Mediumship is the practice of purportedly mediating communication between familiar spirits or spirits of the dead and living human beings. Practitioners are known as "mediums" or "spirit mediums". There are different types of mediumship or spirit channelling, including séance tables, trance, and ouija. The practice is associated with spiritualism and spiritism. A similar New Age practice is known as channeling.
Belief in psychic ability is widespread despite the absence of empirical evidence for its existence. Scientific researchers have attempted to ascertain the validity of claims of mediumship for more than one hundred years and have consistently failed to confirm them. As late as 2005, an experiment undertaken by the British Psychological Society reaffirmed that test subjects who self-identified as mediums demonstrated no mediumistic ability.
Mediumship gained popularity during the nineteenth century when ouija boards were used as a source of entertainment. Investigations during this period revealed widespread fraud—with some practitioners employing techniques used by stage magicians—and the practice began to lose credibility. Fraud is still rife in the medium or psychic industry, with cases of deception and trickery being discovered to this day.Terence Hines. (2003). Pseudoscience and the Paranormal. Prometheus Books.
Several different variants of mediumship have been described; arguably the best-known forms involve a spirit purportedly taking control of a medium's voice and using it to relay a message, or where the medium simply "hears" the message and passes it on. Other forms involve materializations of the spirit or the presence of a voice, and telekinetic activity.
Concept
In Spiritism and Spiritualism the medium has the role of an intermediary between the world of the living and the world of spirit. Mediums say that they can listen to and relay messages from spirits, or that they can allow a spirit to control their body and speak through it directly or by using automatic writing or drawing.
Spiritualists classify types of mediumship into two main categories: "mental" and "physical":Imagine Spirit (2019). 'Differences between Mental-Physical-Trance Mediumship'. Imagine Spirit Universal Psychic Arts Training [online] Accessed at: https://imaginespirit.com/differences-between-mental-physical-and-trance-mediums/ Mental mediums purportedly "tune in" to the spirit world by listening, sensing, or seeing spirits or symbols. Physical mediums are believed to produce the materialization of spirits, apports of objects, and other effects such as knocking, rapping, bell-ringing, etc. by using "ectoplasm" created from the cells of their bodies and those of séance attendees.
During seances, mediums are said to go into trances, varying from light to deep, that permit spirits to control their minds.Thirty Years of Psychical Research by Charles Richet p. 38 The Macmillan Company 1923
Channeling can be seen as the modern form of the old mediumship, where the "channel" (or channeller) purportedly receives messages from "teaching-spirit", an "Ascended master", from God, or from an angelic entity, but essentially through the filter of his own waking consciousness (or "Higher Self")."Glossary of Key Words Frequently Used in Parapsychology". , Parapsychological Association website. "Materialization: A phenomenon of physical mediumship in which living entities or inanimate objects are caused to take form, sometimes from ectoplasm." Retrieved January 24, 2006
History Attempts to communicate with the dead and other living human beings, aka spirits, have been documented back to early human history, such as the Biblical account of the Witch of Endor.
Mediumship became quite popular in the 19th-century United States and the United Kingdom after the rise of Spiritualism as a religious movement. Modern Spiritualism is said to date from practices and lectures of the Fox sisters in New York State in 1848. The trance mediums Paschal Beverly Randolph and Emma Hardinge Britten were among the most celebrated lecturers and authors on the subject in the mid-19th century. Allan Kardec coined the term Spiritism around 1860."Spiritism is not a religion but a science", as the famous French astronomer Camille Flammarion said in Allan Kardec's Eulogy on April 2, 1869, in Death and Its Mystery – After Death. Manifestations and Apparitions of the Dead; The Soul After Death Translated by Latrobe Carroll (London: Adelphi Terrace, 1923), archive version at Allan Kardec eulogy Kardec wrote that conversations with spirits by selected mediums were the basis of his The Spirits' Book and later, his five-book collection, Spiritist Codification.
Some scientists of the period who investigated Spiritualism also became converts. They included chemist Robert Hare, physicist William Crookes (1832–1919) and evolutionary biologist Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913).Brandon, Ruth. (1983). Scientists and the Supernormal . New Scientist. 16 June. pp. 783–86.Hines, Terence. (2003). Pseudoscience and the Paranormal. Prometheus Books. p. 52. Nobel laureate Pierre Curie took a very serious scientific interest in the work of medium Eusapia Palladino.Anna Hurwic, Pierre Curie, translated by Lilananda Dasa and Joseph Cudnik, Paris, Flammarion, 1995, pp. 65, 66, 68, 247–48. Other prominent adherents included journalist and pacifist William T. Stead (1849–1912) and physician and author Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930).Jones, Kelvin I. (1989). Conan Doyle and the Spirits: The Spiritualist Career of Arthur Conan Doyle. Aquarian Press.
After the exposure of the fraudulent use of stage magic tricks by physical mediums such as the Davenport Brothers and the Bangs Sisters, mediumship fell into disrepute. However, the religion and its beliefs continue in spite of this, with physical mediumship and seances falling out of practice and platform mediumship coming to the fore.
In the late 1920s and early 1930s there were around one quarter of a million practising Spiritualists and some two thousand Spiritualist societies in the UK in addition to flourishing microcultures of platform mediumship and 'home circles'.Sutcliffe, Steven J. (2002). Children of the New Age. p. 35. Spiritualism continues to be practised, primarily through various denominational Spiritualist churches in the United States, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. In the United Kingdom, over 340 Spiritualist churches and centres open their doors to the public and free demonstrations of mediumship are regularly performed."The SNU".
Terminology
Spirit guide
In 1958, American Spiritualist C. Dorreen Phillips wrote of her experiences with a medium at Camp Chesterfield, Indiana: "In Rev. James Laughton's séances there are many Indians. They are very noisy and appear to have great power. [...] The little guides, or doorkeepers, are usually Indian boys and girls [who act] as messengers who help to locate the spirit friends who wish to speak with you."The Autobiography of a Fortune Teller by C. Doreen Phillips, Vantage Press, 1958.
Spirit operator A spirit who uses a medium to manipulate psychic "energy" or "energy systems."
Demonstrations of mediumship
In old-line Spiritualism, a portion of the services, generally toward the end, is given over to demonstrations of mediumship through purported contact with the spirits of the dead. A typical example of this way of describing a mediumistic church service is found in the 1958 autobiography of C. Dorreen Phillips. She writes of the worship services at the Spiritualist Camp Chesterfield in Chesterfield, Indiana: "Services are held each afternoon, consisting of hymns, a lecture on philosophy, and demonstrations of mediumship."
Today "demonstration of mediumship" is part of the church service at all churches affiliated with the National Spiritualist Association of Churches (NSAC) and the Spiritualists' National Union (SNU). Demonstration links to NSAC's Declaration of Principal #9. "We affirm that the precepts of Prophecy and Healing are Divine attributes proven through Mediumship."
Mental mediumship "Mental mediumship" is communication of spirits with a medium by telepathy. The medium mentally "hears" (clairaudience), "sees" (clairvoyance), and/or feels (clairsentience) messages from spirits. Directly or with the help of a spirit guide, the medium passes the information on to the message's recipient(s). When a medium is doing a "reading" for a particular person, that person is known as the "sitter".
Trance mediumship In the 1860s and 1870s, trance mediums, also known as trance speakers, were very popular; this allowed female adherents, many who had strong interests in social justice, to speak in public in an era where doing so went against existing social norms. Many trance mediums delivered passionate speeches on abolitionism, temperance, and women's suffrage.Braude, Anne, Radical Spirits, Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth Century America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Scholars have described Leonora Piper as one of the most famous trance mediums in the history of Spiritualism.Deborah Blum. (2006). Ghost Hunters, William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death. The Penguin Press.Amy Tanner. (1994, originally published 1910). Studies in Spiritism. With an introduction by G. Stanley Hall. Prometheus Press. p. 18
Trance speakers believed that entering a trance gave them access to the spirits and, through them, to knowledge inaccessible in the waking world. Sometimes an assistant would write down the medium's words, such as in the early 20th century collaboration between the trance medium Mrs. Cecil M. Cook of the William T. Stead Memorial Center in Chicago (a religious body incorporated under the statutes of the State of Illinois) and the journalist Lloyd Kenyon Jones. The latter was a non-medium Spiritualist who transcribed Cook's messages in shorthand. He edited them for publication in book and pamphlet form.God's World: A Treatise on Spiritualism Founded on Transcripts of Shorthand Notes Taken Down, Over a Period of Five Years, in the Seance-Room of the William T. Stead Memorial Center (a Religious Body Incorporated Under the Statutes of the State of Illinois), Mrs. Cecil M. Cook, Medium and Pastor. Compiled and Written by Lloyd Kenyon Jones. Chicago, Ill.: The William T. Stead Memorial Center, 1919.
Castillo (1995) states,
Physical mediumship
Physical mediumship is defined as manipulation of energies and energy systems by spirits. This type of mediumship is said to involve perceptible manifestations, such as loud raps and noises, voices, materialized objects, apports, materialized spirit bodies, or body parts such as hands, legs and feet. The medium is used as a source of power for such spirit manifestations. By some accounts, this was achieved by using the energy or ectoplasm released by a medium, see spirit photography."Ectoplasm" def. Merriam Webster dictionary, Retrieved 18 January 2007Somerlott, Robert, Here, Mr. Splitfoot. Viking, 1971. The last physical medium to be tested by a committee from Scientific American was Mina Crandon in 1924.
Most physical mediumship is presented in a darkened or dimly lit room. Most physical mediums make use of a traditional array of tools and appurtenances, including spirit trumpets, spirit cabinets, and levitation tables.
Direct voice