Spiritualism: Communication With The Spirits Of The Dead

Spiritualism is a system of belief or religious practice based on supposed communication with the spirits of the dead, especially through mediums. The beginning of the Spiritualism movement was March 31, 1848. The two sisters, Kate and Margaret Fox, were the first ones to report contact with a spirit. They lived in Hydesville, New York, and reportedly would create pranks to trick their parents into believing there was a spirit residing in their home. At first, the Fox sisters would attach apples to strings and through them down the stairs to resemble the sound of footprints. Later, their tricks had gain popularity and the two sisters would have crowds gathered around as they contacted spirits of lost ones. Spiritualism does not
have any sacred text, unlike many religions. However, this religion relies more on the Seven Principles – a model of living that guides rather than preaches, and allows followers to interpret the Spiritualist values:
1. The Fatherhood of God
2. The Brotherhood of Man
3. The Communion of spirits and the Ministry of Angels
4. The Continuous existence of the Human Soul
5. Personal responsibility
6. Compensation and retribution for all the good and bad the human has done on this earth
7. Eternal progress open to every human soul Since the middle 1800’s spiritualism was organized in small groups of people that conducted séances.
A Séance is an attempt to communicate with spirits. Demonstrations of spirit contacts and psychic events were held in larger groups or in public. Another spiritualist practice is spiritual healing, or a branch of alternative medicine. An important group of people in this religion are mediums. A medium is a person claiming to be in contact with the spirits of the dead and to communicate between the dead and the living. Mediums are also known as the “middle man” between the two worlds, physical and spiritual. There are also people known as clairvoyant mediums who claim to be able to predict the future. It is estimated that about 15 million people worldwide are Spiritualists. Over 10 million of this number are from Brazil. In the United States, the most popular mediums are George Anderson, Theresa Caputo, Chip Coffey, Allison Dubois, and John Holland. Many of these mediums have popular reality TV shows, such as, Long Island Medium. Theresa Caputo claimed to have spiritual events since the age of five. She has written several books, a couple being, “You Can’t Make This Stuff Up,” and “There’s more to life than
this”. Besides the popular TV shows, spiritualist churches still thrive in the United States and the UK. Many of the churches take after the Protestant churches without the organized ministry. Spiritualism was mostly considered a movement within the middle and upper-class. Towards the middle of the 1900’s this movement began to fade. Spiritualism is not as popular as it has been in the past and is said to be just “another American invention such as Jazz”.