Victorian spiritualism as a capitalist commodification of grief: how industrialization and colonialism reshaped mourning into marketable transcendence
Original framing: “Victorian spiritualism capitalized on the desire to transcend death to create new ways of making money” — Phys.org
The framing ignores how Indigenous spiritual practices—such as the Navajo *Diné* concept of *Hózhǫ́* (harmony) or the Māori *tapu* (sacredness)—were systematically dismantled by colonial policies, creating a spiritual void that spiritualism later exploited. Indigenous mourning rituals, often tied to land and communal memory, were replaced by individualistic, marketable séance culture, erasing the collective dimensions of grief. The commodification of spiritualism in the West can be seen as a direct consequence of the suppression of these traditions, where grief became a product rather than a communal experience.
Victorian spiritualism was not merely a cultural response to death but a systemic product of industrial capitalism and colonialism, which fragmented communal mourning and replaced it with marketable transcendence.
The framing obscures how elite classes co-opted spiritualism to reinforce their dominance while marginalized groups—Indigenous peoples, working-class women, and people of color—developed their own spiritual economies of resistance. Historical parallels, such as the *Dissolution of the Monasteries*, reveal a pattern where the erosion of communal spiritual practices under capitalism leads to their commodification, while cross-cultural comparisons show how non-Western traditions maintain collective, land-based mourning rituals. A *trickster* reading exposes spiritualism as both a subversive force and a capitalist trick, turning grief into profit—a dynamic that persists today in digital memorial industries. To address this, solutions must revive communal mourning economies, regulate spiritual commerce ethically, amplify marginalized spiritual histories, and integrate grief support into labor and housing policies, ensuring that mourning is no longer a site of exploitation but of collective healing.