Spiritualism

Spiritualism is a religious movement, beginning in the United States and Europe in the nineteenth century, built on the belief that the souls of people who have died live on and can interact with the living. Spiritualists seek contact with the dead, usually with the help of a medium, a person believed to be able to contact spirits directly. The Canberra Spiritualist Association describes the main difference from other religions as asking for "proof of survival" rather than faith. Spiritualism continues to be actively practised in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Description

Beliefs

At the heart of Spiritualism is the belief that living people can hold conversations with the spirits of the dead, through a human medium or through a sensitive device. Writing about Melbourne, the historian Al Gabay describes the movement's view of the person as having two parts, a material body and an inner, immortal spiritual being, and its teaching that the dead survive and can be communicated with.

Early Spiritualists were optimistic about what lay ahead for each person after death. They saw people as continuing to progress in the afterlife, and they regarded séance phenomena not as miracles that broke natural law but as rational effects, not yet understood, of contact between this world and a higher one. Many saw the movement as a way of bringing religion and science together. Some Spiritualists saw themselves as having left Christianity; others, calling themselves Christian Spiritualists, believed they were returning to its true core.

Many Spiritualists summarise their beliefs in the Seven Principles. The Spiritualists' National Union (SNU) in Britain says these principles were given through the mediumship of Emma Hardinge Britten. They are: the Fatherhood of God; the Brotherhood of Man; the Communion of Spirits and the Ministry of Angels; the Continuous Existence of the Human Soul; Personal Responsibility; Compensation and Retribution Hereafter for all the Good and Evil Deeds done on Earth; and Eternal Progress Open to every Human Soul. The Canberra Spiritualist Association says Spiritualism is guided by seven principles but has no dogma, gurus or holy writings, and stresses personal spiritual experience.

Practice: the service

Spiritualists developed their own church services, with hymn singing, lectures and Sunday schools for children, called lyceums. They also encouraged people to develop as mediums who could hold séances or lecture under the influence of spirits. The séance was meant both as a ritual communion between the living and the dead and as a test of the reality of the afterlife; its main product was always personal messages, spoken or written by the medium, from the sitters' dead relatives and friends. For most believers in colonial Melbourne, Gabay writes, the séance was a religious and highly ritualised event rather than a scientific one.

In Spiritualist services in Australia today, the "demonstrations" given by mediums are the ritual high point. At the Canberra Spiritualist Association, mediums aim to give evidence of life after death by describing dead people, whom they never met, in ways that members of the audience can recognise. A typical Canberra service opens with a welcome from the chair and a short meditation, and includes songs and a reading of the Seven Principles before the medium's address and demonstration. See Platform mediumship.

Some mediums worked in a trance-like state, and some claimed to bring about physical phenomena, such as objects appearing or moving, through which spirits made themselves known. Mediums also took up healing: they said they could see into a person's body to the cause of an illness, and many earned their living through healing, sometimes by laying on hands.

Practice: the circle

Alongside the public service, Spiritualists meet in smaller groups called circles. In his study of Sydney Spiritualism, Paul Gillen described circles as gatherings, usually private, of people who meet to contact spirit or to raise spiritual power. Development circles, often called "classes", exist to bring on the gifts of people who may become mediums; open development circles assume that anyone who wants to come could be one. See Development circles.

How mediums develop

Mediums are trained in the Spiritualist development class, in which, J. Gordon Melton writes, meditation is basic (Development circles). In a twenty-week Canberra course attended by the anthropologist Matt Tomlinson, students practised mediumship in front of the group and part of every class was given to public speaking. He also heard an experienced medium say that ongoing mentoring pays off, and that the high standard set early in her own training had kept her from going on platform too soon.

Organisation

Spiritualism has rarely accepted tight institutional structures. Sociologically it has largely centred on individual mediums or ministers and their followers, alongside the local Spiritualist church and, in the United States, the Spiritualist "camp". Nineteenth-century Spiritualists were wary of any hierarchy that would sit in judgement on individual experience, though local associations licensed mediums and lecturers and investigated claims of fraud or misconduct.

Scope

What it includes

• Belief that the dead survive and can communicate with the living
• Contact with spirits, usually through a medium, including séances and public demonstrations of mediumship
• Church services with hymns, lectures and children's lyceums
• Circles for spirit contact, healing and the development of mediums
• Healing, practised by many mediums

What it is not

• Spiritualism is distinct from Spiritism, the offshoot developed in France by Allan Kardec, which teaches reincarnation and later became prominent in Brazil. For the first decades of the movement, most English-speaking Spiritualists rejected reincarnation.
• It is not a proven science. Most of the public and most scientists in the nineteenth century treated Spiritualism as delusion, fraud or mental disorder. Psychical research grew up to examine mediums' claims; over time many mediums who produced physical phenomena were found to be using fraud, sometimes with stage magicians' techniques, and the exposures badly damaged the movement's standing in the United States. Physical phenomena claimed by Spiritualists have not been verified by experiment.

Traditions and lineage

Origins

Modern Spiritualism dates its beginning to unexplained rapping sounds at a farmhouse in Hydesville, New York, in 1848. Kate Fox, the owner's youngest daughter, was said to have set up a code with the supposed spirit, which identified itself as a man murdered in the house. Andrew Jackson Davis's book The Principles of Nature (1847), a visionary cosmology and universal history, also helped bring the movement about. Mesmerism, with its trances, and the ideas of the Swedish visionary Emanuel Swedenborg were the movement's two main intellectual roots.

Sittings with spirits spread quickly, becoming particularly popular in England and France in the 1860s, and table turning became a pastime in Victorian drawing rooms. Churches opposed the movement, some linking it with witchcraft or necromancy, and in 1898 the Holy Office of the Roman Catholic Church condemned Spiritualist practices. In the United States in the 1850s, Spiritualism was one of very few settings where women could exercise religious leadership on equal terms with men, and some Spiritualists were among the most radical early advocates of women's rights.

Churches and later history

In 1893 American Spiritualist associations formed a national body, the National Spiritualist Association (later the National Spiritualist Association of Churches). Interest grew again in England after the First World War, and the 1920s, when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle lectured widely for the cause, have been called Spiritualism's "Silver Age". In Britain the movement fared better than in the United States, especially after the witchcraft laws, which had been used against mediums, were repealed in the 1950s. From the 1970s mediumship found new life within the New Age movement, including the "channelling" of a range of spirit beings.

Context

Within Spiritualism

Spiritualist bodies define their religion through mediumship. The National Spiritualist Association of Churches (NSAC) in the United States calls Spiritualism the science, philosophy and religion of continuous life, based on communication with the spirit world by means of mediumship. The SNU says many services include an inspirational address, time for healing and a demonstration of evidential mediumship (see Platform mediumship).

The NSAC's list of the "phenomena of Spiritualism", which it counts as mental and physical mediumship, takes in clairvoyance, clairaudience, psychometry, trance (Trance mediumship), automatic writings and paintings (Automatic writing, Spirit art), materialisation, levitation and other physical phenomena, and healing by the laying on of hands (Spiritual healing). The SNU says mediumship is for evidence of survival, not for predicting the future or giving advice (compare Psychic reading). Spiritism is a distinct offshoot (see What it is not, above).

In Australian Spiritualism

In his study of Sydney Spiritualism, Gillen found that the main ritual, though shaped like a Christian service, centres on a demonstration of mediumship, and that from about 1900 the churches' main ritual was the reading of flowers (Flower readings). Churches today describe the same core: the Victorian Spiritualists' Union's Sunday service has healings and a demonstration of survival by mediums; the Spiritualists National Union of WA offers healing before its Sunday service and runs open circles; and St John's Spiritual Church in Adelaide lists healing, mediumship or psychic readings, and development, healing and trance classes. The VSU also names astrology and reincarnation within its field, alongside clairvoyance, clairaudience and healing.

A Spiritualist perspective

For a Spiritualist, everything on this page rests on one conviction: that life continues after death and that those who have died can still reach us. Services, demonstrations, healing and circles are all ways of living out that belief, and of testing it. Spiritualism asks for evidence rather than blind faith, which is why a good demonstration describes a person the medium never knew, and why mediums are trained patiently in circle rather than rushed onto the platform.

A thoughtful Spiritualist is also honest about the movement's history. The exposures of fraud described above were real, and they are a standing reminder that claims must be modest and conduct must be clean. The principles shape conduct too: personal responsibility means a medium answers for every word given in a message, and a sitter keeps the right to weigh that message and set it aside. From that standpoint good practice is simple to state. Mediumship is offered as evidence of survival, not as fortune-telling or advice; healing is given alongside medical care, never in place of it; and the grieving, who often come at the hardest point in their lives, are treated with gentleness and never exploited. Spiritualists differ on some questions, reincarnation among them, and the tradition has room for that.

Spiritualism in Australia

Colonial beginnings

Spiritualism came to Australia in the nineteenth century through public lectures, stage demonstrations and private séances, and a church movement soon followed, with dozens of congregations opening in the early twentieth century.

In Melbourne, Spiritualism and mesmerism were important to nineteenth-century intellectual life. The first Spiritualist association in Australia, the Victorian Association of Progressive Spiritualists, dates from 1870. William Terry founded the Melbourne Progressive Lyceum and edited the monthly Harbinger of Light for more than forty years. Leading Melbourne Spiritualists were linked with reform causes such as temperance and Biblical criticism, and the young Alfred Deakin was among them.

In South Australia, press reports suggest séances were held among well-to-do people in the 1870s, and mediums, mostly from Melbourne, arrived in the 1880s. The Adelaide Spiritualistic Society was founded in 1883. Women led several of the state's Spiritualist churches in the early twentieth century, and St John's Spiritualist Church, Victoria Square, dates from 1919. Conan Doyle drew large audiences there as a visiting lecturer in 1920.

Today

Only a handful of the older Spiritualist churches still operate in Australia, generally those fortunate enough to own their building; many small churches have opened and closed over the decades. The sociologist Andrew Singleton describes the movement as one of Australia's longest-lasting alternative spiritual movements, which has changed and survived despite many closures. A 2025 study by Singleton and the anthropologist Matt Tomlinson, based on fieldwork, interviews and archives, examines the movement's resilience, the lasting appeal of mediumship, the strong part women have played in leading it, and Australian Spiritualism as a distinct variant of a wider English-speaking tradition. In South Australia, healing has become the main hope of the movement's few remaining adherents, according to the SA History Hub.

Safety and good practice

• Purpose of mediumship. The SNU says mediumship exists to give evidence of survival, not to foretell the future or to give advice.
• Developing in company. Gillen recorded that mediums often advise people seeking development not to sit for spirit contact on their own but only in a properly run circle, because of what they see as a danger of possession or attachment.
• Healing and medical care. The Spiritualists National Union of WA says its healers follow the SNU Healing Code of Conduct after at least a year of training, and that patients should keep up any medical treatment they have been prescribed. See Spiritual healing.
• Care for the bereaved and the community. Among the Canberra Spiritualist Association's stated goals are to uplift people who are grieving and to build a safe, inclusive community.

Related modalities

• Mediumship
• Spiritual healing
• Development circles
• Platform mediumship
• Trance mediumship
• Physical mediumship
• Clairvoyance
• Clairaudience
• Psychometry
• Flower readings
• Automatic writing
• Spirit art
• Spirit rescue
• Spiritism

Further reading

• Bartley, Helen and Jill Roe. "Spiritualism". SA History Hub, History Trust of South Australia.
• Buescher, John B. "Spiritualism". Encyclopedia of Religion, 2005.
• Ellwood, Robert S. and Gracia Fay Ellwood. "Spiritualism". Contemporary American Religion.
• Gabay, Al. "Spiritualism and Mesmerism". eMelbourne, University of Melbourne.
• Melton, J. Gordon. "Spiritualism". Encyclopaedia Britannica.
• Singleton, Andrew. "A Little Outpost". Nova Religio 26, no. 2 (2022).
• Singleton, Andrew and Matt Tomlinson. Let the Dead Speak: Spiritualism in Australia. Manchester University Press, 2025.
• Tomlinson, Matt. "How to speak like a spirit medium: Voice and evidence in Australian Spiritualism". American Ethnologist 46, no. 4 (2019).