# Phrenology

Source: https://spiritfold.com/Phrenology  
Published by the Australian Spiritual Alliance on Spiritfold, licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

**Cultural advice:** Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this page refers to people who have died, to the collecting of Ancestral remains, and to historical writing that used racist ideas and terms. In some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, seeing or hearing the names, images or voices of people who have died can cause sadness or distress, and may go against strongly held cultural prohibitions.[1]

**Phrenology** was a nineteenth-century attempt to link personality traits with the shape of the scalp.[2] Its followers believed a person's character and intelligence could be judged from the shape of their head.[3] It was hugely popular in the Australian colonies from the 1830s.[4] The scientific community rejected it in the nineteenth century, and historians now describe it as a discredited science.[5][3]

## Description

### Key terms

- **Phrenology** ("science of the mind") was the name Johann Christoph Spurzheim gave to Franz Joseph Gall's system; Gall himself had called it **craniology** and later **organology**.[5]
- **Localisation** is the idea that different parts of the brain carry out different functions.[5]
- **Phreno-mesmerism** was a mid-nineteenth-century practice that combined mesmerism with phrenology.[6]

### The ideas behind it

Two ideas lay at the heart of phrenology: that different areas of the brain were linked with different mental faculties, and that the developing brain shaped the skull. An underdeveloped faculty was thought to leave a hollow in the skull and an overdeveloped one a bump.[7] Phrenologists believed the outside of the skull mirrored the surface of the brain, which they saw as made up of many organs responsible for functions such as love of children, religious feeling, concentration and social sympathy.[8]

### Readings and lectures

A phrenological examination involved feeling the bumps of the skull, and was meant to give an analysis of a person's strengths and weaknesses.[5] Because its core ideas were simple, anyone with a pocket guide could take it up, not only doctors and anatomists. Popular lecturers gave public shows, read the heads of children for anxious parents, and advised clients about their own minds. Lectures often dealt with choosing a partner and raising children, illustrated with lantern slides and quick sketches.[3] In 1854 a client of the phrenologist Archibald Sillars Hamilton (see below) could choose a description of their character with advice, a written sketch of character, or a detailed reading with a phrenological chart, at prices from three shillings and sixpence to ten shillings.[8]

### What the evidence says

A 2018 study tested phrenology's basic claim using MRI brain scans of 5,724 people from the UK Biobank study. It found that the shape of the brain's folds explains very little of the variation in the curve of the scalp, and found no evidence that measuring the contour of the head is a reliable way to infer mental capacities.[2] This result matters because it tests phrenology on its own terms, with modern measurements it could not have imagined, and still finds nothing to support it.[2]

## Scope

### What it includes

- Reading character from the shape of the skull[5]
- Public lectures and private readings, including readings of children for their parents[3]

### What it is not

- Phrenology is not accepted science. By 1843 the whole Western scientific community had rejected it.[5] Its map of mental "organs" does not match today's understanding of how the brain works, and a modern test of its central claim found no support (see What the evidence says above).[3][2]
- Phrenology is not part of Spiritualist practice. Its link with Spiritualism is historical (see Within Spiritualism below).[9]

## Traditions and lineage

### Gall and Spurzheim

In the 1790s the Viennese physician Franz Joseph Gall combined physiognomy with the idea of localisation in the brain, a system he first called "craniology" and later "organology". He worked with Johann Christoph Spurzheim from 1800 to 1812. By the time they parted in Paris in 1812, Spurzheim had become interested in the system's social uses and renamed it "phrenology", the science of the mind. He believed it could help everyone, including working people, to improve themselves, and he spread it to Britain through long lecture tours. Other British reformers, especially George Combe, took it up. Spurzheim travelled to the United States in 1832 and died in Boston three months later, after which phrenology spread widely in American popular culture.[5]

Although phrenology was rejected, Gall's organology was the first comprehensive statement of a theory that different parts of the brain have different functions. The pioneers of modern brain localisation, especially Paul Broca and David Ferrier, took care to explain how their theories differed from phrenology, even as their findings confirmed some of its basic ideas.[5]

### Crime and character

Most phrenologists agreed that some criminals were born bad, while others were made bad by circumstances. In 1836 the Scottish geologist George S. Mackenzie petitioned the British Secretary of State for the Colonies to use phrenology to choose which convicts were sent to New South Wales, but the Secretary of State was not persuaded, and neither was the legal profession.[7] Phrenology later influenced the criminological theories of the early twentieth century.[4]

## Context

### Within Spiritualism

Phrenology has a historical link with Spiritualism through mesmerism. In the mid-nineteenth century "phreno-mesmerism" applied the principles of mesmerism to phrenology.[6] The *Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology* says that Andrew Jackson Davis, whom it calls the herald of Spiritualism, won many followers for the new faith from among believers in phreno-mesmerism and mesmerism,[10] and J. Gordon Melton describes healers, hypnotists and phrenologists touring America in the 1830s and 1840s, a movement of mesmerist "magnetists" arising in the same years, and the Spiritualists following the magnetists.[11] Spiritfold has found no source showing phrenology as part of Spiritualist practice today. For a student of Spiritualism, this history helps explain how the movement began: Spiritualism followed directly on the touring lecturers and mesmerists of the 1830s and 1840s, and some of its first converts came from among believers in mesmerism and phreno-mesmerism.[11][10]

### In Australian Spiritualism

Paul Gillen, in his 1981 study of Spiritualists in Sydney, names mesmerism, hydrotherapy and phrenology as the curative and diagnostic systems that, by the 1840s, represented the fringe traditions out of which Spiritualism grew in English-speaking countries.[9] The two movements also met in the life of Alfred Deakin, who in the 1870s was prominent in the Spiritualist movement, conducted its Progressive Lyceum and became president of the Victorian Association of Spiritualists,[12] and who in January 1880 consulted the phrenologist Archibald Sillars Hamilton under an assumed name.[13]

### A Spiritualist perspective

Phrenology belongs to history, and a Spiritualist teacher would present it that way. As the sources above show, it was one of the popular movements of the nineteenth century from which Spiritualism grew, and some of its early followers came by way of mesmerism and phreno-mesmerism. That is part of our story.

It is not part of Spiritualist practice today, and no Spiritualist should offer head readings as if they had any standing. The science rejected it long ago, and, as the cultural advice at the top of this page recognises, it was tied up with harmful ideas about race and with the taking of Ancestral remains. Looking back, a Spiritualist would acknowledge that harm honestly, with particular respect for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The lesson for us is to test every claim and to judge no one by appearance.

## Phrenology in Australia

Phrenology was popular in the Australian colonies from the 1830s, first in Sydney and then in Melbourne, where a public lecture on it was advertised in the *Port Phillip Herald* in 1840. Archibald Michie, a member of Victoria's colonial elite, had lectured on it at the Sydney School of Arts before arriving in Melbourne in 1852. Executed criminals were favourite subjects for demonstrations: in 1855 Philemon Sohier, then Melbourne's leading phrenologist, drew capacity audiences with death masks of three recently executed highway robbers.[4] After two bushrangers were hanged in Melbourne in 1853, medical men examined their skulls, and *The Argus* reported the next day that "cerebral physiology" showed both to be, in effect, born killers.[7] Alexander Maconochie, for a short time governor of the Norfolk Island penal settlement, was strongly influenced by phrenology.[7]

Phrenology gained a measure of official standing in Victoria when the colonial government commissioned and published *A phrenological report on Aborigines*, prepared by Sohier for the Select Committee on Aborigines in 1858. It remained popular through the 1860s, with lectures at mechanics' institutes and town halls, but by the mid-1870s advertisements for phrenology lectures had disappeared from Melbourne newspapers. Popularisers kept it alive: in the 1880s one offered individual head readings in Melbourne's Eastern Market.[4]

Historian Alexandra Roginski traced more than 200 popular phrenologists who worked in Australia and New Zealand. Some made it a lifelong career; others took it up briefly to earn a living. By the second half of the nineteenth century it was a common entertainment, found everywhere from mechanics' institutes to markets.[3]

One of the best known was Archibald Sillars Hamilton, who arrived in Launceston in November 1854 and spent the next 30 years lecturing and giving private readings in Tasmania, Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland and New Zealand.[8] Within days of Ned Kelly's execution in 1880, Hamilton published a phrenological analysis of Kelly's death mask in the Melbourne *Herald*. In January 1880 the 23-year-old Alfred Deakin, later Prime Minister, consulted Hamilton under an assumed name. Hamilton died in Redfern, Sydney, in 1884.[13]

### Phrenology and Aboriginal people

Roginski notes that the colonies where phrenology flourished were built on the stolen lands of Aboriginal groups and Māori iwi, and points to research on phrenology's role as a racial science, whose legacy includes Ancestral remains collected by museums and scientific institutions until well into the mid-twentieth century.[3] Phrenologists most prized the heads of people who differed from the "middling European type", and the skulls of criminals and of people from non-European races were collected and displayed as examples of supposed abnormality.[13] Hamilton's own collection of human remains drew audiences to his lectures; by his death it held some 55 skulls or parts of skulls, about 30 of them Aboriginal. He obtained them through grave-robbing as well as gifts and trades.[8] In 1860, at Maitland, he was charged with inciting the exhumation of bodies from a burial ground; he had offered the sexton money to dig up the heads of a man executed that day and of a young Aboriginal man executed a few months before. A jury acquitted him, but he later went back in secret and took the skull he had been refused.[13]

By 2015 Museum Victoria held Hamilton's collection, and several of the non-European people whose remains were in it, including that young man, had been returned to country.[13] Roginski's book on the case, *The Hanged Man and the Body Thief* (Monash University Publishing, 2015), describes the museum's work to identify people in the collection so that they could be repatriated to their communities.[14]

## Safety and good practice

## Related modalities

- [Spiritualism](https://spiritfold.com/Spiritualism)
- [Palmistry](https://spiritfold.com/Palmistry)

## References

1. Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS). ["Cultural sensitivity"](https://aiatsis.gov.au/cultural-sensitivity). Last updated 23 October 2025 (accessed 11 October 2026).
2. Parker Jones, O., F. Alfaro-Almagro and S. Jbabdi. ["An empirical, 21st century evaluation of phrenology"](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2018.04.011). *Cortex* 106 (September 2018): 26–35. Full text read via [PubMed Central](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6143440/) (accessed 11 October 2026).
3. Roginski, Alexandra. ["Enigmatic science played out in the fault lines of settler-colonial power"](https://cambridgeblog.org/2023/06/enigmatic-science-played-out-in-the-fault-lines-of-settler-colonial-power/). *Fifteen Eighty Four* (Cambridge University Press blog), 27 June 2023 (accessed 11 October 2026).
4. Wilson, Dean. ["Phrenology"](https://www.emelbourne.net.au/biogs/EM01141b.htm). *eMelbourne: The Encyclopedia of Melbourne Online*. School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne, July 2008 (accessed 11 October 2026).
5. Greenblatt, S. H. "Phrenology in the science and culture of the 19th century". *Neurosurgery* 37, no. 4 (October 1995): 790–804. [doi:10.1227/00006123-199510000-00025](https://doi.org/10.1227/00006123-199510000-00025). Abstract read via [Europe PMC](https://europepmc.org/article/MED/8559310) (accessed 11 October 2026).
6. "Phreno-Mesmerism (or Phreno-Magnetism or Phrenopathy)". *Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology*. Gale. Via [Encyclopedia.com](https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/phreno-mesmerism-or-phreno-magnetismor-phrenopathy) (accessed 12 October 2026).
7. Bradley, James. ["Natural born killers: brain shape, behaviour and the history of phrenology"](https://findanexpert.unimelb.edu.au/news/4245-natural-born-killers--brain-shape--behaviour-and-the-history-of-phrenology). *The Conversation*, republished by the University of Melbourne, 13 June 2014 (accessed 11 October 2026).
8. ["Archibald Sillars Hamilton"](https://heritage.utas.edu.au/index.php/archibald-s-hamilton). Authority record, Special and Rare Collections, University of Tasmania Library (accessed 11 October 2026).
9. Gillen, Paul. [*The Spiritualists: Gnosis and Ideology*](https://figshare.mq.edu.au/articles/thesis/The_spiritualists_gnosis_and_ideology/19431146/1). PhD thesis, School of Behavioural Sciences, Macquarie University, 1981, PDF p. 20. Macquarie University Research Data Repository, posted 28 March 2022, doi:10.25949/19431146 (accessed 12 October 2026).
10. "Mesmerism". *Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology*. Gale. Via [Encyclopedia.com](https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/mesmerism), updated 8 June 2018 (accessed 12 October 2026).
11. Melton, J. Gordon. ["Western Esoteric Family II: Spiritualism & New Age"](https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/western-esoteric-family-ii-spiritualism-new-age). *Melton's Encyclopedia of American Religions*. Gale. Via Encyclopedia.com (accessed 12 October 2026).
12. Norris, R. ["Deakin, Alfred (1856–1919)"](https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/deakin-alfred-5927). *Australian Dictionary of Biography*, Volume 8. Melbourne University Press, 1981 (accessed 12 October 2026).
13. Roginski, Alexandra. ["Getting a head"](https://www.portrait.gov.au/magazines/51/getting-a-head/). *Portrait* 51, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, 9 December 2015 (accessed 11 October 2026).
14. Monash University Publishing. [*The Hanged Man and the Body Thief: Finding Lives in a Museum Mystery* by Alexandra Roginski](https://publishing.monash.edu/product/the-hanged-man-and-the-body-thief). Publisher's description, published 20 July 2015 (accessed 11 October 2026).

## Further reading

- Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. ["Cultural sensitivity"](https://aiatsis.gov.au/cultural-sensitivity).
- Bradley, James. ["Natural born killers: brain shape, behaviour and the history of phrenology"](https://findanexpert.unimelb.edu.au/news/4245-natural-born-killers--brain-shape--behaviour-and-the-history-of-phrenology). *The Conversation*, 2014.
- Parker Jones, O., F. Alfaro-Almagro and S. Jbabdi. ["An empirical, 21st century evaluation of phrenology"](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6143440/). *Cortex*, 2018.
- Roginski, Alexandra. ["Getting a head"](https://www.portrait.gov.au/magazines/51/getting-a-head/). *Portrait* 51, National Portrait Gallery, 2015.
- Roginski, Alexandra. *The Hanged Man and the Body Thief: Finding Lives in a Museum Mystery*. Monash University Publishing, 2015 ([publisher's page](https://publishing.monash.edu/product/the-hanged-man-and-the-body-thief)). Not read for this page.
- Roginski, Alexandra. ["Enigmatic science played out in the fault lines of settler-colonial power"](https://cambridgeblog.org/2023/06/enigmatic-science-played-out-in-the-fault-lines-of-settler-colonial-power/). Cambridge University Press, 2023.
- Wilson, Dean. ["Phrenology"](https://www.emelbourne.net.au/biogs/EM01141b.htm). *eMelbourne*, University of Melbourne, 2008.