Reaching

On spiritualism

“Any yes’s? Maybe’s”

The medium glanced around the chapel, thick with humidity in the first of a series summer heatwaves, looking for connection. She shifted her weight from one foot to another in front of an easel with a light illuminating the faint sketch she’d just made of a spirit that, in my opinion, bore more than a slight resemblance to a young Hugh Grant. She had explained that her mediumistic ability involved channeling these images of spirits of the dead into sketches. Her routine was to sketch the dead person, then ask if anyone in the room was a “yes” or a “maybe,” which would then initiate a series of questions to determine who the spirit was in relation to them. She would signal she was done by taking a drink of water from the glass on the table beside her, to clear the spirit from her mind’s eye.

Her first four sketches managed to find their homes among the thirty or so spectators in the small Spiritualist Church. Though the matches were often vague, she did cause one young woman to fall to tears over the long ago loss of a sixteen year old best friend — even the most hokey cold reading can and often does touch an exposed nerve. The fifth and final sketch proved more difficult. The medium walked up and down the aisles. She tried waiting us out, hoping someone would claim this unknown dead woman just to break the awkward tension. She threw out possibilities, that perhaps it was even someone none of us had ever met but who had some tenuous connection to us as children — a great-aunt, for example, in another country. No dice. Eventually, she gave up.

I had discovered this particular Spiritualist Church a few weeks prior while on my way to the farewell party for my job, having been made redundant after seven years alongside nearly everyone else. Amused that spiritualist churches still existed, I’d taken a bunch of photos, including of the sign advertising their opening times, and decided that eventually I would come back.

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Spiritualism is a 19th Century Century religious, philosophical, and political movement that began in Upstate New York in 1848 when the Fox Sisters claimed to have made contact with the spirit of a murdered man in their house. Through a code of clicks and knocks, the Fox Sisters could receive messages from him on the other side. Though many were skeptical of these claims, and some of the sisters would go on to refute them later in life (and then refute their own refutations), it lit a fuse in the cultural consciousness.

The 19th Century was a period of incredible and rapid social change as the system of chattel slavery collapsed, women’s rights entered the chat, and industrial capitalism rearranged nearly every aspect of social and political life in Europe, the Americas, and beyond. Advances in science had introduced a plausible non-religious explanation for all manner of previously little understood phenomena, including germ theory — the idea that microbes unseen by human eyes could affect our health. Victorians were eager to apply this scientific method of examining the world to all sorts of things, including the realm of the supernatural and philosophical, and Spiritualism became one of the largest avenues for doing so.

In classic Spiritualism, a medium — usually a woman — would receive messages from the other side like the Fox Sisters had, or even incorporate the spirit through a process of trance possession. All sorts of modes of communication were developed, from Ouija boards to tipping tables, and through these people would ask the unseen world for knowledge of its ways. For some, this focused on attempts to detail and understand the nature of death, rebirth, and the afterlife — even to understand God. But for most, it became a way to hear news of lost relatives — a use that would come to dominate following a succession of brutal world wars.

Spiritualists were often incredibly progressive. Mediumship allowed women to take on prominent roles within a religious sphere, at a time when they were otherwise marginalised in nearly every mainstream religious denomination available at that time. It’s no surprise then that so many Suffragettes were avid spiritualists. But so too were Abolitionists. The spirits gave a shocking and relatively consistent message from the other side: race was a social construct, not a spiritual one. Alongside Quakers, Spiritualists were often early adopters of Abolitionist politics, fighting for the destruction of the slave system.

It’s not very surprising then that it caused quite a stir. Not only did Spiritualism push back against the patriarchal and white supremacist system, it also destabilized the power of the traditional churches by promoting the idea that you didn’t need the church’s middle men to achieve knowledge of God and Heaven. But it’s rapid success also called forth legions of charlatans, some who staged spiritualist sessions in theatrical venues complete with special effects ghostly visitations and others who extorted grieving families out of their wealth with the promise of just one last message from a dead father or son. An industry of skeptics coalesced to undermine Spiritualism by exposing charlatans, which some believed included anyone connected to it at all.

Though it would never again reach the same cultural ubiquity it had in the 19th Century, Spiritualism and its many off-shoots would live on across the world, with bursts of interest following each of the world wars, and eventually taking on new forms during the New Age movement of the 1970s-90s. There are spiritualist towns, like Lily Dale in New York, and spiritualist universities like Arthur Findley College in England. And there remain a declining but dedicate number of Spiritualist Churches scattered through Europe and the Americas and attended by your kookiest aunts.

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My parents were not regular church attenders. But when we did go to church, my Mum would take us to Christ Church Unity, a congregation in a large ex-monastery hanging onto the edge of the Escarpment in my hometown. Services were fairly normal as far as I, a child who had little experience of churches, could see. There would be a long sermon and some hymns, and then the children would be led down to the basement for Sunday School. My only memory of Sunday School is a lesson on the Good Samaritans, which we then had to go back upstairs and explain to the congregated adults. My older brother had his first theatrical performance in this church’s production of Fiddler on the Roof.

But that wasn’t all the that church did. After services ended, while the adults drank coffee and we ate dry cookies, sometimes they would offer a special tour of the monastery. The tour took you around to all the other parts of the large building, including a long narrow hallway that ran overtop the church itself and culminated in a very cute single room, big enough for one person to sit and read quietly. In the attics were rooms full of empty beds, relics from its time with the monks. But what made these sights thrilling to my young heart were the stories that went with them. “And this is where [so-and-so] saw the ghost.” “It’s said that many people have heard strange sounds in this room.” It was a church ghost tour.

Activities outside the Sunday service included workshops on how to change traffic lights with the power of your mind. This community was no ordinary Christian group, they were Spiritualists. They believed in the Gospels, but they also believed in contact with the unseen world, in personal spiritual gnosis from spirit guides, and in the idea that, as my Mum so frequently said, “God lives in many mansions” — that spiritual wisdom can be found all over the world, in many forms. Compared to the evangelical or Catholic upbringings of some of my friends, it was a marvellously progressive vision for the world — perhaps made more so by the fact that our attendance was so rare, a treat for only a few times a year.

My parents had met through theatre but Spiritualism had been a big part of their story. Shortly after they’d gotten together, they’d formed a psychic group with some of their friends in Peterborough, Ontario. It was mostly an excuse to hang out, but while doing so they developed their abilities. Both of my parents were psychometrists, practicing the skill of receiving messages and information from touching objects. For example, holding a ring and telling you about the woman who died while wearing it, something my Mum claimed to have once done to startling effect. My Mum read cards, both tarot and playing, alongside her horoscope, tea leaves, and palms. Both of my parents had their own collection of books by T. Lobsang Rampa — the supposedly Tibetan Buddhist author who wrote of his skull-cracking initiation into secret Tibetan wisdom for years before being outed as the son of a plumber from Devonshire (coincidentally, also the early mentor of trans man and later actual Buddhist monk Laurence Michael Dillon). They were not hippies aesthetically — my good Welsh Mum was quick to insist she was a Mod who listened to Rock — but they were certainly engaged in the spiritual questing of their generation. My childhood was full of stories of the unseen, as experienced by every member of our family, even the most atheistic.

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I have spent many nights sitting around a table draped in white cloth, set with a large goblet of clear water, a candle, and vases of white flowers. Gathered in a circle in those dark rooms, we recite a litany of prayers, sing songs in Spanish, and then cleanse our bodies with perfumed water before sitting down to listen.

Spiritism is an off-shoot of the Spiritualist movement, originating from the writing and experiments of Allan Kardec, a French school teacher who applied his own scientific method to the study of the spiritual world, the results of which he published in a series of influential books. Like many Victorians, Kardec was interested in categorising and mapping things out, and he created a vision of a spirit world that was hierarchical — from the most unevolved and possibly malevolent spirits to the highest reaches of the Heavens — but a practice that eschewed hierarchy — allowing anyone to develop the ability to speak to the other side — at once both relatively familiar to the cosmology of the Catholic Church and a radical departure.

French Spiritism made its way across the Atlantic, creating deep roots in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Brazil, where it initially took hold among upper class white women but soon became the province of Black and mixed race women who used it to legitimise their pre-existing healing traditions. The particular branch in Cuba that I practice became known as espiritismo cruzado.

Cruzado means crossed, and the label speaks to the influence of other traditions usually practiced alongside it, namely Regla de Ocha (Santería / Lukumí) and Palo Mayombe. As many may already know, I have been an initiated priest of Regla de Ocha for the past fifteen years this September, and though I see them as distinct, participation in espiritismo has always been part of that for me. The central practice of Espiritismo is the misa — the spiritual mass — in which participant mediums listen for the voices of the dead and of spirit guides, incorporate them in a form of trance possession, and provide cleansings and other works to the community.

Christianity has little appeal to me, beyond the glitz and glam of Catholic Churches, but espiritismo reminds me of my parents and the church I so infrequently attended as a child. Part of me remains skeptical, never truly certain in the veracity of a message heard in the dark, cigar-smoked rooms of the misa. And yet, at the head of the table, messages pour through me in a torrent, unearthing family secrets about those gathered that I otherwise wouldn’t have known. I don’t need to ask if there is a “yes” or “maybe,” because the information is clear and strong. There’s a dissonance for me between two different ways of knowing the world, but it’s in that line that my life is lived.

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The medium at the Spiritualist Church paced about the room. She mentioned the book she had written about her experiences in Spiritualism, that there were copies on hand in case anyone wanted to buy them. I became more interested in the others gathered here.

I had arrived expecting to be the youngest person in the room. Often, Spiritualist spaces are made up of the elderly, seeking out contact with the other side where most of their friends and family now reside. And indeed, when I first shuffled into the chapel, after paying me £3.50 (thank God, or perhaps the spirits, for my last minute decision to put a fiver in my handbag before leaving the house), it was largely older men and women sitting there in the heat. But soon the rows of chairs filled up with all sorts. A mother and daughter, with lip filler and lash extensions. A group of young Brazilians led forward by the sole goth within their troupe. And a clasp of straight hipster types who seemed remarkably out of place.

I fanned myself with a hand fan that my brother in Ocha had gifted me from Puerto Rico, and waited and waited. The drawing medium didn’t manage to stir anything in me, not even my finely tuned spidey sense of spiritual vibes, which was disappointing. But as her act went on, I was sort of glad that she hadn’t connected to any of my own dead people, as she seemed to have little interested in anything that dead might have to say. With each sketch, she would simply identify whose dead person it was, and then move on. As an espiritista, I couldn’t believe it — I’m used to hearing incredibly detailed and stirring messages from the dead, and this woman was satisfied just to know that they were there.

The spiritual heart of the Western world has long since moved on from Spiritualism to other forms, though its influence is pervasive. TikTok is awash with plant medicine light chanters and divine number givers, whose algorithmic hooks quickly lead one toward fascist conspiracy theories and Jewish space lasers. A far cry from the Suffragettes and Abolitionists who imagined, however imperfectly, a world of liberation and enlightenment that could be possible with proof from the afterlife. In some ways, I’m relieved that my parents did not live to see social media as I worry how it may have warped their otherwise empathetic hearts, the way it has to the parents of so many of my close friends.

The practice of Spiritualism is an effort to reach beyond our own boundaries and limited ways of thinking. To put our hands out into the dark with hope that they will be met, to find out that we are not just alone for a brief moment on a rock hurtling through space. While I’m not sure I’ve ever had success changing traffic lights with my mind, and often question some of the messages I hear in misas, I hope that I never quit reaching.