Fernando Ortiz (and the spiritists?) in the Balearic Islands and Catalonia

Abstract

This article explores the social framework of spiritism in the Balearic Islands and Catalonia during the time Fernando Ortiz lived there, and the connections of active spiritists with the pedagogical environment of the Cuban thinker. I reconstruct the wide field of (possible?) spiritist connections in which Ortiz found himself enmeshed, so as to trace his (possible?) encounters with spiritism across places, people, dates, and publications. Spiritism constituted itself as an integral conceptual system that responded to the systematization of mediumship in the West after the middle of the nineteenth century. Therefore, my goal is to present some general considerations about trance and spiritism and to search for the connections between different social, geographic, and temporal contexts (in the Balearic Islands and Catalonia) in which to locate Ortiz’s first awareness that something called spiritism existed, beyond his own autobiographical account of the issue.