The Rise of Contemporary Spiritualism

Concepts and controversies in talking to the dead

Anne Kalvig

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317017585
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Talking to the dead and communication with 'the other side' is often presented as a taboo in an increasingly technological and medically advanced world. However, practices of spiritualism and mediumship continue to remain popular and in high demand within contemporary Western societies. This book analyses the practices of today's mediums, who insist on standing at the threshold between life and death, interpreting signs and passing on communications, and asks how such concepts and practices are perceived by contemporary society. Using first-hand material gathered from alternative fairs, mediumistic congresses, séances, and interviews with both practitioners and clients, as well as thorough textual analysis, Anne Kalvig provides a clear overview of the various forms of consumption of mediumship in Western society and places these within a socio-cultural, religious and historical context. She also raises questions as to the controversies surrounding spiritualism and its representation and relationship with popular culture and the media. This book will be of interest to researchers in the field of sociology, religious studies, folklore, media studies and anthropology as well as to anyone interested in the upsurge of contemporary spiritualism, psychic phenomena and the paranormal.

1What is spiritualism?

On a Wednesday night, a woman stands on a small podium in a community center in Eastern Norway, telling the audience that she is receiving messages from an old, deceased man. The messages are transmitted mentally, and the deceased person is interpreted as the father of another person present in the community center. The receiver of the messages is a middle-aged man, sitting together with 25 other adults. They are the woman’s audience, and she is performing as a medium on behalf of the Norwegian Spiritualist Union.

A concert hall is half-full on a Sunday night in a town in Western Norway. The majority of the audience are women, aged approximately between 20 and 70. On stage is British medium Colin Fry, immaculately dressed in a velvet suit with vest and watch. He makes the whole hall laugh as he reconnects a woman in the audience with what he claims to be her dear, deceased mother: She has a few “juicy” comments about the woman’s recent choice of home decoration.

A family of four have gathered on the sofa on a Sunday night to watch the paranormal docudrama television series “The Power of the Spirits” on Norwegian channel TVNorge. They are astonished and thrilled when presenter Tom Strømnæss interviews a woman who saw all the lightbulbs of the house unscrewed and collected on her kitchen work top by a seemingly spiritual power. The drama heightens when medium Lilli Bendriss, with her characteristic dark and elegant appearance, has choking sensations because she “picks up” from a former, deceased owner of the house that the house caught fire in 1949. This year has already been transmitted to the present inhabitants of the house through mysterious pieces of paper and formations of matches.

At noon, on a Wednesday, a woman in her thirties, “Kjersti”, wishes to receive healing and contact with her dead “on the other side” by participating in the Facebook event “Anita’s Free Distant Healing”. Kjersti is at work in a company where she handles incoming calls, and she is present by the phone while at the same time receiving healing and channeling. Medium and healer Anita Helen Rasmussen is sending out distant healing and messages from the dead within a time span of 40 minutes via Facebook. Kjersti has participated in this weekly event before, and last time she interpreted one of the names written by Rasmussen on the event’s Facebook page as being a greeting from her beloved brother, who passed away unexpectedly three years earlier.

In a little village in mid-Norway, “Psychic Alva” accepts a phone call conveyed by the psychic line tele-market “Magic Circle” with which she is associated. The caller wants to know if her dead sister is alright, and Alva “picks up” comforting messages from the deceased woman to her mourning sister.

In a dentist’s office, “Kyrre” waits for his root filling. Absentmindedly, he reads the newspaper VG, and the paper has a large article on the wildlife television celebrity Lars Monsen. Monsen tells of contact with his dead mother and elder brother in the interview, and reveals that he believes everybody can be in contact with the dead, and that he himself has lived several lives. During the root filling procedure, the dentist, who has known Kyrre for many years, tells him that she has been totally hooked on the books by Irish author Lorna Byrne – an ordinary woman with an extraordinary capacity of communicating with angels and spirits “on the other side”.

The cited situations are examples of what could be called spiritualism, spiritualist and spiritual views and practices within Norwegian – and global – daily culture. In this book, I present spiritualism and similar activities from several perspectives. The focus is on Norwegian cases and material, with examples also from the Nordic area and from the UK. The phenomena described and analyzed are to a considerable extent also present globally, but international literature on the Norwegian and Nordic situation is scarce. This book seeks to address this situation.1 Spiritualism is contact with the dead, that is, transmission of messages from people no longer present. The underlying premise is that the souls or spirits of the dead are still present in places or dimensions with which contact is possible. Spiritualism might also include contact with other spiritual, otherworldly entities, such as angels, guides or ascended masters, but this book’s material is mainly limited to contact with the dead. A well-known actor on the spiritual scene such as “The Angel School”, now “Soulspring”, by Princess Märtha Louise and Elisabeth Nordeng is hence on the fringes of the project of this book, and is discussed only in relation to their commitment towards contact with the dead.

People transmitting contact and messages between our world and the world of the dead are (in Norway and the Nordic countries) called spiritualists, spiritists, mediums, channels, psychics or clairvoyants (in the national languages). As will be thematized below, spiritism, not spiritualism, is the common denominator for the mediumistic field in Norway. The abundance of names illustrates a wide variety of ways to practice and relate to spiritualism. Usually, one distinguishes between psychics and mediums by saying that all mediums are psychic, but not all psychics are mediums. Those receiving messages from the dead through others are called audiences, clients, recipients, receivers or sitters, as in “sitting and receiving messages in a séance”. “Séance” has strong connotations among people as something magic–mystic–occult, with dim light, conjuring mediums and half-frightened recipients. That “séance” is popularly understood in this way is in part understandable when history is considered, with classical spiritualism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often having a rather dramatic and theatrical design. Today, a séance, as we saw from the introductory examples, might be something taking place on a brightly lit stage in a large concert hall with hundreds of spectators, as well as something taking place virtually, that is, via the luminous screens of the social media of the internet. However, people may still sit in semi-dark séances and experience colors, faces, phenomena, voices and sounds thought to originate from the spirit world. Trance mediumship and physical mediumship are, nevertheless, not the most common examples of spiritualism.

Spiritualism is a highly popular and interesting phenomenon in the borderland between the religious and the secular. Relatively few academic analyses of this phenomenon in its contemporary versions have so far been provided, which is striking when considering how widespread spiritualism is in a society like Norway. My starting point is that I, as a scholar of religious studies, have been working for several years with contemporary spirituality and cultural concepts and practices surrounding death. I have been surprised to see that the spiritualist ideas permeating (popular) culture, and the various offerings people make use of to get in touch with their beloved dead, are not treated to a greater extent in academic literature. The transgressive communication conveyed in spiritualism and in contact with the dead is seldom analyzed in an integrated way. The situation is different concerning spiritualism in the past, sometimes called classical spiritualism. This has been of great scholarly interest, and numerous books and articles considering various aspects of the phenomenon have been published within various disciplines for decades.

When people flock to séances today, this has been dismissed as something superficial, embarrassing, speculative or romantic. However, many judged “the spiritualist craze” in the same way in its heyday, and this does not prevent us from being able today to analyze the historical phenomena from other angles than “truth versus forgery” or a hierarchy of taste in which spiritualism belongs to the cultural “others”. Today, scholarly interest in contemporary spiritualism, paranormal experiences and transgressive communication is increasing. An example of interest also from theological institutions and researchers is the Norwegian School of Mission and Theology, which dedicated its annual Reichelt seminary2 in 2015 to neospirituality and paranormal experiences as challenges to Christian belief and theology. Theologians who have worked with these issues include Anne Austad, who presented her dissertation in the psychology of religion, called Passing Away – Passing By: A Qualitative Study of Experiences and Meaning Making of Post Death Presence.3

It is important to note, too, that presenting spiritualism in an “integrated way”, as I formulate it above, is just one of many possible ways of “cutting” the field into shape. For example, one could approach the mediumistic and spiritualist activities primarily as forms of therapy, instead of bundling together disparate phenomena according to whether or not they relate to the typical, transgressive communication with the deceased and with spirits. However, throughout this book, I will show that it makes sense to do just that, and thus demonstrate that using “type of communication” as a fulcrum may reveal religion and religiosity as something far more shifting and diverse than is claimed by more traditional views.

I do not consider whether people actually talk to dead people, spirits, angels or other entities in what follows, as this is beyond the scope of the history of religions/religious studies (in the final chapter, I will see to what extent I am able to hold this “neutral” position). When people pray to a deity, offer food on an altar to ancestor spirits, lay teddy bears and greetings on a child’s grave, carry necklaces with gems thought to have healing effects, or transmit messages from “the other side”, they do so within certain frames that provide such actions with meaning. We tend to call this religion, (popular or folk) religiosity or spirituality, and place it outside or parallel to things made intelligible by natural science. Still, things claimed to infer, or to have as a departure point, the material world, as for example items or actions said to affect body or health, or messages from people who actually have existed, are more easily met with other claims of proving “truth” or “effect” than things we see as traditionally religious and “pious”, such as prayer. Thus, the above examples might be perceived as controversial to a varying degree, perhaps as follows: prayer in church – ok (classical “belief”); food for spirits on an altar – ok (among “the others”); teddy bears and letters written in the present tense to dead children – fairly ok (because the parents are comforted); moonstone in a necklace to promote pregnancy – not ok (fraud and wasted money); messages from actual dead people – not ok (fraud and waste of time and possibly money).4

From a subjective, personal perspective, it is quite legitimate to give such varied, normative consideration to practices based in and around things natural science cannot answer. From a science of religion perspective, however, evaluations of truth or correspondence with “traditional” models of religion are not valid methods in order to gain knowledge of and insight into the concerns of people today. This is not to say that we need to dismiss our critical thinking when studying the surrounding world. We need to reflect on which frames and models we see fit to carry into our meeting with the empirical data, that is, the material we wish to know and understand. We should be open-minded enough to be able to reflect upon religious and spiritual ideas and activities that we do not immediately recognize as typical and easy to place, as well as “rooted” enough to be able to categorize and analyze what we meet in a meaningful way. In other words, we need some definitions and field methods that help us filter the enormous variety of impressions and expressions. These tools must not from the outset define away the field of contemporary spirituality, spiritualism and popular culture that we wish to learn more about, something which could happen if we use a working definition of religion that underscores revelation, tradition, system or specific emotions.

Religion as communication and experience

Religion has been and continues to be defined in a great variety of ways. In daily speech, we “know” what we are talking about when we refer to something as “religion”. Thus, we also “know” what is not religion. But if we scrutinize the categories and phenomena somewhat more closely, things tend to get more blurred. For example, in 2012 Norwegian broadcasting corporation NRK, and its children’s channel NRK Super, showed the film version of a popular book series called The Deceased (Dauinger), in which the corporation had invested heavily (the series was also broadcast during Easter 2015). This highly popular television series, with the same name as the book series, is meant for children above the age of seven, and deals with the soul’s afterlife, with deceased people and with dying children communicating with the living through mediums or via items or extraordinary happenings.5 Its plot combines both thriller components and humor. Could one claim in this case that the national broadcasting corporation is performing (spiritualist) preaching, since the style of mediation of the series’ message is “social realistic” drama, possibly more “persuasive” than
science fiction or fantasy-style products towards children and youth? Or, is it fallacious to call something “religion” or “preaching”, if the intention of the product is entertainment? What if the mind behind The Deceased, Catholic Arne Berggren, actually had as his goal the waking up of Norwegian children to see the immortality of the soul and the mercy of God? Another example: Is it religion we see at play when youth are confirmed in the Norwegian Church? Of course, a standard answer would be that confirmation is a classical and central example of a rite of passage found all over the globe, throughout the
millennia. But what if a confirmand openly admits that he or she is going to be confirmed because it means a considerable amount of money, and because, frankly, it is fun to be celebrated?6 Does it then turn into something different from religion?

In both these examples, psychological or emotional elements are deemed vital for the consideration of what is involved – in these situations, intentions, attitudes and feelings are not very clear guidelines of whether human expressions of culture are placed inside or outside the “borders of religion”. But in many cases, psychological claims of “introspection” (what goes on in the heads of those we study) will be futile, and this way of defining religion presupposes that religion is tied up in unequivocal ways with, for example, existential sincerity, deep emotions, piety and “belief”. Instead of searching for the invisible core of religion, one might define religion as something observable, for example as specific expressions of a certain kind of communication. The historians of religion Ingvild S. Gilhus and Lisbeth Mikaelsson did so in what is now a well-known cultural analytical definition, whereby religion is “human beings’ relations to conceptual universes distinguished by communication with and about hypothetical deities and powers” (Gilhus and Mikaelsson 2001: 29).7 Communication with and about deities and powers includes society’s larger “talk” of religion (for example, when weekly magazines present what celebrities believe or have tried of various spiritual offers), at the same time as “deities and powers” excludes ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 What is spiritualism?
• 2 Spiritualism’s birth and days of glory
• 3 Communication with the dead today: Forms, actors, organizations
• 4 Spiritualist messages and the appeal to women
• 5 Spiritualism, shamanism, healing and popular culture: Array and lattice
• 6 Controversies and delineations
• 7 Table turning and other spiritualist challenges to the science of religion
• Bibliography
• Index