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Feb 16, 2024 · And once again, there’s more to the story than the stories we know. When Spiritualism arose in the middle of the 19 th century, child mortality was around fifty percent. The drumbeat of grief never ceased. And when Spiritualism arose, Calvinism was still the dominant strain of American Christianity.
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spiritualism, in religion, a movement based on the belief that departed souls can interact with the living. Spiritualists sought to make contact with the dead, usually through the assistance of a medium, a person believed to have the ability to contact spirits directly. Some mediums worked while in a trancelike state, and some claimed to be the cat...
Various forms of communicating with discarnate spirits of the recently deceased have been observed in communities around the world, but the purpose of such communication and the understanding of the nature of spirit existence varies considerably. Modern spiritualists point to the ancient accounts of spirit contact in the Bible: the visit of Saul, the king of Israel, to the so-called witch of Endor, in the course of which the late prophet Samuel appeared (I Samuel 28), and the story of the Transfiguration, in which Moses and Elijah appeared to three of Jesus’ Apostles (Matthew 17, Mark 9). Some phenomena associated with mediums were found among those regarded in the Middle Ages as possessed by devils—e.g., levitation and speaking in languages unknown to the speaker. Similar phenomena were reported in the witch trials of the early modern period, particularly the appearance of spirits in quasi-material form and the obtaining of knowledge through spirits.
Modern spiritualism traces its beginnings to a series of apparently supernatural events at a farmhouse in Hydesville, N.Y., in 1848. The owner and his family, as well as the previous occupants of the house, had been disturbed by unexplained raps at night. After a severe disturbance, the owner’s youngest daughter, Kate Fox, was said to have successfully challenged the supposed spirit to repeat in raps the number of times she flipped her fingers. Once communication had apparently been established, a code was agreed upon by which the raps given could answer questions, and the spirit was said to have identified himself as a man who had been murdered in the house.
The practice of having sittings for communication with spirits spread rapidly from that time, and in the 1860s it was particularly popular in England and France. Kate Fox (afterward Mrs. Fox-Jencken) and one of her sisters, Maggie Fox, devoted much of their later lives to acting as mediums in the United States and England. Many other mediums gave similar sittings, and the attempt to communicate with spirits by table turning (in which participants place their hands on a table and wait for it to vibrate or rotate) became a popular pastime in Victorian drawing rooms.
The unconventional new movement naturally provoked opposition. There were not only verbal condemnations but occasional mob violence. Church leaders associated spiritualism with witchcraft. Some churches regarded the practices of the spiritualists as part of the forbidden activity of necromancy (communication with the dead in order to learn the future). A decree of the Holy Office of the Roman Catholic Church in 1898 condemned spiritualistic practices, though it approved of legitimate scientific investigation of related phenomena. Both Protestant and Catholic bodies released a steady stream of anti-spiritualist literature.
Although inherently religious, during its first generation the movement avoided organizing as a church. Spiritualist associations began to appear in some areas of the United States in the first decades after the Civil War and finally formed a nationwide organization, the National Spiritualist Association (later the National Spiritualist Association of Churches), in 1893.
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Jan 27, 2023 · Spiritualism is a unique and important religion in its beliefs and practices and how it has affected people's lives. Some unique and important facts about Spiritualism include:
History. Modern spiritualism as a religion developed in the 19th century within a larger spiritual and mystic resurgence based on such influences as earlier mysticism, Emanuel Swedenborg's writings and North American native beliefs. Through the work of 18th-century Austrian physician F.A. Mesmer, trance and clairvoyance had become familiar.
History of Spiritualism. From the early writings of Swedenborg, Spiritualism developed into a popular ‘alternative’ spirituality in Britain and America during the nineteenth century, combining the mysterious and the theatrical. It fed from a number of contemporary cultural trends and factors: from frequent liberal perceptions that ...
Oct 18, 2021 · Spiritualism offered grieving people solace while coping with their loss. All these factors helped create an opening for Spiritualism to rise. Ghostly Images. Invention and science were factors in the popularity of Spiritualism in the mid-1800s. Some even saw Spiritualism as a scientific religion.
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This contrast between ‘spiritual’ and ‘worldly’ remained common until the European Middle Ages when an important intellectual (page 5) p. 5 shift took place. This resulted in a sharper distinction between ‘spiritual’ and ‘bodily’. The noun ‘spirituality’ in the Middle Ages simply meant the clergy.
