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.
About
1848 in the United States, sisters Margaret and Kate Fox
were exploited by their older sister as alleged child mediums
and aroused sensational news stories that spurred the creation
of a cult of spiritualism.
It
was given impetus by the writings of another medium, the
American Andrew Jackson Davis, who asserted that he was
capable of performing certain intellectual feats while in
a trance that he could not perform normally.
About
this time, the British surgeon James Braid provided a scientific
explanation of mesmerism and thus helped to 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.
The
movement was publicly discredited after the appearance of
a number of charlatans, whose demonstrations were recognized
as simple tricks of prestidigitation. Margaret Fox herself,
as a grown woman, claimed that she had used tricks to make
her "spirit rappings."
Nevertheless,
serious investigators believed some truth lay behind the
reports of other mediums. The Society for Psychical Research
was founded 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 a former
minister of the Disciples of Christ, Arthur A. Ford, a noted
medium, engaged in attempts to communicate with Pike's dead
son.
Several
organized bodies of spiritualists exist, with about 400
congregations and a membership of more than 180,000 persons
in the U.S. in the early 1980s. The larger organizations
include the International General Assembly of Spiritualists,
with headquarters in Norfolk, Virginia; the National Spiritual
Alliance of the U.S.A., in Keene, New Hampshire; and the
National Spiritualist Association of Churches, in Cassadaga,
New York.
"Spiritualism,"
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