'The Golden Key' is a Compulsively Readable Tale that Weaves an Unsettling Tapestry

Spiritualism is a fascinating topic. Based on the idea that the dead can, and wish to, communicate with the living, it first became popular around 1840 in upstate New York’s “burned-over district” (also home to such movements as Christian Science and Mormonism). An “American-made religion” that formed “in the context of the American experience,” Spiritualism was later exported to other parts of the world and was, at its peak, so popular, that Mary Todd Lincoln held séances in the White House.

Though the movement ebbed after the 1920s, remnants are present in modern Swedenborgianism and other small Christian sects.

Marian Womack weaves this history into her debut novel, The Golden Key, along with a plot thick with missing children, portals to other realms, changelings, science, and wonder.

In some ways, The Golden Key is a tale of “What if?” What if the rare medium could contact the dead? What if faerie were real and you could get there if you knew the right spell? What if the law of equivalent exchange demanded humans passing through be replaced by something else – something magical?

What makes Womack’s book compulsively readable is the way in which she fits the pieces of history and myth together to form a gorgeous and unsettling tapestry. Some of her mediums are legitimate, yes, but others are con women and tricksters, trying to bilk the bereaved of their money. Some of her otherworldly creatures are props, but others are very real and perhaps more dangerous than myths and legends claim. There is psychology and divine madness, early feminism and monarchy, life and something beyond human understanding.

Our heroine, Helena Walton-Cisneros, is exactly the kind of badass I look for these days: one who has strength and heart, who throws herself into work but knows when to step back and remind herself to take part in humanity. She’s sympathetic and empathetic but not one to be pressed into the service of others by guilt or social standards of femininity. She is smart, rational, and uncompromising, which, oddly, means that if she believes magic is “real,” then we can as well.

The Golden Key wasn’t only a fantastic read; it reminded me how singular Spiritualism is as a movement, as a religion, and as theater. In a time when science and industry were growing exponentially, Americans (and later, Europeans) retreated into carefully curated fantasy.

I have some short stories kicking around that felt… diffuse? Definitely like they were missing something. But in enjoying Womack’s work, I started thinking about adapting Spiritualism to the modern world and using it as the basis for those short stories. Suddenly, they all came together. It’s amazing what reading the right book at the right time can light up in your brain.

Such an undertaking requires research, of course. The Golden Key, though fictional, is a fantastic survey of Spiritualist practices and the social conventions surrounding them. There are many, many perspectives on the movement, however, and plenty of nonfiction tomes to peruse if you want to learn more.

Here are some of my favorites (in alphabetical order by title because I have to arrange them somehow):

Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam by Pope Brock. This one isn’t actually about Spiritualism; it’s about a self-styled surgeon who sold patent medicines. I feel like the impetus for hiring a medium and buying snake oil may overlap, so I’m including it.
Madame Blavatsky: The Mother of Modern Spirituality by Gary Lachman. This is an in-depth biography of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, one of the most influential figures in the Spiritualist movement and cofounder of the Theosophical Society.
Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America by Peter Washington. Pretty much what the title says, though Leonard (see below) would take issue with the claim of Spiritualism being “imported.”
Occult America: White House Seances, Ouija Circles, Masons, and the Secret Mystic History of Our Nation by Mitch Horowitz. A survey of the esoteric aspects of America’s history and their continuing impact on American life.
Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America by Ann Braude. As mentioned above, many mediums, and most of the highly sought after ones, were women, which allowed them a social currency rarely experienced before and which fed directly into the suffragette and feminist movements.
Talking to The Other Side: A History of Modern Spiritualism and Mediumship by Todd Jay Leonard. An academic text focusing on the “ethno-religious aspects of the religion, mediumship, and the mediums themselves.”