Spiritualist Mediums Research Articles

A Biopsychosocial Approach to Creative Dissociation: Remarks on a Case of Mediumistic Painting

A category of religious experience that still preserves much of the original blurring and fusion between art and religion is mediumistic or spirit painting. Performed by spiritualist mediums in different locations around the world, this form of religious experience is characterized by the supposed ability of an individual to serve as an instrument for deceased artists to continue to perform their works. In the manner of so-called automatic writing, mediums try to reproduce aspects of the style of deceased painters, in order to demonstrate their identity and survival of bodily death. Little scientific research has been conducted concerning this topic. We present a brief analysis of painting activity performed by Jacques Andrade, a Brazilian medium. Born in 1945, Andrade, who has been active in the Brazilian Kardecist movement for many years, has dedicated most of his religious life to mediumistic painting at his center (The Leonardo da Vinci Salon of Mediumistic Art). Data about the medium were collected on several different occasions, from 1998 to 2013, and include psychophysiological measures (hand temperature, heart rate, bilateral skin conductance, muscle tension, and electrical brain activity), psychological measures (Dissociative Experiences Scale, Tellegen Absorption Scale, Revised Transliminality Scale, and Childhood Trauma Questionnaire), artistic material, observational data (photographs of paintings, observations of the medium in action), and some basic socio-demographic and biographical information. Basically we sought to evaluate: a) general aspects of the painting technique and style employed by the medium, b) the main features of his pictorial production, and c) the general behavior shown by the medium during the mediumistic activity. In an effort to combine and integrate our findings about this case, we propose a biopsychosocial approach to the study of what might be called creative dissociation. NeuroQuantology | December 2013 | Volume 11 | Issue 4 | Page 544-572

Spiritual stars: religion and celebrity in the careers of spiritualist mediums

Scholars in celebrity studies have posited a similarity between cinematic stardom and the formation of religious and magical beliefs about the powers of spiritual leaders. Steve Nolan, for instance...

“Say From Whence You Owe This Strange Intelligence”: Investigating Explanatory Systems of Spiritualist Mental Mediumship Using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis

Walsh and Vaughan (1993) defined transpersonal experiences as those “in which the sense of identity or self extends beyond (trans) the individual or personal to encompass wider aspects of humankind, life, psyche or cosmos” (p. 203). One population who regularly report such experiences are mediums. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten spiritualist mediums to explore their lived experience, such as how they communicate with the deceased, the meaning of spirit guide phenomena, and the role of mediumship, regardless of the actual ontology of mediumship. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) identified three themes: explanatory systems of mediumship, spirit guides as transcendental beings versus aspects of self, and the purpose of mediumship. These themes illuminated aspects of the mediumistic experience that have implications for an understanding of states of consciousness, transcendence, and the Higher Self.

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

The medium on the stage: Trance and performance in nineteenth-century spiritualism

While historians of spiritualism have been eager to focus on its political and social implications, less attention has been given to the fact that spirit communication was also a matter of visual spectacle. This article aims to analyse spiritualist séances as a form of spectacular entertainment. Relying on a wide array of spiritualist sources, it argues that séances were meant not only as moments of religious and scientific inquiry, but also as a brilliant amusement where theatrical effects embellished an exciting shared experience. The intermingling of religion and entertainment can thus be seen as one of the defining characteristics of the spiritualist experience. After sketching the history of the presence of spiritualist mediums on the stage and discussing the involvement of professionalism in mediumship, the article will then focus on the trance as a specific performance strategy. It will examine how the trance combined issues of automatism, theatricality and absorption, and contributed to the coexistence in spirit séances of spectacular features and claims of authenticity.

William james, gustav fechner, and early psychophysics.

American psychologist and philosopher William James devoted the entirety of his career to exploring the nature of volition, as expressed by such phenomena as will, attention, and belief. As part of that endeavor, James’s unorthodox scientific pursuits, from his experiments with nitrous oxide and hallucinogenic drugs to his investigation of spiritualist mediums, represent his attempt to address the “hard problems” of consciousness for which his training in brain physiology and experimental psychology could not entirely account. As a student, James’s reading in chemistry and physics had sparked his interest in the concepts of energy and force, terms that he later deployed in his writing about consciousness and in his arguments against philosophical monism and scientific materialism, as he developed his “radically empiricist” ideas privileging discontinuity and plurality. Despite James’s long campaign against scientific materialism, he was, however, convinced of the existence of a naturalistic explanation for the more “wayward and fitful” aspects of mind, including transcendent experiences associated with hysteria, genius, and religious ecstasy. In this paper, I examine aspects of James’s thought that are still important for contemporary debates in psychology and neuroscience: his “transmission theory” of consciousness, his ideas on the “knowing of things together,” and, finally, the related concept of “the compounding of consciousness,” which postulates the theoretical possibility for individual entities within a conscious system of thought to “know” the thoughts of others within the system. Taken together, these ideas suggest that James, in spite of, or perhaps because of, his forays into metaphysics, was working toward a naturalistic understanding of consciousness, what I will term a “distributive model,” based on his understanding of consciousness as an “awareness” that interacts dynamically within, and in relation to, its environment.

Practising Medicine and Spiritualism in the 1860s: Sacred Encounters of Drs. Moses Colby and Susan Kilborn as "Lived Religion"

Le spiritisme n'avait rien d'inusité au XIX e siècle, une époque de turbulences sociales intellectuelles où les vieilles croyances étaient contestées et les nouvelles orthodoxies n'avaient pas vu le jour. Pour ses praticiens du XIX e siècle, le spiritisme était à la fois une religion et une science. Tandis que les théories concurrentes sur la nature de la maladie et du corps opposaient les médecins orthodoxes aux praticiens « irréguliers », la popularité des « médiums médicaux » faisait du spiritisme un facteur de déstabilisation non seulement de la religion, mais également de la médecine. Vue par le prisme de la « religion vécue », la collaboration non conventionnelle qu'entretenaient la D re Susan Kilborn et le D r Moses Colby, son défunt mentor, par l'entremise d'un médium en spiritisme révèle comment les scientifiques protestants pouvaient ressentir la présence du sacré par l'esprit et le corps. Non seulement par son étrangeté, mais également par son caractère ordinaire d'expérience vécue, cette étude de cas présente à la fois un problème et une occasion d'aller plus loin dans la quête perpétuelle de repenser l'histoire de la religion au Canada.

Most Haunted and the Convergence of Traditional Belief and Popular Television

LivingTV's flagship series, Most Haunted, has been haunting the satellite network since 2002. The set-up of the series is straightforward: a team of investigators, including a historian, a parapsychologist, and “spiritualist medium” Derek Acorah, “legend-trip,” spending the night at some location within the United Kingdom that is reputed to be haunted, with the hopes of catching on video concrete proof of the existence of ghosts. However, unlike other reality television or true-life supernatural television shows, Most Haunted includes and addresses the audience less as a spectator and more as an active participant in the ghost hunt. Watching Most Haunted, we are directed not so much to accept or reject the evidence provided, as to engage in the debate over the evidence's veracity. Like legend-telling in its oral form, belief in or rejection of the truth-claims of the story are less central than the possibility of the narrative's truth—a position that invites debates about those truth-claims. This paper argues that Most Haunted, in its premise and structure, not only depicts or represents legend texts (here ghost stories), but engages the audience in the debates about the status of its truth-claims, thereby bringing this mass-mediated popular culture text closer to the folkloristic, legend-telling dynamic than other similar shows.

“SPIRITS IN THE MATERIAL WORLD”: SPIRITUALISM AND IDENTITY IN THE FIN DE SIÈCLE

BOOKS ARE SOMETIMES published posthumously. In the nineteenth century, books were occasionally written posthumously when spiritualist mediums claimed to receive communications from the spirits of famous writers anxious to keep in touch with their public from beyond the grave. Oscar Wilde wrote his last book twenty-six years after his death, Oscar Wilde from Purgatory: Psychic Messages (1926), edited by Hester Travers Smith, the medium who received the messages while in trance and inscribed them through the process known as “automatic writing.” The book was highly regarded in the spiritualist community, boasting a preface by Sir William Barrett, a famous physicist, a member of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and – along with a number of other illustrious men of science such as physicists Sir William Crookes and Oliver Lodge as well as biologist Alfred Russell Wallace – a convert to spiritualism.

Esoteric Art Confronting the Public Eye: The Abstract Spirit Drawings of Georgiana Houghton

he term “Victorian art” commonly brings to mind narrative works rich in anecdotal detail. Abstraction seems far away, part of a different century and a different place—twentieth-century Germany, Russia, and France, not nineteenth-century England. Some well-known Victorian artists did begin the process of abstraction—James McNeill Whistler, Albert Moore, and other artists associated with the aesthetic movement minimized subject matter and placed greater emphasis on the material qualities of painting. Yet even aestheticism remained figurative, as the product was never fully abstract. Given the lack of abstraction within Victorian visual culture, watercolors such as those painted by the artist Georgiana Houghton in the 1860s and 1870s seem shockingly out of place. In her work The Eye of God from 1862 (fig. 1), we see a tangle of transparent straight, wavy, and spiraling lines flowing out of the left corner of the paper and up from the bottom edge of the page as white filaments float across the surface. No recognizable forms appear; all that is visible are lines and colors—yellow, sepia, and blue. There is an organic quality to the undulations, a sense of microscopic detail, and a feeling of being in a deep-sea world or otherwise mysterious place. The vagueness of the imagery contrasts with the specificity of the title, which evokes a dense underlying symbolism. Houghton attributed meaning to particular shapes, colors, and directions in her paintings. While her works were abstract, they remained representational. Born in the Canary Islands in 1814, Houghton spent most of her life in London, working as an artist and a Spiritualist medium. 1 In her youth, Houghton had trained as a painter, but she gave up her artistic practice in 1851 when her youngest sister died. In 1859, still in mourning for her sister, Houghton became attracted to Spiritualism and especially to the idea that the spirit survives after the death of the body and can communicate with the living through a human medium. T

Mediator Deathwork

ABSTRACT The most discussed and analyzed form of deathwork is the dyadic therapist ↔ client relationship, but this far from exhausts the various types of professional work involving the dead. Mediator deathwork is where the professional gleans or constructs information about the dead, edits and polishes it, and publicly presents the edited version in a public rite; this entails a triadic flow of information: the dead → the mediator → public rite. Examples include pathologists, coroners, American funeral directors, funeral celebrants, obituary writers, spiritualist mediums, and museum curators. Other types include barrier deathwork (in which the professional insulates the living from the dead—the dead | the living— as in British funeral directing), and intercessory deathwork in which priests send prayers the other way, from the living to, or on behalf of, the dead: mourner → priest → the dead. The article focuses on mediator deathwork because, though it is the most widespread form of deathwork, it is the least discussed and analyzed.

The Photographic Medium: Representation, Reconstitution, Consciousness, and Collaboration in Early-Twentieth-Century Spiritualism

This article discusses the image of the ghost as adapted by and to photography. It focuses on the evolution of the photographic ghost in relation to a distinctive manifestation of psychic photography (or spirit photography) prevalent during the early twentieth century. Psychic investigators observed that in some photographs the faces of spirits that developed on the glass-plate negatives appeared to have been handmade.1 More specifically, they looked like collages, composed of fragments of existing portrait photographs and prints, and of everyday materials, re-photographed, and superimposed on the plate in the manner of a double-exposure (Fig. 1). Several notable investigators advocated that this phenomenon need not be construed as evidence of fakery. There was another explanation: that psychic photographs contained portraits not of but by disincarnate souls, made from images drawn from the Spiritualist medium’s or the spirit’s visual memories of photographs of themselves, others, and objects, which were assembled, reproduced, and imprinted upon the photographic plate. Thus, psychic photographs were interpreted as being fabricated artefacts, born of an interactive collaboration between disincarnate and embodied consciousness, created (somehow) in the ether or a psychic aura, mediated via the camera (in some cases), and made tangible on the sensitized emulsion. This paper examines the unique and overlooked interaction between science and spirit, apparatus and appearances, and matter and minds, involving and connecting attendant and (purportedly) remote psyches.

Listening for God in America

On Sunday, May 13, 2001, New York Times Magazine featured a brief story on a teenage Christian rally in its What They Were Thinking section. The feature offered this reflection from a young woman named Phillippi: We were at a big gathering where Christians come together every year. There's concerts, speakers and worship. That was during worship when musicians from Teen Mania Ministry sings [sic] songs. I pray and close my eyes, and songs are going in my head, and I'm worshipping him. It's not rock. It's quiet worship music or fast celebration songs. I listen to them all time. I downloaded them off of Napster. Their behavior is scarcely aberrant. Listeners more cash and no computer can purchase Christian rock and pop at every music store in America, and a CD set, Songs 4 Worship, sold by Time-Life and featuring groups like Maranatha Singers and Charlie LeBlanc, has been a regular feature of cable TV advertising throughout summer of 2001. It's not clear if Phillippi or purchasers of Songs 4 Worship would be distressed or pleased by Leigh Eric Schmidt's book, Hearing Things. On one hand, Schmidt argues that the Enlightenment project essentially destroyed faith in auditory spiritual communication. Enlightenment critics associated claims about hearing God erratic revivalism, and their nineteenthcentury successors linked aural communication supernatural to pure charlatanry. By end of century, rush to contemporary technology induced images of sheer silliness, as psycophone, a telephone that spiritualist mediums used with a mix of scientific intensity and mystic awe to [hear] friendly voices of spirits (p. 243). On other hand, Schmidt concludes tales of twenty-first century healers who employ mystical acoustics: psychotherapist Dianne Skafte, who instructs on Listening to Oracle (1997), and movie Contact, in which Jodie Foster's character waits for extraterrestrial contact through electronic transmissions. Would Phillippi interpret these efforts as misguided confirmation

Continuing bonds: Relationships between the living and the dead within contemporary Spiritualism

A number of recent authors have discussed the notion of 'continuing bonds' and methods whereby the living may maintain bonds with the deceased. One such method mentioned anecdotally is the consulting of Spiritualist mediums, although no empirical research has been conducted into this phenomenon to date. The aim of this article is to fill these lacunae in the literature through a discussion of the relationship between the living and the deceased within contemporary Spiritualism, drawing on fieldwork conducted at two Spiritualist centres in the north of England. To this end, I will propose a typology of the different strands or elements that make up the communications that take place during public demonstrations of mediumship - advice, support and evidence of survival - as well as discussing the influence of such messages on their recipients. Finally, I will conclude by answering two inter-linked questions; is bereavement a significant factor leading to an involvement in Spiritualism and, if so, is the desire for messages or a continued relationship with the deceased a significant factor in individuals' continued involvement. Suggestions for further research are also discussed.

Continuing bonds: relationships between the living and the dead within contemporary Spiritualism

A number of recent authors have discussed the notion of 'continuing bonds' and methods whereby the living may maintain bonds with the deceased. One such method mentioned anecdotally is the consulting of Spiritualist mediums, although no empirical research has been conducted into this phenomenon to date. The aim of this article is to fill these lacunae in the literature through a discussion of the relationship between the living and the deceased within contemporary Spiritualism, drawing on fieldwork conducted at two Spiritualist centres in the north of England. To this end, I will propose a typology of the different strands or elements that make up the communications that take place during public demonstrations of mediumship - advice, support and evidence of survival - as well as discussing the influence of such messages on their recipients. Finally, I will conclude by answering two inter-linked questions; is bereavement a significant factor leading to an involvement in Spiritualism and, if so, is the desire for messages or a continued relationship with the deceased a significant factor in individuals' continued involvement. Suggestions for further research are also discussed.

Henry Irving and the Staging of Spiritualism

Spiritualism enjoys an equivocal reputation not unlike that of wrestling – for whatever their intrinsic qualities, both benefit greatly from the trappings of showmanship. Supposed spiritualist mediums first manifested themselves during the Victorian era, which seems to have been highly susceptible to such fraudsters as the American Davenport brothers – whose touring ‘seances’ were, however, greeted with rather more scepticism in the North of England than in London. While audiences seemed to enjoy the way in which such demonstrations of spiritual possession were presented in a manner resembling a professional conjuring act, professional conjurers were properly offended by such presumption. So, too, was the young Henry Irving, who, with two companions, took up a challenge in The Era, the newspaper of the variety profession, to emulate the mystical achievements of the Davenports. The following paper, which was originally presented in July 1995 at the Theatre Museum as part of the celebrations of the centenary of Irving's knighthood, traces the rise and development of the spiritualist craze, and illuminates this previously obscure aspect of Irving's career. Helen Nicholson is currently completing her PhD on the life of the Victorian actress and singer Georgina Weldon, before taking up an appointment as a drama lecturer in the English Department at Manchester Metropolitan University. She has published articles on Georgina Weldon in Occasional Papers on Women and Theatre, on the Victorian supernatural, and on Victorian fairies in History Workshop Journal.

"The Very Happiest Tiding": Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Correspondence with Arkansas Spiritualists

THE SPIRITUALIST MOVEMENT BEGAN DURING the wee hours of April 1, 1848, in the village of Hydesville, New York. On that April Fools' Day morning, two teenaged sisters, Margaret and Kate Fox, had what to observers appeared to be communications with a ghost who claimed to have been murdered at the house years before their family moved in. Mysterious knocks emanated from the walls of the Fox's house. A neighbor-not the girls-suggested they might be spelling out a message: one knock for a, two knocks for b, and so forth. Laboriously rendering each word in knocks, the spirit provided details about the manner of its murder and subsequent burial in the cellar of the Fox home. News of this event was picked up first by the New York Tribune and subsequently by other newspapers. Margaret and Kate Fox promptly became famous. On the heels of this story, thousands of men and women across the United States discovered their own ability to function as mediums, and spiritualism suddenly was all the rage. Everyone, it seemed, was either experimenting with it or sharply criticizing it. For some of its participants, spiritualism was no more than a pleasant group diversion for long, dreary afternoons spent in the parlor. For people grieving the loss of a loved one, however, it offered solace and a feeling of re-connection with the departed. Others, including prominent intellectuals and reformers, were drawn to the movement by a desire to discover truth or to understand better the mysteries of the universe. Spiritualism quickly established itself on the American and European continents. It has been estimated that within seven years of the April Fools' Day incident at the Fox house there were two million spiritualists in the United States.1 Arkansas was not left out of the phenomenon. In April 1872, Claire Robertson advertised her demonstrations of psychic manifestations in the Arkansas Gazette. On February 16, 1877, the newspaper stated there were one hundred and fifty members of the Spiritualist sect living in the city of Little Rock. During 1879, numerous reports of spirit apparitions appeared in the Gazette.2 Through the following century, a number of prominent Arkansans professed their belief in spiritualism. William Grant Still, a composer of orchestral music, and his wife, Verna Arvey, a concert pianist and journalist, consulted spiritualist mediums for years.3 Well-known Arkansas author Bernie Babcock was also a spiritualist.4 Mrs. Babcock founded and was the first curator of the Arkansas Museum of Science and History in Little Rock. Housed in the old Tower Building, the museum's quarters were originally a Civil War arsenal where many soldiers suffered and died. Since its inception there have been reports by its staff of a variety of apparitions. A 1995 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette article identified this MacArthur Park building as one of the most haunted structures in the South.5 Perhaps the most prominent spiritualist in Arkansas history was the author, editor, journalist, and clubwoman, Lessie Stringfellow Read. Read moved to Fayetteville with her adoptive parents in 1911. Her adoptive father, Henry Martyn Stringfellow, was an internationally acclaimed horticulturist whose biography and own spiritualist affiliations were noted in Who's Who in America.7 Miss Lessie, as she came to be known around Fayetteville, was active in the Red Cross, the women's suffrage movement, the establishment of Fayetteville's first public library, and many other civic affairs. Beginning her career as a journalist, Lessie Read rose to the editorship of the local newspaper, the Fayetteville Democrat, after her boss resigned from the post to volunteer during World War I. In addition to editing the Fayetteville newspaper for twenty-eight years, Lessie handled all publicity and edited the monthly news bulletin for the General Federation of Women's Clubs, which was at that time the largest women's organization in the world. …

“I Must Have My House in Order”: The Victorian Fatherhood of John Shoebridge Williams

This article explores the complexities of middle-class fatherhood in Victorian America through an analysis of the unpublished and published writings of Spiritualist medium John Shoebridge Williams. Through mediumistic dialogues with the spirit of his deceased daughter, Williams negotiated the changing and often contradictory ideologies of ideal manhood and fatherhood that accompanied the modernization of family life. The result was a synthetic model of paternal behavior that combined equality with deference, companionship with control, partnership with patriarchy, and traditional understandings of the father's role with the emerging new standards of the nineteenth century.

Trance Types and Amnesia Revisited: Using Detailed Interviews to Fill in the Gaps

Unconscious trance states which involve complete amnesia, and conscious trance states which involve dissociation from the body's sensory process and failure to recall speech or body sensation or movement, both occurred among North American yogis and Spiritualist mediums. Exceptions to statistically established cross‐cultural associations between mediumistic trance and amnesia are examined in terms of community and individual reportage of trance experience. The relationship between dissociation and amnesia within this sample is discussed.

The Religious Construction of Masculinity in Victorian America: The Male Mediumship of John Shoebridge Williams

After John Shoebridge Williams became a Spiritualist medium in February 1852, establishing what he believed to be contact with the spirit of his deceased daughter, Eliza, and access to the wisdom of the spirit world, the sixty-one-year-old man came to the startling realization that he was assuming the features of a woman. At least, this is what he thought as he recorded the events of March 15, 1852, in his spiritual Journal:When walking the streets of Cincinnati Eliza said to me, “You know, Dear Father, that of late years, your breasts have been partly developed like a females [sic]. This was from my influence. You were well prepared to receive me into your bosom, and already do our souls unite in substance so as to become one.”