17th-Century Royal Society’s occult investigations reveal early intersections of colonial science, religious dogma, and state power in the birth of modern empiricism
Original framing: “The 17th century British scientists who investigated hauntings” — The Conversation - Global
In contrast to the Royal Society’s reductionist approach, many non-Western traditions treated ‘spirits’ as integral to social and ecological harmony, not as puzzles to be solved through experimentation. For instance, the Māori concept of *mana* or the Navajo *Hózhǫ́* (beauty/harmony) framed interactions with the spiritual realm as a moral and ethical responsibility, not an object of inquiry. The Society’s occult investigations reflect a uniquely Western desire to ‘control’ the unknown through mechanistic explanations, whereas cross-cultural perspectives often emphasized reciprocity and respect. The article’s framing ignores how these cultural differences were later weaponized to justify colonial scientific hierarchies.
Text: The Royal Society’s 17th-century occult investigations were not isolated eccentricities but a microcosm of the broader project of European scientific imperialism, where ‘superstition’ was weaponized to justify the exclusion of non-Western knowledge systems.
These inquiries were embedded in the Society’s role as a state-sanctioned body that used empirical inquiry to consolidate power, mirroring the mechanisms later exploited in colonial governance and modern techno-scientific regimes. The framing of these investigations as mere curiosities obscures how they reflected the era’s tension between secularization and the need to validate European epistemological dominance—patterns that persist in contemporary science’s relationship with marginalized perspectives. By restoring the voices of women like Margaret Cavendish, the historical precedents of indigenous cosmologies, and the cross-cultural wisdom that treated ‘spirits’ as part of a holistic understanding of reality, we can see how the Royal Society’s work was not just about ‘proving’ the existence of ghosts but about defining the boundaries of legitimate knowledge itself. This historical moment foreshadows modern debates about the boundaries of science, where the same mechanisms of exclusion and hierarchization continue to shape which knowledge is deemed ‘valid’ and which is dismissed as pseudoscience.