Spirit Communication and Mediumship

Few practices in the history of religion have provoked such a sustained, multi-disciplinary argument as the attempt to communicate with the dead. The figure of the medium — a person through whom the dead are said to speak, write, draw, or act — sits at the intersection of theology, anthropology, psychology, showmanship, and fraud. The contemporary vocabulary of “mediumship” and “spirit communication” was largely fixed by the Spiritualist movement of nineteenth-century Europe and North America, but the underlying practices are far older, and the underlying wish — to hear the voice of someone who has died — is older still. What follows tries to give a serious account of the practice, the surrounding scholarship, and the disputes, and to take the questions raised by the historical record seriously rather than dismissing them on either pole of the debate.

The Long History of Contacting the Dead

Humans have rarely been content to let the dead be silent. The earliest burial sites — Skhul and Qafzeh in the Levant, c. 100,000 years ago — are already arguments for the persistence of the person after death. The great civilisations of the ancient world treated the boundary between the living and the dead as porous and dangerous, and built elaborate technologies — sacrifice, libation, oracle, descent — to manage the traffic across it. The shamanic traditions of Siberia, Central Asia, the Arctic, and the Americas are the most thoroughly studied early systems. The classic account is Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1951), which has been criticised in recent decades as constructing a single “shamanic” category out of very different local traditions, but which remains the most cited general framework. What is clear is that the role of the specialist in trance, ecstatic journey, and spirit encounter is one of the most durable religious institutions in the human record.

The Hebrew Scriptures are also part of this record, and the contradiction within them is informative. The Law forbids necromancy (Deuteronomy 18:11), yet the historical and prophetic books repeatedly describe consultations with the dead — most famously the Ba’alat Ov of Endor, called upon by King Saul in 1 Samuel 28, and whose consultation is described as a tolerated, if suspect, practice. The Septuagint’s translation of Ov as engastrimythos, “ventriloquist,” is itself an early sceptical explanation. The tension between the prohibition and the practice has been a recurring theme in Western culture: the official line says no, the human need keeps saying yes.

The classical world had a more open infrastructure. The nekyomanteion at Acheron, the psychomanteion at Ephyra, and several other oracular shrines were places where the living descended — literally, into a cave or underground chamber — to question the dead. The Odyssey depicts Odysseus digging a trench and pouring libations of blood so that the shades (psychae) of the dead might rise and speak (Book 11). The most ambitious classical statement of the philosophical case is Plato’s Phaedo, where the immortality of the soul is argued on the basis of its separation from the body. The Roman tradition was less speculative and more procedural. Pliny the Elder reports, in the Natural History (7.39-42), the prosecution of two vestal virgins in 216 BCE for incestum with a dead lover, an indication that the official apparatus of Roman religion was already treating communication with the dead as a kind of sexual and political offence.

A second major tradition, theurgy, is a distinctly late antique development. Iamblichus, in De Mysteriis (c. 300 CE), described theurgy as a form of ritual action in which a practitioner sought to summon, embody, or merge with divine or semi-divine beings. Proclus, head of the Athenian Academy, developed the philosophical case for theurgy in his commentary on the Timaeus. Theurgical practice used statues, hymns, invocations, and what the sources call the paradeisos — the visible descent of spirits into statues, animals, or human mediums. Theurgy is the most plausible classical ancestor of later mediumship, although the technical vocabulary is different. The figure of the oracle at Delphi, the sibyls, the Roman tradition of the sortes (drawing lots for guidance), and the early Christian reports of possession by the Holy Spirit all belong to this wider family of contact practices. I. M. Lewis, in Ecstatic Religion (1971), has argued that possession is in fact a cross-cultural religious institution with its own rules and its own social function.

In medieval Europe, the Christian church formally suppressed necromancy as a forbidden category of magic, even while accepting the possibility of miracles, saints, and the intercession of angels. The technical literature — preserved in Arabic and Latin — drew on theurgy, on Hermetic philosophy, and on Kabbalah to instruct readers in the conjuration of spirits, including those of the dead. The grimoire tradition that culminated in the Lemegeton (Lesser Key of Solomon), preserved in seventeenth-century manuscripts, contains detailed instructions for the conjuration of spirits into a triangle or circle, a ritual theatre in which the operator stood inside a protected space and commanded the spirit to appear. Strictly speaking, the operator of such a ritual is a magician, not a medium: the spirit is expected to manifest in the room rather than in the body of the practitioner. The underlying logic of guarded, ceremonial encounter is the same, however, and the line from grimoire to séance is direct. For the wider context of the ritual tradition, see ritual and ceremonial magic; for the Hermetic background to these practices, see hermeticism and alchemy.

The Birth of Modern Spiritualism

The Spiritualist movement is conventionally dated to 31 March 1848, when the Fox sisters, Kate (1837-1892) and Margaret (1833-1893), reported mysterious rapping sounds in their home in Hydesville, New York. The family interpreted the rappings as the voice of a murdered peddler whose body was said to lie buried in the cellar. The girls devised a code — one rap for “yes,” two for “no” — and the raps answered questions. The story travelled quickly. Within a few years, hundreds of small circles in the United States and Europe were gathering to hear rappings, watch tables tip, and receive messages from the dead. The most detailed early account is the autobiography of Leah Underhill (Fox), The Missing Link in Modern Spiritualism (1885), which is also one of the most useful primary sources for the early years of the movement.

The Fox sisters were the first famous mediums of the modern era, but they were not the last. Their case is also the founding case of the long argument over whether the rappings were genuine. Both sisters later recanted. In 1888 Margaret Fox demonstrated in front of a sizable audience at the Academy of Music in New York that she could produce the rappings herself, by cracking the joints of her toes. The demonstration was reported at length in the New York World and other papers. Yet by then, the movement she had helped ignite had become a major religious current with its own churches, periodicals, and theories. John Beloff’s The New Believers (1990) is a sympathetic but sceptical overview of the case and its later history; Logie Barrow’s Independent Spirits (1986) is the standard historical account of Spiritualism in Britain.

Three early phenomena defined the movement. The first was the rapping, which soon developed into a system of communication between sitters (the people attending) and an unseen intelligence. The second was table-turning, in which a group would lay their hands on a light three-legged table, which would then rotate, tilt, or rap. This practice swept through Europe in the 1850s; the Parisian salon of the elder Alexandre Dumas tried it, and there is a famous satirical drawing by Honoré Daumier of a fashionable table-turning party. The third was the rise of the trance medium, a person who would fall into an altered state, speak in altered voices, and deliver messages attributed to deceased relatives or to named spirits. The French psychical researcher Théodore Flournoy, in From India to the Planet Mars (1899), gives one of the best accounts of how a single medium (in his case, Hélène Smith) could produce a substantial and consistent fantasy life under trance.

The trance medium transformed Spiritualism in the 1860s and 1870s. American mediums such as the Bangs sisters, Anna Eva Fay, and the Davenport brothers toured the United States and Europe. The Davenport brothers, Ira (1839-1911) and William (1841-1877), were famous for séance demonstrations in which musical instruments played by themselves inside a locked cabinet while the brothers were tied to chairs. The acts were eventually exposed; the brothers were shown to be picking locks and the “spirit musicians” to be confederates hidden in the cabinet. Janet Oppenheim’s The Other World (1985) is the most thorough account of the early Victorian trance medium in England; Alex Owen’s The Darkened Room (1989) covers the same territory from a feminist angle and is one of the most influential works in the recent scholarship on Spiritualism.

The Victorian Séance and Its Investigators

By the 1870s, the physical séance had become a recognisable cultural institution. A typical séance in a London or New York parlour would gather eight to twelve people in a darkened room, often around a table, while a paid medium entered a trance and produced some combination of levitating objects, touched sitters, glowing lights, and voices. The materialised form of a deceased relative might appear briefly, draped in white muslin. Direct-voice mediums, of whom the most famous was the Italian Eusapia Palladino (1854-1918), claimed to produce the voice of a deceased person from a point in the air, often by means of a speaking tube held against the ear of a sitter. Automatic writing, in which the medium’s hand would move without conscious direction, was another common mode of communication; the British medium Geraldine Cummins (1890-1969) produced many pages of prose attributed to spirits between the wars. For the cultural afterlife of these practices in the visual arts, see the occult in music, film, and art.

Two organised research projects attempted to test these claims scientifically. The first was the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), founded in London in 1882 by a group of Cambridge scholars, including Henry Sidgwick (its first president), Frederic Myers, and Edmund Gurney. The SPR sent investigators to séances, took testimony from mediums and sitters, and produced some of the most detailed nineteenth-century case studies of the paranormal. The Proceedings of the SPR (1882-) and the Journal of the SPR (1884-) are still in print and remain an essential source. The second was the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR), founded in 1885, which under the presidency of William James in the 1890s took a more sympathetic line on the survival question. The SPR’s investigators came down, in most cases, against the mediums they studied. Palladino was caught cheating on multiple occasions; the most damning exposure was at Cambridge in 1895, when she was observed freeing her hand from a control loop and producing “spirit” effects by herself. The SPR also investigated the American medium Leonora Piper (1857-1950), who was the most interesting exception. Piper’s sittings went on for years, and many witnesses — including James, who devoted a long chapter of his Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) to her case — felt unable to explain them by fraud. Whatever was happening, it was not crude trickery, and it remains the most serious objection to the simple-exposure consensus.

Fraud, Exposure, and the Twentieth-Century Séance

The question of fraud runs through the entire history of modern Spiritualism. Some of the most celebrated mediums of the late nineteenth century were eventually exposed. Daniel Dunglas Home (1833-1886), one of the most famous, was never caught cheating in circumstances he did not control, but several of his contemporaries were. The materialisation medium Florence Cook (1856-1904) was caught with a confederate dressed as the materialised spirit “Katie King”; the Boston medium Mina “Margery” Crandon (1888-1941) was exposed by the magician Harry Houdini, who had been a passionate investigator of the paranormal. The Scole experiment, conducted in the 1990s by a group of British and American researchers in a house in Norfolk, produced photographs of alleged spirit lights and claimed materialisations, but the experiment has never been accepted as evidence of survival after death by mainstream parapsychology. Jenny Hazelgrove, in Spiritualism and British Society between the Wars (2000), gives a good account of how the 1920s controversies shaped the public perception of the field.

Fraud is a real and recurring feature of the history of mediumship. It is also not the whole story. Some of the mediums investigated by the SPR and its successors produced effects in conditions controlled by sceptical investigators. The trance speaking of Mrs. Piper, the table-turnings of European home circles, the healing practices of Brazilian spiritists (most influentially documented in Roger Bastide’s The African Religions of Brazil, 1960), the demonstrations of Washington Irving Bishop (the “muscle reader” of the 1870s, who was, importantly, a stage performer rather than an academic investigator), and the remote-viewing experiments of the twentieth century sit uncomfortably in any single explanation. Whether the most interesting cases were fraud, dissociation, unconscious role-play, or genuine contact with the dead is, for many researchers, an open question. Tatiana Kontou and Morag Martin’s edited collection Spirits and Spirituality (2019) gives a recent cross-disciplinary sampling of the state of the question. For a careful historical account of the practice, see how séances work and what to expect.

Spiritualism as a Religious Movement

Spiritualism was not only a matter of séances and investigations. It became, in the second half of the nineteenth century, a substantial religious movement with its own clergy, churches, and theology. The first Spiritualist church in the United States was organised in the 1850s; in Britain, Spiritualist churches appeared in the 1860s and proliferated after the First World War, when the bereavements of the conflict drove a wave of recruitment. A typical Spiritualist church service includes hymns, prayers, a sermon, and a period in which the medium delivers messages from the dead to members of the congregation, often with names and specific personal details. Modern Spiritualist churches continue to exist on both sides of the Atlantic; the Spiritualists’ National Union in the United Kingdom has on the order of three hundred member churches, and the National Spiritualist Association of Churches (now renamed the National Spiritual Alliance) remains the largest US body.

The theology of Spiritualism is, on the whole, optimistic. The dead continue to exist, evolve, and remain interested in the living. Suffering in the afterlife is, in most schools, temporary. The communication of the living with the dead is treated as a sacred act akin to prayer. Spiritualism has historically had little use for the doctrine of eternal damnation, and considerable sympathy for liberal Protestantism and the new theosophical and occult movements of the late nineteenth century. Helena Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy, was a former Spiritualist medium; the early Theosophical Society was for several years formally affiliated with the London Spiritualist Alliance. The line between Spiritualism, Theosophy, and the broader esoteric revival of the late nineteenth century is permeable, and the doctrinal cross-fertilisation is one of the most understudied features of the period. Shane McCorristine’s Spectres of the Self (2010) argues that the Spiritualist idea of a discarnate self helped shape the modern Western concept of the unconscious, which is one of the more interesting recent theses in the field. For the historical context of this convergence, see the history of the occult.

The New Age Channeling Movement

After the Second World War, the term “channeling” largely replaced “mediumship” in popular North American usage, although the practices were continuous. The 1970s and 1980s saw an explosion of channelled entities. The discarnate “Seth” was channelled by the American poet Jane Roberts (1929-1984); the sittings began in 1963, and the first book, The Seth Material, was published in 1970, followed by Seth Speaks (1972) and The Nature of Personal Reality (1974). “Ramtha” was channelled by JZ Knight (b. 1946), a former insurance broker, in Yelm, Washington, beginning in 1977; the founding of Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment (RSE) followed. Other major channels included Darryl Anka’s “Bashar” and Esther Hicks’s “Abraham,” and the movement produced a long tail of minor channels. Most of these channelled entities claimed to be non-physical beings who were once human, or who had never been human, and who offered teachings on topics ranging from metaphysics to business. Christopher Iannini’s Spiritual Machines (2001) and Pamela Thurschwell’s The Ghost in the Machine (2010) are useful on the relationship between channeling and the developing computer-and-cyborg imagery of the period.

The cultural distance between a Victorian séance and a modern New Age channeling is large, but the formal structure is similar. A medium or channel enters an altered state; a named entity speaks; the entity is treated as an authority; sitters record the messages. The contents have changed — nineteenth-century spirits were usually dead relatives, twentieth- and twenty-first-century spirits are usually teachers from a higher plane — but the ritual shape is recognisable. The New Age channeling movement is closely linked to the broader interest in witchcraft and Wicca, to Neopaganism, and to the post-1960s revival of ritual magic.

The Roman Catholic Distinction

The Roman Catholic Church treats spirit communication, and especially modern channeling, with a particular kind of caution that has changed very little in two centuries. The relevant principle is the distinction between public revelation, which was completed with the death of the last apostle and is binding on the faithful, and private revelation, which can occur at any time but is owed no assent. Apparitions, locutions, messages from angels or saints, and even communication with the souls in Purgatory are, in principle, possible, but they are treated as private matters to be submitted to the discernment of the bishop or the local ordinary. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992, §§ 2115-2117) and the 1973 statement on channeling issued by the Committee for Pro-Life Activities of the United States Catholic Conference both warn against practices such as spirit conjuration, automatic writing, and Ouija sessions. The argument is not that the underlying phenomena are impossible but that they are considered spiritually dangerous, easily corrupted, and likely to involve deception by the devil. This is a pastoral and ascetical judgment rather than a metaphysical denial, and the pastoral tone is what distinguishes the Catholic position from the simple disproof offered by most secular sceptics.

The Catholic position is, in this respect, more interesting than the simple disproof. It treats communication with the dead as a real possibility that nonetheless lies under a strict pastoral and liturgical discipline. The Church has its own approved channels: the canonised saints, the intercession of the Virgin, the sacrament of the Eucharist, the saints of the calendar. Practices outside this structure, including séances and Ouija sessions, are considered to expose the practitioner to spiritual danger, even when the messages received are accurate or morally edifying. The argument is not “spirits do not exist” but “this is not a safe or approved way to approach them.” Richard Devetak’s work on Catholic responses to modern mediumship is a useful entry point to this literature.

The Survival Question

The deepest question raised by the history of mediumship is the survival question: do the messages that mediums deliver actually come from the dead? The Spiritualist movement answered yes, with great confidence. The Roman Catholic Church answered with pastoral caution. The sceptical and scientific mainstream answered no, on the grounds that no repeatable, controlled experiment has ever demonstrated contact with discarnate intelligences. The Society for Psychical Research, which was founded precisely to settle the question, never settled it. Its investigators split into two camps, sometimes called the “survivalists” and the “animists.” The survivalists, of whom Frederic Myers was the most articulate, took the apparent communications at face value and proposed that the human personality survived bodily death. Myers’s own magnum opus, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (1903), remains the most ambitious metaphysical statement of the survival hypothesis produced within the SPR. The animists, led in the British SPR by Edmund Gurney and in the American SPR by William James, suggested that the medium’s messages were better explained by telepathy, dissociation, and the operations of a layered unconscious mind. The fact that two of the most able nineteenth-century psychical researchers, both intimately familiar with the case material, came to opposite conclusions should be kept in mind by anyone tempted to think the matter settled.

The question has not gone away. The twenty-first century has seen a continuing trickle of academic and quasi-academic work on the survival hypothesis, including the research of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia, founded by Ian Stevenson in 1967 and continued by Jim Tucker. Most of this work has shifted to the study of children who report memories of past lives, the interpretation of which is itself contested. Adam Crabtree’s work, surveyed in Christopher May’s In the Name of the Demons (2014), is one of the more serious recent attempts to give the dissociative alternative a precise theoretical shape. The mediumship question has, in this sense, gradually migrated from the séance room to the parapsychology laboratory, with mixed results. For a focused account of the techniques and devices that emerged from this history, see the Ouija board and automatic writing.

Cultural and Psychological Frameworks

Modern academic interest in mediumship has not been confined to parapsychology. Historians of religion treat the séance as one of the major religious innovations of the nineteenth century. Sociologists treat Spiritualism as a template for the more recent New Age channeling movement and for the rise of alternative spiritualities. Anthropologists study trance possession in Haitian Vodou, Brazilian Umbanda, Korean mudang practice, and the various possession churches of West Africa and the African diaspora. Terence Palmer’s Shouldering the Mantle (2010) and Wouter Hanegraaff’s New Age Religion and Western Culture (1996) are useful starting points for the modern academic study. Antoine Faivre’s Western Esotericism (2010, English translation) provides the broader academic framework within which Spiritualism is now commonly treated.

The ideomotor effect — small, unconscious movements that produce apparently purposeful motion, such as the tilting of a table or the moving of a planchette — is now the most widely accepted scientific explanation for many séance phenomena. It was first systematically described by the physiologist William Benjamin Carpenter in 1852, in a paper to the Royal Institution (“On the Influence of Suggestion in Modifying and Directing Muscular Movement, independently of Volition”), and has been confirmed many times since. The social dynamics of a séance — the pressure to produce results, the heavy emotional investment of bereaved sitters, the willingness of the medium to be the focus of the group — are widely understood in social psychology. Dissociation, including dissociative identity disorder, has been offered as a framework for the medium’s apparent possession. None of these frameworks, however, exhausts the historical record, and serious students of the field still disagree about how much of the mediumship record is fraud, how much is unconscious role-play, and how much, if any, is genuine contact with discarnate intelligences. The most interesting recent work, including that of Crabtree, has been on the question of whether the dissociative explanation is in fact as complete as it once seemed.

What is certain is that the practice has never gone away. The contemporary Spiritualist church in Britain, the New Age channeling circuit in the United States, the medium’s parlour in any small town in Latin Europe, the growing revival of interest in trance and possession in the global South, and the sustained academic interest in parapsychology at a small number of universities all attest to the durability of the practice. The cultural and psychological frameworks for understanding it continue to evolve, but the underlying human wish — to hear the voice of someone who has died — is older than any of the frameworks used to explain it, and is unlikely to disappear just because the frameworks multiply. For a survey of how all of this has been absorbed into novels, films, and popular music, see the occult in popular culture.

Sources and Further Reading

John Beloff, The New Believers: Sects, Cults and Alternative Religions (London: Batsford, 1990) — a sympathetic but sceptical overview by a parapsychologist.
Logie Barrow, Independent Spirits: Spiritualism and English Plebeians, 1855-1910 (London: Routledge, 1986) — the standard social history of British Spiritualism.
Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989) — the most influential work on women and the séance.
Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
Antoine Faivre, Western Esotericism: A Concise History (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010) — places Spiritualism within the academic study of Western esotericism.
Wouter Hanegraaff (ed.), Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism (Leiden: Brill, 2005) — the standard reference work.
Shane McCorristine, Spectres of the Self: Thinking about Ghosts and Ghost-Seeing in England, 1750-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
I. M. Lewis, Ecstatic Religion: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession (London: Routledge, 1971; 3rd ed. 2003) — the classic cross-cultural study of possession.
Roger Bastide, The African Religions of Brazil: Toward a Sociology of the Interpenetration of Civilizations (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1960; English trans. 1978).
Christopher May (ed.), In the Name of the Demons: The Medium and the Paranormal (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014) — a recent collection with material on Adam Crabtree and the dissociative alternative.
Frederic W. H. Myers, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (London: Longmans, Green, 1903; abridged ed. ed. Susy Smith, New York: University Books, 1961).
Jenny Hazelgrove, Spiritualism and British Society between the Wars (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).
Encyclopedia of the Unexplained: Psychic Phenomena, Spirit Possession, Ectoplasm, Materialization, Levitation, Telepathy, Clairvoyance (London: Routledge, 2002) — useful for the most contested categories of phenomena.