Religion
Spiritualism
Also Known As Modern Spiritualism The usual scholarly qualifier for the movement dated from the Fox sisters in 1848. · Spiritualist Movement
New Religious Movement
Origin 1848
Spiritualism is the religious movement, born in the United States in 1848 and spreading through the English-speaking world, holding that the personality survives bodily death and that the living can communicate with the spirits of the dead through gifted individuals called mediums. It began with the young Fox sisters of Hydesville, New York, whose reported rappings became a national sensation, and it grew through the seance, the trance address and later physical phenomena such as materialisation. Doctrinally loose and largely without creed, it drew on the earlier visions of Andrew Jackson Davis and on Swedenborg, and it was closely bound to nineteenth-century reform, above all to abolition and to women's rights, since mediumship gave women a public religious voice. It endures in Spiritualist churches and helped give rise to organised psychical research.
History & Origin
Modern Spiritualism is conventionally dated to 1848, when the Fox sisters in New York reported rapping sounds that they interpreted as communication from the dead.
Facts
Status
Status TodayLiving tradition, practised today 1 Reach
Adherents TodaySourced to the subject's own accountBy 1897, more than eight million followers across the United States and Europe, drawn disproportionately from the middle and upper classes and from women. That figure describes the movement's historical peak during its Victorian-era boom rather than its present size, for which no comparably documented modern estimate exists. 3 Origins
Origin Period Place of OriginHydesville, New York State 1 FounderNone single; the movement begins with the Fox sisters at Hydesville in 1848 1 History
Era of DeclinePublic interest in Spiritualism declined considerably after a series of exposed fraudulent mediums in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though organised Spiritualist churches continue today. 2 Classification
Kind of Tradition Learn More
1848: The Fox Sisters and Hydesville
Modern Spiritualism has an unusually precise birth date. In 1848, in a farmhouse at Hydesville, New York, the young sisters Kate and Margaret Fox reported communicating with the spirit of a dead man through mysterious rapping sounds, answering questions by a code of knocks. The claim spread with astonishing speed through a religiously ferment ing "Burned-over District" and across the United States and Britain, and within a few years mediumship, the seance, spirit rapping, table-turning, trance speaking, spirit writing and later spirit photography, had become a mass phenomenon.
The movement's core conviction is that the personality survives bodily death and that the living can communicate with the dead through gifted mediums. It should be dated honestly to 1848: Spiritualism is a modern religious movement, not an ancient one. Decades later, in 1888, Margaret Fox publicly confessed that the original rappings had been produced by cracking her toe joints, a confession she afterwards partly retracted, and which by then had little effect on a movement grown far beyond its origins.
Women, Reform, and the Churches
Spiritualism's significance is not exhausted by the question of whether the rappings were genuine. As the historian Ann Braude has shown, the movement gave nineteenth-century women a rare public religious authority: because mediumship required no ordination, education or institutional sanction, only the "gift", women became its most prominent voices, and Spiritualist platforms became entangled with the causes of abolition and of women's rights, so that the seance and the reform lecture often shared a speaker.
The movement also helped provoke the founding of organised psychical research, the Society for Psychical Research was established in London in 1882, which set out to investigate mediums scientifically and produced both exposures of fraud and a serious literature on the question of survival. Spiritualism endures today in organised Spiritualist churches and the National Spiritualist Association, a living if much smaller religious body, and its imprint on modern popular ideas about mediums and contact with the dead is large.
Connections
Associated With
This source names Spiritualism directly: "doctrine against Anglo American Spiritualism, medium and worker as its named roles, and Brazil's 2010 census count of approximately 3.8 million declared Spiritists, a continuously revised, community..."
Source Kardecism (Wikipedia)
A set piece of the British spiritualist seance room in the 1870s.
This source names Spiritualism directly: "Wikipedia's article on the Spiritualism movement, consulted 2026-08-12."
Source Spiritualism (movement) (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors
This source names Spiritualism directly: "Wikipedia's article on Spiritualism as a religious movement, stating that by 1897 it had "more than eight million followers in the United States and Europe", drawn particularly from the middle and..."
Source Spiritualism (Religious Movement) (Wikipedia)
This source names Spiritualism directly: "Calcutta (India), Mediums, Murder and Spiritualism."
Source The Thirteenth Chair, AFI Catalog Record (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1929)
The act was the instrument used against spiritualist mediums into the twentieth century.
Depicted In
The AFI Catalog's own subject-heading field for this 1929 mystery names Spiritualism and Mediums outright, and the story turns on a professional medium's seance, portrayed as genuinely effective within the film.
Source The Thirteenth Chair, AFI Catalog Record (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1929)
Objects and Practices of This Tradition
Daniel Dunglas Home, the best known medium of the Victorian seance era, belongs to Spiritualism, its own tradition field.
Source Incidents in My LifeDaniel Dunglas Home
Source Eusapia Palladino (reference article)Wikipedia contributors
Feda, Figures Source Man, Myth and MagicRichard Cavendish (ed.)
Source Man, Myth and MagicRichard Cavendish (ed.)
Source Wikipedia: Leonora Piper
Clergy or specialist role within Spiritualism.
Source Modern Spiritualism: A History and a CriticismFrank Podmore
Source Paschal Beverly Randolph (Wikipedia)
Source Photograph of the Materialized Spirit, Katie King, Harvard Art Museums
Source The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian EnglandAlex Owen
Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)
Source Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)Encyclopaedia Britannica editors
The Summerland is a Spiritualist term before it is a Wiccan one, taken from Andrew Jackson Davis and carried into modern witchcraft along with much else.
Source The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan WitchcraftRonald Hutton
Originated In
Source Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century AmericaAnn Braude
Theological Position
Sources
1. Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America
Ann Braude, Beacon Press, 1989- passim
- On Spiritualism, mediumship and women in nineteenth-century America
- Originated In: New York, Stored origin-place property on this entity, cited to this source: Hydesville, New York State
View the Source 2. The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850-1914
Janet Oppenheim, Cambridge University Press, 1985- passim
- On Spiritualism and psychical research in the nineteenth century
View the Source 3. Spiritualism (Religious Movement) (Wikipedia)
4. BBC Religions (archived): BBC Religions: Modern Spiritualism
BBC Religions (archived)IntroductionQuote, Introduction
The Modern Spiritualist movement dates from 1848 when the Fox sisters of Hydesville, New York produced knocking sounds that were alleged to be messages from a spirit.
Modern Spiritualism: A History and a Criticism
Photograph of the Materialized Spirit, Katie King, Harvard Art Museums
Harvard Art MuseumsObjects and Practices of This Tradition: Photograph of the Materialized Spirit, Katie King (Harvard Art Museums), Harvard Art Museums 2010.56View the Source The Thirteenth Chair, AFI Catalog Record (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1929)
American Film InstituteDepicted In: The Thirteenth Chair (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1929), AFI Catalog, MovieDetails/12638View the Source Paschal Beverly Randolph (Wikipedia)
Objects and Practices of This Tradition: Paschal Beverly Randolph, Lead sectionQuote, Objects and Practices of This Tradition: Paschal Beverly Randolph, Lead section
was an African-American medical doctor, occultist, spiritualist, trance medium, and writer.
Wikipedia: Leonora Piper
Objects and Practices of This Tradition: Leonora Piper, Lead sectionQuote, Objects and Practices of This Tradition: Leonora Piper, Lead section
was a famous American trance medium in the area of Spiritualism.
Eusapia Palladino (reference article)
Wikipedia contributorsObjects and Practices of This Tradition: Eusapia Palladino, Lead sectionQuote, Objects and Practices of This Tradition: Eusapia Palladino, Lead section
was an Italian spiritualist physical medium.
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