By the dawn of the nineteenth century, the shout tradition had become a dominant theme in evangelical Protestantism, especially Methodism, soon to become America’s largest denomination. The epithet, "enthusiasm," lost its sting as its political connotations of regicide lost their relevance. A new term, "fanaticism," arose as the term used by respectable and learned authorities to discredit what they regarded as false religion. Whereas the charge of enthusiasm had implied social contagion among weak-minded, ignorant persons using faulty readings of scripture, the accusation of fanaticism added the understanding that the experiences claimed as supernatural by believers could now be replicated and thus explained away by mesmerism. Ellen White becomes important for Taves’s story because White was an exemplar of the shout tradition who was accused of fanaticism and whose trances and visions were challenged by mesmerist explanations.

As informed Seventh-day Adventists have known at least since Spectrum published its articles on the trial of Israel Dammon, Ellen White was one among several radical adventist visionaries who arose in the months after the Great Disappointment. 4 The region around her home in Maine was reputed to be a hotbed of fanaticism, and the Israel Dammon transcript reveals her to be much more intimately involved with fanatical activity than her own later accounts suggest. The mainstream of post-disappointment adventists explicitly repudiated as fanatical any "’new messages, visions, dreams, tongues, miracles, extraordinary revelations, discerning of spirits.’" 5 One of White’s tasks, says Taves, was to emerge out of fanaticism’s ferment as a sober opponent of fanaticism while casting competing visionaries as the fanatics. At the same time, she also had to overcome mesmerism’s naturalistic explanations of her visionary experiences.

Ellen White accomplished this task, says Taves, through a strategy of demonization. Early in her visionary career she claimed to have been shown in vision that mesmerism was from the devil and that those who used it were destined for the bottomless pit. 6 About a decade later she elaborated this view in a testimony, "Philosophy and Vain Deceit," that has shaped Seventh-day Adventist attitudes toward psychology ever since. "The sciences of phrenology, psychology, and mesmerism," she said, "are the channel through which he [Satan] comes more directly to this generation and works with that power which is to characterize his efforts near the close of probation." 7 As Taves observes, demonization was "not a particularly sophisticated attack" on White’s opposition, but it did serve to neutralize the threat of mesmerism for those who accepted White’s prophetic authority. 8 Ellen White also demonized competing visionaries among the radical Advent bands as she toured to give testimony to her own visions, speaking of "fanatical persons . . . who were exalted by the spirit of Satan" and delivering rebuking messages to them as she was shown in vision by God. 9

Taves observes that the emergence of a single authoritative prophet from among the several competing visionaries was not the only way the early Seventh-day Adventist story might have come out. A set of visions, from several different visionaries, might have become the authoritative canon for the new movement, an outcome rather like that of the early Christian church and the New Testament. Taves explains Ellen White’s emergence over her competitors with two speculations that invite further historical research. First, Taves thinks the timing and content of White’s visions spoke more consistently than those of others to the needs of the movement. Second, and perhaps more important, she credits what Jonathan Butler calls the "symbiotic relationship" between Ellen and James White. No other post-disappointment Adventist visionary had so faithful and forceful a promoter as Ellen had in James. 10

Taves’s analysis of the shout tradition and Ellen White raises more implications for informed Seventh-day Adventists than can be covered here. The issues that occur to this reviewer include, first, the question of what habits of mind and heart were bequeathed to succeeding generations of Seventh-day Adventists by the Whites’ struggle to define themselves over against fanaticism and mesmerism. Second, we may ask about the validity and use to Seventh-day Adventists of the mediating tradition that Taves delineates and defends.

One of Taves’s more provocative observations is that in constructing a prophet by demonizing mesmerism, Seventh-day Adventists both "neutralized mesmerism and inscribed it at the heart of the Seventh-day Adventist cosmos." 11 Taves recognizes that spiritualism, because of resemblances between mediumship and Ellen White’s visionary activity, also became part of this cosmic inscription, but she observes that Spiritualism was chronologically too late to be a formative influence in White’s religious experience. 12

Nevertheless, the images of mesmerism and Spiritualism in the Seventh-day Adventist mind have combined to send a persistent and powerful message: "Don’t lose control! At peril of demonic possession of your soul, DO NOT LOSE CONTROL!" Demonization, while used by the Whites to fend off mesmerism’s naturalistic explanations of Ellen’s visions, implied and ingrained a fear that one’s mind might be possessed and dominated by another. With such anxiety continually at the back of our minds, we Adventists of subsequent generations could not help but lose touch with ourselves.

We have lost touch, it seems, with what Taves, in her concluding theoretical meditations, calls "the tendency of the mind to act upon or influence itself of others." Variously called "suggestibility," "hypnotizability," or "sympathy," this tendency is best understood as a set of abilities that can be cultivated or suppressed depending on cultural contexts. In so arguing, Taves contests the Western Enlightenment critics of enthusiastic religion, who built their criticism on a series of dichotomies--strong/weak, self-possessed/possessed by another, rational/emotional, objective/subjective, dispassionate/sympathetic--and favored always the first term in each pair.

Women, slaves, and colonized peoples seemed to practice the involuntary acts of enthusiastic and fanatical religion more frequently than others. Because such categories of people, under Anglo-Saxon law, were legally the possessions of others, Taves finds it unsurprising that leading Enlightenment thinkers associated women, blacks, and the colonized with weakness and impulsiveness. 13 Western thinkers’ contempt for weakness implied also a preoccupation with control, as in the ability of the hypnotist to control a subject or the ability of "group contagion" to infect and undermine an individual’s judgment. When the spirituality of interpersonal influence is viewed with such hostility, people’s sympathetic abilities tend to be discouraged. Taves points to the very different African cultural contexts, however, in which such abilities are cultivated in order bring about the "dynamic rhythmic interconnection of individuals-within-a-group" whereby "the Spirit is known." 14

Notes and References

1. Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions, 3.
2. Ibid., 141-48.
3. Ibid., 163-64.
4. "Special Section: Early Adventures in Maine," Spectrum 17.5 (Aug. 1987):15-50.
5. Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions, 157.
6. Early Writings of Ellen G. White (Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald, 1882), 21.
7. Testimonies for the Church (Mountain View, Calif.: Pacific Press, 1948), 1:290.
8. Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions, 164.
9. Spiritual Gifts, Vol. 2: My Christian Experience, Views, and Labors (Battle Creek, Mich.: James White, 1860), 39-40, 49-51.
10. Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions, 163.
11. Ibid., 158.
12. Ibid., 398.
13. Ibid., 356.
14. Ibid., 357.