigate whether the paranormal phenomena were true or false – such a judgement is left to those who read. Working through the Scrapbook of the Psychic Research Society, together with other séance records, an attempt is made to reconstruct the world of Christchurch Spiritualism, a fledgling discipline at the time, on the border between the empirical and extraordinary. The group was active in the 1930s and ‘40s, before mysteriously disappearing at the end of the decade. This digital exhibition investigates the Psychic Research Society of Christchurch, founded by Edgar Lovell-Smith, which attempted to investigate the truth of Spiritualist claims.