A religion built on talking to the dead began with rapping noises in 1848
On March 31, 1848, two sisters in Hydesville, New York said a spirit was knocking answers to their questions. Kate and Margaret Fox became celebrity mediums, and a movement of séances, trance lectures and camp meetings swept the English-speaking world. Forty years later the sisters called it a hoax, then took that back.
Spiritualists hold that consciousness survives death and that the living can reach it. The dead, in their view, keep developing through higher spheres, so they can advise on ethics, God and the afterlife. Many believers rely on particular spirit guides. Mediums lead formal séances, yet anyone is thought capable of learning to receive messages.
The movement grew in the Burned-over District of upstate New York, the same ground that produced Millerism and Mormonism, though neither embraced it. Many locals there believed God would speak directly and would never damn unbaptised babies. Two earlier figures supplied raw material. Emanuel Swedenborg, a respected scientist turned visionary after 1741, described many graded heavens and hells and spirits acting as go-betweens, while warning against seeking them out. Franz Mesmer contributed no theology but offered a trance technique, later called hypnotism, which touring lecturers turned into showmanship.
Andrew Jackson Davis, a Mesmerist and clairvoyant from Blooming Grove, New York, fused the two into what he called harmonial philosophy. His 1847 book The Principles of Nature, dictated in trance, became the closest thing to scripture in a fiercely individualistic movement. Spiritualism peaked from the 1840s to the 1920s and for half a century held together without creeds, relying on periodicals and travelling mediums. Many leaders were women, and adherents widely backed abolition and votes for women.
Fraud accusations eroded trust by the late 1880s, pushing believers toward formal bodies. The National Spiritualist Association adopted a six-article Declaration of Principles in Chicago in October 1899, added two more in Rochester in 1909, and a ninth came in St. Louis in 1944. Britain's Spiritualists' National Union teaches Seven Principles. Churches in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom carry the practice on.
Source: Spiritualism (movement)
