Mediumship and channelling

The Fox sisters started modern Spiritualism with cracking toe joints, confessed it forty years later — and the movement carried on regardless.

What it is

The claim to receive communication from the dead, or from non-physical intelligences, and to relay it.

The forms differ:

Physical mediumship — raps, table-tipping, materialisations, ectoplasm, levitation. Dominant in the nineteenth century, essentially extinct now, and the form in which fraud was most often caught.
Mental mediumship — the medium reports impressions, images or voices. This is what a modern public reading looks like.
Trance mediumship — the medium's ordinary personality appears to be displaced by a communicator.
Channelling — the twentieth-century form, where the communicator is usually not a deceased relative but a discarnate teacher, an ascended master, a group entity or an extraterrestrial, and the output is a body of teaching rather than personal messages.

Where it came from

Modern Spiritualism has a date and a place: Hydesville, New York, 1848, where Kate and Margaret Fox, aged eleven and fourteen, reported communicating with a spirit through rapping sounds. Within a few years the movement had spread across the United States and to Britain, and the Fox sisters were famous.

In 1888 Margaret Fox publicly confessed, demonstrating on stage how the raps were produced by cracking the joints of her toes. She later retracted the confession. Both sisters died in poverty within five years.

Spiritualism did not stop. It grew through the casualties of the American Civil War and again after the First World War and the influenza pandemic, when a generation of bereaved parents wanted contact with sons who had no graves. Arthur Conan Doyle became its most prominent advocate, and Harry Houdini its most determined opponent — a friendship that ended over it. Houdini's objection was specifically that he knew, professionally, how every effect was produced.

The Society for Psychical Research investigated mediums extensively. Leonora Piper, studied for decades from the 1880s, was never caught in fraud and convinced several serious investigators including William James, who described her as his "one white crow" — the single case that would refute the claim that all crows are black.

Channelling is the modern branch: Jane Roberts and "Seth" from 1963, Helen Schucman's A Course in Miracles (1976), J.Z. Knight and "Ramtha", and the very large contemporary market in channelled material online.

How it is done

By sitting, in a group or one to one, with the medium reporting what they receive. Nothing here describes how to induce the state.

What we can and cannot say

We can say fraud has been demonstrated repeatedly, at every period, in every form. The nineteenth-century physical mediums were caught with concealed apparatus, muslin ectoplasm and confederates. The great majority of famous physical mediums were exposed at some point, including several whose supporters had declared exposure impossible.

We can say the cold-reading mechanism is well understood and fully sufficient to explain a typical public reading. High-probability guesses, questions disguised as statements, the shotgun technique of throwing out many details rapidly, reliance on the sitter to supply and then forget they supplied the specifics, and selective recall afterwards — the hits are remembered and the misses are not. None of this requires the medium to be knowingly dishonest, which is part of why it persists.

We can say the controlled tests have failed. Where mediums have been tested with the sitter absent and the medium blind, accuracy has generally collapsed to chance. Gary Schwartz's Arizona studies reported positive results and were criticised on serious methodological grounds, including inadequate blinding and rating procedures. Nothing in this literature has replicated in independent hands.

We can say the best cases remain unexplained rather than compelling. Piper was never caught. The SPR's cross-correspondence material — fragmentary messages delivered through several mediums on separate continents that appeared to make sense only when combined — is genuinely odd, is a century old, and cannot now be re-examined. These are the field's strongest cards and they are not enough.

We can say the harm is specific and concentrated on the bereaved. Grief creates exactly the conditions in which targeted exploitation works: high motivation to believe, low motivation to check, and willingness to pay. Paid readings sold to recently bereaved people are the sharpest ethical problem on this site. There are also documented cases of psychics inserting themselves into missing-person and murder investigations, wasting police time and prolonging families' suffering.

And we can say that some people find it consoling, and that this is not nothing. Grief counsellors have noted that a reading sometimes gives a bereaved person permission to say things they needed to say. Whether that justifies the transaction is a judgement each person makes; what can be said is that the consolation does not require the claim to be true, and the price is frequently high.

We cannot say what Leonora Piper was doing. What we can say is that a hundred and seventy-five years of investigation, beginning with two girls and their toe joints, has not produced a single case that survives independent controlled testing.

What it is

Where it came from

How it is done

What we can and cannot say

Further reading