Mediums, Spirits, and the Séance
The séance is the most distinctive ritual of modern Spiritualism, the formal occasion on which one or more mediums attempt to communicate with the dead in the presence of a group of sitters. From the 1840s until the 1930s, the physical séance in particular was a major social institution, an entertainment, a religious rite, and an object of scientific investigation. It was the central technology by which nineteenth-century Europe and America made contact with the dead. The terms “séance,” “sitter,” “medium,” “circle,” “control,” and “ectoplasm” all belong to this particular historical moment, and most of them are still in use today. The historical literature is now substantial: Logie Barrow’s Independent Spirits (1986) is the standard social history; Alex Owen’s The Darkened Room (1989) added the feminist reading that has shaped the field since; Janet Oppenheim’s The Other World (1985) is the most thorough scholarly account of the British case.
The Setting
A Victorian séance took place in a private parlour, a hired room, or, after the 1880s, a dedicated Spiritualist church. The room was usually small enough that a dozen sitters could form a circle around a single table. A long oval or round table of light wood was preferred — partly for atmosphere, partly because a heavy table moved less. The sitters placed their hands flat on the table, often with the little fingers linked to make what Spiritualists called the “magnetic chain,” and waited. Theatrical realism mattered: in published séance accounts the table is a kind of lightning rod for the supposed forces, and the linked fingers were thought to form a circuit through which the “fluid” of the medium could pass.
The lights were dimmed or extinguished, partly for atmosphere and partly for the production of certain physical phenomena. The sitters would sing, often a hymn, until the medium “went under.” A musician — a piano or a small harmonium — was often present. Music was considered to assist the formation of the ectoplasm and to soothe the sitters. A cabinet was often constructed at one end of the room, an alcove or closet in which the medium sat, behind a curtain, for the duration of the séance. The cabinet is one of the most important pieces of apparatus of the late Victorian séance. It was used to produce materialisations, the supposed appearance of a spirit body. A typical cabinet might be a small wooden enclosure roughly six feet high and four feet wide, hung with black curtains to absorb the dim light, in which the medium sat on a chair, stool, or camp bed, ostensibly in a deep trance.
The circle, in the technical Spiritualist sense, was the assembled sitters. Membership in a circle was not casual. Many mediums insisted that sitters attend regularly, abstain from alcohol, and maintain a sympathetic attitude toward the spirits. A hostile sitter, it was said, could disrupt the séance; a “vibratory” harmony among the sitters was treated as a precondition for materialisations. Hodgson’s analysis of the famous “Hodgson’s Control” — the case in which Richard Hodgson, an SPR investigator, was supposedly “controlled” by his own discarnate self during Mrs. Piper’s sittings — is the most important early study of how the dynamics of a circle could shape what was reported. Home circles, smaller groups of family or friends meeting weekly, were the most common form of Spiritualist practice in Britain, and many of them operated without a professional medium. The detail of home-circle practice is one of the great strengths of Barrow’s book.
The Medium
The medium was the focus of the circle. The word, from Latin medium, was popularised in this specific sense by the Spiritualist movement; before 1850, it would have been unintelligible in English. The medium was understood to be a person whose nervous system was unusually sensitive to the spirit world, in much the same way that a musician might be unusually sensitive to sound. A “physical medium” produced physical phenomena: rappings, table-tilting, levitation, apports, materialisations, and direct voice. A “mental medium” or “trance medium” produced speech, automatic writing, drawing, or clairvoyance, while in an altered state of consciousness.
Trance was the most common mediumistic state. A mental medium would typically close the eyes, sink the head, and after a few minutes begin to speak in a voice not her own, often addressing sitters by name and offering messages attributed to deceased relatives. Some trance mediums, the British medium Gladys Osborne Leonard (1882-1968) among them, remained productive for decades. Leonard’s principal control, “Feda,” was presented as her deceased young brother, and the long running of her sittings — across more than forty years — gives one of the largest single datasets in the field. Others, such as Mrs. Piper, the most studied medium of the SPR, were at their most convincing only during particular periods of their lives.
Physical mediums produced a wider range of effects. Ectoplasm, a word coined in 1894 by the SPR’s Charles Richet in his La suggestion mentale et les applications, was the supposed substance of a materialisation. It was described as a white, viscous material that exuded from the body of the medium and could take the shape of a face, a hand, a draped figure, or an entire standing form. Photographs of ectoplasm circulated widely in the 1920s and were almost always exposed as cheesecloth, paper, gauze, or in some notorious cases (notably the Eva C. / Rita Goold case in Paris) animal tissue. The most famous materialisation medium of the twentieth century, Mina “Margery” Crandon (1888-1941), was investigated by Houdini and exposed by the magician’s friend Rose Mackenberg, who in 1925 smuggled a piece of cheesecloth into the séance room and photographed it being produced as “ectoplasm.” Direct-voice séances, developed in the early twentieth century by practitioners such as Etta Sleight in the United States and, in a later generation, Leslie Flint (1911-1994) in Britain, produced spoken communication through a trumpet-shaped device that supposedly moved independently. Apports, the spontaneous appearance of small objects inside the séance room, were another physical phenomenon, and one of the easiest to fake.
The Spirits
The spirits who communicated at a typical séance fell into recognisable categories. The most common was the deceased relative or friend of a sitter, often someone recently dead. Communications of this type were given in recognisable voices, with characteristic phrases, and with personal information that a stranger would be unlikely to know. The sitter typically judged whether the message was authentic. The medium’s most important skill, in this context, was a talent for warm, plausible speech and an extensive knowledge of grief — and this is one of the reasons the sittings were so hard to police by outsiders.
A second category was the “spirit guide” or “control,” a recurring entity who claimed to have been a historical figure, often from a non-Western culture, and who acted as a kind of master of ceremonies for the medium. The most famous examples were the Native American and Indian spirit controls of American and British mediums, “Black Hawk,” “Silver Star,” “Yolanda,” and the like. These controls were usually named, often dressed in stereotyped “Indian” costume, and spoke in a theatrical accent. The cultural appropriation at work in these presentations has been widely remarked upon by modern historians. The British medium Daniel Dunglas Home (1833-1886) was controlled by the spirit “Dr. Marigold,” variously described in the literature as an eighteenth-century physician from Peru, from India, or simply as a spirit-physician of unspecified origin. The American medium Mrs. Piper’s control was “George Pellew,” supposedly a young French or Italian youth killed in a duel, not specifically a Huguenot. The use of historical, religious, or non-Western figures lent an air of authority to the proceedings, and the underlying mechanism — the cultural authority of the outsider — is something the modern literature has paid increasing attention to.
A third category included “oriental” and “Hermetic” teachers, particularly in the more esoteric circles. Helena Blavatsky’s “Mahatmas” were of this type; so were the “Ascended Masters” later channelled by the “I AM” Activity (founded 1930s by Guy Ballard in the United States) and the Bridge to Freedom movement (founded 1961) in the twentieth century. These figures often delivered complex metaphysical teachings in written or spoken form, and several of them — most notably “Koot Hoomi” (Kuthumi) and “Morya” — recur across the Theosophical, New Age, and contemporary channelling traditions. The standard scholarly edition of the Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett (Barker ed., 1974) is the place to follow the controversy over the Blavatsky transmissions in detail.
The Social Life of the Séance
The Victorian séance was a social as well as a religious event. The parlour, the hymns, the table, the shared touch of hands, the dimming of the lights, the medium’s slow entry into trance, the delivery of messages, the surprise and recognition, the tears of the sitters, the after-séance conversation over tea — all of this made the séance a powerfully cohesive experience for the group. For an increasingly secular urban middle class, it filled a gap left by the decline of family prayer and by the unsettling effects of mass bereavement in the wars and epidemics of the nineteenth century. The séance answered a real social need, and the academic literature has generally been more interested in this function than in the truth or falsity of the phenomena.
It was also, in many cases, a fashionable entertainment. The journalist W. T. Stead (1849-1912) founded the spiritualist periodical Borderland in 1893. The chemist and physicist William Crookes (1832-1919), later president of the Royal Society, sat with Daniel Dunglas Home repeatedly in the 1870s, and published his report in the Quarterly Journal of Science in 1874. The prime minister of Britain, William Gladstone, attended séances; the future prime minister Arthur Balfour sat with the Italian medium Eusapia Palladino. The séance sat at the intersection of fashionable society, fringe science, and lower-middle-class religion, and was treated in all three contexts. The magician J. N. Maskelyne (1839-1917), whose career began as a stage performer exposing the Davenport brothers, treated the séance primarily as a form of theatre. The British psychical researcher Harry Price (1881-1948), working in the 1920s and 1930s, used both scientific and theatrical means to expose mediums in the laboratory he set up at the National Laboratory of Psychical Research.
The decline of the physical séance in the twentieth century is one of the striking changes in the history of modern religion. Several factors contributed. The repeated exposures of the most famous physical mediums — Florence Cook, the Davenport brothers, Palladino, Crandon — discredited the field in the eyes of much of the public. The First World War and the Spanish flu produced so many bereaved families that the demand for séances briefly spiked and then, in many places, collapsed. The rise of broadcast media moved entertainment away from the parlour. The professionalisation of psychology and psychiatry offered competing explanations for trance and dissociation. The development of trance mediumship without physical phenomena, in which the medium simply speaks, made the elaborate apparatus of the physical séance feel increasingly archaic. By the 1930s, the physical séance was a small and declining practice. The mental or trance séance, by contrast, has continued, in modified form, in Spiritualist churches around the world. For the practical and historical account of how these sittings were actually conducted, see how séances work and what to expect.
Sources and Further Reading
- Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
- Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989).
- Logie Barrow, Independent Spirits: Spiritualism and English Plebeians, 1855-1910 (London: Routledge, 1986).
- Jenny Hazelgrove, Spiritualism and British Society between the Wars (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).
- John Beloff, The New Believers: Sects, Cults and Alternative Religions (London: Batsford, 1990).
- Tatiana Kontou and Morag Martin (eds), Spirits and Spirituality: Material and Metaphysical Currents in British Spiritualism, 1840-1930 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
- Shane McCorristine, Spectres of the Self: Thinking about Ghosts and Ghost-Seeing in England, 1750-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
- Wouter Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1996).
- Roger Bastide, The African Religions of Brazil: Toward a Sociology of the Interpenetration of Civilizations (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).
- I. M. Lewis, Ecstatic Religion: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession (3rd ed., London: Routledge, 2003).