Religions
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
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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
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 Status
Status TodayLiving tradition, practised today 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 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.
Cross-Tradition 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..."
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."
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..."
This source names Spiritualism directly: "Calcutta (India), Mediums, Murder and Spiritualism."
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.
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.
Clergy or specialist role within Spiritualism.
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.
Sources
1. Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America
1. Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America
Ann Braude, Beacon Press, 1989On Spiritualism, mediumship and women in nineteenth-century AmericaView the Source 2. The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850-1914
2. The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850-1914
Janet Oppenheim, Cambridge University Press, 1985On Spiritualism and psychical research in the nineteenth centuryView the Source 3. Spiritualism (Religious Movement) (Wikipedia)
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 Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
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