Abstract
In the religion known as modern Spiritualism, mediums publicly describe private details of death. Mediums describe to audience members what their deceased loved ones were like and in many cases how they died. In doing so, mediums aim to prove that there is life after death, as shown by the fact that they are revealing details about deceased people they never met before. Mediums seek to produce evidence at two hinge points: between the spirit world and the world of the physically living and between private knowledge of a person’s character and death and public description and affirmation of them. The chapter is based on research with the Canberra Spiritualist Association in Australia and describes and analyses the “demonstrations” mediums give which are the ritual high point of Spiritualist services. Whereas scholars such as Philippe Ariès and Allan Kellehear have argued that in twentieth-century “Western” societies a split has emerged between the private experience of death and the public management of it, I argue that in Spiritualism the categories of private and public are manipulated in the pursuit of proof that people’s personalities survive physical death and that those people remain interested in actively communicating with loved ones through mediums.
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Notes
- 1.
“In point of fact,” Ariès (1975: 139) cautions, “it must happen quite often—but the dead never tell—that the sick person knows quite well what is happening, and pretends not to know for the sake of those around him.” This was likely the case with my father; but as this chapter will make clear, Spiritualists would argue that the dead often do tell about the processes and circumstances of their deaths.
- 2.
The historian Alex Owen analyses the private/public distinction in early Spiritualism as it articulated with the era’s gender and class ideologies (Owen, 1989: 49–50). Women have always been prominent in Spiritualism, and in the contexts Owen examines, private mediumship was considered more respectable:
Within the [S]piritualist vocabulary the terms ‘public’ and ‘private’ (or, professional and domestic) mediumship were a matter of everyday parlance, and their meanings had been roughly assumed from the ‘separate spheres’ ideology [of gendered natures and responsibilities]. A public medium was one who had entered professional life, gave séances to which there was general entry, and was paid for the demonstration of her gifts. Her mediumship had become her livelihood, and her ability to please and satisfy her audience was thus vital. Spiritualists liked to emphasise that public mediumship was a comparative rarity, a mere ‘one in a thousand’, whilst private mediums were to be found flourishing ‘in every rank of life, from royalty down to the humblest household’. A private medium invariably operated within a small circle of family or friends, her séances were closed to outsiders, and she received no direct payment. (Owen, 1989: 49)
She notes how the private/public distinction was manipulated. For example, mediums seeking to remain respectable while also earning a living could receive a salary from a benefactor and then give ostensibly free séances. But class dimensions were difficult to escape: “Although believers chose not to express this directly, public mediumship was associated not only with the working classes but also with middle-class assumptions about lower-class morality.… The bottom line was that public mediums were often suspect where private ones were not” (1989: 51).
- 3.
Ethnographies include Skultans (1974), Wilson (2013), Kalvig (2017), Yerby (2017), Tomlinson (2019), and Tomlinson (n.d.). A notable recent analysis of scholarship on Spiritualism is a paper by Timothy Jenkins (2014). In it, and drawing in part on the work of Owen (1989), he argues that Spiritualism helped shape the categories through which it is now apprehended, and that these categories distort its origins and dynamics. Jenkins writes that the force of Franz Mesmer’s theory of “animal magnetism” in sha** Spiritualism is underappreciated by scholars, and notes that Christian Science, Theosophy, and New Age emphasis on the power of positive thinking are all successors to Mesmerism, like Spiritualism. (And, to be sure, Theosophy and New Age ideals have both partly developed from and dialogically reshaped Spiritualism.) All are movements seeking “direct inspiration” from extrahuman agents working through human minds, as Jenkins puts it. Once Mesmerism birthed Spiritualism, he argues, Spiritualism and its post-Mesmer kin were “contained” by emerging disciplines in the science of mind: “It is not clear that either Psychology or Psychoanalysis could have existed in anything like the forms we know them without these generative social movements to serve as stimulus, object and silent collaborator” (Jenkins, 2014: 16; compare Brown, 1997: 19–20, 167–173, 179–183 and Bubandt, 2012).
Jenkins’ argument goes further yet, as he points to two other frameworks Spiritualism both generated and became misunderstood by: the rise-and-fall narrative which functionally situates Spiritualism as a response to past social crisis (while ignoring its continuation to the present) and Modernism itself: “Spiritualism joins intuition and mechanism, it embodies another view of language and its possibilities, it implies radical social critique and new personal potentials, and disturbs conventional accounts of both time and space. In all these respects, it is Modernism avant la letter” (Jenkins, 2014: 16; see also Pels, 2003).
- 4.
In the transcripts of mediums’ speech, I have edited lightly for readability without changing meanings. Ellipses mark snippets of deleted text, but I do not mark every deletion with ellipses. For example, I eliminate some minor repetitions (“And, and so” becomes “And so”), placeholders (“um”), false starts, and the like without indication.
- 5.
For a sympathetic but critical historical examination of claims about the Seven Principles’ origin, see Gaunt (2013, 2014, 2015). The claim that death is not an ending is hardly unique to Spiritualism, but for Spiritualism the historical antecedents include Swedenborgianism, Transcendentalism, and the varieties of American Protestantism influenced by those movements: “A new eschatology that influenced nearly all of Protestant thought ‘sought to narrow the distance between this world and the next, even to annex heaven as a more glorious suburb of the present life’” (Faust, 2008: 178–179, quoting James H. Moorhead).
- 6.
I am using the present tense to describe my early experiences with the CSA in 2015–2016 and the main fieldwork period of 2017–2019.
- 7.
In Spiritualist services I have attended outside of Canberra, mediums have stood on small stages, making their performances “on platform” literally. In Canberra, the phrase is used but the medium simply stands on the floor in front of the seated audience.
- 8.
This example comes from the medium Sarah Jeffery, whom I interviewed in December 2018.
- 9.
A lesson I learned in mediumship training courses was that if a death was disturbing, it should be described delicately. For example, a medium should not describe a murder victim as having been “murdered,” but rather, should say that his or her “life had been taken by another’s hands.”
- 10.
In some cases, mediums do bring through spirits of people they knew in life, or people whom they have connected with the same recipient before.
- 11.
When I interviewed Maura in March 2018, she mentioned that her daughter had purchased the tickets for them to attend Probert’s demonstration, and she (Maura) had not been expecting to get a reading that night, let alone two. Although some audience members, known informally as “body snatchers” or “grabbers,” seem to think every message is for them, Maura was clearly not a grabber.
- 12.
On the page, this response sounds like a criticism, but in context it was clear that Maura was playfully imagining aloud: why did I buy a ticket when I didn’t want to get a reading?
- 13.
Surprising details—that is, details that are meaningful to the recipient but seem especially odd to the medium, who nonetheless feels she needs to pass them along—are called “clinchers.” In her mediumship course, Lynette Ivory gave the example of once mentally seeing a rabbit sitting on a dresser when she was giving a reading. Who would dream up such a detail? So Lynette passed it on, and the recipient affirmed that her mother had given her a rabbit before she died.
- 14.
“Super” is a reference to a superannuation fund.
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Tomlinson, M. (2023). Mediumship and Evidence in Australian Spiritualism: Conjunctions of Private and Public. In: Millie, J. (eds) The ‘Crossed-Out God’ in the Asia-Pacific. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3354-9_8
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