spiritualism

Belief in the survival of the human personality and in communication between the living and those who have died. The spiritualist movement originated in the USA in 1848. Adherents practise mediumship, which claims to allow clairvoyant knowledge of distant events and spirit healing. The writer Arthur Conan Doyle and the Victorian prime minister William Gladstone were converts.

There are two main groups of spiritualistic phenomena, mental and physical, and there are both mental and physical mediums (persons endowed with psychic awareness). In the presence of such persons, alleged paranormal phenomena take place, often when the medium is in a trance. Movement of objects without contact (telekinesis) is one type of physical phenomenon. Mental phenomena include information given by mediums which they supposedly could not have acquired through any normal means. Ectoplasm exuded from the medium is the culmination of spiritualistic physical demonstration. Many mediums have been detected producing various phenomena fraudulently.