Spiritualism

Spiritualism, belief that the dead manifest their presence to people, usually through a clairvoyant or medium; also, the doctrine and practices of those people who so believe.

Although spiritualism has been practiced in one form or another since prehistoric times, modern spiritualism is the result of 19th-century occurrences and research. In the United States the spiritualism movement developed around Margaret and Kate Fox, sisters in New York State who were awakened with the rest of their family by mysterious rappings in their house. The young sisters decided to ask questions with yes, no, or numerical answers, and they claimed to receive responses in the form of raps. Visitors began to crowd the Fox house to witness this spectacle or prove it a hoax, and stories quickly spread that the Fox girls were mediums in touch with spirits. The Fox sisters later conducted séances in New York City that were attended by prominent citizens. Spiritualism was given impetus by the writings of Andrew Jackson Davis, an American medium who asserted that he was capable of performing certain intellectual feats while in a trance that he could not perform normally. About this time, British surgeon James Braid provided a scientific explanation of mesmerism and thus helped establish the modern technique of hypnosis.

In 1872 a former British clergyman, William Stainton Moses, became editor of the spiritualist paper Light and wrote several books concerning spiritualism. Opposition grew as the movement gained popularity, however. Hounded by publicity, detractors, and doubters, Margaret Fox confessed in 1888 that she had made the rappings herself, but she retracted this admission the following year. Although the movement was discredited by Fox’s first statement, serious investigators believed some truth lay behind the reports of mediums. The Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882 by a distinguished group of Cambridge scholars in London, United Kingdom, and a fund was established to examine the claims of spiritualism.

A number of eminent people have supported investigations of the field, among them two British writers, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge. More recently, a former Episcopal bishop, James Albert Pike, working with former minister of the Disciples of Christ and noted medium Arthur A. Ford, engaged in attempts to communicate with Pike's dead son.

Several organized bodies of spiritualists exist, with about 600 congregations and a membership of more than 210,000 people in the United States in the late 1990s. The larger organizations include the International General Assembly of Spiritualists, with headquarters in Ashtabula, Ohio; the National Spiritual Alliance of the USA in Lake Pleasant, Massachusetts; and the National Spiritualist Association of Churches in Lily Dale, New York.