Spiritism, Spirit Communication and Séance Practice

Spiritism is the movement of spirit communication with the deceased, codified by Allan Kardec and practised in séance practice with mediums.

Spiritism is the teaching and practice that the souls of the deceased can communicate with the living through mediums. It arose in the United States in 1848, spread rapidly across Europe and Latin America, and shaped the 19th and 20th centuries both as a religious movement and as a field of inquiry for early parapsychology.

Hydesville 1848 and the Fox Sisters

In March 1848 the sisters Margaret and Kate Fox in Hydesville, New York, reported rapping noises in their house, which they had answer questions with one or more knocks.

From this episode a distinct practice quickly developed: rap-speaking, later table-turning, and finally trance and materialisation phenomena. Within a few years there were thousands of circles in North America and a network of travelling mediums.

Allan Kardec and the French Codification

In France the educator Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail, under the pseudonym Allan Kardec, systematised the teaching from 1857 onward.

His Le Livre des Esprits (The Spirits‘ Book, 1857) and the Livre des Médiums (1861) developed spiritism into a coherent doctrine: reincarnation of the soul towards progressive perfection, a hierarchical order of the spirit realms, and an ethical orientation of life towards charity and spiritual progress.

Kardec’s system differs from Anglo-Saxon Spiritualism through its explicit doctrine of reincarnation.

In Brazil, Kardecist spiritism found a second home. Today it hosts the largest organised spiritist communities worldwide, with offshoots in Umbanda and Candomblé. Kardec is also present within the Catholic folk-religious spectrum of Latin America.

Practical Forms

Spiritist practice knows several main forms. The classic form is the sitting in a semicircle around a table, led by a medium who, in light or deep trance, mediates contacts. Communication takes place through knocking, table movement, automatic writing, or speech from the medium’s mouth.

In the late 19th century, physical phenomena were added: levitations, materialisations, ectoplasmic substances. These more spectacular forms led to a wave of scientific investigation, but also to the exposure of numerous cases of fraud.

Early Parapsychology

The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was founded in London in 1882 by Frederic Myers, Henry Sidgwick, Edmund Gurney and Eleanor Sidgwick to investigate spiritist phenomena methodically. Their studies, such as the Census of Hallucinations (1894) and the multi-volume Proceedings, remain a principal source to this day.

SPR research laid the foundation for later experimental parapsychology. In his later years, William James worked intensively with the medium Leonora Piper and described her as his “white crow”: a case that, for him, undermined the general thesis that all mediumistic reports are purely subjective.

Charles Richet, the French physiologist and Nobel laureate, coined the term ectoplasm and conducted strictly controlled sittings. His Traité de Métapsychique (1922) remains a remarkable document of a serious scientific engagement. The mediumship of Eusapia Palladino was tested in hundreds of controlled sittings, with detractors and supporters divided over it for years.

Scepticism and Exposures

Already in the second half of the 19th century, numerous mediums were exposed as frauds. The Fox sisters themselves publicly confessed in 1888 that they had produced their rapping sounds by cracking their toe joints (Margaret later retracted the confession, but the admission stood).

In the 1920s, the stage magician Harry Houdini made it his task to expose fraudulent mediums; his A Magician Among the Spirits (1924) documents dozens of such cases.

Even though not every phenomenon was fraud, physiological self-deception such as the ideomotor effect in table-turning explains a large part of the table and writing phenomena even without conscious manipulation.

Spiritism Today

Organised spiritism continues to exist, above all in Brazil (Federação Espírita Brasileira, with millions of adherents), in France, and in Great Britain (Spiritualists’ National Union). In the German-speaking world the movement is smaller, but it is present through séance circles, trance mediums and the spectrum of afterlife contact practitioners.

For the phenomenological study of spirits, spiritism remains a key tradition: for more than 170 years it has provided the most extensive corpus of documented spirit contact reports and, at the same time, a continuing debate over their authenticity.

Sources

• Allan Kardec: The Spirits’ Book, German edition Brussels 1996.
• Janet Oppenheim: The Other World. Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England 1850, 1914, Cambridge UP 1985.
• Ann Braude: Radical Spirits. Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in 19th Century America, Beacon 1989.
• Renaud Evrard: Folie et paranormal, PU Rennes 2014.
• Leonardo Vincentini: Spiritism in Brazil, Lewiston 2009.