What is Spiritualism | PsychicSmile
What is Spiritualism: A Movement, Not Just a Practice
What is Spiritualism? It is a religious movement built on the belief that the human soul survives death, that the dead can communicate with the living, and that this communication can be demonstrated through mediumship. Spiritualism describes itself as a science, a philosophy and a religion at once: a science because it claims its facts can be observed, a philosophy because it offers a way of understanding life and death, and a religion because it gathers people in worship and gives them a moral framework. That threefold claim is the key to the whole movement. Spiritualism is not only a set of techniques for contacting spirits. It is an organized faith with churches, ministers, principles, hymns and a history that stretches back more than 175 years.
It is easy to confuse Spiritualism with mediumship, and the two are closely related, but they are not the same thing. Mediumship is the practice: a person acting as a channel between the living and the dead. Spiritualism is the movement that grew up around that practice, giving it a theology, an organization and a community. Our page on the history of mediumship tells the story of the practice itself, from ancient oracles to modern readings. This page tells the story of the movement: how it began, what it believes, how it organized itself, and what it looks like today. The distinction matters, because you can practice mediumship without being a Spiritualist, and you can be a Spiritualist without ever sitting in a seance.
Hydesville, 1848: Where Modern Spiritualism Began
Modern Spiritualism dates its birth to a small farmhouse in Hydesville, New York, in the spring of 1848. On the night of March 31, 1848, two young sisters, Maggie Fox, aged 14, and Kate Fox, aged 11, claimed that mysterious rapping sounds in their bedroom were answering their questions. According to the accounts that spread across America in the following weeks, the family asked the raps to count, to give ages, and to identify itself, and the raps responded. The family said the spirit was that of a peddler who had been murdered and buried in the cellar. Neighbors crowded into the house, the story traveled, and within months the Fox sisters were giving public demonstrations in Rochester and then in New York City.
The sisters' story has a complicated ending that belongs in any honest account. Forty years later, in 1888, Maggie Fox publicly confessed that the raps had been a trick, produced by cracking the joints of their toes, and she demonstrated the method on stage. She later recanted her confession, and Kate never confessed at all. Historians still argue about what really happened in that farmhouse. What is not in dispute is the effect. The Hydesville raps lit a fuse. Within a few years, seances were being held across the United States and Britain, table tipping and spirit writing became parlor pastimes, and a movement that had no founder, no scripture and no church found itself with millions of followers.
Spiritualism did not come from nowhere. The ground had been prepared by earlier ideas: the mesmeric theories of Franz Anton Mesmer, the visions of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, and the writings of the American seer Andrew Jackson Davis, whose book The Principles of Nature was published in 1847, the year before Hydesville. Davis later became known as the John the Baptist of Modern Spiritualism, because his work gave the new movement an intellectual framework before the Fox sisters gave it a public event. Spiritualism grew so fast because it answered a need that the churches of the time were not meeting. In an age of high mortality, when families routinely lost children to disease, it offered direct, personal evidence that the dead lived on, not as a doctrine to be believed but as an experience to be witnessed.
What Spiritualists Believe
At its heart, Spiritualism rests on a small set of beliefs that have remained remarkably stable since the nineteenth century. The first is that the soul survives the death of the body, with memory, personality and reason intact. The second is that communication between the living and the dead is possible, and that mediumship is the means by which it happens. The third is that this communication is not a miracle or a mystery reserved for saints, but a natural fact that can be observed and studied. The fourth is that the spirit world is a place of progress, where souls continue to learn and grow after death. And the fifth is that how a person lives matters, because moral responsibility does not end at death.
Different Spiritualist organizations state these beliefs in different words, but the shape is shared. The American movement, organized through the National Spiritualist Association of Churches, adopted a Declaration of Principles that began with six articles in 1899 and grew to nine over the following decades. The first principle states a belief in Infinite Intelligence. The second says the phenomena of nature, both physical and spiritual, are the expression of Infinite Intelligence. Later principles affirm that the individual survives death, that communication with the dead is a fact, that the Golden Rule contains the highest morality, and that prophecy and healing are divine attributes proven through mediumship. The British movement, organized through the Spiritualists' National Union, follows Seven Principles that trace back to the medium Emma Hardinge Britten, who articulated them in a lecture at Cleveland Hall in London on April 30, 1871. Those seven principles speak of the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, the communion of spirits and the ministry of angels, the continuous existence of the human soul, personal responsibility, compensation and retribution for deeds done on earth, and eternal progress open to every soul.
Notice what is absent from both lists. There is no creed about the nature of God beyond Infinite Intelligence. There is no doctrine of hell, no original sin, no savior whose death is required for salvation. Spiritualism is deliberately undogmatic, and that was part of its appeal in the nineteenth century, when many people were leaving churches they found rigid and unwelcoming. A Spiritualist church service reflects that openness. It typically includes hymns, a prayer, a reading, an address on spiritual philosophy, and a demonstration of mediumship, in which a medium gives messages to members of the congregation. Healing is often offered as well, usually in the form of hands-on or absent healing prayer.
Organizing a Religion: Churches, Ministers and Camps
For a movement that began with two girls in a farmhouse, Spiritualism organized itself with surprising speed. The first Spiritualist church in the United States was established in Sturgis, Michigan, in 1858, only ten years after Hydesville. In Britain, Spiritualist societies multiplied through the 1860s and 1870s. In the United States, the National Spiritualist Association was formed at a convention in Chicago on September 27, 1893, bringing order to a movement that had been chaotic and decentralized, and responding to the charges of fraud that had dogged it for decades. The association later became the National Spiritualist Association of Churches, and it remains one of the oldest and largest Spiritualist organizations in the country.
The movement also created its own geography. Spiritualist camps, summer communities where believers gathered for lectures, seances and healing, sprang up across the northeastern United States. The most famous, Lily Dale in western New York, was founded in 1879 and still operates today as a year round community of mediums, healers and teachers. At its height, Lily Dale drew thousands of visitors each summer, and it became a kind of capital for American Spiritualism. In Britain, the Arthur Findlay College at Stansted Hall, established as a college for the advancement of Spiritualism in the 1960s, became the leading training center for mediums and healers, and it remains so today.
Spiritualism also trained and certified its own ministers and mediums. The National Spiritualist Association of Churches ordains ministers, certifies mediums and healers, and publishes a manual for its churches. The Spiritualists' National Union in Britain awards diplomas and certificates in mediumship, healing and speaking. This professional structure was partly a response to fraud. After decades of exposure, from the Fox sisters' confession to the unmasking of physical mediums, the movement's leaders understood that credibility required standards, and they built them.
Spiritualism at Its Height and Its Decline
By the early twentieth century, Spiritualism was a major religious force. Its followers included the novelist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, who became its most famous champion after the death of his son Kingsley in the First World War. Conan Doyle wrote and lectured about Spiritualism for the rest of his life, and his public break with his friend Harry Houdini, who campaigned against fraudulent mediums, became one of the great public arguments of the 1920s. Conan Doyle believed the evidence for survival was overwhelming. Houdini believed the movement was a fraud from start to finish. Their quarrel, played out in newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic, defined the public image of Spiritualism for a generation.
The movement declined after the Second World War, for reasons that are easy to see. The exposures of fraudulent mediums had damaged its credibility. The rise of psychology offered natural explanations for experiences that Spiritualists had read as supernatural. New forms of entertainment competed for the attention that seances once commanded. And the churches themselves, many of them small and aging, struggled to attract young members. By the late twentieth century, Spiritualism was a small movement, counted in the tens of thousands rather than the millions.
Yet it did not disappear. Spiritualist churches still meet every Sunday in Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia and elsewhere. Lily Dale still draws visitors. The Arthur Findlay College still trains mediums. And the ideas of Spiritualism, survival after death, communication with the dead, personal spiritual experience without dogma, have spread far beyond the movement itself, into the wider culture of psychics, mediums and spiritual seekers. Many people who would never call themselves Spiritualists hold beliefs that Spiritualism first made popular.
An Illustrative Example: Ruth and the Sunday Service
This example is illustrative, not a real person's story.
Ruth, a 67 year old retired school secretary, had not been inside a church for 30 years when a friend invited her to a Spiritualist service in her town. She expected something strange and found something ordinary: a small hall, a hymn she half remembered, a short talk about kindness, and then a medium who stood at the front and spoke to people in the congregation. The medium turned to Ruth and described an older man with a flat cap who liked to garden, and Ruth felt her breath catch, because her father had worn a flat cap and had spent every evening in his garden. The medium said the man wanted Ruth to know he was proud of her, and Ruth cried quietly in her seat. She went back the next Sunday, and the Sunday after that. She does not claim the experience proved anything. She says the service gave her a place where grief was allowed to speak, and where the dead were treated as present rather than as gone. That is what a Spiritualist church offers at its best: not proof, but a community built around the hope that death is not the end.
Spiritualism and Mediumship Today
If you are curious about Spiritualism, the best way to understand it is to attend a service. Most Spiritualist churches welcome visitors, and the service follows a familiar pattern: hymns, a prayer, a reading, an address, and a demonstration of mediumship. You will not be asked to believe anything on the spot, and you will not be asked for money beyond a small collection. If a message is given to you, you are free to accept it, to set it aside, or to disagree with it. The mediumship hub explains how modern mediums work, and what is a medium describes the role in detail. If you want to understand the sitting itself, our guide to what is a seance explains the format that Spiritualist circles have used since the nineteenth century. For the wider journey of spiritual growth, see spiritual awakening signs.
It is also worth reading Spiritualism with a clear eye about its history. The movement was born from an event that may have been a trick, it was shaped by sincere believers and by frauds, and it was investigated by some of the best minds of its age, who reached different conclusions. The Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882, exposed many mediums and documented others it could not explain. That mixed record is the honest one, and it is the record this page has tried to give. Spiritualism deserves to be understood as a religion, with its own beliefs, institutions and community, and not only as a collection of strange stories. Whether you share its beliefs or not, its history tells you something important about what people need when someone they love dies: not an argument, but a reason to hope.
If you would like a quiet space to reflect on questions of life after death, a reading can be a gentle next step. First 3 minutes FREE — every time, for every reading, with all advisors.
For a simple next step, try a One-Card Tarot reading and reflect on what continuity and connection mean to you.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Spiritualism in simple terms?
Spiritualism is a religious movement based on the belief that the soul survives death, that the dead can communicate with the living through mediumship, and that this communication can be observed and studied. It describes itself as a science, a philosophy and a religion, and it has churches, ministers and stated principles.
When did Modern Spiritualism begin?
Modern Spiritualism dates its beginning to March 31, 1848, when the Fox sisters, Maggie and Kate, reported rapping sounds in their farmhouse at Hydesville, New York, that seemed to answer questions. The story spread quickly, and seances and Spiritualist societies multiplied across the United States and Britain within a few years.
What is the difference between Spiritualism and mediumship?
Mediumship is the practice of acting as a channel between the living and the dead. Spiritualism is the religious movement built around that practice, with its own beliefs, churches, ministers and principles. You can practice mediumship without being a Spiritualist, and you can be a Spiritualist without sitting in a seance.
What are the Seven Principles of Spiritualism?
The Seven Principles of the British Spiritualists' National Union are the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, the communion of spirits and the ministry of angels, the continuous existence of the human soul, personal responsibility, compensation and retribution for deeds done on earth, and eternal progress open to every soul. They trace back to the medium Emma Hardinge Britten's 1871 lecture.
Is Spiritualism still practiced today?
Yes. Spiritualist churches still meet in Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia and elsewhere, and communities such as Lily Dale in New York and the Arthur Findlay College in England continue to train mediums and welcome visitors. The movement is much smaller than at its early twentieth century height, but its ideas about survival and communication have spread widely into modern spiritual culture.
Last updated: November 12, 2026
