Angels in the Trenches Reviewed by Kai Mügge
The book is therefore a clear recommendation! – Kai Mügge, Felix Circle
Angels in the Trenches is historian, sociologist and Paranormal Review‘s Editor Leo Ruickbie’s newest achievement after his 2016 well acclaimed The Impossible Zoo. Angels in the Trenches is definitely different from what any average reader of a book about the later European heydays of Spiritualism might expect.
Ruickbie refuses to regurgitate any already previously presented simple landmark-facts of the spiritualism-movement like we all have read about enough before, like about the famous mediums and séances, the Dialectical Society, Crookes with Home and Cooke, the SPR, Richet’s ‘ectoplasm’, Conan Doyle and Houdini…
No, Ruickbie’s standards and requirements lay clearly beyond the well-known and already exhaustively discussed.
What he is presenting in his new work is not less than a particular dissection of the continents recent past, facilitated with the hand of a master surgeon, namely of the WWI years and its societal sensitivities – mainly but not only of the British – and how these did interrelate and interfere with the most influential spiritual movement ever having occurred in Western Society: Modern Spiritualism!
Therefore Ruickbie digs deep and presents to the reader with an insight and overview only the diligent historian has contemporary historical materials from different publications and correspondences rendering the change in society’s perception from the age of enlightenment into a state of willingly accepting or even purposefully seeking for the supernatural.
At the time maybe not even worth a short remark in the news-section, information among many, in retrospective indeed the very moments that impacted the collective unconscious sustainably and enduringly, uniquely presented in this collection of relatively short episodes.
The books chapters are short, sometimes changing with the next page and so sending the reader onto a specifically determined curvaceous ride into the past.
It is Ruickbie’s psycho-analysis scrutinizing how step by step Western Spirituality started – suffering under the terror of WWI and experiencing personal loss of loved ones into the millions – to circle more or less solely around the question of and proof for Survival – and not let’s say rather ‘classically‘ exploring the path to epiphany and enlightenment.
Angels in the Trenches is hence a thorough, dense and intensive, oftentimes surprising read, revealing many never before interrelated facts underlying an important younger section in the metaphysical evolution of mankind and its western perspective.
They today restrict western spirituality by evaluating its efforts exclusively if addressing the quest for the proof of survival. Conditions that many do believe deserve a critical review ….
The book is therefore a clear recommendation!
Reviewed by Kai Mügge on 7 December 2018 at https://felixcircle.blogspot.com/2018/12/angels-in-trenches-leo-ruickbies-psycho.html