Mediumistic Phenomena Research Articles

Спиритуализм в истории русской религиозной мысли: ключевые оценки и трактовки

The article presents a critical review of the assessments of Modern Spiritualism in Russian philosophical historiography and positions it as a certain kind of natural theology. The author positions spiritualism as a special religious philosophy and outlines the reasons why it was considered as a practice without any philosophical significance. The article considers philosophical characteristics of Spiritualism given by Russian religious philosophers and offers some critical remarks on historiography's opinion about Spiritualism as a kind of "positivism". The author suggests, that spiritualism should be investigated in the perspective of the history of philosophical and theological thought of the early New Modern period. The article deals with analogies between the themes of early modern natural theology and the problems spiritualists were deeply interested in. It touches upon the discussions about the nature of the soul, especially, the questions of its corporeality and possible annihilation. Early modern discussions about witchcraft should be studied as a key issue, which links natural theology and spiritualism. The article proposes to compare seventeenth-century "witch-hunts", aimed to prove the existence of the spirit world, and nineteenth-century investigations of mediums. The importance of Leibnizianism and pneumatological teachings of the eighteenth century as precursors of spiritualist religious and philosophical thought is also pointed out. The article proposes to investigate Spiritualism not only as a subject for Orthodox apologetics’ criticism, but also as a special kind of Christian apologetics that emerged in the early Modern period and aimed at proving the immortality of the soul while refuting the arguments of materialist critics. Both Russian spiritualists and Russian philosophers (V.S. Soloviev, N.Y. Grot, L.M. Lopatin) were interested in "mediumistic phenomena". It is argued that the spiritualists of the late 19th century sought to overcome «positivist» limitations, and were not satisfied with the Kantian solution, which put a barrier to the cognition of the "real" world. The study of Spiritualism in the perspective of Christian natural theology makes it possible to grasp the main reason for the interest of Russian philosophers in Spiritualism and its’ "psychic phenomena" – the potential opportunity to find new arguments in favor of the immortality of the soul.

Деоккультизация медиумических явлений на основе фактологических и спекулятивных данных в XIX-XX вв.

Деоккультизация медиумических явлений на основе фактологических и спекулятивных данных в XIX-XX вв.

A psychiatry's conception about mediumistic phenomena

This project aimed to investigate the psychiatrist’s conception of the mediumistic phenomena and his considerations on the mental health of the subject who experiences the mediumistic phenomena. This a qualitative research used a semi-structured interview as instrument for obtaining the data that were treated according to the method of categorical content analysis. Understanding the psychiatrists' conception of the mediumistic phenomenona is relevant because from this understanding different professional treatments can be offered, having a direct and / or indirect impact on the mental health of the patient.

Mediums and Science in Early 20th Century Europe

Abstract This paper investigates and contextualizes the contribution made by the Italian physiologist Filippo Bottazzi (1867–1941) to research on mediumistic phenomena in Europe at the beginning of the 1900s, focusing on his investigation of the claims of Eusapia Palladino’s powers, a well-known Italian physical medium who inspired the “conversion” of Cesare Lombroso. Bottazzi’s work, conducted between 1906 and 1909, is compared to that of colleagues in Italy and elsewhere and analysed in the light of the scientific methodology that he used in his research as a physiologist. This paper will review the events that led Bottazzi to take an interest in mediumship, and analyse how he designed and conducted his experiments and the conclusions that he drew from them. Particular attention will be focused on the methods and the scientific instruments that he used in his psychical research, which were in keeping with his Positivist epistemological views, as is shown by an essay on the scientific method that he wrote in the same period.

The Criminological Construction of Female Mediumship in Early Twentieth-Century Germany

ABSTRACT During the early twentieth century, several prominent fraud trials that featured mediums as defendants captured public attention in Germany. Of particular note were the trials of the “flower medium” Anna Rothe in 1902 and the criminal-telepath Else Günther-Geffers in 1928, which were given substantial coverage in the German daily press. While these sensational trials focused the public on the question of the reality of mediumistic phenomena and psychical researchers on discovering the mechanism by which mediums achieved their supernormal feats, a small number of jurists and criminologists used such cases to explore the nature of female criminality. Among them was the criminologist Erich Wulffen, whose books Psychologie des Verbrechers (Psychology of the criminal) and Das Weib als Sexualverbrecherin (Woman as sexual criminal) used Rothe and Günther-Geffers as examples of a particular type of criminal: the hysterical female swindler.

DISCOVERING PALLADINO'S MEDIUMSHIP. OTERO ACEVEDO, LOMBROSO AND THE QUEST FOR AUTHORITY.

In 1888, the spiritist Ercole Chiaia challenged Cesare Lombroso to go to Naples and study a brilliant though still unknown medium: Eusapia Palladino. At that time Lombroso turned down the challenge. However, in 1891 he became fascinated by the medium's phenomena. Despite the abundant literature on Palladino, there is still an episode that needs to be explored: in 1888, the Spanish doctor Manuel Otero Acevedo accepted the challenge rejected by Lombroso, spent three months in Naples studying the medium and invited the Italian psychiatrist to join his investigations. This unexplored episode serves to examine the role of scientific authority, testimony, and material evidence in the legitimization of mediumistic phenomena. The use Otero Acevedo made of the evidence he obtained in Naples reveals his desire to proclaim himself an authority on psychical research before other experts, such as Lombroso, Richet, and Aksakof.

'Report of the Committee on Mediumistic Phenomena', by William James (1886): With an introduction by.

Mediumship was a topic of great interest to some nineteenth-century students of mental phenomena. Together with the phenomena of hypnosis and other manifestations, mediumship was seen by many as a dissociative phenomenon. The purpose of this Classic Text is to present an excerpt of an article about the topic that William James (1842-1910) published in 1886 in the Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research about American medium Leonora E. Piper (1857-1950). The article, an indication of late nineteenth-century interactions between dissociation studies and psychical research, was the first report of research with Mrs Piper, a widely investigated medium of great importance for the development of mediumship studies. In addition to studying the case as a dissociative experience, James explored the possibility that Piper's mentation contained verifiable information suggestive of 'supernormal' knowledge. Consequently, James provides an example of a topic neglected in historical studies, the ideas of those who combined conventional dissociation studies with psychical research.

'S.W.' and C.G. Jung: mediumship, psychiatry and serial exemplarity.

On the basis of unpublished materials, this essay reconstructs Jung's seances with his cousin, Helene Preiswerk, which formed the basis of his 1902 medical dissertation, The Psychology and Pathology of so-called Occult Phenomena. It separates out Jung's contemporaneous approach to the mediumistic phenomena she exhibited from his subsequent sceptical psychological reworking of the case. It traces the reception of the work and its significance for his own self-experimentation from 1913 onwards. Finally, it reconstructs the manner in which Jung continually returned to his first model and reframed it as an exemplar of his developing theories.

Science, Seduction, and the Lure of Reality in Third Republic France

On June 8, 1905, a group of researchers representing the elite of the French scientific community gathered in the offices of the Institut general psychologique (IGP) on the rue Conde in Paris with the celebrated Italian spiritualist medium, Eusapia Palladino, and the goal of ascertaining the reality of mediumistic phenomena. In the course of forty-three seances stretched over three years, the members of the group witnessed Eusapia producing a variety of unexplainable phenomena. With her hands and feet carefully controlled by the attending scientists, Eusapia shattered drinking glasses without touching them, caused curtains and strips of fabric to billow and bulge, produced luminescent wisps of light, materialized “spirit” hands and arms, and caused tables to lift from the floor and fly about the room. The observers reported being tapped on the shoulder, poked in the back, and pinched by an unseen agent. They felt their hair being pulled and chairs suddenly jerked from underneath them and overturned by an invisible force. The movement of a small side table floating over his head caused Pierre Curie to exclaim: “What is astonishing is the precision with which the gueridon moved without touching anyone. It made a nice curve and did not touch me at all.” The physicist Jacques-Arsene d’Arsonval, seizing another table as it was floating from the floor, cried, “It is absolutely the resistance of the magnetic field!” In spite of these experiences, three years, and thousands of francs spent, the research of the IGP culminated in a disappointing lack of consensus among the attending scientists about the meaning of the phenomena. While d’Arsonval admitted in the discussions following the presentation of the written account that he and his fellow scientists had “observed phenomena” and “believed that they were protected against fraud,” in the final analysis he maintained that they could not be “scientifically certain.” The obstacle in the end proved to be the one element that the scrupulous measurements of the seances could not fathom. Like the purloined letter hidden in plain sight, subjectivity—both that of the medium and of the observers—remained

Rhodri Hayward, Resisting history: religious transcendence and the invention of the unconscious, Manchester University Press, 2007, pp. xi, 147, £40.00 (hardback 978-0-7190-7414-1).

Rhodri Hayward, Resisting history: religious transcendence and the invention of the unconscious, Manchester University Press, 2007, pp. xi, 147, £40.00 (hardback 978-0-7190-7414-1). - Volume 52 Issue 4

Table Talks: The Spiritualist Controversy of the 1870s and Dostoevsky

An early April 1875 the renowned zoologist at St. Petersburg University, Professor Nikolai Petrovich Vagner published a letter On the Subject of Modern Spiritualism in Vestnik Evropy enthusiastically describing the mediumistic phenomena he had heard and seen at seances of the French medium Camille Bredif in 1874. These phenomena (rapping, sounds, partial materialization of spirits, and so on), Vagner asserted, not only bore witness to the fact that life beyond the grave was a reality but also opened new horizons for science, which, he argued, should begin to study manifestations from the spiritual world.1 D. I. Mendeleev, Public Lecture on Modern Spiritualism.

Icelandic Spiritualism: Mediumship and Modernity in Iceland

Icelandic Spiritualism is an engaging social anthropological study of the place of spiritualism in Icelandic church and society during the first half of the twentieth century. Challenging standard theoretical approaches to the study of religion, the book contributes a wealth of data on the history of religion and psychical research, presenting it in a vivid descriptive narrative. The authors trace the role of the spirit world in Icelandic culture, giving particular attention to the distinctive history of Iceland's conversion to Christianity. They focus on the appearance of modern spiritualism as a distinct phenomenon in Icelandic life. The book studies the interaction between various groups in fin-de-siecle Icelandic society, not least in the state church, as mediumistic phenomena became widely reported through the newspapers. To some, Icelandic spiritualism may be considered a deviant case of Protestantism. What makes this book interesting, however, is that the spiritualism is seen as integral to Iceland's transition to modernity. While Icelandic Spiritualism concentrates mainly on the first half of the twentieth century, it also provides a summary of the continuation of spiritualist phenomena up to the current period. This intriguing study will be of interest to theologians, philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists.

Ethnology and Spiritualism

THERE is only one point in Mr. Tylor's communication (NATURE, Feb. 29, p. 343) on which it seems desirable that I should say a few words, in order that I may not be supposed to assent to what I conceive to be a most erroneous view. Mr. Tylor suggests that the phenomena that occur in the presence of what are called mediums, are or may be of the same nature as the subjective impressions of persons under the influence of a powerful mesmeriser. Five and twenty years ago I was myself a practised mesmeriser, and was able to produce on my own patients almost the whole range of phenomena which are exhibited in public as illustrative of “mesmerism” or “electro-biology.” I carried on numerous experiments in private, and paid especial attention to the conditions under which the phenomena occur. During the last seven years I have had repeated opportunities of examining the phenomena that occur in the presence of so-called “mediums,” often under such favourable conditions as to render trick or imposture simply impossible. I believe, therefore, I may lay claim to some qualifications for comparing the. mesmeric with the mediumistic phenomena with especial reference to Mr. Tylor's suggestion, and I find that there are two great characteristics that broadly distinguish the one from the other.