A Movement That Began with Two Sisters and Some Knocking Sounds

This entry records that Spiritualism, a religious movement that grew rapidly in the United States and Britain from 1848 onward following the Fox sisters' claimed communication with spirits through rapping sounds, centers religious practice on communication with the spirits of the dead through mediumship, typically conducted in a seance setting opened and closed with prayer and hymn singing, without reproducing specific Spiritualist liturgical content here.

Spiritualism developed formal denominational structures, including the National Spiritualist Association of Churches in the United States and comparable organizations in Britain, that maintain their own published hymnals, prayer books and doctrinal statements, distinguishing organized denominational Spiritualism from the closely related but historically and theologically distinct tradition of Kardecist Spiritism, discussed as its own separate entry in this atlas, which developed independently in France around the same general period with a more systematically codified doctrine. Spiritualism attracted considerable interest during and after major conflicts including the American Civil War and the First World War, periods of widespread bereavement scholars of the movement connect directly to spikes in public interest in the possibility of communicating with deceased loved ones through mediumship.