mediums

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.

Belief in psychic ability is widespread despite the absence of objective evidence for its existence. Scientific researchers have attempted to ascertain the validity of claims of mediumship. An experiment undertaken by the British Psychological Society led to the conclusion that the test subjects 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.Ruth Brandon. (1983). ''The Spiritualists: The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries''. Alfred E. Knopf. Fraud is still rife in the medium or psychic industry, with cases of deception and trickery being discovered to this day.

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.

The practice is associated with several religious-belief systems such as Shamanism, Vodun, Spiritualism, Spiritism, Candomblé, Voodoo, Umbanda and some New Age groups.

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 claim 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":
* Mental mediums purportedly "tune in" to the spirit world by listening, sensing, or seeing spirits or symbols.
* Physical mediums are believed to produce 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.

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").

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 a
Allan Kardec eulogy
/ref> Kardec claimed 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). Nobel laureate Pierre Curie took a very serious scientific interest in the work of medium Eusapia Palladino. Other prominent adherents included journalist and pacifist William T. Stead (1849–1912) and physician and author Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930).

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