Mediumship
Mediumship is the practice of communicating with spirits, often by claiming to serve as a channel for messages or other manifestations.
Mental mediumship: A form of mediumship in which a medium claims to receive impressions, images, or messages from spirits. It covers claimed communication through thought, intuition, or speech rather than material effects.
Spiritualism: A religious movement centered on the belief that spirits of the dead can communicate with the living. Modern mediumship became a defining practice of this movement.
D.D. Home: Daniel Dunglas Home was a nineteenth-century Scottish-American medium known for séances and reported physical phenomena. His performances made physical mediumship a subject of public attention.
Psychical research: The historical investigation of alleged psychic phenomena using systematic observation and experiment. It provided organized inquiry into mediumistic claims outside conventional religious settings.
Afterlife: Existence or experience believed to continue after bodily death. Claims of spirit communication often imply that personal existence continues after death.
Physical mediumship: A form of mediumship involving claimed physical effects, such as sounds, movements, or materializations. It concerns manifestations attributed to spirits acting on the physical environment.
Fox sisters: Margaret and Kate Fox were nineteenth-century American sisters whose reported spirit rappings helped launch modern Spiritualism. Their 1848 claims brought spirit communication into public view.
Leonora Piper: Leonora Piper was an American medium studied by psychical researchers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Investigations of her séances became influential tests of mediumistic claims.
Cold reading: A technique for eliciting or inferring personal information through observation, questioning, and broad statements. It is a naturalistic explanation for some apparently specific messages.
Grief: The emotional response to loss, especially the death of someone close. Some people seek mediumship as a way to sustain connection with the dead.