Word: spiritualists
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...inspired amateurs, fuddled bunglers, sensational charlatans, and uncomfortable professionals. Each has survived a series of tumultuous popular vogues, and each today seems to have found tenuous public acceptance. Out of the black box and darkroom came what may really be the vital art of the moment. Out of the spiritualist's dim salon has emerged what may prove to be tomorrow's scientific revolution. In reaching a toe-hold, each discipline has sacrificed a measure of color and excitement: gone are the horrific lantern shows of the early photographer-magicians, gone too the emphasis psychic investigators once placed on communication...
Brazil's newspapers hoot at Zarur. The Protestant churches deplore him, spiritualist sects repudiate him, and Rio's Roman Catholic Auxiliary Archbishop Dom Helder Camara calls him a heretic. Says Zarur: "I don't say I am comparable to Christ, but my followers do." Then he pleads their case: "Look, my enemies call me a thief, a heretic, a sorcerer. Well, they called Jesus all those things as well. I was born on Dec. 25th, the same day as Jesus was, and I also received a message from St. Francis on my 33rd birthday, the same...
...After King's death, Rockefeller learned to his chagrin that the Canadian Prime Minister was a spiritualist, who sought counsel at seances with his dead mother...
...sent to him years ago, and now unaccountably lost, purporting to be the pieced-together fragments of a love letter in the Queen's handwriting, fished from Brown's scrap basket. The basis of the bond between them, he speculates, may have been that Brown was a spiritualist medium through whom Victoria thought she was in touch with Albert...
Durrell is sloppy about his grammar and careless about facts. Thus a spiritualist of the 30s is shown receiving otherworldly messages "from Edward Gibbon and Ramon Novarro to such of their descendants as might still be living." Novarro, a spry 62-year-old living in North Hollywood, is to this day perfectly able to communicate with anyone by word of mouth rather than mediums. But at the center of Durrell's Labyrinth, there lurks enough true humanity to make up for a little bit of bull...