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spontaneous acts of scholarly combustion
Speaking with the Dead
An Ethnography of
Extrahuman Experience
Contents
Preface
. e Opposite of Haunting
. Dreaming before an Audience
. e Sense of a Story
. Mother’s Day
. How Not to Speak with the Dead
. Spirit Guides and the Daily Aerlife
. Life, Stories
. Greetings! I’m Sorry for Your Loss
Bibliography
xi
Acknowledgments
I owe a tremendous debt of thanks to the committee and mem-
bers of the Canberra Spiritualist Association, as well as the me-
diums, not all of them members of the Association, who spoke
at their services and consented to being recorded. Norman and
Lynette Ivory, Sarah Jeery and Julian Glover, Janet Adams,
Jane Hall, Selma McLaren, Penelope Murray, Elayne Strahan,
and Jen Webb have been wonderful dialogue partners. Many
other members have shared their experiences, reections,
and philosophies with me in recent years as well, and I regret
not being able to list everyone. I fondly remember here the late
Debby Walker, whose devotion to Spiritualism gave her resilient
energy, hope, and humor in the face of a terminal disease. Her
voice is profoundly missed, but will be heard in these pages.
My collaborator in the research project, the sociologist An-
drew Singleton, has been a generous and insightful friend and
colleague. He and I acknowledge the support of our universities
and the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Project grant
number .
At the Australian National University, I am beyond grateful
to Shameem Black, Francesca Merlan, and Carly Schuster for
their engaged and encouraging responses to the work as it de-
veloped. At the University of Oslo, members of Marianne Lien’s
and Wenzel Geissler’s writing group gave lively and useful feed-
back on a dra of part of Chapter . Courtney Handman, Mi-
chael W. Scott, Kristina Wirtz, and Erin Yerby have also given
critically insightful feedback which has pushed me to reconsider
xii
my assumptions and develop the analysis throughout the book.
Over several years of work, the complete manuscript received
two anonymous reviews which were both erudite and sympa-
thetic. I owe special thanks to Eileen A. Fradenburg Joy and
Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei for believing in the manuscript
and seeing it safely across planes of existence, and to SAJ for
editing the text skillfully.
e research project would not have been possible with-
out the involvement of my family, Sharon, Andrew, and Evan,
whose patient goodwill and humor is a source of inspiration and
support. Finally, this book is dedicated to three remarkable sis-
ters, the Usakowskis: To my mother, Alexis, whose interest and
open-mindedness in religious and spiritual matters has always
inspired me; to her late sister, Carole, whose faith ran deep in
ways I did not understand but have come to respect; and to her
younger sister, Zmira, who forged her new way into an old tra-
dition. is book is dedicated to you with love and aection.
Preface
Because much of this book deals with spoken words, a few notes
on the recording and transcribing process may be useful. I did a
lot of audio recording during the research project, all of it with
the permission of the Canberra Spiritualist Association and the
mediums working at their services. My equipment was a small
and inexpensive Sony mp recorder with an external micro-
phone. Recording conditions were sometimes dicult, with
(for example) a heater blowing, a coee urn boiling, and the
room itself providing plenty of echo. Readers will note several
instances in which inaudible speech is mentioned, and what
“inaudible” sometimes means in these cases is “not recorded
clearly enough.”
I have gone over transcripts of all of the recordings multiple
times to make corrections and verify accuracy. In the service
of readability, I have edited text lightly to heal the bumps and
bruises of real-time talk. Ellipses indicate snippets of deleted
text. I do not mark every deletion with ellipses; for example,
sometimes I eliminate minor repetitions, placeholders (“um”),
false starts, and the like without indicating them. Em dashes
(—) indicate interruption, either by oneself or another speaker.
As an example of the smoothing-out process, “But he’s also
showing me gum trees,” quoted in Chapter , was originally spo-
ken as “But sh — the— he’s, he’s also showing me gum trees.”
I generally use real names for mediums and pseudonyms for
audience members. One person whose real name I use is given
a pseudonym in discussing a sensitive event. Priscilla, Bened-
etta, and Ariadne (rst mentioned in Chapter ), Warren, Aunt
Stephanie, and Stella (Chapter ), Maura (Chapter ), Jessica,
Wanda, Anne, and Jack (Chapter ), and Susan (Chapter ) are
all pseudonyms.
e Opposite of Haunting
Within any spiritual or religious tradition, nothing could
seem more obvious than the reality of the unseen world. Gods
demand attention. Spirits compel action. In a famous essay on
religion’s cultural foundations, Cliord Geertz (, ) wryly
observed that when he asked a Balinese man who had gone
into trance and performed as the goddess Rangda if the man
believed Rangda were real, the question le Geertz “open to the
suspicion of idiocy” — What do you mean, is Rangda real? I was
her. But outsiders oen view these practices negatively: Who
could believe such things? Don’t you know you’re talking to air?
ere is an imbalance of certainties, then, in which spiritual
claims inspire either devotion or scorn.
Many social scientists who study religious life try to avoid
these extremes. A careful observer can try to understand the
social reality of spirits without insisting on any reality beyond
that. Social reality can be a slippery concept even for social sci-
entists, though, and the balance between skepticism and advo-
cacy has proven dicult to sustain for many authors.
In this book, I try to maintain the balance. As part of my
ongoing research on popular religion, I developed an inter-
est in the religion known as Spiritualism. In Spiritualism, you
speak with dead people. In its heyday from the mid-nineteenth
century into the early twentieth, Spiritualist séances and pub-
lic demonstrations attracted huge crowds and attention. It had
deep but oen unacknowledged inuence in politics, with
Alfred Deakin in Australia and William Lyon Mackenzie King
in Canada acting on Spiritualist principles. Although some sci-
entists attempted to investigate the movement’s claims soberly,
many commentators couldn’t help tilting in one direction or
the other. Harry Houdini, the magician and escape artist, wrote
A Magician Among the Spirits in to denounce Spiritualist
mediums as “vultures,” adding that he did not mean to insult
actual vultures, which are a blameless natural species. Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes and dear friend of
Houdini, toured Australia as an evangelist for Spiritualism and
announced in his two-volume history of the movement that
Spiritualism was the greatest event in history since the coming
of Christ (Houdini , , and Doyle , vii).
In deciding to conduct research with Spiritualists, I intended,
as far as possible, to hold the dicult balance: to be open-
minded, to learn what they had to teach, and to try to under-
stand how Spiritualism works culturally — that is, how people
create it together. e reader can judge whether I have kept the
balance or not. I must mention that the Spiritualists of Can-
berra, Australia, were an exceptionally welcoming group. ey
seemed happy to have an outsider join them. is was a chance
for them to teach me what they knew to be solid facts. And, as a
small and aging congregation, they were glad to have someone
in his forties help run some of the practical aspects of services,
like setting up the computer and speakers before the service.
I joined the Canberra Spiritualist Association () in .
Becoming a member simply meant paying twenty dollars, sign-
ing my name to an application form, and waiting for the com-
mittee to approve. I attended oen enough that, in addition to
being accepted as a member, I was asked to join the church com-
mittee and duly elected to it in August . I also took the night
courses the oered on mediumship, psychic skills, tarot,
and dream interpretation. In January , I moved to Norway
and served out my committee term from a distance. I continued
to correspond and consult with Association members as I wrote
up the ndings of my research.
is book is the result. It is a portrait of a modern religion
with an old purpose: to communicate with the dead. I have
tried to speak with spirits. I have witnessed many mediums
try as well, and they do a better job of it than me. Most of this
book will describe what I learned from skilled mediums and
what it feels like to try mediumship as a newcomer. I will dis-
cuss moments from services, private readings, and other events,
telling the stories of how mediums nd their way into a world
where talking with people on the astral plane is sometimes rou-
tine but never dull.
Like any religious movement, Spiritualism is a histori-
cal creature. It has changed in profound ways since it began.
Although many present-day Spiritualists describe their religion
as primeval, it took institutional shape in the mid-nineteenth
century. Its early popularity was stoked by physical manifes-
tations such as mysterious knocks, writing by unseen hands,
musical instruments oating about the room, and, to the delight
of historians of photography, images of ghosts and ectoplasm
(spirit substance oozing from mediums’ bodies). When spirits
were contacted in the early days of the movement, they might
be family members, but they were just as likely to be famous
gures. Benjamin Franklin showed up notably oen at early
séances. Since those days, however, Anglophone Spiritualism
has deemphasized physical manifestations. Mediums today are
likely to be “mental mediums.” ey receive impressions which
they believe come from the spirit world: sights, sounds, scents,
tastes, feelings, and intuitions. eir task is to pass these signs
on to living human audiences in order to gure out who this
deceased person is and what they want to say. Mental medi-
ums do not usually change their tone of voice as they converse
between dead and living. For example, they do not sound creaky
when speaking for grandparents or use tiny voices when speak-
ing for children. ey nonetheless bring forth a parade of char-
acters when they do their work. ese characters are your late
loved ones. Benjamin Franklin doesn’t show up from the spirit
world anymore. Your grandmother does.
It is tempting to view Spiritualism as one way people address
the vulnerability of families. As extended families shrink to
nuclear families, nuclear families fragment, and hometowns
become a succession of worksites, it is plausible to see move-
ments like Spiritualism as attempts at making kinship stable.
e people you really love and care for, mediums say, will always
be with you. You will always be with them. Family is eternal.
is understanding of Spiritualism’s appeal gains traction when
we consider how older Christian visions of heaven and hell
have lost plausibility for many people. Except for fundamental-
ists, who believes in eternal hellre anymore? And if there is a
heaven, isn’t it less likely to feature harps and clouds and more
likely to look like the version mediums describe, a loving family
forever?
But Spiritualism is not just a way to make family ties feel
secure. Much of the passion poured into mediumship comes
from the modernist conviction that science is the source of
truth. Modern Spiritualism took shape in the same era as Dar-
winian understandings of evolution. At the same time, develop-
ments in technology like telegraphy and photography prompted
new thinking about the possibilities of communication and
recording. As a result, Spiritualists came to cherish the idea that
progress is woven into the design of the universe and the claim
that life aer death is provable. Scientic investigators like mem-
bers of Britain’s famed Society for Psychical Research worked to
understand whether mediums’ skills came from genuine other-
worldly sources, or perhaps from telepathy, keen observational
powers, or subconscious memory — or, for that matter, from
mediums’ fraudulence and audiences’ gullibility (Blum ,
and Crabtree ).
Although mediums and skeptical investigators oen disa-
greed on what counted as evidence of real communication with
the dead, many nineteenth- and twentieth-century mediums
came to agree that they needed to prove their claims. Today, the
kind of evidence most Spiritualist mediums produce is a har-
mony between their description of a person’s character and a lis-
tener’s memories of that person. If a medium describes your late
grandmother’s personality vividly, with supporting details that
cluster like stars around the sense of a story, then, Spiritualists
argue, the medium has shown you something true and deeply
comforting about the nature of existence. ere is no such thing
as death. Your late loved ones are showing up here and now to
speak with you.
e technologies that red people’s imaginations about spirit
communication in the nineteenth century, especially photogra-
phy, might seem to threaten Spiritualism these days. Photos and
videos stored online now make accurate representations of dead
people imperishable. Even the best mediums can’t portray the
dead as clearly as a photo or capture their voices as crisply as
a recording. Mediumship is a notably complicated and chancy
form of memory-work. But, I suggest, Spiritualist practices are
likely to thrive with new technology because the connection
Spiritualism makes between living and dead is not only about
memory. Spiritualism emphasizes recognition. e point of a
medium telling you about your deceased loved ones is not to
look or sound like them, but to acknowledge them, and oen
to acknowledge them publicly, before an audience. In providing
this opportunity for recognition, mediums underscore the fact
that your loved ones mattered and your relationship with them
mattered — and will always continue to matter.
If I am correct in predicting that mediumship will continue
to thrive in the twenty-rst century and beyond, there is still
no doubt that Spiritualist churches face the same challenges as
other religious institutions. Just as the majority of Christians
In writing about recognition, I am drawing especially on Keane (). I
am also inspired by Barbara Myerho ’s discussion of the “erce human
drive to be noticed,” which she makes in reference to Jewish seniors in Los
Angeles and resonates with my experiences with Spiritualist mediums.
What Myerho says about elderly Jewish people’s self-understandings
applies well to mediums’ work of expressive relationship-building: “the
opposite of honor is not shame, but invisibility” (Myerho , ;
emphasis in original).
prefer to skip church on Sunday, so the majority of Spiritual-
ists — or, to broaden the category, people who are interested in
hearing from the dead — do not want to sit through a formal
service. ey will watch celebrity mediums on , from eresa
Caputo to Tyler Henry to John Edward. ey will attend psychic
fairs, and occasionally pay a medium for a private, individual
reading. Attending regularmeetings is lessappealing for many.
But women have kept Spiritualism alive. Indeed, Spiritual-
ism’s growth and development has always been profoundly
shaped by female leaders. e movement began with knock-
ing sounds heard in the presence of two sisters, Kate and Mag-
gie Fox, in upstate New York in . Many of the popular and
inuential mediums in Spiritualism’s heyday were women. It
gained strength in its resonance with nineteenth-century wom-
en’s rights movements. And, as I show in the following pages,
twice as many women as men attend Canberra Spiritualist Asso-
ciation meetings. is is emphatically not to say that men do not
participate — and Spiritualist women sometimes say they wish
more men would join. But this is a movement where women
not only participate, but regularly speak with public authority.
As practiced in Spiritualism, mediumship is distinctly mod-
ern in its empowerment of women and emphasis on the need
for evidence to support its claims. For these reasons and oth-
ers, I resist using the term “haunting” in these pages, although
it might seem to t a religion in which you speak with spirits.
ere is now a tendency in nonction writing to use the term
“haunting” to analyze many kinds of loss, damage, and domi-
nation. But to approach Spiritualism in these terms, I suggest,
would skew the possibilities of understanding it. Spiritualists
made it clear to me that what they were doing was normal and
unremarkable, so I am searching for suitable language to rep-
resent this. To put it plainly, in Spiritualism, the dead are not
coming to haunt you but to help you. ey are still alive, making
Key sources on Spiritualist feminism include Moore (, chapter ),
Braude (), and Owen (). For histories of the movement’s heyday,
see Podmore (), Brandon (), and McGarry ().
continual spiritual progress, gesturing toward a vitalist cosmos
in which there is no end to existence and intimate connection
is absolute.
* * *
I have to mention that my rst encounter with Spiritualism was
deeply upsetting. While living in Melbourne in the late s, I
had signed up for a mail-order course to learn more about Spir-
itualism because I was fascinated by the idea that people would
go to church on Sundays to hear not from ministers but from
the dead. As part of the course, there was one meeting held at
the Victorian Spiritualists’ Union’s stately old hall in central
Melbourne.
at day, I traipsed over to A’Beckett Street to hear about this
curious religion. I do not remember much about the session
except for one moment.
ere were several speakers. One was a woman who told us
how her young daughter — a toddler — had died of cancer. And,
the woman said, this was wonderful. It showed that her daugh-
ter loved her and had gone ahead into the spirit world to guide
her mother from there.
I was aghast. I had a young son, and the idea of celebrating
a child’s death was revolting. I tried hard not to be judgmental.
I knew intellectually, if not emotionally, that the woman must
have felt pain at one time, and maybe did still. But I couldn’t
put on critical armor. I sat there, dumbstruck, thinking: is is
wrong. en I le. When the completion certicate for the mail-
order course arrived, I ripped it up and threw it away. I gured I
had heard enough that day on A’Beckett Street.
Several years later, having moved to Canberra, I began to
wonder if Spiritualism deserved a second look. I was not sure
why I felt this way. My father had died a few years earlier, which
might seem to be one reason; yet while I missed him, I was not
expecting or wanting to hear from him. At his memorial ser-
vice in Newton, New Jersey, while I was speaking, I looked out
into the audience and saw him sitting there — and even in that
moment, I felt my mind was probably playing tricks on me. e
next instant, he was gone. I was miserable that day, but I did not
feel I needed to connect with him in any way except through
memory.
I knew that part of my interest was practical. I wanted to have
a research project close to home so I would not need to spend a
lot of time away from my family. I had been conducting research
in the Pacic, especially Fiji, which I loved. But by the time I
moved to Canberra, my wife and I had two young sons, they
were growing up quickly, and it was dicult to take them on
trips to the islands. Of course, I was still repulsed by the idea of
listening to rhapsodies about children’s deaths. But I wondered
if my rst experience had been anomalous. Maybe even hard-
core Spiritualists would have felt uncomfortable with the lesson
on A’Beckett Street years before.
Another reason was intellectual. I realized that members of
the public who know anything about Spiritualism tend to see it
as a strange bird, apping its wings vainly in modern storms.
Spiritualists themselves cheerfully acknowledge that their views
meet with public skepticism. Yet the attempt to communicate
with spirits has an extensive human history, and central themes
of Spiritualism, including the importance of your family in the
aerlife and the ideal of human perfectibility, are endorsed by
many people who would reject the idea that they are closet Spir-
itualists. I wanted to understand more about this imbalance in
which many of a group’s values are respected but the group’s
existence is largely unknown and, for those who do know about
it, sometimes ridiculed.
In addition, having worked in the Fijian language during
my earlier research, I had become painfully aware that a lack of
deep uency limits one’s analysis. During my research I enjoyed
speaking Fijian every day and was condent in my functional
competence. But I was also aware of how much I was missing:
individual voices, inside jokes, the salt in the soup of language.
I wanted to try an English-language project in which I could
analyze how people talk with each other about spiritual things,
knowing that even if I got confused by people’s philosophy or
logic, I would understand the nuances of how they expressed
themselves.
So I began attending services at the Canberra Spiritualist
Association. As I mentioned above, I was warmly welcomed. I
let people know I was interested in what they had to say, and that
I had a research project in mind, too. I began to learn how medi-
umship works. When the research project was ocially funded
and approved by university ethics boards as well as the , I
made audio recordings of services with mediums’ permission.
One of the rst things I noticed was that Spiritualist medi-
umship stands in a middle zone of people’s understandings
about how easy or dicult it is to communicate with spirits. In
shamanism, as classically described by Mircea Eliade (), a
young person typically has to become sick to gain healing pow-
ers. Being able to contact the spirit world starts with a painful
apprenticeship. In comparison, I learned during my research
in rural Kadavu Island, Fiji, that spirits are easy to reach. Most
people in Kadavu are members of the Methodist Church. ey
enjoy drinking the mildly numbing beverage kava for hours
every day. (I enjoy kava, too.) But the Methodists of Kadavu,
inuenced by evangelicals, worried that kava — the traditional
drink of their ancestors — might be a conduit to those ances-
tors. And those ancestors might be up to no good, spiritually
speaking. One Methodist minister told me he oen said a prayer
at kava-drinking sessions to guard against this connection
between drinkers and spirits. In other words, making contact
with spirits is too easy: You only need to take a sip.
In short, shamans work hard to get the gi of spirit com-
munication. For Fijian Methodists, communicating with spirits
is easy, but you shouldn’t do it. Spiritualists fall between these
extremes. ey believe that anyone can communicate with the
dead, and the dead are eager to take part in conversations. But
becoming a good medium requires diligent practice. Some
people may have more natural ability than others, but no one
becomes a top medium on talent alone. You have to practice
hard, make plenty of mistakes, and keep developing.
* * *
Mediumship does not require enchanted surroundings. It
enchants the place it’s in, even if this place is a large, echoey
multipurpose room in a bland community-center complex. In
this case, the suburb is Pearce, where the Canberra Spiritualist
Association holds its meetings on the rst, third, and h Sun-
days of each month, with a summer break from mid-Decem-
ber until mid-January. e room is large but unremarkable. Its
wooden oors are mostly covered by hard black-rubber matting
sealed to the oor with duct tape. Stackable black plastic chairs
stand on gray metal legs. e walls are white, and long white
vertical blinds shield large windows. e back of the room has
a curtained stage which is used for storage. A visitor, looking at
the architecture and decor, might expect anything from a dance
class to a school assembly.
A few members show up an hour before the service and
arrange the chairs in an arc focused on the front and center of
the room. A microphone is placed behind a card table holding
a creaky laptop computer and video projector. Cables sprout
from the table’s equipment, with two lines running to speakers
mounted on portable stands at either side of the room.
Despite the room’s plain functionality, there are clues that
something out of the ordinary is going on here. On a table near
the door stand three framed images. One, an old photograph,
shows what looks like rumpled cloth with a man’s face peering
from within it. e other two are reproductions of book cov-
ers, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s e History of Spiritualism and
Many Australians see the city of Canberra itself as decidedly unmagical,
cold and boring with roads that only go in circles — the place where your
tax dollars go to die. Peter Proudfoot () oers a dierent view,argu-
ing that Walter Burley Grin and his wife Marion designed Canberra
according to spiritual principles of sacred landscapes, making it a site akin
to Stonehenge, Glastonbury,the Egyptian pyramids, and other geomantic
hot spots. Laurie Duggan (, ) argues thatProudfoot overstates the
case due to his reliance onlater accounts by the Grins, but acknowledges
that Walter “may have imbibed” principles from Spiritualism’s cousins
Anthroposophy and eosophy at the World’s Fair in Chicago.
Estelle Roberts’s Fiy Years a Medium without its cover text, just
a picture of the stately Roberts with ethereal faces shimmering
about her. At the far front of the room is another table, a low one
draped in purple cloth overlain with white cloth. It has a vase
of articial owers and a jug and water glasses on it, suggesting
something modestly ceremonial.
Now comes the surest sign that something unusual is tak-
ing place. e service is underway, and a tall, broad-shouldered
woman, standing at the front of the room and addressing an
audience of sixteen people, is saying she “just heard a church
bell ringing,” although the room is silent. She goes on to explain:
And this person is coming through to me with bell ringing.
[Whispers:] It’s so beautiful. [Normal voice:] But he’s also
showing me gum trees. So this is someone in Australia who
also appreciated bell ringing. Yes, it’s denitely in Australia.
And I’m being… shown cauliower. Cauliower, ‘kay, we’ll
go with cauliower. And I’m being shown a goat. Anyway…
a goat. I’ve got this man who thoroughly enjoys the bell ring-
ers, who had a penchant for cauliower with white sauce and
a sprinkling of cheese, and there’s also a goat connection with
him, be it either he had goats or he knew someone who had
goats, or something like that. But there’s a goat connected
with this man. Does anybody resonate with this man?
e popular image of mediums is that they are on shing expe-
ditions. Standing before an audience, a medium will supposedly
say things like, “I see the letter M,” and an overwrought person
in the front row will cry, “It’s Grandma Mary!” As the excerpt
above shows, however, talented Spiritualist mediums work in a
more unpredictable way than this. ey oer clues to a mys-
tery that can sometimes sound like it was written by a surreal-
ist author. ese are odd and remarkably specic details: e
deceased man was an Australian who enjoyed church bells, cau-
liower with cheese, and had some kind of “goat connection.”
e combination of church, cheese, and goats is so specic it’s
funny, and the medium slyly suggests she herself is surprised by
the impressions she’s receiving.
And then, when she asks, “Does anybody resonate with this
man?,” a woman in the audience immediately answers, “Yeah.”
“You do,” the medium responds. “Oh, good. I’m not batty.”
Here is the moment where it is all too easy to tip the interpre-
tive boat. On one side, the medium might be accused of “cold
reading” (watching people’s reactions to gure out what to say
next) or “hot reading” (looking up audience members’ details
before the reading); or the audience member might be sus-
pected of wanting so desperately to hear from a loved one that
she bends random details into patterned truths (goats? well, he
spent time on a farm). On the other side, one might insist that
the weirdness of the details proves that spiritual communication
is really taking place. If you wanted to trick someone into think-
ing you were speaking with a spirit, why would you mention
cauliower with white sauce and cheese, never mind the goats?
Better to stick with the letter “M” and see where it takes you.
Here, then, is where I want to proceed with the most cau-
tion, moving ahead without capsizing. e conversation that
actually developed that day between the medium and her liv-
ing respondent, needless to say, was not like a conversation
you would overhear in a supermarket line. Yet there was no
hint of haunting or damp ghostliness, despite the fact that the
third party in the conversation was dead. It was just a friendly
question-and-answer session, with details oered, accepted,
or rejected as a portrait came into view. e man was a pipe
smoker? (“Yeah, absolutely.”) He was impatient? (e audience
member did not respond clearly.) Well, he insisted on punctual-
ity. (“Yes.”) He liked going outside for fresh air? (“Absolutely.”)
He knew how to play the gum leaf as a musical instrument, a
rare Australian skill? (“No, no.”) Less than nine minutes aer
she heard church bells, the medium nishes her reading for the
woman in the audience, both of them having agreed that the
man was the woman’s father. e medium then moves on to her
ese quotations come from a service held in May .
next spiritual dialogue: “Okay, I’ve got a man with me at the
moment who used to walk his dogs. And I feel these dogs were
quite big. Got big dogs. Big — two dogs.”
If we insist on proving or disproving the existential claims
that frame these encounters, we would need to silence questions
about mediums’ intentions and self-understandings and the
conversation’s therapeutic charge. An investigator with an axe
to grind will nd something to hack apart soon enough. But, as
I have mentioned, I am not posing questions of truth or false-
hood in this book, although I do consider the topics of fraud
and failure in Chapter . Rather, I am looking at the cultural
dynamics of Spiritualist mediumship, especially the ways medi-
ums and audiences learn to work together.
Of the many authors who have insisted on posing questions
of ultimate truth, one of the most passionate was Alfred Rus-
sel Wallace, a pioneer of evolutionary science alongside Charles
Darwin. Wallace took exception to David Hume’s denition
of “miracles” as violations of the laws of nature, arguing that
miracles point to “superhuman intelligences” at work. Hume
had concluded that “no human testimony [could]… prove a
miracle,” whereas Wallace insisted that Spiritualism was “an
experimental science” doing exactly that (Hume , –,
and Wallace , , , ). is book does not try to resolve
the philosophical or scientic arguments, but shows instead
how Spiritualists bring the arguments to life in such vivid ways:
through church bells, cauliower with cheese, and goats — or,
on other occasions, a yellow daodil, dirty sneakers, a lollipop,
birds hitting propellers, a badly shaved beard, and a lemon tree.
e details might sound quirky, but I don’t present them to
make fun of anyone. Spiritualist mediums can be playful, but
they take their philosophy of life aer death seriously. In speak-
ing with the dead, mediums continually attempt to link the inti-
mate with the ultimate, doing what people have long done in
societies around the world. e fact that mediums speak their
evidence in New Age accents means their eorts now oen meet
with contempt. An appreciation of the hard facts of science and
the supple philosophies of esoteric faiths leads Spiritualists to
insist on proof that takes deeply personal forms. A sympathetic
analysis must be personal in return.
Dreaming before an Audience
To learn mediumship, I signed up in for a twenty-week
course conducted by Lynette and Norman Ivory, the leaders of
the Canberra Spiritualist Association. Norman was the ’
president and Lynette the treasurer, and they were the prime
movers of everything the Association did. Neither was origi-
nally from Canberra; Norman was from England, Lynette from
Sydney. ey were well into their seventies, had devoted them-
selves to Spiritualism for decades, and had run the for the
past ten years. Norman always waited outside the meeting hall
in Pearce before Sunday services, greeting arrivals in his cheer-
ful British baritone, and Lynette waited for students in the tiny
foyer of the seniors’ center where evening classes were held.
e mediumship course was held on ursday nights from
: to : in the suburb of Turner. Our classroom was tucked
away at the side of the building, and we usually had to skirt
around a yoga session taking place in the main room to get to
our place. Gray carpet, beige plastic chairs, and an underpow-
ered heating system were our room’s main features, meaning it
did not feel much more enchanted than the community hall in
Pearce where services took place.
On the rst night of the course, April , , there were
ve people in the room: Lynette, Norman, and three middle-
aged students: Vee, Priscilla, and myself. In later weeks we were
joined by a fourth student, Debby from New Zealand.
A key lesson we learned that rst night was that having con-
dence is essential to successful mediumship. is lesson would
be repeated over the coming months. Lynette and Norman
emphasized condence so strongly that a portion of each class
was devoted to public speaking — having students simply stand
and talk. In that rst session, we were told to stand at the front
of the room and explain our interest in mediumship. Aer we
sat down, we were given critical pointers about how to be better
public speakers. I was told to slow down a bit, and not put my
hands in my pockets or fold my arms when speaking.
You will receive odd impressions while practicing medium-
ship, Norman said, things that don’t seem meaningful to you.
But you should say what you sense. e symbol or message you
get is meant for the person you’re talking to. When you are con-
dent, he said, you won’t imagine things. You will receive real
messages from the spirit world. Lynette emphasized the point,
saying, “If you get a thought in your head, speak it,” and “Don’t
question yourself. Just give what you get. It doesn’t matter how
stupid it seems.” She followed this advice with a story. Once she
was giving a reading and a male spirit was coming through, but
the recipient had trouble recognizing who he was. Lynette then
saw a yellow daodil. What a random image! How could it mean
anything? But she mentioned the daodil, and immediately the
recipient knew who this person was.
Part of having condence, Lynette explained, was not let-
ting listeners’ negative responses discourage you: “Don’t allow
a ‘no’ to put you o,” she told us. It was always possible that the
problem lay with the audience member who could not recall
who their deceased relatives were. She said that people’s mobil-
ity was “a weakness of Spiritualism in Australia,” meaning that
everyone moves around so much that family connections have
become weaker, which makes mediumship harder. How can you
describe a person’s deceased aunt to their satisfaction if they
never met her?
Despite my dgetiness during public speaking, I was never
too nervous when I did it, because I routinely talk to audiences
in my day job. But when it came time to take the next step and
try mediumship, I was anxious. is was a dierent kind of
work: speaking with the dead. And not just speaking with the
dead, but speaking with the dead on behalf of someone else. I
was not sure it was possible, or if it was, how to do it. But I knew
I had to try.
My rst attempt was not actually in the classroom. Around
three weeks earlier, a British medium named Lynn Probert had
visited Canberra and held two training workshops, which I will
describe below. During those workshops, I made brief, if game,
eorts — but those were sitting down in one-on-one sessions
with fellow trainees. Tonight, in the back room of the Canberra
Seniors Centre, was my rst time trying to “bring through” a
spirit while standing before an audience.
To begin your work as a medium, you do an “attunement,”
meaning you close your eyes, quiet your squirrel brain, and
try to sense your own energy. e cultivated mindlessness of
attunement gives way as impressions eventually pop into your
body and mind. e key task for a medium is learning to recog-
nize impressions that come from the spirit world, and then hav-
ing the condence to present those impressions to an audience.
Vee, an artist, was the rst to try that night. Norman, sit-
ting at the side of the room, prompted her with questions about
what she was sensing. Lynette wrote Vee’s answers on a small
whiteboard mounted on the wall. First, Norman asked about the
person’s physical traits. Next, he asked where they were from.
en he asked about their manner of death. Finally, he asked if
this person had a message to give. Answering these questions
as Norman posed them, Vee described a young girl, eight or
ten years old. She had brown hair and a round face. She was
from the United Kingdom, maybe Ireland. And she had died
falling down stairs. is description made sense to Priscilla,
who believed it was her daughter’s best friend’s sister, a brown-
haired and round-faced girl who died at een when she fell o
a pickup truck.
Priscilla went next. She was in touch with a spirit, too, and
felt I was the intended recipient. Norman asked questions to
develop the portrait. It was a childless woman. She had died
in her sixties, aer her husband had already passed away. Her
name included a C and an L.
My Aunt Carole had died without children in her sixties, not
long aer her husband, so I was suitably impressed.
e only thing that didn’t make sense to me was the message
Priscilla related: I should be myself, and this woman was proud
of me. Aunt Carole had had strong Christian beliefs which did
not leave room for things like Spiritualism. In her later years she
became a conservative Episcopalian, and I doubted she would
approve of what I was doing now. But there was no question that
Priscilla, like Vee, had given an impressive performance.
Now I stood up and faced the audience.
And here was the problem. I had an image in my head. It
was a thin, dark-haired man with a mustache. He was wearing a
suit and bowtie. So I described him, identifying him as someone
known to Vee. But I knew exactly where he was coming from,
and it wasn’t the astral plane.
* * *
From its beginnings, Spiritualism made claims about other-
worldly presence which were met by demands for worldly proof.
To demonstrate the validity of their connections with the spirit
world, mediums produced knocking sounds, made tables tilt
and dance, went into trance to deliver lectures on topics listen-
ers proposed, and wrote texts under “spirit impression.” Later in
the nineteenth century, they would begin producing ectoplasm,
spirit turned into lmy or waxy matter.
e vehicle was identied as a ute, a low-slung Australian utility vehicle. I
later asked Vee if when she said she “saw” the girl she had really seen the
girl visually, and she said yes.
Mediums’ interest in proving they were communicating
with spirits was paralleled by scientists’ interest in testing their
claims. If mediums could enable spirits to move furniture, then
the movements might be measured to establish cause and eect.
If spirit could be made esh, or at least ectoplasm, then it could
be weighed and dissected. e British Society for Psychical
Research was founded in , followed three years later by the
American Society for Psychical Research.
Some laboratory scientists were unimpressed by what they
found. e pioneering English physicist and chemist Michael
Faraday made an ingenious device — pieces of wood rubber-
banded together, with glass rollers in between — to measure the
pressure from people’s ngers as they rested their hands on the
edge of a table. Even as they were seemingly unaware of what
they were doing, the test subjects were pressing just hard enough
to start the table tilting, as Faraday’s device showed (Blum ,
–).
Some scientists were willing to be persuaded by mediums’
claims, however. Alfred Russel Wallace knew that natural selec-
tion explains our biology. But, he wondered, what about our
minds and our souls? He sat with mediums in London to see
what he could learn. “Wallace saw nothing that approached the
level of scientic proof” required to show a higher intelligence
at work, the science journalist Deborah Blum (, ) writes.
“But the séances were just weird enough to be encouraging.”
Eventually, Wallace was convinced. He and likeminded
investigators like William Crookes and Oliver Lodge would go
on to argue that Spiritualist claims had been empirically veri-
ed, although this position was dismissed and ridiculed by most
of their peers. As I describe in Chapter , many physical medi-
ums were caught in fraud in this era. Although exposure did not
necessarily lead to a medium’s loss of public reputation — and in
some cases, observers protested that even though the medium
was caught cheating this time, she didn’t always cheat — the
claim that mediumship’s physical eects could be tested came
to seem less tenable. If any kind of dialogue were to continue
between Spiritualists and scientists, the search for evidence, and
agreement on what counted as evidence, would need to take a
new path.
In contrast to the position that mediums’ eects needed to
be tested by scientic standards of replicability, William James
reversed the gure-and-ground relationship. He argued that if
someone claims that spiritual phenomena do not exist, you only
need to nd one contrary example to disprove their claim. Or,
as he put it, “If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black,
you must not seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you
prove one single crow to be white” (James , ). And James
felt he had indeed found a white crow, a woman whose talents
as a medium were so extraordinary that any objective observer
would agree she had perceptions and insights which could not
be explained by normal science.
Her name was Leonora Piper. She lived in Boston. She
would go into a trance, feeling her brain go numb, the room
grow chilly, and light disappear into blackness. When she spoke,
she did not always give accurate information to her listeners,
but she seemed to do so more oen than other mediums. And
when she succeeded, the level of detail could be astonishing.
When the parents of a recently deceased young girl came for
a sitting, Piper, speaking as the girl, gave both her name and
nickname (Katherine, or “Kakie”), mentioned the nicknames
of her brother (“Dodo”) and sister (“Bagie”) and real name
of another sister (Eleanor), mentioned her love of horses, her
desire to bite a silver medal her father had brought, and her old
rag doll, Dinah. e details were all accurate and made sense to
her parents. She also included details which the sitters found
hard to understand or verify, but overall this was the kind of
performance that impressed and convinced observers. As Piper
continued to practice her mediumship — watched not only by
James but studied intensively by Richard Hodgson — her repu-
tation as an honest medium grew. She seemed to be the best
chance Spiritualists had of proving their case. She didn’t make
tables tip, summon ghostly faces in darkened rooms, or produce
ectoplasm. She talked. And the talk, for many of her listeners,
was proof of hidden reality.
But what was the nature of that reality? What was being
proven? Of those who took Piper seriously, some felt that her
skills simply showed that telepathy was real. She was reading
the minds of her subjects, telling them what they already knew,
scanning their brains, and revoicing their thoughts. Others felt
that her demonstrations went beyond telepathy and that some
spirit agency must be involved. In either case, she seemed to be
a white crow in an odd ock — or, to switch metaphors, “the
only ower le in a denuded garden” of discredited mediums,
as Blum puts it. Yet there were some awkward features of Piper’s
mediumship. Her spirit guides seemed articial, like the French
doctor who spoke through her but did not know French very
well. And Piper herself admitted that she did not know what to
think. “My opinion is today,” she said in , “as it was years
ago. Spirits may have controlled me and they may not. I confess
that I do not know” (Blum , , ).
* * *
On that night in the Canberra Seniors Centre in April , I saw
that thin, dark-haired man in his suit and bowtie, and knew I
should describe his appearance to see if anyone in the room rec-
ognized him. But embarrassingly enough, I already recognized
e information in this paragraph comes from Blum (): Piper’s
description of trance (), and snippets of the transcript of her reading
(; for the full transcript, see Hodgson , –). For an analytical
critique of Piper’s techniques and how a neat account of success can grow
from complex verbal exchanges, see Brandon (, –). In addition to
speaking in trance, Piper sometimes practiced spirit writing.
Spiritualists sometimes turned the argument against them — they wanted
too desperately to believe — back onto scientists: ey wanted too much to
disbelieve. Scientic hostility could be, in its own curious way, faith-like.
e historian Peter Lamont notes that although Spiritualism is oen con-
sidered a response to the “crisis of faith” provoked by the rise of Darwinian
theory and biblical criticism, it can also be seen as the catalyst of a “crisis
of evidence” (Lamont ).
him: He came from the cover of the ’s rock band Blue Öyster
Cult’s album Agents of Fortune. Some readers will know that
this album features the band’s big hit, “Don’t Fear the Reaper,”
which might seem appropriate for Spiritualism, if edgier than
the songs we tended to sing during services, like those of John
Denver, , Rod Stewart, and other upbeat choices. But I
had not been thinking along these lines. Rather, I had seen the
album cover the night before. It was fresh in my visual memory.
at’s why I thought of it. Standing before a waiting audience,
I was desperate to have something to say, and for that I needed
a mental image, any mental image, to talk about. And here was
that guy, cheerfully popping up from (or, rather, from last
night), to help me out.
I rationalized the situation to myself: I had just been taught
not to question impressions, but to speak them aloud. It doesn’t
matter if an image seems ridiculous to you. You have to have
condence. And, I thought, if a deceased person coincidentally
happens to look like the gure on the album cover — I mean,
there really are dapper men with mustaches and bowties in the
world — wouldn’t it make sense to show me the album cover so
I could describe the real person accurately?
But my connection had static. I was not in tune as clearly or
strongly as Vee and Priscilla had been. Most of the details I gave
to Vee, prompted by Norman’s questions and tallied by Lynette
at the whiteboard, did not make sense to her. e only thing I
could salvage from my attempt was that, when asked for letters
associated with the man’s name, I said F and J. (My logical mind
protested: Aunt Carole’s husband was Francis J. Price — that’s
where you got it!) Vee responded that the man she was thinking
of had driven an FJ Holden. I was glad to claim this tiny victory.
* * *
e research project I had developed was a collaboration with
Andrew Singleton, a sociologist from Melbourne. We had
taught at the same university years earlier, and long talked about
developing a project on religious life in Australia. We nally put
together a grant application to study Spiritualism, and were hap-
pily surprised when it was successful. Although we had worked
hard on the proposal, and knew it would make a serious con-
tribution to understanding Australia’s religious history and
trends, we were aware that grant reviewers increasingly insist
on the kinds of things — changing public policy, strengthening
national security, developing marketable technology, and so
forth — that are not really oered by a project in which people
speak with the dead.
e reviewers approved our project, agreeing that it was
important to understand Spiritualism’s social inuence. By
March , we were ready to begin. e Canberra Spiritualist
Association allowed me to make audio recordings of their ser-
vices, always with mediums’ permission. e vote did not actu-
ally face opposition, as I was on the church’s committee by then.
(Norman Ivory did urge me, twice, not to write anything that
would expose the Association to ridicule.) e ethics boards at
Andrew’s and my universities had approved the project’s meth-
ods. And the granting agency, the Australian Research Council,
had sent the funds.
Just as the project ocially began, the British medium Lynn
Probert came to Canberra. Probert teaches mediumship at the
Arthur Findlay College in Stansted Mounttchet, Essex, Eng-
land, between London and Cambridge. e College is part of the
Spiritualists’ National Union, which many Australians consider
the peak of global Spiritualist expertise. is makes Lynn a rock
star of mediumship. Her position at the Arthur Findlay College
gives her prominence and authority, and she gives “demonstra-
tions” (public mediumship readings) and workshops in Europe
and the as well as the . is was not her rst trip to Aus-
tralia, nor even her rst time in Canberra.
She spoke at four events during her March visit. She
gave a public demonstration of mediumship on a Friday night,
which around forty people attended. On Saturday, she held a
daylong workshop for anyone who wanted to develop as a
medium, whether they were seasoned professionals or rookies
like myself. On Sunday morning, she gave a similar but shorter
workshop. Attendance at each workshop was in the low twen-
ties, and all of the participants were women except for Norman
and myself. ese three events had entrance fees: dollars for
the demonstration, dollars for the longer workshop, and
dollars for the shorter one. Finally, on Sunday aernoon, the
held its regular public service, and Lynn was the featured
medium. All the events took place in a function room at the
Gungahlin Lakes Golf Club, a social club in Canberra’s north.
e visit of a celebrated medium gave the weekend a jolt of
adrenaline. is was a big deal for Spiritualists in Canberra. I felt
lucky it was taking place just as the research project began, and,
as it happened, the rst thing Lynn said at her rst event — aer
warming up the crowd with a joke about traveling with her
mother — was extremely useful for my research. I will quote her
at length:
So, thank you for coming along tonight, and, who’s never
been to a demonstration before? Oh, so, some of you. Don’t
be scared. And just ’cause you’re sitting at the back doesn’t
mean to say I won’t get you. [e audience laughs.]
But it’s not me getting you, ultimately. Wherever you sit,
wherever you are in the room, if your people in the spirit
world are able to lter information through my mind and
awareness — ’cause that’s what they do — they will get to you,
wherever you are.
So, people think that mediums see the spirit world in
full form and hear every word they say. And that’s what we
want. But that’s not the fact of how it happens. Very much we
move our mind — which is the hardest thing to do — out of
the way, and try not to be too nosy, and they will provide us
with information, and the way that we get that is in dierent
ways. So it may come as a feeling, it may come as an emotion,
it may come with an image, a symbol, a picture, a memory.
e sponsored Lynn’s trip to Canberra, and shared revenue from
ticket sales with her, making a small prot.
And we as mediums then have to try and interpret it, and
hopefully put it across in a way that you will understand.
So, it very much is a thing where we work together, so I
will need you to respond to me… .
And you know, people think they’ve got to be so serious
when you come to things like this. Just ’cause someone’s died
in a physical sense, they haven’t lost their humor and their
ability to have fun with you. And to me, that’s what it’s all
about. And when I go to do a demonstration, I look at it that
I’m going to a party; I just don’t know who I’m going to meet.
’Cause when we go to a party, we chat to someone for ten
minutes, we get to know a bit about them, we talk, and then
we go, “Lovely to talk to you,” and we go o and talk to some-
one else. So, that’s what we do as mediums when we demon-
strate. We get to know people.
So, I’m going to have a party with your relatives and
friends, and thank you for that. And you can join me if you
wish.
But I will need you to talk back to me, and not just nod
your head or shake your head. Because there’s something
in your voice that is like a recognition to the spirit world,
and that helps me perceive information easier and hopefully
stronger and more — to provide as much as I can for you.
So… is that clear? Yes? [Some audience members respond
“yes.”] So, even if someone’s got their hand up but you’re
understanding the information that I’m providing, please put
your hand up. Because, just because someone’s saying “yes”
to me doesn’t mean… that I’m exactly in the right place.
’Cause I always say my mediumship’s like my… driving
and my map reading. I never know where I’m going, but I get
to the destination. [e audience laughs.] So, welcome to my
world. [e audience laughs.]
So, hopefully that’s all clear and I will work with as many
of you as I possibly can this evening.
In this three-minute stretch of speech, Lynn oered three les-
sons for successful mediumship. e rst is that you need to
be open to all kinds of impressions from the spirit world, from
feelings to emotions to images, and be able to present them to
your audience in a meaningful way, even if the meanings are not
clear to you. e second is that a sense of humor is vital. Talk-
ing with dead people is not a cheerless lament, but a lively chat.
ird, the audience needs to do more than just show up. Medi-
umship is a conversation running in two directions: from the
spirit world to the medium and from the medium to her audi-
ence. e medium is a hinge point in the dialogue. If the audi-
ence does not respond clearly and strongly to what the medium
says, the project fails.
Lynn’s mediumship that night was impressive. In Chapter
, I describe her remarkable conversation with the mother of a
young man who died in a car accident. For now, I will turn to
the lessons she taught at her mediumship-training workshops
which began the next day.
* * *
Lynn began Saturday morning’s workshop by asking who had
not done mediumship before. A few hands popped up, includ-
ing mine. Perhaps because so many audience members had
some experience, the rst part of the morning was mostly a
question-and-answer session.
Lynn’s responses to our questions made mediumship seem
both fun and serious, hard work and second nature. “I don’t
think about what I do,” she said at one point. “I just do it so nat-
urally.” But she added that what mattered was “practice, prac-
tice, practice.” When a woman asked Lynn how she transitioned
out of mediumship at the end of a session, she said it was like
turning a switch, or, aer driving, locking your car and walking
away. When she works, she works. When she’s done, she’s done.
Spiritualists make a key distinction between psychic work, in
which two minds communicate telepathically, and mediumship,
which requires contact with people in the spirit world. A lesson
I heard many times during my research was that all mediums
are psychic but not all psychics are mediums. Lynn explained
this distinction further, telling us that psychic vibrations come
from ourselves and are heavier, whereas spiritual vibrations are
lighter. In learning to sense your own vibes, then, you should
learn to feel the intensity of the energy, recognizing when a mes-
sage is coming from the spirit world and when it is coming from
the person sitting in front of you.
Lynn’s main instruction that rst morning was that we
should focus on sensing the character of a person in the spirit
world rather than their physical appearance. Describing a per-
son in the spirit world as “old” is pointless in most cases. In chil-
dren’s memories, every adult is old. Dierent audience members
will have dierent images of a person. And mediums should
not waste time on unimportant details. Understanding a per-
son’s character — their essence, what they were really like — was
Lynn’s gold standard for mediumship.
en we began to practice. Lynn asked most people to pair
up voluntarily, but assigned me to work with a woman in her
eighties whom I will call Benedetta. Benedetta had come to
Australia from Italy many decades ago. She clearly found medi-
umship appealing, and felt she had a connection to the unseen
world, but seemed keenly aware that the Catholic Church would
disapprove of what she was doing.
She went rst. She said her shoulders felt heavy. I thought of
my father in his nal stages of cancer. But Benedetta was frus-
trated, not knowing how to proceed aer this rst sensation.
Lynn came over and coached her with gentle questions about
the spirit’s character. Some of her answers made good sense to
me, if it was my father. He had worked with his mind rather than
his hands. (Yes.) He was more private than sociable. (Yes.) He
was a hard worker. (Maybe?) But she also said he had long hair
and a big family, which was not the case for my father, nor any
other deceased family member I knew. is was a brief reading,
and we le it there, without rm conclusions.
en it was my turn. I tried to concentrate by not concentrat-
ing.
I saw an image in my mind of a little girl, so I said this. I
said there was a feeling of calmness and happiness. Benedetta
said she did not know who the girl could be. Lynn had come
by again, and asked me who this girl was connected to. ere
had to be a link between her and Benedetta. is instruction
prompted a new image in my mind, a thin, middle-aged man
with dark hair. I said so. Benedetta thought this might be her
father.
en things got interesting. But they got interesting not
because of my skills, but because of Benedetta’s revelations. She
said that her father had had seven children, but that he had also
slept with a prostitute and fathered another daughter. Benedetta
was the only one of his children he had told about this. And, for
some reason, he had also named this daughter out of wedlock
“Benedetta.” Benedetta thought the spirit I was in contact with
might be her half-sister and namesake. I had an urge to tell the
living Benedetta that this girl felt a positive connection with her.
In other words, besides having pictured the girl, I felt emotion-
ally that she liked Benedetta — that there was warmth and hap-
piness in her presence. is was a diuse feeling, and typing this
now, several years later, I can’t recapture it or put into compel-
ling prose, but it was the kind of eeting sensation I would come
to expect when I practiced mediumship: a vanishing moment
turned into something tangible through conversation.
Benedetta seemed very happy with the reading to which she,
of course, had contributed the key details. Later, she read coee
grounds for me from my morning cup of espresso.
I was disoriented. I had simply mentioned images that
popped into my head, and somehow persuaded a kindly grand-
mother to reveal a family secret and take solace in a connection
with her secret and presumably now dead half-sister. Was this
it, then? Could I say I was a medium aer one brief success?
Because, despite my awkwardness and doubts, it was a success.
ere was now a person in the world who, among her countless
life experiences on dierent sides of the globe for most of a cen-
at is, the name was the same as my practice partner’s (“Benedetta” is a
pseudonym).
tury, felt I had put her in touch with a deceased family member.
I was skeptical, enthralled, and confused, all at once.
* * *
I hope some readers understand my discomfort. My sympathy
and enjoyment of Spiritualism, and Spiritualist mediumship,
could never fully escape my skepticism. When talking about
(and perhaps with) other people’s deceased loved ones, I was
excited by the possibility of connection, yet worried that I was
forcing myself to be credulous for the purpose of making people
feel good. But I quickly learned that I was thinking about medi-
umship the wrong way. Or rather, there are many dierent ways
of thinking about mediumship, but only one way that works if
you want to do it well.
When I began trying to do mediumship, I thought of it like
baseball. A tough pitcher is on the mound, and he throws a
sharp curveball. You see it coming, know it’s about to swerve
and dip, and time your swing to — hopefully — connect. But if
that pitcher is really good, you might bail out, or swing and miss
by a mile. So too with mediumship, I had thought, you have
your moment: a chance to give a person meaningful informa-
tion. Either you connect or you don’t. “I’m sensing an aunt who
died of respiratory failure.” (Strike one.) “She lived on a farm
for much of her life.” (Strike two.) “I’m also getting the name
‘Agnes.’” (Home run!)
is is not the productive way to think about mediumship.
Rather than sports, mediumship is like music. Say you sit down
at a piano to play. You might play uidly, hitting all the notes and
expressing the passion you feel. Or you might play disastrously,
mung everything, feeling lost, embarrassed that the music in
your body is dying at your ngertips. Or, like John Cage, you
might sit down at the piano, play nothing for four and half min-
utes, and call it music anyway. e point is that unlike swing-
ing at a curveball, where you might miss completely, in making
music you can’t fail in the same way. No matter how bad, idi-
osyncratic, or perplexing a performance is, it’s still music.
Mediums begin from the premise that the spirit world is real,
and people who live there — people on the astral plane of exist-
ence (see Chapter ) — want to communicate with their living
loved ones. Spiritualists insist that this is not a matter of faith.
As they see it, these claims are proven each time a medium con-
nects with someone in the spirit world. But not all mediums
are equally skilled, and like everyone, they have days when they
are full of color and energy and days when they are not. So a
good medium might stand before an audience, speak out her
sensations, and receive only the dull thump of “no,” “no,” “no”
in return. is does not mean, to a committed Spiritualist, that
spirits are not real. It means the medium is having a bad day.
Or it means the audience isn’t paying enough attention, and the
medium might need to draw on psychic energies instead of spir-
itual ones to oer something, anything, to her listeners.
At Lynn’s weekend workshops, I had ve more one-on-one
sessions. She varied the exercises to deepen our knowledge of
mediumistic technique. For example, in one session, we were
told to begin not by identifying the spirit in terms of their
basic characteristics (sex, age, and so forth), but rather to try
to sense their character. Never mind if it was a young woman
or old man — what was this person really like? Lynn said this
approach could free us up while also having a “soer feeling,”
and perhaps make a stronger impression on us as mediums. My
partner and I disappointed each other mightily in this exercise.
She mentioned a bathrobe, and I thought of my mother’s father;
she added that this person was not a cranky old man, which he
was. In return, I told her I saw cats, gardening, and trees, and
Aer writing this, I came upon the same comparison made by another
author, although he emphasizes talent rather than possibility: “One anal-
ogy I have oen used… is to point out that anyone can learn mediumship,
just as anyone can learn to play the piano… but only a few will show a real
aptitude for it and only very rarely will a ‘Mozart’ appear” (Wilson ,
).
then a woman associated with these things. My eldnotes here
are blunt: my reading was “a complete strikeout.”
In another exercise, I was paired with a well-known Canberra
medium, Janet Adams, who delivered the reading I mentioned
at the beginning of this book — the one with bells, goats, and
cauliower with cheese. Today, she mentioned a marching band
and a twirling baton, and I felt a tingle of excitement because
my mother used to be a baton-twirler. My mother is still alive,
however, so my thoughts hopped over to her father. Janet men-
tioned tennis, and I was intrigued, because a partner from the
previous day’s workshop had mentioned tennis, too. But I had
no idea if my grandfather had played tennis. (Later, I did what
you are supposed to do in these cases: chase up verication. I
asked my mother if her father played tennis. Yes, she said, when
he got the chance.)
When it was my turn to read for Janet, I mentally saw a wom-
an’s dark and beautiful eyes (although I only saw one eye at a
time), a red sports car, and people driving this car on a road
through tall trees.
“She loved that car,” Janet responded immediately. is was
her mother, and she identied the scene I had described as a
“shared memory” of a trip.
e practice sessions were decidedly mixed, then, in terms
of how successful they seemed to be. Some were exhilarating.
Some were at. All were exhausting. In fact, because the men-
tal experience of concentrating-on-not-concentrating was so
draining, I had trouble recalling details aerward. My notes on
the fourth session from the rst day are ridiculously unreveal-
ing:
en we did the fourth pairing-up. I was quite tired by now,
and the new twist was kind of complicated. We were to be in
touch with a spirit and compare their philosophy of life when
they were alive (e.g., were they an optimist or a pessimist)
with how they see life and their families now. I don’t remem-
ber the details of this interaction except that my reader, Ari-
adne, seemed to identify Gerry [my father] and I identied
a sisterly type that Ariadne did not recognize. But she (Ari-
adne) was very encouraging and told me not to self-criticize.
at’s all I wrote. Although I wish I had written more, clearly
I couldn’t. Fresh aer the event, my mind had already begun
forgetting it, not because it was unpleasant but because it was
inherently eeting: a wave that crests, dreaming before an audi-
ence.
ese intense sessions were interleaved with discussions
and advice from Lynn, as well as lunch (on the rst day) and
coee breaks, meaning we had time to recuperate from our
spiritual trips. Lynn gave practical tips. For example, when
attuning — relaxing your mind, feeling your own energy, and
preparing to do mediumship — you should declare your inten-
tion to the spirit world. You can do so by mentally saying a phrase
like “I’m here to be within my own power, to open my mind and
awareness to those in the other world that will be recognized
by the person that sits before me” — or, more simply, “Take me
to the greatest need.” She then had us practice “sitting in our
own power” to sense our energy while she played a recording by
Krishna Dass. She also gave tips on how to develop techniques
for getting specic information. For example, one woman said
she wanted to work on knowing relationships — that is, the rela-
tionship between the person in the spirit world and the recipient
in the audience — and Lynn recommended visualizing a family
tree. Another woman wanted to know how to link spirits with
places, and Lynn suggested picturing a map. Norman said that
he wanted to know full names and addresses of the spirits, and
Lynn joked that she wanted to know these, too.
What impressed me most about her teaching was her empha-
sis on speaking the right way. It would be too simple to say that
At the time, I did not realize that a fellow attendee, Norman, was having
prophetic visions as Dass’s music played. He describes them in Ivory
(, –).
I learned later that the ability to know “full names and addresses” of peo-
ple in the spirit world was a skill claimed by the leading British medium
Gordon Higginson; see Bassett (, ).
being a medium only means talking like one. But talking the
right way makes an enormous dierence. Lynn gave bits of
advice on speaking which, I learned from attending ser-
vices, are cardinal principles of good mediumship.
e rst rule is that a medium speaks plainly. Although your
work is outside the social mainstream, you speak like you would
in everyday conversation. “We have to really think about how
we term things, and the vocabulary that we use,” Lynn admon-
ished. She said she was frustrated by jargon, like calling people
in the spirit world “entities” or “energy.” ey are people, she
said — mothers and fathers, for example. So call them that.
e second rule is that a medium should speak with discre-
tion. In one of the question-and-answer sessions, I asked Lynn
if she had ever received a message from the spirit world that she
felt she should not pass on. (I couldn’t help but wonder: What
if you sensed that the spirit you were communicating with was
angry or disappointed with the living?) She said no, this does
not really happen. But sometimes, a medium receives infor-
mation that is meant to give her broader knowledge about the
subjects she is dealing with. If a medium stands before a big
audience, Lynn said, and that audience includes parents whose
three-year-old daughter had been murdered, the medium might
receive this information — but only so she would know what a
horric experience the family had been through, and to proceed
with sensitivity. e medium should not say that the daughter
had been “murdered,” but that the daughter’s life had been taken
from her by another’s hands. Lynn added that some mediums
insist that all information from the spirit world should be passed
on to the living, but she disagreed. e daughter would not want
her parents to be reminded of the events. e family would not
want to be reminded of them, either (in front of a crowd of
strangers, no less). And the audience did not need to know.
e third rule was the one I mentioned earlier, which was
stressed throughout Lynette and Norman’s mediumship course:
Have condence. Be in control. Aer you describe the char-
acteristics of a person in the spirit world, Lynn said, don’t ask
“Who understands?” Rather, say “Who am I with?” is is more
denite, and does not suggest that you need to keep adding veri-
fying material. Also, don’t say “Let me get you a little bit more
information.” Don’t explain how you’re working. Just work.
With these basic rules of speaking, one can pass as a medium.
But as with all speech meant to persuade or convince, some lis-
teners will respond positively and some will not. Or, to turn the
claim around: My good medium might be your bad one. e
medium who astonishes you by describing your great-grand-
mother might perplex me by describing nothing and no one I
can recognize. Despite the long history of scientic testing of
psychic and mediumistic claims, mediumship is always and
necessarily a deeply subjective relationship between speakers
and hearers. ere is no gold standard for what counts as eec-
tive mediumship.
Nonetheless, some mediums persuade more people than
others.
* * *
In mediumship, you quiet your mind, but you are not passive.
You mentally let the spirit world know you are ready and will-
ing to communicate. When something unexpected comes to
you — sight, sound, scent, or other sensation — you pass on
what you have received. Over time, a medium might learn that
particular things she “sees” are symbols in her personal library.
For example, a pink ribbon tied around a tree might mean love
and not an actual ribbon or tree. But you oen say what you
see, directly. en you ask people in the spirit world for fur-
ther information as necessary, and you speak, condent that
you are connecting two worlds. Some mediums are obviously
more sophisticated at doing this than newbies who stand up and
describe Blue Öyster Cult album covers. In her workshops and
demonstration, Lynn had given us a master class in how to be a
medium. Now, in Lynette and Norman’s twenty-week course, I
was prepared to work with these lessons and see if my baby steps
could become longer and steadier strides.
In most sessions of the Ivorys’s course, two students were
called upon to practice mediumship before the group. We did
not know in advance if we were going to be called that night.
Some weeks when I wasn’t called, I was relieved, because trying
to do mediumship made me anxious. As it happened, over the
course’s twenty weekly meetings, I missed ve sessions, limiting
my chances a bit more. Even so, I had enough attempts at medi-
umship to experience some notable moments.
For example, in the fourth class session, I stood up and felt
I could connect a person in the spirit world with Vee, the art-
ist. is time, I had a bodily sensation: the woman in the spirit
world had ngers that were dexterous but arthritic, and I moved
my own ngers as I both felt and conveyed this sensation. I am
not comfortable in my own body, so feeling someone else’s bod-
ily sensations seemed like a breakthrough to me.
Earlier that night, Lynette had described mental medium-
ship as involving a “very light trance,” and I could understand
what she meant. You are aware of your surroundings, and you
are holding a conversation with a living partner, but you are
also trying to hold a mental conversation with a dead partner,
and you can feel a kind of detachment and heightened energy
at the same time. As a result — and as I noticed aer Lynn’s exer-
cises — recalling details aerward was dicult. My notes from
that night’s class are downright primitive: “Vee mentioned that
this person had been a musician; I think it was her mother, but
I can’t actually recall.”
I decided to make audio recordings of my classroom attempts
at mediumship. Aer all, I was recording the ’ Sunday ser-
e anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann, who has worked extensively with
modern Pagans and evangelical Christians, identies the key psychologi-
cal state as absorption: “the mental capacity common to trance, hypnosis,
dissociation, and to most imaginative experiences in which the individual
becomes caught up in ideas or images or fascinations” (, ). Luhr-
mann describes how utterly enraptured she was reading fantasy books as a
child, and suggests that this ability to lose oneself in wonder is a skill cul-
tivated by those looking to communicate with magical and divine beings.
See also Tomlinson ().
vices to learn how mediums worked, so it made sense to record
my own eorts. In my rst recording, from the eighth week
of the course, I went once again to Vee. is time I saw a man
with a beard. Many of the details were run-of-the-mill. He had
a reddish face and curly hair. He was probably an uncle or great-
uncle. A bit stocky, and wearing a gray and green sweater, he
enjoyed his beer, but probably not to excess. I sensed something
in my belly, so I suggested that he might have died from stom-
ach troubles.
And somehow, I began to quote him. In mental mediumship,
you don’t change your voice tone, so this was just me speaking
in my regular New Jersey accent. Here is what I said, or he said,
that night: “I could have made it another ten years if I’d gone
to the doctor earlier… . I had a good long life, but you know it
could have been even more.” And then: “Well, I wasn’t a saint,
but people weren’t upset when I showed up. ey… were happy
when I was there. But this doesn’t mean — I wasn’t some…
saintly type of person.” I didn’t hear him audibly, and I didn’t
feel like he was doing the talking for me. is was my mind and
my voicebox. But they were his words, it seemed to me. is was
him expressing his own character.
e most striking feature of the reading was not the words
themselves, but an image that popped into my mind. I men-
tally asked the man what he wanted to show Vee, and I saw his
hands unfold in a V shape, and a white bird y out. I guessed
the bird was a dove, and suggested to Vee that it was related to
peace. What excited me was that this vision was genuinely unex-
pected. I had not been thinking about peace. I had not been
thinking about unfolding hands. I had worried that the image
of the bearded man was somehow a mashup of my friend Rod
Ewins and the actor Albert Finney, and looking back, I wonder
if Vee’s name suggested the image of hands in a V shape. But the
bird — where did that come from?
When I nished the reading, and Lynette asked Vee about
the things I had said, it became clear that I had gotten one major
detail wrong. I had said twice that I did not think this man was
a manual laborer, despite his rugged, stocky appearance. But
Vee, who identied this man as her uncle, said that he had in
fact been a builder. e bird, for Vee, was suggestive. “Well,” she
reected during the general discussion, “I’m not very close with
his children for a reason.” She didn’t speak with her cousins, and
said she wondered if her uncle might be suggesting something
to her. She trailed o. Lynette gently suggested that the mes-
sage might not be to make peace with her cousins, but that Vee
should make peace with herself.
Vee said she accepted the connection, meaning she was per-
suaded that I had really brought through her uncle. I was happy
about this, of course. I might not be a skilled medium, but I was
getting somewhere. What excited me most was seeing that bird.
is was a rare moment when my mind loosened up enough
to receive an impression that felt random — or, at least, not an
obvious projection from myself.
* * *
I was learning, following the lessons of seasoned mediums like
Lynn, Lynette, and Norman, to think of people in the spirit
world as regular folks. ey are people just like us. ey con-
tinue to lead lives of work, pleasure, learning, and family com-
mitment. e dierence is that they exist on the astral plane, at
a more rened level of energy than we do. My skepticism pro-
tested this claim, and still does, but suspending the skepticism
for a moment means you get better results. When I practiced
mediumship in our classroom training sessions, I did so in good
faith, trying to do a proper job, and usually things went rea-
sonably well, even when my delivery was rushed and clumsy. I
moved from thinking of mediumship as a sport to thinking of
it as music, something that exceeds your control but which you
can always tap into. You can’t fail at making music, although you
might not make particularly good music on any given day.
In learning to think of spirits as normal people, then, I started
to sense them as characters. I mean this in the sense of a gestalt,
an overall impression: this kind of person, that kind of person,
their attributes tting together. In the second recording I made
of myself practicing mediumship, I identied a spirit who had
a message for Norman. e theme was slender elegance. All of
the notes harmonized with that ideal. Here was a woman in her
sixties with silver hair and long, thin ngers, wearing what I
described confusingly as a “sedate but beaded red necklace,” and
holding an old-fashioned cigarette holder. Once again, I began
speaking for the spirit, saying of the woman’s cigarette holder,
“is is my style.” And: “When I danced, that’s how I danced,
too,” meaning she danced with elegance and renement.
is sounds like bad ction, a projection from a s movie
of what elegant old-fashioned women were like: Dahhhling! But
I had not planned this. I sensed it and spoke it. Norman, who
was always a very encouraging audience member, said, “I’ve got
someone who it could be, yes.”
“Okay,” I replied.
“I’m not certain,” he said, “but it could be.”
I kept going, saying that she had died painlessly in her sleep. I
then reported how she felt about it: “But this is interesting, she’s
saying she wasn’t confused. She’s saying, ‘I… went to sleep alive,
and I didn’t wake up, but I passed [away], but it was seamless,
it was very smooth. When I… went to the other side, I knew
where I was.’” I remember feeling that her lack of confusion
clashed with my own expectations. If a person went to sleep,
and then woke up on the astral plane, they might be disoriented,
yes? But I got the sense that she was saying no. She knew what
had happened to her.
e statement about confusion struck Norman as signi-
cant, too. He said it “gives me a pointer also to the same person
I’m thinking about.” But in the discussion aer the reading, he
explained that “she was considered to be confused most of the
time in her life. Yes, I won’t say anything else. I might upset her.”
is last line prompted a laugh from Lynette. It bothered me,
though, that what I thought the woman meant by confusion
seemed to be dierent from what Norman thought she meant.
I thought she was explaining that she knew she had died in her
sleep. Norman thought she was answering people who had criti-
cized her as confused while she was alive. Our understandings
might not have matched, but we had put together a coherent
dialogue around the idea of confusion itself.
e third and nal recording I made in Lynette and Nor-
man’s course felt like a culmination, because it included both my
most fullling moment and a sharp comedown. For me, these
readings showed how I had changed — I had started to take suc-
cessful steps in mediumship — and also how far I had to go if I
wanted to get good at it.
I began by explaining that during the attunement, I had a
vision of walking through snow in a farmer’s eld, seeing the
boots I wore as a child. I was crunching along through the snow.
Now the farm seemed summery, with golden elds and a fence.
I knew I had to get to the fence. Such a dreamlike vision, with
its impossible transition and meld of things only I knew — those
old boots! — with things I didn’t know at all.
I said:
And I walked there, and there was a farmer. ere was a
man there who was a farmer. He actually had a pitchfork.
He had a… lean face, he was very lean in his body type. And
he had a lined face. Lines on his face. Deep lines. He was…
a real farmer. And I… tried speaking to him, communicat-
ing. I said, “Who are you here for?” And at rst I thought he
said, you know, “ey’ll — the person will know, the person
who I’m for will know.” But I kept thinking on it, and he said
“Priscilla.” And I was trying to work with this. is was just
during the attunement period. I was trying to stay with this
vision.
And I would say he was probably in his sixties or seven-
ties. Very healthy, very t, lean farmer, farmer clothes. He did
have a pitchfork. And the next bit of information I got was
a river. ere was a river next to this farm. And he said that
you and he were there together, that this is a place you were
with him together, that you would remember that.
So, I see a man in his sixties or seventies, clean shaven,
lined face, certainly a farmer, and he said that you and he
were together by a river. Does this — have any recognition
for you?
It feels odd to quote myself like this. But then, from a Spiritualist
perspective, this scene is the farmer’s, not mine. And while the
scene, taken as a whole, reminds me somewhat of Aunt Car-
ole’s and Uncle Frank’s country home in Mehoopany, Pennsyl-
vania — where my family spent New Year’s holidays in the s
and s and I crunched through snow in those boots — the
pitchfork seems such a silly detail that, even though it’s a farm,
it feels out of place.
Priscilla responded positively: “I may have been very young
when I was there.” She added that she had known a farmer, and
thought he would have had a lined face.
I said okay, then paused for eleven seconds. I don’t recall
how or what I felt during that time, but when I started to speak
again, it was clear that the river had become the focus: “You
need to go there for some reason,” I insisted. It was a spiritual
reason — “like a homecoming, or a pilgrimage, or whatever you
want to call it.” I went on to say that the man didn’t drink, but I
did see him smoking a cigarette. en I concluded, “And that’s
what he’s saying. Return to the river… . You may not be able to
go physically, but… he’s saying somehow you have to be able to
be back there, at the riverside. at’s what I’ve got.”
Lynette now stepped in, saying, “Ask… him if he’s connected
in a relationship way. How he passed.” In my rush to the river, I
had skipped over essential details.
Aer a pause, I responded:
He’s saying neighbor… . And he died on the farm. He had a
heart attack, in his seventies. But… another thing he’s saying
you’ll know is that he buried a child. ere was a — he had
a child. You may not have known the child, but you know
that he buried a child. And I think he buried the child on the
farm, which sounds odd, but that’s what he said.
I had given the details Lynette asked for, and added a macabre
new one: the burial of a child. If this was my subconscious talk-
ing, it sounded like drunk talk, my imagination on a bender,
anxious and staggering about.
But now Priscilla said, “Yeah, I’ve got who it is.”
Lynette asked, “So that claries who it is?”
“Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.”
Lynette said “Okay,” and Priscilla seemed to close the mat-
ter by saying, “Yeah. at’s great. ank you.” But I felt I had to
emphasize the message one more time, so I said: “Yeah, that’s it.
He’s saying… go back to that river.”
Here, as in all my attempts at mediumship, my primary sense
was intuition. I did not hear a man’s voice speaking these words.
I just knew the words, and that they were his. Aer intuition, my
second most used sense in mediumship was visual: farm, snow,
boots. I never heard spirit words audibly, nor tasted or smelled
anything, as some mediums do.
Our conversation in class continued:
: Yeah. Do you want some feedback?
: Yes, please.
: Sure.
: It was my grandfather.
: Oh!
: … I wouldn’t say it’s neighbor. I’d say it’s my
father’s father.
: Okay.
: He lived ‘til he was eighty-seven.
: Oh, okay.
: Which, back then, was a long time.
: Yeah.
: He buried his rst child. His rst child — ah, it
was terrible. My grandmother was een years younger than
him. And they went out to dinner on a horse and sulky. And
somebody looked aer him, and put Vicks Vaporub under-
neath his [inaudible], and he lost his breath.
: Oh.
: And he was — his name was Keith.
: Oh.
: And he was buried in .
: Oh.
: So, yeah. And… it would’ve been the Murrum-
bidgee [River] he was talking about. And the reason why he’s
telling me to go back is because — this is really strange. My
grandmother planted a tree. And all my childhood, we used
to see the tree. Nobody documented — we don’t even know
where the tree is now. It may well still be there… . I was very
close to my father. And, yeah, they were just salt-of-the-earth
types of people. And also I’ve been told that my son, who’s
the one who doesn’t really know what he wants to do with
life, may well be going to get a block of land in years to come,
and may be into… growing bio-whatever.
: Ah ha ha.
: So that may well be connected [inaudible].
: So, returning.
: Yeah. at’s amazing. ank you.
: Ah, thank you.
: Yeah.
: at’s interesting, because I don’t think they use…
a pitchfork much these days.
: at — well, I denitely saw that. And it, for me it feels
like the stereotypical farmer, but there it was.
: It’s probably… to conrm he was a farmer.
My surprise is comically clear in the transcript, with my yelp
of “Oh!” when Priscilla identies the man as her grandfather,
and my meek string of “ohs” and “okays” aerward. But here,
as always, is the paradox of mediumship. While two details
were strangely and compellingly right — her grandfather had
buried a child, and the river was an important site for family
connections — another was completely wrong: He was Priscilla’s
grandfather, not her neighbor. So I am not sure, looking back,
whether my surprised “Oh!” was embarrassment that I had been
so wrong about who this man was, or surprised that I had been
right enough for Priscilla to be sure.
If this was the high point of my mediumship training, I
quickly came back to earth. Lynette asked me to do a second
reading, and I brought through a middle-aged woman with
reddish hair, medium build, and “an elegant small purse with a
strap over her shoulder.” e woman had a message for Lynette,
and it was slightly combative: Lynette had thought this woman
made mistakes during her life, but the woman was happy with
her choices. Lynette asked if I could identify their relationship.
I said, “We worked together, but it’s not necessarily oce work.
We… were doing, sort of, projects together.” Lynette asked for a
name. Fiona, I thought and replied. Lynette charitably said she
could think of someone who sort of t, but she had known her
when she was young, and had no idea if she was dead now. Nor-
man tried to help by suggesting an adult woman Lynette had
known, but Lynette said she would have heard if that woman
had died. “ere’s a couple of people there that might t the bill,”
Lynette mused, “but I don’t want to t it.” As the medium, I had
not given persuasive enough evidence, and the reading ended
without a rm conclusion.
* * *
e small size of Lynette and Norman’s mediumship course
was a challenge. Once you know everyone and have heard them
talk about their families, you limit your chances of generating
anything fresh. Having more people in the room builds a more
lively feeling, a greater energy. Lynette and Norman acknowl-
edged this, saying the course would be better if it were bigger.
But it was an eective course. Along with Lynn’s workshops,
it changed me. I was still awkward and full of doubt when trying
to contact the dead, but I had experienced moments when audi-
ence members armed that a detail made harmonic sense. As
a result, I had felt a combination of surprise and determination.
I still wasn’t sure what I was doing, but I wanted to do it well.
Although I hadn’t gotten good, I had gotten better. On a few
occasions, things had worked startlingly well. On others, they
had trailed o, inconclusively. Even in the best moments, I got
key details wrong, which, I came to understand, all mediums do.
What struck me, and sticks with me, is the sense of medium-
ship as speaking in a new key. You stand before a group of peo-
ple, trying not to think. You remain open to mental impressions.
ey pop into your head: visions, ideas, hard-to-pin-down sen-
sations. You say what you sense, whether it’s what a person looks
like, the color of the car they drove, or their ngers — now your
ngers — strumming the air. All this needs to be put into words,
and audience members should respond. Sometimes they stay
mute, and you press on. Sometimes they respond negatively, say-
ing these details don’t make sense, and you press on. Sometimes
they agree strongly with what you’re saying, and you might feel a
jolt of surprise before pressing on. You speak plainly: a chat, not
a chant. You speak diplomatically, avoiding the sensational. But
most of all, you speak condently. is is its own kind of music.
e Sense of a Story
If this book were a movie, I would now join a development cir-
cle to train with other mediums in small groups. en I would
raise the stakes by going “on platform” at church services to give
public demonstrations. First I would succeed, and get overcon-
dent. en I would fail, and be chastened. Finally, in the closing
minutes and over a swelling orchestral soundtrack, I would suc-
ceed once again, or learn that success meant something other
than what I had expected.
Because this is real life, things did not work out that way. I
did not join a development circle, nor perform as a medium at
services of the Canberra Spiritualist Association or any other
group. I did, however, attend services regularly to learn how
skilled mediums work. I got more exposure by going to Spir-
itualist events in the , , and Norway. And I learned a key
lesson: how to be an audience member, or how to hear medium-
ship.
is might not sound like much of a challenge. How hard is it
to sit in a crowd? But listening is active, not passive. One has to
learn to respond to mediums’ words in particular ways, to give
by receiving. Audience members, in concert with mediums, can
make good or bad music.
Just as mediums prepare to get in touch with the spirit world,
so too should audience members get ready for spirit communi-
cation to take place. At a service in March , Jane Hall
explained her technique before she began her work. She urged
audience members to invite their late friends and family to come
to the service. People in the spirit world, Jane said,
know where they need to go… . But I think it’s really impor-
tant to send out thoughts to your loved ones on the way to
one of these events, and just ask them to step forward with
you. “Come journey with me today.” And that energy just
brings them forward, brings them closer. So I invite you to…
think of your… friends in the spirit world, and your family
in the spirit world, and ask them to join us… so I can blend
with them.
So, today, I ask that the spiritual world join me and blend
their energy — so close that I may feel them. And that I may
provide healing to the people in the audience, or in the spirit
world. And that’s what I do. at’s what I do to start my
work. I blend. I ask them to step so close to me that I may feel
them… so I can prove that they haven’t died.
Jane seems to suggest that the medium’s work and the audience’s
work are not that dierent from each other. True, the medium’s
special task is to “blend” with a person from the spirit world,
sensing and feeling as that person does. But this blending is only
partly under the medium’s control. e deceased person needs
to want to come through. It helps if audience members have sent
an invitation.
However, many audience members don’t act the ways medi-
ums want them to. In Spiritualism, there are several kinds of bad
audience member. One is the clueless listener. is is someone
who fails to recognize convincing signs the medium relays from
the spirit world. Many mediums have stories about such audi-
ence members who sit there, saying “no” or being puzzled dur-
ing the reading, then come up aer the service and say some-
thing like, “Oh, now I know who you were talking about! It was
my grandmother. Everything you said was right, but it took me
awhile to get it.”
When I interviewed Sarah Jeery about her mediumship, she
recalled an especially dicult reading along these lines:
I’ve had some bizarre experiences. I’ve had a lady sit in front
of me, and I said, “I’ve got a gentleman here with burns
all down half his face.” She looked at me, vacant. “No.” I’m
thinking: that’s a pretty specic piece of evidence, y’know.
You would know if you knew someone who had burns all
across one side of the face.
So the second time: “No.” I’m thinking, oh dear, this is — I
can’t throw this evidence away. It’s so specic!
So I said it one more time, but I did the sort of physi-
cal movement of — you would have seen him putting com-
presses or cream on his face. And it was only as I put my
hand to my face and showed her that that she looked at me,
she said, “at’s my dad!”
Now… the look on your face was the look on my face… .
How can this girl not have realized it’s dad? Anyhow, she went
on to tell me that her dad didn’t believe in mediumship. She
had just been to his graveside and spoken to him in her mind.
And she was absolutely sure that there was no way her dad
would come through. So, she had just created this false real-
ity that her dad wouldn’t communicate. So it took her all that
time for her mind to actually switch to, “Oh my God, that’s
my dad.”… [T]he recipient comes with all sorts of precon-
ceptions as to what can happen, who might come through.
Another kind of bad audience member is the “grabber” or
“body snatcher,” who thinks every reading is for him or her. You
might be sitting in the audience, and the medium says she has
connected with a man who was a great joker, smoked cigars,
loved playing cards, and died in his ies from heart failure.
is sounds like your uncle, so you get ready to respond. Now,
swoop, in comes the body snatcher, raising his hand and telling
the medium he thinks he knows who it might be — his cousin’s
friend knew a guy like this in Bendigo back in the ’s. Because
mediums oen face audiences in which several people indi-
cate they recognize the person being described, good mediums
patiently add details to sort through the possibilities, eventually
identifying one audience member as the likely recipient. People
who initially raised their hands might then be satised that this
wasn’t their uncle, aer all — or be frustrated that their reading
was grabbed by a body snatcher.
A third kind of bad audience member is an overly critical
one. Janet Adams, addressing a service in July , told a
story about dealing with such a person:
e other day I was in Albury, and I said, “I have a man by
the name of Joe.” It wasn’t “Joe,” it was “Joel,” but I only heard
the “J, o,” okay? So I misinterpreted. And the person got hung
up on the fact that I got the name wrong.
Never get hung up on… things like that. Wait. Hear the
medium through. But we got there eventually. ’Cause he kept
saying, “It’s Joel, it’s Joel,” and I’m going, “It’s Joe, it’s Joe?”
ere was so much noise around me, I could hardly hear.
e man in Albury insisted on “Joel” when the medium oered
“Joe,” the kind of minor mishearing that could happen in any
conversation. e lesson from this part of Janet’s talk was, in
part, an instruction to audience members to behave properly.
One lesson you learn by watching mediums work is that audi-
ence members are supposed to hold a delicate balance of atten-
tiveness, receptiveness, and critical awareness — but oen don’t.
Learning to listen to mediums in the right way means, in
part, managing your emotions. Wanting to hear from a specic
deceased person means you are more likely to convince your-
self that you are hearing from them, or to insist on ridiculously
precise details which no medium can deliver. e former is a
therapeutic trick — nice consolation, but for committed Spiritu-
alists, ultimately empty — and the latter cuts o the possibility of
meaningful engagement.
Mediumship is meant to be evidence-based. Good proof
is good proof, but not all signs are proof, and not all audience
members are listening in the right ways. Your faith should
not make you overinterpret what is being said. Indeed, “faith”
should be irrelevant.
* * *
Canberra Spiritualist Association services are held on the rst,
third, and h Sundays of each month, with a summer break
from mid-December to mid-January. As mentioned in the rst
chapter, they are held in a large, plain room in the community-
center complex in the suburb of Pearce. In –, I counted
the total attendance at services, and the respective numbers
of men and women at of them. I found that average attend-
ance per service was between seventeen and eighteen people,
and the proportion of women to men was two to one. At the end
of , the total number of paid-up members was eighteen, but
by May it had increased to .
ree people run the service. One person, always a mem-
ber, serves as the chairperson, whose responsibilities I describe
below. Another person, with no ocial title, runs the laptop
computer and audiovisual system. e featured performer is the
medium. e schedule of which mediums will perform at which
services is set months in advance. Mediums may or may not
be paid-up members of the Association, but most live in Can-
berra. Of the ten mediums I saw work at services, nine were
women. I chaired six services, and ran the / system many
times.
A typical service begins with the chair welcoming every-
one, asking them to turn o their phones, and introducing the
day’s medium. Next comes a brief meditative session in which
I say “men” and “women,” but on rare occasions youth attended. In count-
ing them, I included girls with women and boys with men. I was not aware
of any attendees identifying as transgender. e precise gures are: average
attendance was . people per service, . percent females and . per-
cent males. e most attendees at any service was (once), and the fewest
was ten (also once). A study of a Spiritualist congregation in Edinburgh
found that only ten to eighteen percent of the audience there was male
(Wilson , ).
audience members are told to focus their spiritual energies to
send healing to the world. e chair oen leads this part of the
service, although sometimes she or he asks someone else to do
it. en comes the rst song. Music is meant to build spiritual
energy, so audience members are encouraged to sing buoyantly
to the recorded songs, intensifying a vibe which will help the
medium do her work well. During my research with the , the
artist played most oen was John Denver, including his songs
“Eagles and Horses,” “e Flower at Shattered the Stone,”
“e Wings at Fly Us Home,” and “Looking for Space.” One
especially popular song is ’ “I Have a Dream.”
e rst song is followed by a brief talk in which the chair
reads out Spiritualism’s “seven principles” (see Chapter ) and
oers brief commentary on them, sometimes selecting one on
which to focus. Next, everyone sings the second song, continu-
ing to build the energy in the room.
e day’s featured medium then gives a speech which might
be compared to a sermon. It is oen an extended consideration
of a spiritual topic: philosophy, instruction, and storytelling
rolled together. Dierent mediums’ personalities ower during
these talks, with some giving chatty, personal performances and
others adopting a lecturer’s style, some even bringing scripts.
Aer this address comes the third song.
Spirit healing is an enormous topic in its own right. In this book I do not
discuss it much because I prefer to keep the focus on mediums’ conversa-
tions with their audiences, but it is addressed in chapter of Singleton and
Tomlinson (forthcoming). For much of my time at the CSA, the speaker
was free to lead the healing however she or he wanted, but later Lynette
Ivory developed a script for it.
Besides being sung at many services, “I Have a Dream” is also in
the songbook of Melbourne’s Victorian Spiritualists’ Union, the longest
continually existing Spiritualist congregation in the world. My colleague
Andrew Singleton has heard it sung at services in Ballarat, Ringwood, and
Brisbane, and he and I also heard it sung at a service at the Arthur Findlay
College in the United Kingdom. Debby Walker reported it being sung at a
Spiritualist service in Christchurch, New Zealand (personal communica-
tion, July , ; see also Yerby , – on hearing it at Lily Dale,
the Spiritualist community in upstate New York). If there is an unocial
Anglophone Spiritualist anthem, this ABBA song is surely it.
With spiritual energy cresting, the medium gives the “dem-
onstration,” providing “proof of survival” — that is, communi-
cating with people in the spirit world and passing on messages
from them to audience members. Following the demonstra-
tion, the service winds down with a nal song (usually Daniel
O’Donnell’s “Our Special Absent Friends”), brief notices from
the chair, and two baskets being passed around to collect dona-
tions of coins and small bills.
Norman Ivory oen said that a chair’s main job is to make
sure the medium is safe. ere are two dangers a medium might
realistically face. e rst is if she goes into trance and loses
awareness of her surroundings, running the risk of tripping over
a wire or banging into something. As Janet Adams put it at a
service in July , “Trance is not something I do on plat-
form anymore. I used to, but not anymore. Mainly because I’m
a bit unsteady on my feet, and sometimes you can get a bit wob-
bly.” However, I never saw mediums at the go deeply into
trance. ey always seemed to be aware of their surroundings.
e second possibility is that a rude, heckling audience mem-
ber might show up. I was told that Australian Spiritualists had
faced protests from evangelical Christians in past years. During
my research, however, no meeting was ever disrupted this way.
Sometimes a lost person would wander in, looking for another
event in the community-center complex, but usually an audi-
ence member rather than the chair went to help them.
Serving as the chair of several services, and more oen run-
ning the / system, helped me understand the ow of Spiritu-
alist ritual. But it was the sheer fact of being present at many ser-
vices — of showing up and listening — that taught me the most
about how mediumship works. In other words, even when I
was just another audience member, I always learned something.
One of the main lessons I learned was that good mediumship
depends on having a good audience: an audience whose mem-
e medium is not usually paid, so the collection goes toward the ’
operating costs, including room rental.
bers do not gobble up everything that comes their way, but do
not reject all the signs before testing their evidential avors.
And in this regard, the most important lesson I learned as a
listener was to pay attention to how stories take shape.
* * *
Many authors have observed that narrative is foundational to
human experience and understanding. Simply put, our brains
think in stories. We expect the world around us to unfold in
chains of before-and-aer where things are not random, events
have causes and eects, people have motives and personalities,
and we can build greater senses of a meaningful world and our
place in it.
It would be natural, then, to think that stories have a central
role in Spiritualist ritual. And they do — but not in a straight-
forward way.
Mediums sometimes tell stories in the speeches they give
before their demonstrations. For example, at a service in Octo-
ber , Debby Walker described an awkward moment when
she was beginning to explore Spiritualism. Now in her mid-
ies, Debby had lost her grandmother around een years
earlier. She had been devastated: “I wanted to stay in touch with
her,” she explained in her strong New Zealand accent. “I wasn’t
ready to let go and believe that I could no longer talk to her, see
her, or feel her around me. We had a connection, a very strong
bond. And I wasn’t quite sure how life was going to go for me
without her around.”
So Debby decided to try Spiritualism. She went to a meeting
in Wellington, where she was living at the time.
I remember sitting there, hoping and praying for a message,
rstly to know that there were people on the other side who
For the argument that humans universally and interactively create mean-
ingful experience through narrative, key sources include Bruner (),
Labov (), and Ochs and Capps ().
loved me and were interested in me, and that I could trust
what they said. For a lot of my experiences to that point had
been ones with a lack of trust… .
One medium standing on platform looked across at me in
the audience as I was in the seat. And I’d put my elbow out
on the next seat — I thought in a relaxed pose, and the hope
that, oh, maybe Nanna’d come through, ’cause I’m nice and
relaxed. I’m not all, “Come on, Nanna, where are you?”
Unfortunately, or fortunately, he did come to me. But
his… rst comment was that I looked bored. I wasn’t really
there. I was just sitting there, going, “Oh, yeah, okay, ho hum,
ho hum.” Isn’t it… the way of our world, where one person
makes a judgment based on their own experiences? He had
never lived my life, didn’t know why I was sitting there like
this, trying a new method to reach my grandmother, for her
to come through. He just saw me as someone bored and dis-
interested.
Nevertheless, he gave me a reading. And my Nanna did
come through. So that was quite good.
Debby’s story has a lot happening within a simple framework.
And everything harmonizes: the poignancy of her desire to con-
tact her grandmother, the humor of her attempt to be relaxed,
the medium’s misinterpretation of her pose, and the ultimate
success of the reading. I have quoted it at length to show how
mediums tell stories in their speeches, and also because it reveals
how mediums expect audience members to behave: respectfully,
attentively, and not leaning casually across the seat next to them.
When communicating with the spirit world during demon-
strations, mediums cannot tell stories in this way. e signs they
get from the spirit world are fragments: sights and sounds, tastes
and smells, intuitions. ey relate these signs to the audience,
and the person who responds (the “recipient”) has to recognize
them as bits of a character who features in a constellation of
memories. If a medium did oer a full narrative — “I’m in touch
with a lady who took a trip to the Yucatán in the ’s, where she
met her future husband, who was her tour guide at Chichen Itza
and asked her to take a photo of them on a frisky burro in front
of the Temple of Kukulkan” — it would prove either that she was
best medium in the world or an astonishingly clumsy fraud.
Audience members are constrained during the reading,
instructed by mediums not to give too much information. ey
are told to respond “yes,” “no,” or “I don’t know” to the medium’s
questions. ey are not supposed to give information beyond
basic verication, rejection, or minor clarication. If a recipi-
ent starts to tell a story or give details about what a dead person
was like, the medium usually cuts them o, saying: It’s my job
to give you the evidence. Sometimes audience members ask for
more details from the medium before deciding how to respond.
For example, at a service in July , the medium brought
through the spirit of a woman who did not live to an old age,
loved her cats, and travelled a lot. An audience member thought
this sounded a bit like her husband’s aunt, but was not ready
to commit fully: “She certainly travelled a lot. But, I must say,
there’d have to be something more to clinch it.” In other words,
the audience member was politely saying that she did not yet
feel the evidence was strong enough to know this was really her
husband’s aunt coming through — but she was willing to be per-
suaded.
Storytelling has a nely balanced position in mediumship.
In one sense, mediumship sancties narrative. It treats charac-
ters and events as objects of creative ritual focus. It points to
eternal life by reminding people of shared events with their
deceased loved ones. But in another sense, mediumship thrives
by not telling stories, at least not directly. e medium just gives
you the threads. Later, you do the work of weaving the threads
together, and in that weaving is an emotional coherence and
completeness. Or, as the French philosopher Vinciane Despret
(, ) puts it evocatively, “e dead turn those who remain
into story makers.”
What especially skilled mediums do is oer hints of narra-
tives, or what I came to call in my research notes “protonarra-
tives”: the sense of a story, the suggestion of a memorable event.
For example, in a reading I will discuss in the next chapter, Lynn
Probert described the spirit of a young man by saying, “I feel
that there was a suddenness to his passing. And as I get that
sense, I know he would have passed in an accident… . And I
know this was not his fault, regardless of anything that may have
been said.” is is not a fully edged story, but rather an outline
for one. When outlines resonate with audience members, as this
one did with the man’s mother, the sense of a story comes alive
even as the story itself does not get told.
Learning to be an audience member, then, means learning
to answer mediums directly — yes, no, I don’t know — while
suppressing your urge to say more, even as stories race through
your mind and emotions ood your body. Being an eective
audience member can be hard work.
* * *
I had a strange, exhilarating, and frustrating experience with
this process during a service in March . Jane Hall, the day’s
medium, was one of the liveliest presences on platform at the
. With shoulder-length blonde hair, her slender frame buzz-
ing with energy and her Aussie-accented speech salted with
youthful turns of phrase, Jane is a perpetual-motion medium.
Today, Jane’s rst reading brought through the spirit of a
bridge-playing grandmother. In her second reading, she was in
contact with the spirit of a man who liked cars. “I know all you
men love cars,” she joked, and oered a detail: the car was an
Austin-Healey convertible. Also, this man had been overseas.
At this point, Jane, who knows I am American, asked me
directly, “Am I with you, Matt?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
: You don’t know. Because I feel like… I have to go over-
seas as well with this gentleman. Would you understand your
father to be in the spirit world?
: Yes.
: Okay. And would you understand that your father
liked cars?…
: As much as any man.
: As much as anyone. Okay. Would you understand that
your father would have liked to have had a nice car, like a
convertible —
: Yes.
: — but didn’t have an opportunity to?
: In the ’s, he owned a Fiat.
: A wha’?
: Fiat.
: A Fiat.
: Yes.
: Is that a convertible?
: No, it was — it was a sporty Italian car in the ’s. It —
: Okay!
: — was a bright yellow.
: And you’re saying he… liked cars as much as anyone!
[Laughs.] And he lives abroad. He lived abroad.
: Yes.
is looked like a tipping point in the reading. Jane was saying
in a playful and condent way that she was clearly right. She saw
a man living overseas. He liked cars. My father lived his whole
life in America, and for his midlife crisis, he bought a yellow
Italian sports car. From Jane’s perspective, she was two for two.
But something felt o to me. Because, although he had
bought the Fiat, and when younger had gone to races at Wat-
kins Glen — and for that matter was proud of the Oldsmobile
he owned when he was older — he was not, in any real sense, a
“car guy.” He didn’t x cars. He didn’t read about cars. He didn’t
comment on other cars on the road, except to complain about
their drivers, especially when they tailgated him on Weldon
Road. And the yellow Fiat was not a convertible, let alone an
Austin-Healey.
Still, I enjoy Jane’s mediumship, and was willing to work with
her to see where the conversation would go. Yet at this moment,
things got complicated. Another man in the audience, Warren,
made it clear he wanted to be part of the discussion.
: Okay. Sorry, Warren, you’re —
: Possible as well.
: You’re a possible as well. Okay… . D’you know, I always
wanna make a Fiat red. But [she laughs] I don’t feel like it was
red, was it? Would you understand it was… like, green? Or,
like, a dark color?
: Yellow.
: Nah, that’s not it. Would you understand a green, or a
dark color?
: Absolutely.
: Would you understand overseas, though?
: Absolutely.
: Okey-dokey-pokey, we might be over here. Okay. And
would you understand — but you don’t understand it being
an Austin-Healey? You understand it being a sports car.
: Um… very likely. Yes, a sports car. Not necessarily
an Austin-Healey. I’m not real sure about that.
: Okay, but it’s a dark sports car.
Warren: Oh yeah.
: Dark colored, like a bottle green, or a dark green, like a
black color. I just see —
: … British racing green.
Here, then, was the real tipping point of the reading. Warren had
stepped in, ready to take over. To sort things out, Jane described
the car as “green, or a dark color,” which seemed to rule me out,
as I had already mentioned my dad’s Fiat was yellow. Warren
snapped this up, clarifying that the car he remembered was
“British racing green.” But he, too, was not sure what to do with
the claim that it was an Austin-Healey.
Jane repeated the phrase “British racing green,” and joked
that she was going to take this as evidence, “’cause that’s a bottle
green as far as I’m concerned… . To be British racing green, it’s
gotta be a Jaguar.” Although she said this with a laugh, Warren
responded clinically: “Correct.”
e mention of a Jaguar surprised me, for reasons I will
explain soon. But at this point in the reading, I was happy to
have it go to Warren. I don’t think of my dad as a car guy, and
if Warren’s father owned a green convertible, then the evidence
seemed to be pointing in his direction.
Jane now indicated that she had given readings to Warren
before, and knew some things about his family. But, she said, she
felt this was not the spirit of someone she had brought through
before.
Warren objected: “I think you have.”
Jane, somewhat ummoxed (“Whoo! Okay… . Okay”), then
asked if this man was Warren’s father, and he responded, “Yeah.”
Looking back, it is hard not to feel that Warren was push-
ing for the reading he wanted. Meanwhile, Jane was trying to
stay in contact with the spirit world — to keep her mediumistic
focus — while also dealing with her memories of previous inter-
actions with Warren. “I just get newspapers,” she said. “So, soon
as I see your dad, I know I get newspapers.”
en came a hiccup. Warren said he didn’t think it was Jane
who brought through his father earlier, aer all. It was another
medium. And, as Spiritualism in Canberra is a cozy community,
this other medium happened to be in the audience. is second
medium armed that she was the one who had been in contact
with the spirit of Warren’s dad.
Jane processed this odd development. en she returned to
the reading with her usual condence:
: … Okay. All right. Now… I just know that there’s con-
nections with newspapers. ’Cause he shows me newspapers,
and I see newspaper articles, and I see, back in the time
where there were black, white, and red newspapers. And I
know that there are big newspapers. Now, I have to say he
must have had something in the New York Times.
: I’m not sure. Possibly.
: Can I ask that you go and research that? at — some-
thing of his work that he has done or written, whether he
wrote to the New York Times — but I just see “New York
Times” written above me. Would you also understand that
he must have… travelled to New York?
Warren was not sure about the connection to the New York
Times, although overall he remained persuaded by the read-
ing. In response to Jane’s question about travel to New York, he
replied, “Absolutely.”
Now I had a problem. Although the car thing was wobbly for
me, New York was not. My dad worked in publishing for many
years in New York. In fact, he met my mother when they both
worked at Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Okay, he was in book
publishing, not newspapers. But I could feel a spark now, as well
as an irritation. Obviously, my father had a strong connection
to New York.
Following Warren’s “Absolutely,” the conversation continued:
: Absolutely. Okay. ’Cause I also know I have to talk
about New York… . But I know that he travels further than
just New York within America.
: Yep.
: Okay. Now, I have to say, Warren, there must have
been times for him where he didn’t have time for the fam-
ily. Because I very much feel him coming through now say-
ing, “I want to talk about the New York Times. It’s about time.
Sometimes I didn’t have time for my family.” And I know, as
he comes through now, I know that he is here for his own
healing, in the sense that he is coming through to say: “Sorry,
because I didn’t have enough time with my children.” And
you would understand in particular, Warren, that… there
were times where he just had no time for his children.
: Yep.
: Not enough time, but no time for his children. And
I know very much… the newspapers would have taken his
time —
: Yep.
: — away from his family. And I know he comes through
to apologize for that time, because there were things that
were just… too much business, too much in his head. And
too important. And kind of — he’s indicating, you know… he
got trapped in the cycle of, of the desire, of the Jaguar, of the
lifestyle, New York, all of that.
Now my ears were burning, my ngers itching, my mind rac-
ing: this was starting to make sense. While Warren and Jane
developed the portrait of Warren’s father as a man working with
newspapers so intensely that he ignored his family, my magpie
brain was plucking bits of what Jane had said and seeing that,
like a motley nest, they were tting together, aer all.
I was, in short, becoming a bad audience member. I was too
eager for the reading. Partly this was because it had been taken
from me by another guy — and I realize there is a goofy pathos
in two middle-aged men insisting that the charismatic blonde
medium is talking with their dead father and not the other guy’s
dead father. I didn’t say or do anything to disrupt the reading,
but in my head and heart I was feeling frustrated because Jane
had now said enough for me to put together compelling stories.
e rst story: In his nal years, my father apologized for
not having had the announcement of my wife’s and my wedding
published in the New York Times. He had intended to do it, but
had been too slow to act, and by the time he contacted the news-
paper the deadline had passed. e second story: My father had
bought my mother a toy Jaguar, like a Matchbox car — bright
yellow, like the Fiat. He had joked that this was the only Jaguar
he could aord to buy her. When Jane mentioned a Jaguar, I saw
the toy gi in my mind’s eye.
At the beginning of this book, I mentioned how when I began
to attend Spiritualist services, I was not hoping to communicate
with my father. I did not want or expect him to show up, because
I accepted that he had lived his life, and was now gone. But in
this moment, he was alive again. He was alive through the New
York Times and the Jaguar, and the stories these objects called
up in my memory.
Looking back at the transcript now, I regain a sense of bal-
ance. If my father was wealthy in anything, it was in time for
his family. So Jane’s insistence — and Warren’s agreement — that
this man had no time for his family would seem to show deni-
tively that if Jane was bringing through the spirit of anyone, it
was more likely Warren’s father than mine. But I can’t forget the
emotional pull of that day. It was the feeling that you are hearing
things meant just for you, things only you could have known:
stories that aren’t actually stories, but fragments, moments,
things you can put back together.
* * *
e other time I was an especially bad audience member, it was
in an entirely dierent way. e reading was not for me, but,
strangely, I seemed to be the one person in the room who could
connect things up. Yet I held back.
It was at a service in December , and I had brought my
mother-in-law. Joan is now in her eighties, and still has propul-
sive energy. She is also devoted to her family and intellectually
curious, which makes her a great person to invite to Spiritualist
events. (is was her second service, and she had also had
a private reading with Lynette Ivory at my suggestion.) I had
intended to sit next to Joan during the service, but it turned out
I needed to run the / system and she needed to sit in the front
row to be able to hear the day’s medium, Norman Ivory, prop-
erly. So there was a physical distance between us. is didn’t
bother me at rst, as I gured I would just chat with her aer
the service to see what she thought.
But then Norman gave Joan an extraordinary reading. At
least it sounded extraordinary to my ears. He had gone directly
to her. at is, he identied her as the audience member with
whom a person in the spirit world wanted to communicate, and
it was now up to her to say whether or not she recognized what
he described.
I did not make an audio recording of that service, but aer-
ward I wrote in my eldnotes:
It was a lady seen polishing a table to high gloss. She had a
partner, but the rest of her family situation was not clear. Her
father had been an infantryman killed in action. e name
“Aunt Stephanie” was mentioned… . Joan said she didn’t rec-
ognize anyone. Norman passed along a message, holding his
hands out and saying that the woman in [the spirit world]
was saying Joan had been generous to her, and generous to
other people, and would be rewarded for it.
As Norman was going through these details, and Joan was
politely saying she did not recognize the person, I found myself
aching to speak up. Everything he said made sense. But I stayed
mute, wondering: Can I step in? Should I step in? What should
I do?
e story I knew was that Joan’s mother lived to be years
old. In her last years, she had required a live-in housekeeper.
e one she hired, a woman named Stella, had been married,
but her husband was not oen around. ere was a delicious bit
of improbable scandal: Stella claimed to have had an aair with
Elvis Presley when she was young. And she had gotten pregnant!
So as Norman was speaking, here is what I was hearing:
e woman was polishing a table. (Makes sense for a house-
keeper.) She had a partner, but an otherwise vague family situa-
tion. (is sounded accurate.) Her father was a soldier killed in
action. (Not sure, but Stella grew up in Germany, where she met
Elvis when he was in the army.) e name “Stephanie” is close to
“Stella,” although apparently the person in the spirit world was
not identifying herself as Stephanie. Joan had been generous to
this person. (Yes, Stella was well paid.)
I was unsure why Joan was not responding. I suspected it
was because she is so devoted to her parents’ memory that any
woman in the spirit world would need to be her mother, not
her mother’s housekeeper. But I didn’t really know. I strained
forward in my chair, wondering what to do, and doing nothing.
When the service ended shortly aerwards, I bounded over
to Joan.
I have chosen “Stephanie” and “Stella” as pseudonyms because the real
names have the same number of syllables and also begin with the same
three letters.
at woman Norman was talking about, I asked — doesn’t
that sound like Stella?
Joan, electric as always: Oh, yes, it does! You’re right! She
hastened to tell Norman and Lynette.
I, too, told Norman that his reading had made sense to me.
I was now the classic bad audience member, saying aer the
fact: You were right. Sorry not to say anything while you were
struggling in front of the whole audience! I asked if it would
have been acceptable for me to pipe up during the reading even
though it wasn’t for me, and was politely told that yes, that
would have been ne.
As odd or selsh as this might sound, I remember feeling
elated. I had heard things the right way. When Norman gave the
description of this woman, I knew someone who t the prole
remarkably well, and each bit of evidence seemed to conrm
the one before it. Heard from the right angle, it made harmonic
sense.
Home again aer the service, I told my wife about the read-
ing, and she asked an obvious question: Wasn’t Stella still alive?
* * *
Before a service In August , I was chatting with an older
member of the congregation who had moved to a warmer part of
Australia but was now back in Canberra for a medical appoint-
ment. She knew the and its personalities well, and oered
a funny comment on the group and its history. She asked, you
know how an onion has so many layers? Yes, I said. Well, she
explained, the is like six onions in one.
Six onions in one — the kind of thing that, when you peel it
apart, just keeps peeling, all complexity and bite. She meant the
comment in terms of the as a human institution — people,
politics — but it’s also a good description of being an audience
member at a mediumship demonstration.
Being a good audience member means letting the layers peel
away and not expecting any core. First, obviously, you have to
be open to the idea that communication with dead people is
possible. If so, then you need to be willing to hear from them
through a medium, and even invite them to come and chat. But
you also need to listen to the medium with critical sensibility.
Or, to put it more plainly, you need to be willing to say: No, that’s
not my father.
In becoming an audience member, you get layered in stories.
ere are stories about past readings, as when Debby recalled
the New Zealand medium who thought she was bored but
brought through her grandmother’s spirit anyway. ere are
stories that live only in audience members’ memories, but are
suggested anew as listeners rearrange the bits of information the
medium has oered. Indeed, mediums sometimes tell audience
members to continue the process begun during the reading, as
when Jane told Warren, regarding his father and the New York
Times, “Can I ask that you go and research that?” What she was
saying, in essence, was: there’s your story. You need to go and
discover it, conrm it, and complete it.
Many stories cannot be resolved. Or, in the case of my
mother-in-law’s reading, they could probably be resolved, but
they trail o instead. I looked Stella up on Google, expecting it
would be fruitless. How could I nd information on an obscure
housekeeper who had lived most of her life before Internet
saturation? Yet I was spectacularly wrong. She was, it turned
out, famous as one of several women said to have had a love
child with Elvis. anks to journalistic luminaries such as the
National Enquirer and Hollywood News Daily, she was easy to
locate online. But none of the sites included an obituary, so it
was not clear to me whether or not Stella was still alive.
I didn’t pursue it, because what I took from the reading was
not a desire for external validation, but the intensity of the
moment itself: recognizing enough of a character, her personal-
ity and actions, to sense a story coming together through the
work of a medium. It was a story I already knew, and a story
which the medium could not have known. He oered bits of it,
fragments to make whole.
My lack of interest in validation might frustrate some read-
ers, because there is no getting around the fact that Spiritual-
ism’s central claim — we speak with the dead, because they are
not really dead — is something that committed insiders take as
rmly established and committed outsiders take as easily dis-
proven. As I mentioned in Chapter , this book is meant as a
quiet analytical engagement rather than a shout for either
endorsement or debunking. In the next two chapters, however,
I do address the matter of eective and ineective mediumship.
Even in a small society like the Canberra Spiritualist Associa-
tion, one meets mediums with a remarkable range of styles and
abilities. If one suspends judgments of the truth of mediums’
claims, then how can one distinguish a good reading from a bad
one?
Mother’s Day
Skilled mediums share several qualities. One is condence.
ere are several ways to express condence, such as speak-
ing with deliberate authority. For example, don’t ask audience
members whether the details oered so far make sense, but ask,
“Who am I with?” — indicating that someone in the audience is
denitely the correct recipient. Another is to persist. When the
room is silent, or an audience member responds with a string of
“no’s,” don’t give up. When you feel you are really in touch with
the spirit world, you will be able to work eectively.
Another feature of successful mediumship is the ability to
suggest the sense of a story. By describing what a deceased per-
son was like, the medium prompts audience members to recall
their loved ones and tales from their lives. Later, mediums tell
stories about memorable readings, whether happy successes like
when Lynette Ivory saw a yellow daodil, or moments of frus-
tration, like when Sarah Jeery described a man with a burned
face and his own daughter did not recognize him.
A third feature is exibility — the ability to think laterally
and stretch symbols just far enough. Beginning with a dark-
colored Austin-Healey roadster, as Jane Hall did when reading
for myself and Warren, she was able to propose that it might be
another car, but it needed to be a convertible. My yellow Fiat
fell away and Warren’s “British racing green” Jaguar moved into
position. Mediums think nimbly this way because it is under-
stood that people in the spirit world do not communicate too
directly with us.
A fourth feature of successful mediumship is a sense of
humor. is might seem counterintuitive, because popular
images of communication with the dead include things like
séances and Ouija boards. Séances are old-fashioned and rever-
ential, if o-kilter, aairs: sitting around the dining room table
in darkness, waiting for grandpa to materialize with a whoosh
and a moan. Ouija boards are just spooky. But Spiritualist medi-
ums avoid these clichés as they cultivate a light tone. ey use
plain language in plain rooms. Making people laugh in the face
of death, loss, and grief is something skilled mediums are espe-
cially good at, enhancing a reading’s emotional completeness
and resonance.
When Lynn Probert came to Canberra in March , she
gave a thrilling public demonstration. As I described in Chap-
ter , she is a well-known British medium who works interna-
tionally and teaches at the Arthur Findlay College, the training
center of the Spiritualists’ National Union. Before her visit, I
had asked Norman Ivory, president of the Canberra Spiritualist
Association () at the time, if I might be allowed to record
her public demonstration. He asked her on my behalf, and she
agreed, although as I was setting up my recorder that night, she
mentioned that this kind of thing would not be allowed where
she came from.
Lynn gave six readings in a demonstration that lasted an
hour and a half, with a twenty-minute break between the rst
three readings and the last three. Around forty people attended,
paying y dollars per ticket. As I described in Chapter , Lynn
sparked a warm vibe in the room from the beginning of the
evening. She started by explaining how mediums work (“Very
much we move our mind… out of the way”), told the audience
how to react (“I will need you to respond to me”), and explained
that a sense of humor is vital (“Just ’cause someone’s died in a
physical sense, they haven’t lost their humor and their ability to
have fun with you”).
’
Here, I will focus on her second reading of the night, which
combined pathos, humor, persuasion, and assertion. As in the
rest of this book, I am not posing the question of existential real-
ity — whether spirits exist, and whether Lynn speaks with them.
Rather, I am pointing out that in Spiritualist mediumship, as in
any ritual form, some people do a better job than others. Lynn
did a remarkable job. But what, exactly, did she do so well?
* * *
“Okay, I’ve got a younger male now,” she begins. en comes her
initial description of a man in the spirit world:
I know he’s taller, he’s slimmer. I feel he’s got quite an edgy
personality, and when I say “edgy,” I don’t mean naughty or
horrible. I just know that there’s a little bit of a swagger to
him. But I know that I’ve got a kind young guy. I do feel that
he would have passed quickly. I… get the sense with him, he
was someone that looked quite serious, although he wasn’t.
I feel that there was a studiousness to him, so I know that he
was an intelligent young man. But I do feel that he got a little
bit lost within himself just a short time before he passes.
Now, I feel that… he would have had a wide circle of peo-
ple that he knew, but he was very particular about who he
kept close to him, or who he allowed close to him. Now, I feel
that there was a suddenness to his passing, and as I get that
sense, I know he would have passed in an accident. So I know
that I pass quickly, I pass in an accident, and I know this was
not his fault, regardless of anything that may have been said.
So, who would I be with?
Some of this description is generic. What young man is not “a
little bit lost within himself” and closer to some friends than
others? But the core of this persona is specic: It is a young man
who died in an accident for which he was blamed. In response to
the question “who would I be with?” several audience members’
hands go up.
Lynn says again that the man died in an accident. Now she
claries, “he passes instantly,” and she adds extra information:
“I also feel that he would have a friend… that passed either in
a very similar manner to him or within a short space of time to
him.” is statement winnows down the possible recipients to
one person in the audience, a woman I will call Maura.
“Okay,” Lynn says to Maura. “May I work with you?”
“Yes,” she replies.
“Good,” Lynn jokes. “I’d be really stuck if you said no.” e
audience laughs.
Maura proves herself a good comic foil, replying, “I just
wasted y bucks.” e audience laughs again.
Lynn says wryly, “at’s a rst,” and the audience laughs one
more time. Following this exchange, Lynn now begins to work
with Maura to develop the sense of this man’s character and
presence.
: Okay, but I also know that would have been his humor.
Do you understand that? Because I just feel like he’d go,
“What are you doing here anyway?” ’Cause I don’t feel that
he’s someone that would have been involved in this, or would
have been open-minded to it. He would have said it’s a load
of rubbish. And now he’s got to eat humble pie. Because I
know that he’s been very active around you since he’s passed,
to let you know that he’s still very much a part of your life.
You would understand this.
: at’s it.
: I do feel, too, there was still that innocence to him.
’Cause I still want to say — I want to call him a boy, even
though I know he’s not. ’Cause I know I’ve just got that inno-
cence and that naivety. He’s not streetwise. Does that make
sense?
: Mm hm.
: He would come across as he was, because he wanted
to be seen that way. But I don’t feel that that was his natural
manner. Okay? Now, I do feel that he had a great sense of
humor. But it was very dry, it was very quick, and it was very
’
witty. And I know that if you said something to him, he’d very
quickly come back with a remark. And you would become a
volley of —
: Yes.
: — tennis, almost, between the two of you. Okay?
Here, Lynn’s comic air owers: she is teasing the spirit of the
dead man by suggesting that he would have teased his mother
for attending a Spiritualist meeting. He was a funny guy, and
now the joke’s on him, because he’s here with us now — proving
what he never would have believed while he was alive. Maura is
clearly engaged by Lynn’s words, and responds with a string of
armations: “at’s it,” “Mm hm,” “Yes.”
e medium continues:
: I know that you would have tted under his arm. Does
that make sense to you? [Maura’s response is not audible.]
’Cause I feel that seems important to do that to you. I want
to get you in a hug. I’m not going to literally come and do it
to you —
: No.
: — don’t worry.
: at’s .
: But I know that that’s the kind of thing. ’Cause I feel he
wants to kiss you on the top of your head —
: Uh huh.
: — and I know that’s because of how he feels towards
you. Do you understand?
: Mm hm.
: But I know he wasn’t able to verbalize it so easily when
he was here. He would do it by showing you, and doing
things for you, but you would have to pester him… . Does —
: Yeah… .
: — that make sense?
: So true.
: And particularly keeping his room tidy seems to be an
important thing to talk about as well, because it wasn’t. [Lynn
laughs.] Okay. Now, I do feel as well — think he’s putting the
word “Mum” across your head. Okay, you understand that?
: Yeah.
: So, yes. You’re mum.
is part of the reading begins in the pleasant, almost bantering
style established from the beginning. Lynn assures Maura she’s
not really going to come over and grab her in a hug, and jokes
about the signicance of a clean room, because this young man
had trouble keeping one. But then she oers something new.
Until this moment, when referring to her sense of the man’s
spirit, Lynn has almost exclusively used the verbs “feel” and
“know.” She has been building an intuitive sense of what he is
like and how he died, and she uses these two verbs again and
again. Now, however, she has an actual vision: she sees the word
“Mum” displayed on Maura’s forehead. (She uses the words
“think” and “feel” in saying this, but it is clear from her descrip-
tion that she now has a visual impression of the word on Maura’s
body.) And Maura conrms that yes, she is the mother of this
young man.
So it is established for the audience: Lynn is in touch with
the spirit of a young man who died, connecting him with his
mother. is scenario, the tragedy of a parent losing a child, is
what drove me away from Spiritualism almost ten years earlier,
when a medium in Melbourne spoke cheerfully about her tod-
dler’s death from cancer. But something’s dierent now, and it’s
not only the passage of time. I’m still horried at the idea of
young people dying. In Melbourne, I felt I had been brought
to the edge of a pit of despair by a reckless if well-meaning
tour guide (Lean in for a closer look!). But now, in Canberra,
with Lynn Probert demonstrating her mediumship, I feel
like I’m being pulled back from the edge by — improbably
I am eliminating a brief stretch of dialogue aer this, in which Maura was
briey confused, thinking Lynn was referring to Maura’s mother. Several
audience members piped up at this moment, and Lynn claried that she
meant Maura, joking, “Sorry. It’s my English, it’s not so good.”
’
enough — something like jealousy: Wow, this woman is getting a
great reading! Lynn’s sympathy, combined with her lightness of
touch and sureness of method, creates a sense of calm and safety
that is encouraging, even as the event we are all being brought
toward in a suggested narrative, a fatal accident, could not be
more shocking or depressing.
* * *
In watching and listening to mediums, and going over tran-
scripts of their readings, I oen nd it hard not to fall into circu-
lar reasoning. Who is an eective medium? Someone like Lynn.
Why is she eective? Because audience members agree she is
doing a good job. Why do they agree on this? Because she is an
eective medium. To break the circularity, obviously, the ques-
tion that needs answering is: what specically does an eective
medium do that an ineective one does not? And the answer,
unfortunately, is never straightforward, and depends as much
on the audience as on the medium.
Condence, yes: Lynn is supremely condent. But condent
mediums can give bad readings, as I describe in Chapter . Per-
sistence, yes: But as you will see, Lynn gets so many details right
the rst time around — right enough to convince Maura — that
her persistence does not mean scaling a wall of “no’s,” but pre-
senting more and richer information. A sense of humor: Yes,
clearly, although theorizing humor is famously a dead end.
What seems to matter for Lynn’s humor is that it is balanced
carefully with respect for everyone in the room, including the
grieving mother and the spirit of her late son. She moves dely
between jokes which lighten the mood and poignant messages
of love.
Again, I am only describing her eectiveness, not really
explaining it. If anything sets this reading apart from many oth-
ers, it is the sense of a story which Lynn suggests. She sketches
a character, a young man at the heart of a tragedy. Although she
cannot tell the story in detail, she can gesture toward it, and let
Maura and the rest of the audience tell themselves how it goes.
As the reading continues, Lynn says, “I know I want to get
you in a hug. And he just gives me that feeling of, ‘It’s my mum,’
and — .”
Maura says “Yeah,” and the medium continues, “that’s why I
saw it just written across your head there quite easily.” She tells
Maura to look for a rainbow, which might be an actual rainbow
or a picture of one. When she sees it, she will know it’s a sign
from her son.
: Now, I do feel he did have those periods where he
would become quite introverted. And I know that you
couldn’t always reach him emotionally. Do you understand
that?
: at’s true.
: And I feel that it was a struggle sometimes to under-
stand where he was coming from, or where he was going, so
to speak. But I still feel that around his accident there were a
lot of question marks. Would that make sense to you?
: ere were, yeah.
: ’Cause I feel that either he wasn’t somewhere that was
so familiar to him, or his diary had changed… . He wasn’t
meant to be where he was at that time —
: Yeah, he wasn’t.
: — his plans changed.
: Yeah.
: And that’s why there was — again, that was just one
of the many questions: Why was he there at that moment, at
that time?
: Mm hm.
: But I know that he wasn’t the cause of this accident.
You understand?
: Yeah.
: But I still feel that there may have been things that had
been said or presumed in that way. ’Cause he wants to say,
“Mum, thanks for being strong and standing my corner, and
ghting for what you believed in. And that’s me.” Does that
make sense to you? Okay.
’
In this remarkable passage, Lynn has begun to build a more com-
plex sense of the young man and the meaning of his death. He
was introverted at times. He could have trouble communicating.
And something went wrong on the night he died — something
unusual, a change in plans or some kind of mistake, something
which put him in the wrong place at the wrong time. Having
had trouble communicating while alive, he is now communicat-
ing uently, and thanking his mother for doing the hard work
of speaking up for him aer the accident. She stuck up for him,
correcting the misinformation other people were spreading.
e accident was not his fault.
Here, Lynn is weaving together two strands as she develops
the sense of a story. First is the universal question of meaning:
Why was he there at that moment, at that time? As for any-
one’s life or death, the question can be answered in two main
ways, with reference to either proximate or ultimate causality.
Proximately, he was there at that time because of a mistake. His
plans had changed, or perhaps he got lost. Normally, he would
not have been there, and the mistake led to the fatal accident.
But ultimately, he was there because it was his fate. In a deep
sense, he was supposed to be there. Fate is a complicated topic
in Spiritualism, and I will hold o discussing it until Chapter
. But what Lynn does here, notably, is link the proximate rea-
son — the mistake — to a moral reason rather than an ultimate
one. She is saying: Because there was a mistake, people want
to assign blame, and they blame your son, but he was not at
fault. e hinted-at story becomes complete not through a theo-
logical explanation (“God said it was his time to go”), but rather
through a moral armation: In life and death, he was good. An
emotional loop is closed in catharsis. Maura’s son died, but he
is still alive, here and now; everyone said the accident was his
fault, but it was not. He conrms his innocence from the spirit
world and thanks his mother for arming it to others. Here is
an emotional groundswell, with loss, promise, and thanks roll-
ing into each other.
* * *
“Now, I know that you’ve still got an item of his clothing,” Lynn
continues. “But there’s something that you hold to your face, or
you did do when he passed, because I know it’s something that’s
so. ’Cause I feel it’s like a tee shirt, or a top, and I know it’s
still got the smell of him on it. Does that make sense to you?”
Maura’s response is inaudible, but seems to be positive.
e reading continues:
: Why did you keep his dirty — you call ‘em sneakers, do
you? Trainers, we call ‘em trainers —
: I kept everything.
: Okay. And it’s like, “Why keep those, mum? ey’re
dirty.” ’Cause if anything got dirty like that, rather than clean
them, he’d throw them away and buy a new pair.
: He — denitely. Denitely. at’s true.
: ’Cause I — and I know they’ve all got to be lined up in
a certain way. And, and the thing about dierent color laces,
I don’t know what’s going on there. But, I just know that
he’s aware of all of those things. Now, there must have been
something that was done to commemorate him in some way.
Because I feel like there was a memorial, or there was some-
thing to mark his passing in terms of a celebration of his life.
Do you understand this? ’Cause I’m seeing a big screen with
his face on it, and I’m trying to understand what he’s showing
me. Would there have been something done from where his
school friends were concerned?
: ey probably did. ey were very good to us… .
: Okay. Because, well, it just feels like the community
come together. And I just get a sense that there’s been some-
thing done to commemorate him, or in his name and honor.
Would that make sense to you?
: Yeah.
: Because I feel that not only is he touched, he’s so sur-
prised that they’ve all done this. Because I don’t feel it was
just a shock — obviously a huge, immense shock to you as a
family — but it extended more than that. It became an eect
to the community, or the surrounding area in particular.
’
Okay. Now, I spoke about a lock here, but I got to talk to you
about keys, okay? Because I don’t know if someone snapped
a key just recently. Would you know of this? [Maura’s answer
is inaudible, but seems to be no.] Okay. Well, I do know that
there is a key that either is very supple and —
: All right.
: — is it gonna snap, so you need to check your keys —
Maura: Yes.
: — but I also feel that there’s something about your keys
moving. So, you put your keys down, you can’t nd them. Or
you put them in one place —
: Oh, just tonight!
: Right, okay.
: We just couldn’t nd the keys tonight before we
came.
: Okay, okay. [e audience laughs.] Well, I know he
wants to talk about that, or he wants to draw his attention to
that — your attention. But I also know that he sort of takes a
little bit of responsibility for that, too. ’Cause I feel, if he can
do as much as he can to let you know he’s there — he’s the
type — and again, he’s just put the thought in my mind: If I
could jump out of a cupboard and scare you, I would.
: Oh, dear. [e audience
laughs.]
: Obviously, that would be a very hard thing for him to
do, but ultimately that would be his aim and goal. [e audi-
ence laughs.] You would understand that.
Here, Lynn hints at another story: e community came
together to commemorate the young man’s life. ey showed
his face on a screen. Maura does not respond strongly to this
description, however, and simply allows, “ey probably did.”
e details lay in place for the moment, undeveloped.
e striking moments in this part of the reading are the funny
details of the young man’s character. He was fastidious, lining up
his sneakers and organizing their colored laces, and now he is
dismayed that his sentimental mother won’t throw out an old,
dirty pair. He pranks his mother by moving her car keys — he
did it just this evening, in fact. And, in a delicious sendup of
campy horror, he would love to play the part of a really ghosty
ghost by jumping out of a closet to terrify his mother. But, Lynn
adds drily, “that would be a very hard thing for him to do.”
Following this streak of humor, Lynn returns to the poign-
ancy of memory, and the young man’s care for his living rela-
tives:
: Now, I know that you put owers beside a photograph
of him.
: I just, just —
: Just tonight.
: is last week… .
: Okay. Because I know he wants to say “thank you” for
the owers that you placed beside his photograph. And you
light a candle there as well. ’Cause it’s like he’s got his little
space in your room —
: Yeah.
: — that is just dedicated to him. And there’s a little
prayer card there as well, isn’t there? Or there’s a card with
a verse on it.
: Not there, but I do have —
: But you’ve got one —
: — yes.
: — okay. And I also know there’s a picture of him on
your phone as well. [She addresses a woman next to Maura]
Are you sister?
’ : I’m his sister, yes.
: Yes, sister. Okay. Because I needed to move my atten-
tion to you. But I know that his picture would be on both of
your phones, okay? I know he wants to talk about a photo-
graph that you have of him when he’s little, and he’s got all
this chocolate smeared ‘round his face. Would you under-
stand that?
: at’s actually of his brother.
’
: Of his brother, okay. So that’s his way of saying: Don’t
miss him out, don’t miss her out. He’s bringin’ me all the
things to help me move through the family. But I also feel,
too, that — and I don’t know if it’s brother, or someone else
in the family, that still struggles to talk about him. Yes? Okay.
Because, again he brings me that feeling of wanting to bring
healing in that space. Because he wants it to become more of
a space where you can all talk and laugh about him. It’s okay
to cry about him. But he wants you to laugh about him more.
’Cause he was funny, and he did have his quirky ways, but he
doesn’t want it to be — I don’t know, there’s something where
his brother’s concerned. Would it make sense that his brother
at the moment is going through a little bit of — I don’t know,
going into himself, like he did? And it’s like he doesn’t want
him to make the same mistake of feeling like he can’t resolve
things, or that it’s not xable.
: Yeah.
: Yeah?
: Yeah.
: Because that seems important: “Come on. If you can’t
do it for yourself, do it for me.” So, he wants his brother to
know that he’s aware of how he’s feeling. But more impor-
tantly, that he wants him to pull his socks up… . Just get on
with it. Just get on with living life, yeah, but believing in
himself — that seems to be very important. And what other
people think of you is none of your business.
: Yeah.
: So it’s like, “Come on, get on with it, and let’s do it
together.” So, I know that that’s important.
Lynn begins this part of the reading by describing what she sees:
owers next to a photograph, a prayer card. Maura recognizes
them. Although this is a typical Spiritualist dialogue, with the
medium providing details as evidence and the audience mem-
ber arming them, it is noteworthy that Lynn is still doing this
long aer Maura has accepted that her deceased son is com-
municating with them. is adding-up of conrmed detail is
another dimension of Lynn’s skills as a medium: sheer volume.
Ten correct details are better than ve, and twenty are better
than ten, because persuasion depends on evidence, and evi-
dence builds up.
But Lynn also starts doing something new here, expanding
the web of relations and beginning to develop another mes-
sage the young man wants to deliver. First she brings Maura’s
daughter into the dialogue, identifying her as the sister of the
deceased young man. Next, she happens to pull Maura’s living
son into the dialogue although he is not present in the room,
because she describes a photograph of a kid with chocolate
on his face which Maura recognizes. Lynn says the son in the
spirit world is acknowledging everyone in the family, and wants
them to remember him with laughter as well as tears, because
“he was funny.” But then she focuses on the living son, suggest-
ing he is in a dicult situation. He is withdrawing, and doesn’t
know how to go on — presumably, although she does not say so,
partly because of his brother’s death. Lynn emphasizes that the
deceased young man is exhorting his brother, encouraging him:
“Come on, get on with it, and let’s do it together.”
e reading is becoming a family aair. At least four mem-
bers of Maura’s family are now involved: Maura, the daughter
who came with her tonight, the son at home, and the son in
the spirit world. e key messages being developed are the son’s
gratitude to his mother and the worrisome fact that his brother
is suering. e young man wants his brother to move beyond
suering, to embrace the life he still has in the physical world.
* * *
e reading is almost two-thirds nished. ere is no count-
down clock in mediumship, obviously. But good readings take
on a form, weight, and direction that leads toward completion.
Lynn has already succeeded in this reading by giving Maura
details she recognizes from her son’s life. She has also begun to
deliver his messages of love and care for his family members.
’
Now, coming toward the end, she continues to braid expressions
of loss and memory with colorful threads of humor.
: I do feel, though, that he wants to say — now, you’ve
kept a Mother’s Day card from him, haven’t you?
Maura: Yeah.
: And Mother’s Day is a dierent time of year here to
what it is in the . But he wants you to make sure that you
get that card out. Put it out, pride of place, this year.
: He was born on Mother’s Day.
: He was born on Mother’s Day. Okay. I wish I’d told you
that. [e audience laughs.]
: But that’s why it’s special.
: Okay.
: He was born on Mother’s Day.
: Okay. Well… I did feel it was special. But please put
that card out. Because I know that every Mother’s Day that
comes along — I mean obviously, even harder because he
was born on that day — but every day, you feel to yourself, “I
haven’t got a card from him this year.” And so he knows that
that’s something that saddens you at that time of year. So, he
wants to make sure that you put it out, so that you can see
that there’s something from him. And just know that when
you do it, that you’re sending his love in exactly the same
way. He wouldn’t have written lots of words in there. He just
would have written “To Mum, from Me.”
: Yes. [e audience laughs.]
: Yeah, that’s it. But he would have chosen the card that
said it for him. And I know that card does. And I feel that’s
why he wants to draw attention to it, because it’s important
to him… for you to read those words again, all right? Now…
I’ve got my lenses in, I can’t see very well [she gives a small
laugh], that’s really bad, isn’t it? [e audience laughs.] Well, I
can see you… but I can’t see what you’ve got ‘round your neck.
But I am very drawn to what’s ‘round your neck, but — he’s
showing me a buttery. And I know that that would be very
signicant as well. And would it make sense that there’s a
tattoo as well that he wants to talk about? Is this with both
of you, though?
’ : We both have tattoos of butteries.
: You both — okay. Because as I said it to you, he went,
“And her.” [e audience laughs.] So — but one of you has
talked about getting another one done. [One of the women
says, “Yes.”] Is that you? Okay. He knows. at’s it — you’ve
been busted. So, I know that he’s aware of all these things,
and they please him. One of you really struggled with the
pain, and he found that hilarious. Does that make sense to
you?
: Actually, it was his brother. His brother had tattoos
of an eagle on his ribcage.
: Ah, okay. [Several voices speak; Lynn continues.]
But… he had to stop, he had to stop halfway through, or he
had to stop and go back.
: Yeah, he had to stop, take Panadol, and go back. [e
audience laughs.]
: Well, tell him he knows. Tell him he knows. Because
it’s things like that that are gonna give his brother something
to hold on to. But I know that it made him laugh in the way
that he would have done that — any misfortune [Lynn gives a
small laugh] when he was here. “But please know, mum, that
I was only the person I was because of you. And I was only
the person that I was because of how you made me strong.
’Cause I couldn’t have done it on my own.” You understand
that?
is part of the reading begins with a poignant moment. Lynn
mentions a Mother’s Day card which persistently reminds
Maura that her son is no longer here. Maura mentions that her
son was born on Mother’s Day, giving the symbol especially
painful gravity. But Lynn, agile as always, now gets everyone to
laugh by making fun of herself. She implies that a really good
medium would have known this fact (“I wish I’d told you that”).
is is both funny and extremely condent: Sure, I’ve been cor-
rect about many things, but I should have given you even more.
’
She continues to keep the mood light, making people laugh
by joking that the young man did not write much on the card,
and making fun of her own poor eyesight. I keep pointing out
Lynn’s humor because it is an essential feature of her skill as a
medium, but, as should be clear, she is not a gabbling nightclub
entertainer. She jokes to develop a fuller sense of what this event
is fundamentally about. e humor is sometimes at her own
expense, and when it is at the expense of the deceased young
man, it is in the service of developing his portrait as funny.
Indeed, humor is so essential to his character that he is teasing
his brother about a painful tattoo as a way of giving his brother
“something to hold on to.” e brother had started getting an
eagle tattoo on his ribcage, but had to pause and take painkillers
during the process. e young man in the spirit world is mak-
ing fun of his brother in order to cheer him up and give him
hope. Lynn’s humor lightens the mood of somber circumstance
and vividly shows a young man who himself poked fun, laughed
at misfortune, and would enjoy scaring his mother as a way of
showing his love for her.
Now comes the nal part of the reading. Even in these late
moments, Lynn oers new details. And, crucially, she oers
more suggestions of possible stories. is time, Maura takes her
up on one of them.
: And I know that when he passed — and I know that
when it came to saying goodbye to him — I know that there
were a lot of people that came that he hadn’t expected to, and
that you hadn’t expected to. But more importantly, you heard
stories about the things he’d done for other people. And I
know that he’d helped a lot of people in your community, and
within his friends as well, that he’d never talked about. So
there was a humbleness to him that showed his sensitivity.
And I think if he was still here now, I feel that he would say he
could make a good medium out of himself. Does that make
sense? Because he did have that sensitivity and that aware-
ness. And I think that was part of him that he was sort of
struggling with to understand, or to accept, shall we say. But
please know — okay, just in the last couple of months, you
must have had an experience where, just as you were waking
up, you thought you saw him there.
: I did. It was — I was sleeping alone, and —
: Yeah.
: — I just had this awful feeling, like there was some-
one in the room —
: Yeah.
: — and I woke —
: I know that as you opened your eyes, it’s like you saw
him, and the minute you concentrated, it went. Okay. e
image went. ’Cause I know that he draws close to you when
you sleep. But I know you felt him sit on your bed. And I
know you felt him lay on your bed as well. Does that make
sense?
: Yeah.
: But I know that he shows himself to you. And he didn’t
mean to scare you. But I know he was just watching over
you, the way that you always watched over him. So, please
know that he will continue to do so. But please take his love,
and — whose birthday is it around now?
’ : My uncle’s… .
: Okay, ’cause he just wants to say happy birthday. Okay,
so please, take his love and I say thank you so much for allow-
ing me to work with you. [e audience applauds.]
A bit more than sixteen minutes aer it began, the reading ends.
Sixteen minutes is long for a single reading within a public dem-
onstration, but there were no slack moments.
One of the stories Lynn begins to suggest is that many people
attended the man’s memorial service to show their appreciation
for the help he had given them. e number of people surprised
Maura, as well as the young man himself, watching from the
spirit world. Lynn is suggesting a new story, one about the tell-
ing of stories, with people gathering in honor of the young man
to talk about all the good he had done. He was good because
he was sensitive, and because he was sensitive he would have
’
made an eective medium. is connection leads Lynn to sug-
gest another story: Maura has actually seen her late son. Maura
agrees. But, in taking up this narrative and beginning to tell it
herself, she explains that it wasn’t a pleasant experience: “I just
had this awful feeling, like there was someone in the room.” Ear-
lier, Lynn had joked about how much the young man would like
to scare his mother. Now, his mother says he actually did this.
Lynn quickly acknowledges that this was a shock, and reassures
Maura that he is only coming with love. Finally, she adds one
more detail, a birthday, and Maura’s daughter arms that it is
her uncle’s.
* * *
As a sympathetic audience member with an academic interest
in what was going on, I found the reading mesmerizing and
cathartic. As soon as the service was over, I raced over to Maura
to let her know I hoped to analyze her reading in my research
project. She was very gracious about it.
In this book, sticking closely to my experiences with the
Canberra Spiritualist Association, it might seem odd to spend
so much time discussing the work of a visiting medium from
overseas. Indeed, many Australians are sensitive about “cultural
cringe” — Australians thinking that everything from England
Maura received another reading that night. As she explained when I
interviewed her a year later, her daughter was especially interested in this
kind of thing, and had purchased the tickets for the evening’s demonstra-
tion. Although Maura enjoyed seeing mediums — she had gone to Sydney
to see John Edward, for example — she had not come that night expecting
to receive a reading, let alone two. Her demeanor showed that she was not
a “grabber” or “body snatcher,” the kind of audience member who is too
eager for a reading and poaches them from other recipients. Indeed, she
mentioned that she had had readings from at least two Canberra mediums
that did not ring true to her, so she had a degree of skepticism.
I had the sense that Lynn’s readings were meaningful and upliing for
Maura. When I interviewed her, she did say that aer a reading you feel a
bit at, as you realize once again that the deceased person is not physically
here anymore.
must be better than it is Down Under. I did, of course, observe
highly skilled Australian mediums. Lynn’s demonstration stood
out for several reasons nonetheless. She continually built up
details throughout the reading, adding onto them even when
many had already been accepted. She pulled o an adroit bal-
ancing act between evoking grief and prompting laughter. And
perhaps most importantly, she suggested a web of stories — ones
she could not tell in full but Maura could, and the rest of us
could imaginatively follow. A fun-loving but somewhat troubled
young man went driving one night. ere had been a change in
plans — a mixup. He was somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be,
and then, in the moment that can never be undone, he crashed.
He died. People wanted to blame him for the accident. is was
a natural reaction to such an untimely death. But he had been
innocent, and his mother stood up for him. Tonight he came
back to thank her. He also came to urge his brother onward, to
let him know that he should follow a dierent road and move
on with his own life.
I began this chapter by asking what makes mediumship suc-
ceed, and have oered Lynn’s reading for Maura as an exam-
ple. Now I will turn to the thornier question of what makes a
reading fail. When a medium speaks with condence, per-
sists through moments of doubt and negative responses, adds
a touch of humor, and suggests wider stories that can be spun
from threads of evidence — when the medium does everything
right — what could go wrong?
Plenty, it turns out.
How Not to Speak with the Dead
In Chapter , I gave an example of failed mediumship. It was on
the rst night of Lynette and Norman Ivory’s training course,
and I was the one who failed. I steadied my nerves, quieted
my mind, and declared my intention to be in touch with the
spirit world. I stood up, faced the class, and saw the man from
the Blue Öyster Cult album cover. According to the principles
of mediumship, there was nothing inherently wrong with my
vision. People in the spirit world might have shown me the
image because I was familiar with it and it looked like someone
who would be recognized by my classmates. But no one recog-
nized him.
Because this was a training course, everyone had a dicult
time now and then. e third week’s session, I wrote in my
notes, “was a notably o night, with I think no real recognition
of any of the spirits making contact.” In the ninth week, a stu-
dent brought through a vivid character — a tanned, outdoorsy
bloke — whom no one recognized. Another time when a stu-
dent was in contact with a spirit nobody could “take,” I asked
Norman if random spirits ever showed up. He said yes. He
explained that when mediums gather, they emit a kind of light
which attracts people in the spirit world. Because the deceased
have the same personalities they did while alive, and because it
takes them a while to learn how the astral plane works, the spirit
of a naïve, curious, and recently deceased person might get con-
fused and show up to a mediumship session even though they
don’t know anyone in the room.
Seasoned mediums sometimes struggle. At a Canberra Spir-
itualist Association () service in October , I wrote in my
notes, the veteran medium “had one complete miss — no one
ever identied the spirit, so she moved onto another. ere was
also considerable doubt (that is, not a strong identication) of
another.” At a July service, the same medium described
someone’s grandfather who had lived in the s, was an
engineer, and had an association with pine trees. e medium
appealed to me twice, apparently hoping I would recognize this
character, but I said no, I didn’t. No one else in the audience did,
either. So the medium said she would ask the spirit to move on.
In an October service, a medium I will call Jessica had
similar diculties. On this day only twelve people had shown
up to the service, meaning the room’s energy was not especially
high.
: I have a gentleman… . I’ve got music going. He’s
appearing in his — he doesn’t look like Elvis Presley, but he’s
that kind of dressed, and that kind of apparel. He has a black
suit on. Shoes that are, like, his toes are back here, and they’ve
got big pointy bits out the front… black and polished. He’s
got a white shirt on and a thin tie. Black tie. I almost, almost
wanna say it’s got [a] keyboard on it, but I don’t think he’s
gone quite that far. He is a piano player; he was a piano player
here. He absolutely adores music… .
He passed in his eighties. He’s showing me himself sitting
in a retirement home, as opposed to — not a village, but an
actual retirement home. He’s in a leather chair by a window,
large window which has a garden outside. And he’s got a
leather — like a La-Z-Boy chair, but he’s got his feet on the
ground and he’s tapping away with his right hand. So he’s
right-handed as well, I believe. So, he’s tapping away on his
knee… . It’s a light tan, middle brown color, this La-Z-Boy,
and he has a crocheted blanket, but it’s over the back of the
chair. It’s like he’s sort of leaning on it. It’s not covering his
knees or anything like that. And he says… “I’m not putting
that on.”… So, he doesn’t see himself as quite the older gen-
tleman he is.
Here was a sharp and memorable character. An old man who
did not consider himself old. A ashy dresser. A passionate
musician. Jessica asked if anyone recognized him, and no one
responded. “Nope?” she said. “Okay. Let’s see — .” en an audi-
ence member tried to help.
: Jessica, I’ve worked a little bit in the aged care, dis-
ability area. at’s all I’ve got. It might be someone —
Jessica: Okay.
: — in that time, but I can’t place it at all.
: Okay, that is right. We’ll see what else he’s got to say.
He’s saying, “We’re both going to be working for our money
this aernoon.” [She laughs.]… He is in Australia. I believe
it is ’round New South Wales. He’s showing me — I could see
New South Wales on the map, as opposed to ACT [the Aus-
tralian Capital Territory, where Canberra is]. So, he’s come to
say, “I know someone.” So I’m just gonna ask him if someone
knows him. I’m gonna get a better idea. [Short pause.] It’s a
girl, so one of you ladies knows him [Jessica indicates two
women in the front row]… . He lived a happy life, a contented
life. He wasn’t — his wife, two boys, he had two boys. ey
weren’t excessively wealthy, but they had enough to live on,
and they were quite content with that. Is that bringing any-
thing to you?
: Nuh uh.
: Okay. And no one else? Okay. He passed around
ten to een years ago. He — when he was younger… he had
black hair, and it was slicked back, Brylcreem, with Bryl-
creem… . So it’s sort of slicked back. He said he never, never
forgot a tune, and the music was exceptionally important. I
don’t appear to be with you, Wanda, sorry.
: No. No, it’s all right, [inaudible]. Yeah. Sounds like
an amazing person.
: [Laughs.] He was happy. Okay. If no one else at this
point’s going to — and I can’t get any more information… at
the moment. So I’m just gonna thank him for coming, and
bring someone else in. [Seven-second pause.] Okay. I’ve got
a lady with me who’s showing herself to be in her seventies.
Jessica did not do anything wrong. She gave bright and spe-
cic details. It was easy for me to visualize an elderly, colorfully
dressed piano player with a youthful heart and gelled hair. e
problem was I did not know any such man. No one else did,
either. Jessica spoke condently. She kept trying. Yet despite
her proper technique and her enthusiasm, she and the audience
could not do anything with this man in the spirit world.
Audience members at services believe in the reality of
the spirit world, and rocky performances do not call that belief
into question. I never saw anyone challenge a medium’s authen-
ticity. Indeed, during Jessica’s reading, Wanda was disappointed
that it wasn’t working out: “Sounds like an amazing person,” she
said.
* * *
e topic of belief is central to Spiritualist understandings of
eective and ineective mediumship. Knowing how belief
works in mediumship requires clarifying the term’s meanings
and usefulness. On my academic home turf of anthropology,
“belief” has been the topic of sharp criticism for several dec-
ades. Rodney Needham () argued that belief was a distinctly
Christian category. Two decades later, Talal Asad (, chapter
) published a profound critique of a widely used anthropologi-
cal denition of religion, arguing that it was awed because it
was based on a modern Christian understanding of belief. In
recent years, it has become commonplace for scholars to assert
that, even if one wants to try to dene religion, basing the de-
nition on belief would be a mistake.
Several scholars have suggested a productive way forward
by pointing to two dierent meanings of “belief.” In one sense,
belief concerns propositions, statements oered as facts that
can theoretically be proven or disproven. Did dinosaurs exist? I
believe they did, because the fossil evidence is highly persuasive.
is use of “belief” is open to ridicule, because I’m supposed to
say I know dinosaurs existed, and using “belief” suggests I’m
acknowledging a ludicrous counterargument. But insisting too
loudly on the dierence between belief and knowledge can lead
in unproductive directions and close o the kind of considera-
tion I am trying to oer here. I simply want to point out that one
use of “belief” is to mark a position on the truth or falsity of a
statement.
e second sense of “belief” concerns trust and commit-
ment. Do you believe in freedom of the press? Although a
respondent might spin this as a proposition (“ere is no real
freedom of the press as long as news media are driven primarily
by a prot motive”), the question, as posed, is really about what
position you commit yourself to. Do you think the press ought
to have signicant freedom to operate, or should private and
public interests be allowed to constrain it?
ese two meanings of belief are not exclusive. As Jean Pouil-
lon () observes, writing “E=mc” would be an expression of
belief for most of us. We believe it is a factually true statement
about energy and mass, but we believe this because we trust in
Albert Einstein’s authority — he knew a lot more about physics
than we do. When talking about mediumship and its audiences,
the distinction between belief as proposition and belief as com-
mitment is crucial to keep in mind but easy to confuse.
See also Ruel (), Robbins (), and Rutherford (). e deni-
tion of religion critiqued by Asad was Geertz’s ().
For a lively example of confusion during a research project caused by the
conation of belief as proposition and commitment, see Steedly (,
–).
e grounding claims of Spiritualism are that people survive
physical death and can communicate with us from the spirit
world, and that mediumship enables this communication. e
purpose of a medium’s demonstration is to prove that these
claims are true (belief as proposition); the aim of mediumship is
to “serve Spirit” (belief as commitment). “Serving Spirit” means
communicating across planes of existence to enlighten human-
ity and lead us in spiritual progress. In short, mediums com-
bine the two senses of “belief” in their work. What Spiritualists
say is true about the world is meant to be proven in a medium’s
demonstration, and the demonstration shows commitment to
a project that is spiritual, moral, intellectual, and interpersonal
all at once.
Belief as proposition is safeguarded against failure in medi-
ums’ readings. When a person in the spirit world is not recog-
nized, as in the case of the elderly piano player, Spiritualism’s
propositions are not thought to be disproven. People in the
spirit world “speak” to mediums in many ways, and many things
can go wrong in transmission. Perhaps the medium is having
a low-energy day, struggling to do what would normally come
easily to her. Perhaps she put her own interpretation on a sign
instead of relaying it directly to the audience, causing confusion.
Perhaps the medium did a good job and the right recipient in
the audience was simply tuned out, inattentive. What is being
tested in demonstrations is not the reality of the spirit world, but
mediums’ eectiveness in bringing forth recognizable signs and
valuable messages from it. As long as mediums try their best,
they cannot fail to serve Spirit.
* * *
So far, I have avoided the question of fraud. I have done so for
two reasons. First, I never saw anything at services that
seemed fraudulent. e mediums and audience members all
struck me as open and honest about what they felt they were
doing. Everything was done in earnest — sometimes to a fault,
as when mediums oered such specic details that it became
unlikely anyone would recognize the spirit. Mentioning a piano
player might get a few people in the audience to raise their hands,
but describing a piano player with big pointy shoes, gelled hair,
and a dislike of his crocheted blanket is not shing in the pond
of generality. Second, the topic of fraud immediately puts the
discussion of mediumship into the true/false meat grinder I am
trying to avoid.
But the question of fraud does need to be posed, if only
because Spiritualism has had a dicult history with it. Old-
fashioned physical mediums were oen caught faking their way
to sensational results, as Ruth Brandon () observed. Some-
times they were clumsy. One nineteenth-century medium, pre-
tending to materialize as a spirit, got “her lmy robe caught on a
nail and she was stuck on her knees” (). At other times, they
were exposed by audience members. When a medium named
Rosina Showers was inside her “cabinet” — the small enclosure
where physical mediums are supposed to build up spiritual
energy — a spirit’s face materialized in the gap between curtains
parted at the top. e audience drew closer to see better, and the
daughter of the household, in a moment of innocent curiosity,
pulled the curtains wide open. ere was “the very substantial
body of Miss Showers standing on a chair and vainly clutching
the curtains together. e spirit face was revealed to be undeni-
ably attached to this body” (). Sometimes critics intention-
ally exposed mediums as hoaxers. One medium who attended
a rival’s séance lit an especially bright match in the darkness,
revealing his competition “dancing about the room like a fay,”
performing tricks (). Whatever their intentions, when audi-
ence members grabbed at the gauzy gures of ghosts in dark-
ened séance rooms, they oen found them all too eshly — and
struggling mightily to get free ().
Yet when mediums were caught cheating, sympathetic
observers oen argued that skepticism was the real problem:
mediums could not perform properly in front of a disbelieving
or hostile audience. Even eminent scientists could twist them-
selves into rhetorical knots to explain things that looked sus-
picious. For example, Alfred Russel Wallace once argued that
when a “spirit” hand was grabbed during a séance and turned
out to be connected to the medium, this did not prove the
medium was tricking anyone. It could mean, he suggested, “that
if a form is seized which is really distinct from the medium, yet
the result may be that the form and the medium will be forcibly
brought together, and a false impression created that the form
was the medium” — an astonishingly shaky bit of logic from
a great scientist (Brandon , ). If some scientists were
fooled, however, showmen and magicians were not. Both P.T.
Barnum () and Harry Houdini () wrote books explain-
ing the techniques of fraudulent mediums.
e terms “fraud” and “authenticity” might seem to stand in
sharper contrast to each other than the terms discussed earlier
in this chapter, “proposition” and “commitment.” Yet in both
cases, Spiritualist authors draw on the meanings of both to con-
rm each other. Some writers put fraud and authenticity into
the same frame by suggesting that fraud only succeeds when
it imitates an authentic possibility. “I have met fraud, both wil-
ful and unconscious,” acknowledged the British medium and
longtime editor of Psychic News, Maurice Barbanell. “I think I
can say that I have exposed more charlatans in this eld than
any other person.” He attributed his discernment to having
seen honest mediumship: “I have witnessed so many genuine
phenomena that I was able to recognise the counterfeit. Aer
all, the spurious is a copy of the real. Were there no genuine
phenomena, there could be no simulations of them” (Barbanell
, ; see also Ivory b, –).
In popular culture, the fake medium is a well-known char-
acter. Daniel Dunglas Home, reputed to be one of the few nine-
teenth-century physical mediums never caught in fraud, was
lampooned by Robert Browning as “Mr. Sludge, the Medium.”
In Browning’s poem, Sludge is caught cheating and begs not
to be exposed. He suggests that a medium’s audience is half to
blame:
e cheating’s nursed
Out of the lying, soly and surely spun
To just your length, sir! I’d stop soon enough:
But you’re for progress. (Browning , –)
Just as memorably, Mark Twain satirized the mail-order medium
James Vincent Manseld in his memoir Life on the Mississippi.
Customers sent Manseld letters asking about deceased loved
ones; Manseld returned spirit-dictated replies, claiming he had
not opened the envelopes. Twain, changing the medium’s name
to “Manchester,” recalled meeting him in person years earlier.
Manchester had oered Twain and his friends answers to their
questions which were wrong or, worse yet, banal:
Question. Where are you?
Answer. In the spirit world.
Q. Are you happy?
A. Very happy. Perfectly happy.
Q. How do you amuse yourself?
A. Conversation with friends, and other spirits.
Q. What else?
A. Nothing else. (Twain , )
e medium’s description of the aerlife was so bland that one
of the inquirers asked what crimes he could commit to avoid
getting sent there.
As Spiritualism moved from the nineteenth century to the
twentieth, so did the literary skewering of fraudulent mediums.
In her novel Strong Poison (), Dorothy Sayers has Lord Peter
Wimsey send the spinster Kitty Climpson to a country house
in search of a will which, he rightly suspects, will hold the clue
to a murder. She learns that the nurse who cares for the house’s
owner is a Spiritualist, so she pretends to be a medium to win
her condence. Kitty even performs tricks to convince the nurse
of her spiritual powers. She makes mysterious cracking sounds
with a small box strapped to her knee. She tips a table with
I am drawing on the discussion of Twain’s experiences, and his creative
adaptation of them, in Kerr (, chapter ).
sti wire attached to her wrist. She rummages through photos
to gure out the woman’s family connections, which she then
describes while faking a trance. e kindhearted Kitty feels
guilty, but knows she is working to catch a criminal. She assures
herself that audiences are always complicit in mediums’ perfor-
mances: “it didn’t much matter what you said,” she muses, “the
other person was sure to help you out of it” (Sayers , ).
Her point — that audiences largely convince themselves —
reects the argument made by Lamar Keene in his sensationalist
exposé e Psychic Maa (). Keene, a medium who worked
in Florida and Indiana, portrays himself and his fellow medi-
ums as griers. Although he can’t stop crowing about what a
talented magician he was, the book’s dominant motif is Keene’s
contempt for his audience. People are so desperate to hear from
the dead, he says again and again, that they will believe anything
at all. Indeed, one medium — somehow even more disdainful of
his clients than Keene is — lets him know that “the sitters didn’t
deserve even convincing fraud. e cheapest, silliest, most pal-
pable fakery was more than good enough for them” (Keene
, ).
With this popular history in mind, I gently asked questions
about fraud now and then during my research. When I asked
Lynette and Norman Ivory if they had seen dishonest mediums,
they answered yes. But, Lynette said, “You can’t go up to them
and say, ‘You’re lying.’” You would need to be able to prove that
they were lying. She recalled an early experience in Canberra,
before she and Norman took leadership of the , in which
a man was clearly cheating. He chatted her up before the ser-
vice, asking about details of her life. It turned out he was the
medium for that day’s service. While giving the demonstra-
tion, he repeated Lynette’s information back to her as if he were
receiving it from the spirit world.
“ere is always an outcry about fraudulent mediums,” the
textbook for the mediumship course acknowledges:
Fraud cannot be stopped in any walk of life and so it is
with mediums. ere will always be those who want to take
money from naive, uninformed and gullible people and so it
is within [S]piritualism. Every eort is made to expose these
fraudulent mediums, but it is not possible to stamp it out.
e responsibility lies with the person requiring a sitting
[that is, the medium’s client] to ensure that the person they
are going to see is a bona de medium with a solid reputa-
tion. Spiritualists have always condemned fraud and always
will. (Ivory and Ivory , –)
* * *
When Jessica struggled to get audience members to “take” the
description of the piano player with gelled hair, the reading
ended and she moved on to a new person in the spirit world, a
lady in her seventies or eighties with curly grey hair. e di-
culty Jessica had with the piano player is a somewhat rare exam-
ple, however. Not many readings during Sunday services peter
out this way. What happens more oen is a reading pockmarked
with “no’s” and silence — a dicult conversation in which the
medium keeps pressing on, tentatively but with determination,
and reaches a nebulous agreement with audience members,
not admitting failure but not delivering a strong performance,
either.
Norman has had long experience as a medium and has given
many successful readings. One day in November , however,
he had a notably dicult one. e man in the audience he read
for, Jack, is generous and so-spoken. But as the reading makes
clear, Jack is strictly committed to high standards of evidence, as
is Norman. On this day, the evidence was mostly judged by Jack
not to be strong enough.
: I’m not seeing this person at the moment, but I’m
feeling a very motherly feeling. So it seems to me that I’m
getting a mother or a grandmother. I’m not seeing — and I
don’t know who it is yet — but it’s someone in that sort of
vibration that’s coming to you. It’s a very motherly feeling, a
lot of love and warmth. [Twelve-second pause.] Now, I’m not
sure whether it’s that lady who may have been — I’m seeing
someone who liked playing cards, because I’m seeing some-
one showing me a hand of cards. Mostly red cards, hearts or
diamonds.
: Got you.
: [Ten-second pause.] I don’t know whether… tell
me if this is correct: She says you used to play cards a fair bit,
but you don’t now.
: No.
In context, it was clear that Jack’s “No” meant he did not play
cards in the past. He was not accepting the description yet.
: And in that case it must be someone else. Someone
played a lot of cards, but doesn’t — didn’t lately, or didn’t at
the end of their life. Something like that.
: I wouldn’t know.
: You don’t know. Right, okay. Well, they’re not back-
ing up.
Norman, a resilient medium, indicates that the person in Spirit
is resilient, too: “they’re not backing up.” is person wants to be
acknowledged, and Norman needs to keep working. He oers
more details as he senses them. Aer an eight-second pause, he
says:
: Now she’s changing the scene completely, and I’m
seeing a kitchen situation. And I’m seeing a big pot, and stir-
ring this pot. And it’s got some sort of stew or vegetables, or
things like that in it. And, and meat. And it’s stirring all of
this. And this was something that she did quite oen, appar-
ently.
In the audio recording, Jack’s answer is not clear. It sounds like
he says he doesn’t remember, meaning he can’t identify this
image as evidence. Whatever Jack’s precise words, Norman
seeks clarication:
: Now, this is a few years ago.
: Mm.
: You don’t remember that, either?
: No.
: Ah, okay.
: No memory of it.
: Not something you remember.
: No.
: No. Okay.
Norman now pauses for een seconds, still working mentally
with the person in the spirit world, trying to get evidence Jack
will recognize. “Now I’m feeling something,” he eventually says.
: You come from Charlottetown, don’t you?
: Moncton. It’s just across the water.
: Ah, right, so it’s — that, for me [laughs]… it’s the
same, you know? I’ve never been there. Well, I’ve own
through, and — . is lady says she wasn’t as close in. She was
a bit away from where you lived, as though she wasn’t there,
she was a bit further away somewhere.
: Depending on who you’re talking about, one would
have no experience in that part of the world, and the other
one was actually living with us.
Jack’s voice is so and his tone neutral, but the substance of his
response is blunt. He does not know who this woman could be.
Neither of the two possibilities he has in mind lived “a bit away”:
One lived in his house, and the other was never nearby. Norman
says “Uh huh, okay,” and pauses again. Aer fourteen seconds,
he continues:
I am substituting these places for the ones mentioned by Jack, choosing
them because (like the places Jack identied) they are “across the water”
from each other.
: Now this lady is showing me a dog. She’s showing
me quite a big dog, which would not be bigger than a Lab-
rador. It’s a light fawn color, this dog, and quite big. I have a
feeling there were two at one time, but one of them passed
and just the one was le. And she had that for quite a number
of years.
: No.
: You don’t remember that, either?
: No, she didn’t have any dogs, that was — no. We had
dogs, but not her.
: Did — you didn’t have a big one like that?
: We did, but not her… .
Norman: Okay. Well, she’s showing me this big dog, so that’s
what she’s trying to link to, then. I thought it was her, but it
doesn’t have to be her. It can be you. You did have a big dog
like that?
: Mm hm.
: Right. Okay.
e curious dynamics of this conversation are becoming clearer.
Jack has a particular woman in mind. Despite the string of “no’s”
so far, Norman has said something that made enough sense for
Jack to identify who the woman in the spirit world must be.
Jack continues to hold Norman to the strictest standards of evi-
dence, pointing out that although his family owned a big dog,
the woman he is thinking of did not.
Norman pauses for een seconds. en he says, “I feel that
you didn’t always live in the same place. ere seems to have
been a move when you were young.” Jack’s response is inaudible,
and Norman says, “Pardon?” Jack responds, “Multiple times.”
: Oh, multiple times. Oh, well, she’s talking about
moving. [Sixteen second pause.] And you had to change
school in some stages. Right. She says that was sometimes
quite dicult for you.
: Could be, yeah.
: I think she’s changed into trying to talk about you
rather than herself, because I’m not getting evidence from
her. So she’s trying to give evidence of the things that you
know but I don’t know, you see? [Five-second pause.] Now,
I’ve no idea what grows around that area, but what I’m seeing
at the moment are orchards. As though there must be some
area, somewhere there, that’s got orchards. I do know that
Canada’s big for its trees, and all the rest of it.
: ere are orchards around, but not that we would be
familiar with.
: Nowhere where you lived… there were orchards?
: Around, but not —
: Well.
: Direct, directly where [inaudible].
: Okay, around. She’s talking about the area, you see.
[Seven-second pause.] And I get the name “Peter” around
you somewhere.
: Yeah, I can take that.
: [Seven-second pause.] Something to do with Peter,
whether it’s him or something to do with him, I’m seeing
someone playing the violin.
: Can’t take that one.
: You don’t recognize that. Right. Well, I’m denitely
seeing a violin being played, or a string instrument of that
nature. [irteen-second pause, near the end of which Nor-
man gives a small laugh.] She says that you will realize one or
two of these things later.
In this stretch of their conversation, Norman and Jack seem
almost competitive. Norman suggests that moving house was
dicult for Jack when he was young, and Jack is noncommit-
tal: “Could be, yeah.” Norman mentions orchards, and Jack says
there were none near him, although some were “around” his
area. Norman suggests this is close enough. Aer this exchange
comes one solid hit, when Norman oers the name “Peter”
and Jack arms that this makes sense (“Yeah, I can take that.”)
Names are highly valued as evidence, so this feels like a break-
through — but immediately aer this, Norman mentions a vio-
lin being played, and Jack rejects it.
e reading goes on for another minute and a half. Norman
says Jack will be traveling, and it will be protable: “there’s some
more money at some stage there.” Jack jokes that he “can always
take that one.” At the end, Norman apologizes, saying, “Sorry I
was slow,” and Jack responds, “It’s okay.”
Tanya Luhrmann describes how modern British practition-
ers of magic and witchcra learn to see evidence that their
magic works. In their rituals, Luhrmann writes, they “maintain
a sense of the possibility of falsication,” judging some rites as
successes and others as failures. By doing this, they come to see
themselves as testing the truth of their claims, although failures
do not call the whole system into question, just individual per-
formances. Small failures in a ritual can help conrm people’s
sense that the larger project is working and greater truths con-
rmed. Over time, practitioners experience “interpretive dri,”
coming to think and feel that what once seemed extraordinary
is now normal (Luhrmann , , ).
In Spiritualism, this cultivated normalcy — the sense that
evidence is regularly gathered, and the dead can always commu-
nicate — never makes mediumship dull. No matter how experi-
enced the medium or committed the audience, there is always
(at least there was for me) the feeling that attempting to speak
with the dead is both strange and sacred. It is a classic ritual:
something set apart, a patterned engagement with extrahuman
forces. It is not easy to do. It can evoke profound emotion. Like
belief as proposition and commitment, and like questions of
authenticity troubled by possibilities of fraud, success and fail-
ure in mediumship need to be considered in the same frame,
necessarily going together while being held apart. Norman’s dif-
cult exchange with Jack shows that some things do not count
as evidence, and also brings his, and others’, successful perfor-
mances into high relief.
* * *
I wish I could say that eighty percent of all mediums’ readings
are successful, ten percent are unsuccessful, and ten percent are
inconclusive, because saying something like this would give
readers the delicious crunch of numbers. But trying to identify
a reading as successful or unsuccessful only shows how slip-
pery the features of spiritual experience are. A medium might
nish a reading and you might be uncertain what to think. A
reading you don’t grasp today might make sense tomorrow, or
later on. For some audience members, a detail conrmed aer
the reading might ip an unsatisfactory reading to a satisfac-
tory one. And when the reading is for someone else, you cannot
always tell how they feel about it. I once heard a reading which I
was sure the recipient would nd unconvincing, even problem-
atic, but he told me aer the service that it had been “very, very
accurate.”
Norman’s reading for Jack was remarkable for its number of
nos, but calling it unsuccessful would overlook the fact that Jack
clearly had a woman in mind whom he thought Norman might
have been in touch with. Both Jack and Norman were commit-
ted to the larger project of communicating with the spirit world.
It was just a trouble spot, a rough day. e large majority of Spir-
itualist readings fall between the polar examples I have given
in the last two chapters. ere are usually yeses and nos, along
with hesitation, speculation, tentative hope, and intimations of
wonder.
But the polar examples are instructive. ey also lend them-
selves well to storytelling. Mediums tell stories about astound-
ingly accurate readings, and also about the times they oun-
dered. For example, speaking at a service in March ,
Lynette recalled that “my very rst platform performance was
woeful, to say the least.” Norman interjected cheerfully, “It
Some investigators have tried to quantify mediums’ successes and failures.
For example, James Hyslop had four sittings with the renowned medium
Leonora Piper, over the course of which specic events were men-
tioned. Of these, Hyslop concluded that “ were true, unveriable, and
false” (Blum , ; see also Tomlinson ).
wasn’t that bad.” He had helped train her in mediumship, and,
as Lynette laughingly told the congregation:
Norman threw me in at the deep end. And I was very, very
new, and knew very little about Spiritualism. I knew almost
nothing about communication. I hadn’t read many books.
I’d seen [British medium] Doris Stokes on television, but not
doing a demonstration… . And all I did for the next twelve,
eighteen months — ’cause he made me do platform — was
give psychic readings.
And one night I was going to do a service, and he said,
“Why don’t you try to see somebody?” Well, y’know, big joke.
And surprisingly — I could not believe it: the very last read-
ing I gave, I saw somebody. And even more amazing was, the
person recognized it.
Told in the playful, bantering style Lynette and Norman had
achieved as a long-married couple, the story had a serious
meaning. Failure in mediumship is normal.
Although anyone can become a medium, and people in the
spirit world want to communicate with us, tuning into the right
vibration takes persistence and the willingness to fall at, again
and again. At some point, you will sense a person signalling you
from the spirit world. But practical knowledge about what to
do with this experience is hard won, and even veteran medi-
ums have bad days. ey will start conversations that never take
shape, but spin inside themselves and then slip away, unresolved.
Spirit Guides and the Daily Aerlife
Alfred Russel Wallace argued in his book On Miracles and Mod-
ern Spiritualism (, ) that “the cardinal maxim of Spir-
itualism is, that every one must nd out the truth for himself.”
He meant that people should personally examine the evidence
mediums claim to produce. He was convinced that any objec-
tive observer would conclude that mediums’ eectiveness was
proven, their statements accurate, and their theories true. But
his words can be read from another angle. “Finding the truth”
can mean that you have the ability to discover universal truth, or
it can mean that the truth you discover is unique to your experi-
ence. Although Wallace was not arguing for this second sense,
some modern Spiritualists tend in this direction. Inuenced by
New Age emphases on personal experience and self-discovery,
some Spiritualists conclude that your truth might not be my
truth, but both are true.
Spiritualism in Australia and the United Kingdom has seven
ocial principles. ey are credited to the medium Emma
Hardinge Britten. Sometimes Robert Owen, a famed nineteenth
Wallace’s position was shared by working-class and lower middle-class
British Spiritualists who, as the historian Logie Barrow () observes,
had considerable condence that despite their own scant book-learning,
they could gure out as well as anyone else how the universe operated.
century utopian activist, is named as her source in the spirit
world. Reading the principles aloud is required of churches
aliated with the Melbourne-based Victorian Spiritualists’
Union, as the Canberra Spiritualist Association () is. On
the Powerpoint slide displayed during services, the phrase
introducing the principles is “We acknowledge.” It is followed
by:
. e Fatherhood of God
. e Brotherhood of Man
. e Communion of Spirits and the Ministry of Angels
. e Continuous Existence of the Human Soul
. Personal Responsibility
. Compensation and Retribution Hereaer for All Good
and Evil Deeds Done on Earth
. Eternal Progress Open to Every Human Soul
e rst two principles recall a Judeo-Christian heritage and put
humanity in a family relationship with God. e third places
spirits and angels in helpful connection with living humans. e
fourth and seventh principles form a natural pair, and are Spir-
itualism’s core contribution to a modern philosophy of spiritual
existence: because humans are essentially spiritual creatures,
we live forever; yet eternity is not endless sameness, but growth
toward perfection. A notion of karma emerges in the h and
sixth principles: we are responsible for our actions, and will be
rewarded or punished accordingly.
Commenting on the principles, Spiritualists describe them
as guidelines rather than doctrine. For example, Janet Adams
said at a service in May , “the seven principles of Spir-
itualism are not just an act of faith. ese principles are a guide
for our conduct here on earth.” At a service two months later,
Lynette Ivory recalled that when she became a Spiritualist, she
For an analysis of the principles’ history, see Gaunt (; ; and ).
e -based National Spiritualist Association of Churches has its own list
of nine principles; see Ptacin (, –, –).
and Norman discussed the principles “quite a lot, and I found
that they’re not quite as simple as they appear. If you are not
interested in philosophy, they’re still excellent guides for liv-
ing your life.” Norman, for his part, had joked at a service in
June that the principles “sound a bit complicated and a bit…
religious-y.” But, he continued, they are not as complicated as
they seem, and no one is compelled to believe them: “We lend
them to you. We use them quite a lot, but we don’t say to you
they’re the only truth. We don’t say to you that you must believe.
We say: have a look at them, and see what you think, and see
how you can apply them to your life.”
e gendered phrasing of the rst and second principles — the
Fatherhood of God, the Brotherhood of Man — became a topic
of mild disagreement at the in and . In July ,
during our mediumship training course, Lynette mentioned
that some Australian Spiritualists had decided to change the
phrasing because of their concerns over sexist implications.
She and Norman asked members of the Association for their
thoughts, and the committee (with myself as a member)
discussed the possibilities in late and early . In March
, the committee voted for a compromise, retaining the
original phrasings while providing a new plain-language ver-
sion underneath each one. “e Fatherhood of God” was to be
followed by “(e energy that permeates all things and is the
source of everything),” and “e Brotherhood of Man” by “(We
are one, yet we are individual).”
e debate over the seven principles had not been heated, but
it did reveal a range of opinions which is typical for Spiritual-
ism and probably all religious groups. Ask about reincarnation,
free will, or any spiritual topic and you are likely to get various
answers. Any binding doctrine would be rejected by Spiritual-
ists, who each hold their individual knowledge and experience
to be authoritative. And yet, like other modern people keen to
express their individuality, Spiritualists wind up agreeing on
many things. e main thing everyone agrees on — the heart,
the core — is that there is no such thing as death.
* * *
True, we die physically. But humans are essentially spiritual
beings, and our spirit selves exist before and aer our physical
bodies do. Lynette stated the position neatly on the rst night of
the mediumship course, when she told us: “Death doesn’t really
exist, because we exist forever.” is does not mean Spiritualists
treat the deaths of loved ones lightly, or shrug at the thought of
their own. It just means that, intellectually, they commit to an
understanding of continuous being as the warp and woof of the
universe.
“You know, I’ve been to a number of funerals,” Norman said
at a service in June . He continued:
I’ve done quite a lot myself. And it’s not uncommon, when
you do a few more, if you’re clairvoyant, to see the person
who has passed standing by the con. Sometimes sitting on
or standing on the con, because they haven’t got that dread
of the con that we have. Because they realize that it doesn’t
really mean anything, because it’s just a physical vehicle that’s
been put down, and the real self continues on. And I have
seen that myself.
And then, oen — and you know, you have people lined
up at a funeral — and they come and they stand with the
person that they’re trying to comfort. And they’re sending
healing to them like we did just now. People from Spirit can
send healing to other people. And they come and they stand
with the person who’s grieving, and they send energy to that
person. And sometimes, it really makes a dierence.
When he said this, I thought it was funny and had a kind of
scapegrace beauty. I could picture a ghost hanging out, leaning
on his own con with bent elbow, insouciant, slightly confused
by why people were making such a big deal of things. Read-
ing Norman’s words now, I realize he oered a more serious
image, one with the typical roles of mourning mixed up. Rather
than the living comforting each other about the dead, the dead
actively want to comfort and heal the living, even at their own
funerals.
Becoming a medium, I learned, meant understanding the
philosophy of Spiritualism. Because although Spiritualism is
a capacious movement, and people believe a wide variety of
things, they don’t believe just anything. Starting with the ar-
mation that there is no such thing as death, Spiritualists develop
their ideas systematically.
First comes the idea of “Spirit” itself. When Spirit is given
a pronoun, it is usually “they.” It is the collectivity of the
dead — “people who’ve passed from this world,” as Norman
put it succinctly at a service in February . And as “they” or
“them,” Spirit are agents who can act upon us. At a minimum,
we count on them to show up when we are practicing medium-
ship so we can prove their continued existence and pass along
their messages. But as Norman suggested with his con story,
Spirit does more than this. ey heal us, too.
Spirit is also a place, or at least is shaped grammatically like
one, because Spiritualists frequently speak of the dead as being
“in Spirit.” Nineteenth-century Spiritualism introduced the
term “Summerland” for the spirit world, although I did not hear
anyone at the use it. e aerlife is sometimes identied
with existence on the astral plane. Over the past century and a
half, countless authors have written about what the terrain of
Spirit is like. Whether called Summerland, the astral plane, or
simply being in Spirit, the aerlife for Spiritualists tends to be
essentially the same as life for us here and now. ere are some
minor dierences. For example, people in Spirit are not aware of
time the same way we are. But individuals retain their person-
Andrew Jackson Davis developed the concept of Summerland in his exten-
sive writings; see, for example, Davis (). He is credited with having
foretold the arrival of the Fox sisters when he wrote in that the truth
of spirit communication would “ere long present itself in the form of a liv-
ing demonstration” (Davis , ). For a discussion of Davis’s inuence
in Spiritualism, see Podmore (, I:–).
alities. In Spirit, your funny and well-dressed grandfather is still
funny and well-dressed.
Socially, the spirit world is similar to life on earth, too. e
people you associate with here are the people you will associ-
ate with there. ose who love working in the garden now will
continue gardening in the spirit world, although the owers will
be of unimaginably brilliant colors. ose who enjoy drink-
ing beer with their mates can do this, too, although beer in the
spirit world is not alcoholic. is philosophy of “anity” has
sometimes been taken to an extreme. One nineteenth-century
medium, channeling omas Paine, reasoned that murderers
One historian described the Spiritualist otherworld as “imaginable, famil-
iar, and attainable”; another scholar observed that “Astral bodies of the
departed looked… very much like their earth bodies had looked except
that physical disabilities had disappeared. Spirit babies grew up into spirit
men and women just as they would have done had they lived. e spirit
realms presented landscapes very similar to terrestrial ones” (McGarry
, , and Moore , ; see also Singleton ). Or, as Ruth Brandon
wrote wryly of Arthur Conan Doyle’s vision of the aerlife, it was “rather
like Sussex, slightly watered down” (, ).
A famous example of reportage from the spirit world is Lodge ().
One of the most entertaining books of this kind is E. Stanley Brookes’s My
Four ousand Ghosts (), which was recommended to me by Debby
Walker of the . e book is an account of a long-term project in which
Brookes interviewed deceased people. He asked questions and the spirits
responded through a medium; around twelve mediums participated in the
long-term project, one per session. Within the spirit world, the master of
ceremonies was Edgar Tozer, late president of the Victorian Spiritualists’
Union. He was assisted by a “Spirit Rescue Circle” with spirit helpers at
each event. is somewhat complex setup gives the sessions the character
of a talk show in front of an audience on the astral plane.
e spirits Brookes interviewed are diverse, colorful, and sly. A former
prostitute from London named Trudy, whose Cockney accent is repro-
duced by the entranced medium (“Daise and me ’ave lots o’ torks about
hit now an’ we understands — we hare ghosts! Blimey! Funny — ain’t it?”),
tells how she now brings spirits of deceased children to sit beside their
living mothers, who are unaware of their children’s presence but nonethe-
less comforted. Robert Burns says he is still writing poems in the spirit
world and jokes that if he couldn’t do so, he might as well be dead. George,
another Londoner, drove a horse-drawn hansom cab while alive, but in the
spirit realms has upgraded to a motor car, and delights in startling pedes-
trians by honking at them (Brookes , –, , ).
in the aerlife must hang out with other murderers and nd it
satisfying — so he wrote that they form “one congregated broth-
erhood of crime,” with killers able to “use imaginary weapons,
and commit imaginary murders” (Wood , ; see also Cox
, –).
Training as mediums in Lynette’s and Norman’s course, we
learned how to think about this spiritual landscape and the lives
lived within it. In the sixth week, Norman indicated that because
people in the spirit world form the same groups they did while
alive, some of them might not want to contact the living. For
example, he said, if they were staunch Roman Catholics in this
life, then in the spirit world they were still staunch Roman Cath-
olics — at least initially — and might reject Spiritualism even as
they were experiencing its truths rsthand. Over time, he said,
they would become more aware of their new situation, but soon
aer death they could well be the same old stubborn people they
were before. Lynette added a surprising detail: because the spirit
world was so comfortable, it could get boring. A person who
enjoyed gardening and baking cakes would keep doing this, and
e idea of anity, which came into Spiritualist thought partly from
Emanuel Swedenborg’s inuence, could be erotic. For example, in
William Bowley — writing “under spirit-impression,” as he put it on the
title page — told the story of a spiritual journey taken by a deceased Baptist
minister, Reverend Wilson, who discovered the dierence between earthly
marriage and true love. Bowley’s term for true love, or the reuniting of
originally coexisting souls, is the awkward “anital love.” Marriage is a
church thing, but anital love is pure and perfect. Rev. Wilson begins his
aerlife by nding two of his deceased parishioners in what looks to him
like an adulterous relationship. e lovers admonish the minister, telling
him he’s too new to the spirit world to know what he’s talking about. e
reverend then nds himself falling in love with a married woman, Mrs.
James. Insisting on the literal truth of the bible, he realizes he can’t be in
heaven, but it’s clearly not hell, either — so he wonders if somehow he
ended up in Catholic purgatory (Bowley , ). He then watches a
play performed by spirits in a majestic theater called the eoresonium,
intended to impart spiritual knowledge. As it happens, the themes and
characters of the play mirror those of Rev. Wilson’s earthly life, so he
learns the natural truth of Spiritualism, and it becomes clear that he and
the former Mrs. James will be (re)united in anity.
eventually reach the point where they thought there must be
more to existence than this.
In the eenth week of the course, Norman mentioned that
spirits can give wrong information. He said that a leader of Mel-
bourne’s Victorian Spiritualists’ Union once “brought through”
the spirit of a scientist who gave incorrect details about the solar
system. But, he explained, this was because the scientist had
lived in the s and his knowledge was simply out of date. I
asked Norman about this later, and he said a scientist in Spirit
could stay involved with the latest developments by observing
and working with other scientists. People in the spirit world can
learn and grow by staying in touch with the physically living.
But they can also be shy, confused, and wrong. ey are human.
e aerlife, we learned as trainee mediums, is a happy, gen-
tle place. But it isn’t paradise. It’s life, continued. We can learn
and grow there, or just relax and not do very much. Eternal
existence follows the law of perfectibility. All people — no mat-
ter how awful their actions or miserable their lives — are bound
to make progress to higher levels of spiritual existence accord-
ing to the design of the universe. And there are no accidents.
If you were in a car crash, it was because your spiritual self
agreed to it long beforehand in concert with the spirits of the
other people involved, who also beneted in some way. It was all
ultimately for a higher purpose, however dicult it might be to
accept when you’re standing in the twisted plastic and smashed
glass arguing over insurance.
e principle of perfection prompts a disagreement over the
reality of reincarnation. If we are essentially spirit beings who
become physical in order to gain a full appreciation of existence,
do we need to return to eshly bodies again and again to keep
learning, or is once enough? e Spiritualists’ National Union
() of the United Kingdom, which many Australian Spiritual-
ists consider authoritative, has historically been skeptical about
reincarnation. An ocial publication of the ’ Philosophy
and Ethics Committee oers three reasons for their longstand-
ing rejection of the idea of reincarnation. One is that it seems
to clash with the principle of eternal progress, which does not
mention driing back into the muck of physical life. Second,
the holds that reincarnation has never been rmly proven.
ird, dierent spirit communicators have given dierent infor-
mation about reincarnation over the years, so it’s hard to know
what to believe, although the authors adroitly turn this observa-
tion into a new possibility: perhaps spirits who want to reincar-
nate can do so, and those who don’t want to, don’t have to. In the
end, the authors diplomatically urge individual Spiritualists
to decide for themselves what they think is the correct position
on reincarnation, and not to close o the possibility of revising
their opinions in the future (Oates, Hopkins, and Austin ,
–).
At the Canberra Spiritualist Association, Norman and
Lynette Ivory were rmly convinced that reincarnation was a
well-established fact. ey knew their certainty was not quite in
agreement with the position, but they were condent none-
theless. Indeed, Norman has written three books and the sec-
ond one is titled Reincarnation: Why and How. Speaking on the
seven principles at a service in May , he suggested that
the point of reincarnation was its newness: “growing up with
new challenges, new things to teach us things, new lessons to
learn, new growth to make, new progress to nd for ourselves
in life.” He added:
Sometimes I wonder why we come at all. Sometimes it’s just
too tough. But we somehow manage to nd our way along,
and we learn a lot. Hopefully, hopefully, one incarnation
or another, we will be able to remember consciously all the
things we’ve learnt, so that in that particular lifetime, we’ll be
able to really ll in some gaps, and really make some prog-
ress.
* * *
e nature of the aerlife became a surprise topic during a pri-
vate reading I had with Jane Hall. I had seen her work several
times at the , and was always impressed by her boldness
and energy. She was the medium who, six months earlier, had
described a man I thought could be my father, although another
audience member jumped in to claim him (see Chapter ). She
also once memorably channeled the spirit of a cat. I asked Jane
if I might interview her for my research project and also have a
paid private reading. She agreed to both.
On this warm spring day in September , I met Jane at
her home. We settled into comfortable chairs across from each
other. First, I interviewed her for a bit less than an hour and
a half. Aer a brief break, we began the reading. It was simi-
lar in many ways to those given publicly at services. Jane’s
language was plain and conversational. She oered some infor-
mation about deceased relatives of mine that was specic and
accurate, some that did not make sense to me, and some parts
of our conversation were tentative and unresolved. e main
dierence was length: my private reading lasted a few minutes
short of an hour, whereas most readings at services do not
pass the ten-minute mark. Jane also explained as she began to
work that she would approach things dierently than normal
because she knew I was conducting a research project. She
would explain her method to me so I could understand how
she was working. In doing so, she said, she would try not to let
her conscious mind bring her “out of the power” of spirit con-
nection, which would force her to work psychically. She trusted
that people in the spirit world would see that this was a dierent
kind of reading and give just a bit more time and information
than usual.
Near the beginning of the reading, Jane mentioned that dur-
ing our interview she had become aware of a man in the room
with us, listening to our conversation. She asked if my father was
“in Spirit,” to which I said yes, unsure if she remembered the
service from half a year earlier. Jane said she was also in contact
with a woman in spirit, although it took another twenty minutes
to get back to her and identify her as my mother’s older sister.
Near the end of the reading, another woman showed up who
sounded like my mother’s mother. But for much of the reading,
we stayed focused on my father.
Discerning family connections and telling me about the
impressions she received, Jane spoke, and I worked with her as
a receptive listener to help bring forth the character of the late
Gerald Tomlinson. He had been an optimist, but died slowly of
cancer and needed assistance at the end. From the spirit world,
he worried for my mother, alone in the house as she now was.
He enjoyed music. I couldn’t help but blurt out that it was coun-
try music, which the rest of the family was not fond of. And
he happily recalled a family vacation somewhere on the water,
which I suggested was probably Nantucket. My father’s ashes
might still be in Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey, but now he had
become present in a new way, a person wrapped in stories sug-
gested in a medium’s sitting room in Canberra. As I said earlier
in the book, I had not thought my interest in Spiritualism was
connected to my father’s death. Although I missed him, I was
not looking to keep him near. But Jane was doing what a skilled
medium does. She was bringing him to life by sketching his
character and suggesting stories.
ere were two moments during the reading which fore-
shadowed the surprising description of the aerlife Jane would
oer. First, she said that although my father was not a hoarder,
he liked collecting things: “It’s like I’ve got a lot of books, I’ve
got a lot of everything.” Second, she said that he liked studying
and learning, and had been a teacher. He had a good breadth
of general knowledge, including knowledge of sports, and was
“the type of person you’d want at a trivia night.” en, forty min-
utes into our session, having established my father’s identity as a
curious collector, Jane decided to “see if I can see what he shows
me from the spirit world.” She explained that this was a tech-
nique she had learned from Tony Stockwell, a British medium
who has conducted training courses in Australia.
So this is something that I like to do that Tony has taught
us — that you ask them what they are doing in the spirit
world now. And you can see what they will be doing. And
I’m just gonna see if he will show me what he does in the
spirit world now. [As she speaks this last sentence, her speech
becomes noticeably slower and soer.]
Okay. Um. Uh, okay. Uh, this is quite strange.
Um, so, I see in the spirit world — this is quite strange.
It’s like he’s archiving specimens of — I’m not sure if they’re
insects, or if they are, like, things — creatures. It’s like he’s — .
[She exhales.]
is is very interesting. It’s like in the spirit world, he’s
archiving — you know when they… put spiders and creatures
in plastic discs so kids can look at them?
“Yes,” I say. Jane continues:
Yeah? It’s like… this is, like, what he’s doing. He’s doing this to,
like, preserve. It’s like, preserving things for future — would
he have worked with science when he was here?
: No.
: Okay, because it’s — this is the only thing I — it’s, like, I
feel like… did he do archiving when he was here?
: Yes. Yes.
: Right.
: But not of specimens.
: Not of specimens. But he did archiving. ’Cause this is
what he’s doing on the other side. I see him. He’s archiving.
But he’s archiving, like, specimens in the spirit world. So it’s
like keeping these… it’s almost like these are sacred. It’s like
the sacred form of insects. So it’s like he’s archiving the sacred
geometrical shapes of insects in discs, but he’s archiving them
in the spirit world. is is a very unusual thing. I’ve never
seen anything like this… . You know how a shell —
: Mm, yes.
: — has? Well, it’s almost like he’s working with archiving
things of sacred geometrical existence. And they’re, like,
discs of insects.
: Wo w.
: Wow, right? Wow. at’s a very interesting thing to
be doing. So it’s the archiving, though, that I’m drawn to,
that he’s fascinated with. It’s like keeping these things for
future — yeah, it’s like keeping them for future, when they’re
dying o. You know, it’s like — extinct! at’s what they are.
ey’re extinct. So he’s archiving extinct insects, and extinct
creatures, which are small, not big. And he’s archiving them
in the spirit world. And I have to say, I know we talked about
education with him before. It’s almost like he’s archiving
them, but he’s also explaining them to people. So it’s like he’s
teaching people the process of archiving, and how it works,
and the system of locating these things, and the process. He’s
like a super librarian, this guy.
She went on to say that the archiving system he was using in the
aerlife was not like anything she had seen before or knew how
to describe, “because our archiving system is something that
goes into something rigid, whereas this is an archiving — like a
vibrational archiving system.”
In the transcript above, I included some of Jane’s “ums” and
“likes,” rather than smoothing them out of the text, because
when she began describing her vision, her tone was one of
wonder, discovery, and struggling to nd the right words. As
she went on, she became more excited and spoke more surely,
having gotten a handle on the odd scene she saw before her
(“extinct! at’s what they are”). My father, who enjoyed his-
tory, was now a historian of a decidedly alternative stripe, cata-
loguing the sacred geometry of insects for the cause of universal
future knowledge. Aer getting conrmation from me that my
father enjoyed archiving things, Jane then delivered the lesson
that the aerlife is essentially like this life: “it’s like he’s taken his
passion from here over there, and continuing to work in that
eld — but in the spirit world, ’cause we don’t just stop working.
We have things to do over there.”
* * *
In another private sitting, the medium was Lynette Ivory and
the recipient was my mother-in-law, Joan. Lynette did not
describe the work of the aerlife as Jane had, but mentioned
how the deceased feel about their bodies and how they choose
to represent themselves. As Joan understood it, Lynette suc-
ceeded in bringing through the spirits of her mother and hus-
band. Discussing the results at the end of the session, Joan said
the description of the male spirit was “really quite accurate”
although “the age was wrong.” Lynette then explained that peo-
ple in the spirit world “show themselves at a time when they felt
comfortable. When they were okay, and life was good for them.”
For me, these descriptions of the aerlife were delicious food
for thought, but they also le a curious aertaste. On one hand,
life in the spirit world is essentially like life here. We have our
friends and family. We do our work and enjoy our hobbies. On
the other hand, life in the spirit world is radically dierent. My
father’s main historical interests had been the Civil War and
minor league baseball, and his last major archiving project was
to assemble old les of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of
Sussex County, New Jersey. Going from those interests to curat-
ing a sacred collection of insects is not just a stretch, but a snap
into a very dierent kind of space.
And the spirit world gets more complicated than this. From
the beginning of my mediumship training, I heard about
“guides.” ese are spirits who help you in your work as a
medium. Some work with you during regular mediumship, and
others perform specic functions, like teaching you philosophy,
protecting you, or helping with spiritual healing. Guides might
be deceased humans, but they can be extrahuman gures, too.
Nineteenth-century mediums oen worked with “controls,”
guides who interacted with other spirits who wanted to commu-
nicate through the medium (Marryat , ; McGarry ;
and Manning ). ey were the medium’s medium. Controls
also sometimes spoke directly through the medium while she
was in trance. I did not hear people use the word “control” at the
, but the old expectation remains strong: every medium has
a guide or guides to help out.
For example, speaking at a service in October , Debby
Walker recalled when she was discovering Spiritualism in her
homeland, New Zealand, and a medium named Clint transg-
ured into his guide, Jimmy:
Clint was, I think, in his thirties around that time. Young.
Blond hair. Just a typical Kiwi bloke, really. And when he
brought Jimmy in, his whole demeanor changed. His whole
face changed, and he became an older gentleman. He had a
Scots accent. Jimmy, his guide that he channelled in, was a
gentleman who lived, when he was last on the earth, in Scot-
land, in the Isle of Skye. So, at the top of the . So, hence,
he was totally dierent. is was my rst time I’d ever seen
someone ever do that, and I was just in awe.
I have never seen a medium transgure into their guide like this,
but the general principle that guides show up to help was shared
by the mediums I met. At a service in April , Norman said to
the audience: “For those of you who don’t know, I have a guide
here, and he points where he wants to go.” In other words, his
spirit guide linked him to the person in the audience with whom
the person in the spirit world wanted to communicate.
As nineteenth- and twentieth-century mediums developed
Spiritualist philosophy, spirit gures became identied with
specic roles. Two of the most prominent were the healer and
the “doorkeeper” (or “gatekeeper”). Healers work with mediums
who channel energy through their bodies to cure people of ill-
nesses. At a service in July , Janet Adams explained that a
healer “uses a channel for the healing energy from Spirit. So it
comes from Spirit through their spirit to the spirit of the recip-
ient. It’s that simple. A healer can be used to help healing, to
bring comfort, upliment, easing of pain, or help at passing.”
Doorkeepers are bouncers. ey mediate between other spirits
and the medium, and protect the medium if evil spirits show
Vieda Skultans, an anthropologist who studied Spiritualism in South
Wales y years ago, learned that local Spiritualists felt that “the power of
healing” was “the greatest gi which spirit can bestow on human beings”
(, ).
up. Although Spiritualism’s portrait of the aerlife is a gentle
and sunny one, some people obviously lead terrible lives and
might stir up trouble once they’re on the other side. A strong
doorkeeper guards mediums against this threat.
Alongside these various guides and helpers, some spirit per-
sonalities become famous for helping in dierent ways. Espe-
cially in Spiritualism’s early days, Benjamin Franklin spoke
through many mediums. Indeed, he was credited with having
invented the “spirit telegraph” now connecting the spiritual and
physical worlds. An exceptionally popular spirit in the nine-
teenth century was a young woman called Katie King, who
appeared physically through the work of several prominent
mediums and was investigated enthusiastically by Sir William
Crookes. And whole groups of people could become spiritual
emblems. In the and Australia, for example, Indigenous
Americans became highly visible spirit gures. ey were por-
trayed as paragons of wisdom and connection to the natural
world, reecting what Catherine Albanese (, ) calls “the
abiding racialism of culture-as-usual.”
A notable split has developed between the regular dead of the
spirit world — for members of the , largely white and work-
Some members of the conduct “house cleansings,” releasing the spirits
of negative people (dead drug users and psychopaths, for example) from
the houses they infect. I was not able to participate in any house cleansings
in Canberra, but for details see Ivory (b, –).
See also McGarry (); on Benjamin Franklin being credited with estab-
lishing the spirit telegraph, see for example Hardinge (), Podmore
(), and Kerr (, –, ). e literature on Katie King is particu-
larly entertaining. Although she was a popular spirit gure, she had the
unfortunate distinction of being exposed as the product of fraud in two
countries. In London, a skeptical séance-sitter grabbed her spirit-hand
and wound up grappling with the medium, who was hustled away by sym-
pathizers and then found inside her cabinet, “dishevelled and distressed”
(Brandon , ; see also Podmore , II:–). In Philadelphia, she
appeared regularly at the sittings of a married couple, but a local woman
eventually confessed to playing the role of Katie (Braude , –, and
Brandon , ). Trevor Hall () suggests that Crookes’s defense of
Katie King’s spiritual nature is explained by his sexual infatuation with the
medium manifesting her, Florence Cook.
ing- or middle-class — and the guides and helper spirits who
assist mediums and are oen marked as ethnic others: Indig-
enous Americans, African Americans, Chinese, and Egyptians,
for example. If you and your family are white Australians, the
medium will generally bring through white Australian spirits
for you, because those are your deceased loved ones; but the
medium might well see herself helped in this task by spirit g-
ures from other lands.
I asked Sarah Jeery about her guides when I interviewed
her in December . I will quote her answer at length, because
she elegantly describes guides’ signicance for mediums while
also noting their mysterious, partially hidden nature — and she
comments critically on the stereotypes that lter into visions of
the aerlife.
Early in her training as a medium, Sarah said, her mentor
Christine Morgan told her about guides: “Yes, they’re there. You
don’t need to worry about it.” Sarah continued:
And so, for many years, that’s exactly how I approached
guides: to acknowledge that yes, there are helpers within the
world of Spirit, but you know, we can’t prove them… . And
I’ve listened to people — and even some of my students, who
know I disagree wholeheartedly with them — but everyone
has a right to their own opinion. You know… why do the
guides need to be known, if their role is to help us in the
background? Did they have a need for that?
I have never heard of anyone talk about their guides…
who’s said, “Oh, yeah, mine was a rubbish man.” You know,
it’s always special, isn’t it? It’s always unique. And of course,
then you tie that in with archetypes. You tie that into, okay,
well, you know: the nuns, the doctors, the philosophers, the
Native American Indians, the medicine man, the shaman,
et cetera, et cetera. Now, I’m not suggesting that they aren’t
guides. But it sounds pretty common, doesn’t it, that every-
one’s got one?
At this point, Sarah noted with amusement that she had pictures
on her walls of “what looks like guides and monks and Native
American Indians.” An inspired “psychic artist” had painted
them for her. Sarah said she could not prove whether or not
these gures were her guides or her husband’s guides.
So, I look at them and I go: Well, they’re nice pieces of art.
ey may or may not reect reality. Does it matter?
So, I didn’t worry for a number of years. And then, it was
actually the year I was going to the [Arthur Findlay College
in the ], I said to the spirit world: “Dear Spirit, if you’re
ready to be known, if you want to be known to me, I’m pretty
keen. I’m pretty keen to know who you are.” So I’d sort of put
this thought out, and I travelled to the with another won-
derful medium, an intuitive lady… . [We] went to the
[Spiritualist Association of Great Britain], and we got to see
two wonderful mediums on platform… Terry Tasker and
Billy Cook. Two completely dierent styles of medium. But
amazing. And we’d literally got o the plane, we were sitting
in the front row, and Terry Tasker [said], “And you two are
from Australia, and from a place called Canberra.”
And you think — Okay, all right. You win! Y’kn ow, How
do you know that? If you’d said “Sydney,” we would have said,
“Sure.” But you’ve nailed it.
Anyhow, so I had a reading with Terry Tasker. And now,
I had had some experiences of who I felt one of my guides
were. And I had pushed it away, pushed it away, pushed it
away. Why? Because how did he present? As a Native Ameri-
can Indian. And all my discernment and all my training went:
Well, that’s rubbish. at cannot be true. It’s your mind. Now,
I had seen him subjectively stand in my doorway. I had had
numerous experiences. But I just went no, no, no, no, no. No,
no, no, no. Sarah, you’re just like everyone else. You’re making
it up in your mind. You’re making it up.
So, I’m sitting in front of Terry Tasker, and I also had the
feeling of another gentleman who also played into the cli-
chés. Totally played into the clichés of a little Asian man with
a good sense of humor. And so, this was a real issue for me.
Because, like, Well, come on, Sarah. is is the same as every-
body else. And why would I be getting this?
Sarah said she had kept her experiences to herself because she
wanted evidence of who her guides were. She needed to have
other mediums tell her, without her feeding them information,
about her guides. If three or four reliable mediums give the same
information, she said, “then that’s probably the closest we’re
going to get to have it conrmed.”
So I would always say to people, “Don’t discuss your guides.
Don’t tell people who you think your guides are. Because
how, then, can you get that conrmation from other peo-
ple, if people already know?” If people say “Ah, yes, I know
you’ve got the Native American Indian,” or “I know you’ve
got the Oriental” [sic], and they’ve heard it from you, that’s
not gonna conrm anything for you.
Anyhow, so I’m sitting across from Terry Tasker, who
mentions in that reading the two chaps that I think are with
me. I think: Okay, that’s pretty cool. at’s pretty exciting.
Okay, control yourself. Control yourself.
So then I go o to the [Arthur Findlay College] and I have
a reading from another wonderful medium… who was on
our week. She wasn’t my teacher, but I had a reading with
her. And in that reading, she then also mentioned the guides.
And I thought: Well, two for two. Two good mediums. Nor-
mally mediums don’t talk to me about guides at all… .
I know that there are others that help me. Do I know who
they are? No. For many, many years I felt that I only had males
working with me. I now think that there is a lady who assists.
But I don’t really take notice. ey don’t play a part when I’m
on platform. I’m not putting thoughts out to guides. I’m not
seeking help from them. e only time when I’m working
that I feel I’m being inuenced by my helpers in the spirit
world is generally when I’m talking philosophically. So, if I’ve
got someone who’s sitting in front of me, and they say, you
know — it might be something about a suicide. And then I
feel inspired to say certain things that I know is not com-
ing from their family members. I know it’s not just from my
own knowledge. But I’m feeling that it’s very important that
I get a certain message across. at’s probably the only time
I sort of go, Oh, someone’s helping me here to make sure that
I do no harm, and that I say the right thing. But that’s prob-
ably the strongest sense I have of my helpers stepping for-
ward — when I’m working in that way. And it’s not oen… .
But I do believe everybody has helpers. I believe even
those who aren’t in the mediumship world will have some-
one within the world of Spirit, from rst breath to last, who
will be keeping an eye on them.
Sarah’s remarkable description reects guides’ ambiguous
nature in Spiritualist philosophy. In a movement devoted to
interacting with largely unseen realities, guides can be a trompe
l’oeil, revealing mysteries and keeping them mysterious at the
same time. ey inspire metaphysical reection as they slip
away from any kind of easy recognition.
In the course of my research, I came to understand that
guides are tremendously important to successful mediums. But
in Australian Spiritualism, as Sarah suggests, they are not some-
thing you talk about too directly or too oen. When I asked
Jane about guides, she joked that there was “a lot of guide-wor-
shipping going on” now, and added, “I think it’s important that
we shouldn’t tell people what our guides are.” If you talk about
your guides too much, you weaken the chance that other medi-
ums can conrm their identity to you independently. en, too,
Hilary Mantel’s novel Beyond Black () skewers the gure of the spirit
guide. e novel’s main character, a fat medium named Alison Hart, is
plagued by her guide, a potbellied little creep named Morris who (when he
was physically alive) was in a gang of “ends” who abused and tormented
Alison and other women. Now the ends are all dead, and aicting Alison
as much as ever. I have never heard a medium describe guides this way,
but Mantel’s ear for how mediums describe their work is otherwise pitch-
perfect.
speaking about your guides might be seen as bragging. As one
Canberra medium told me, her guide was a famous woman, and
if she told people who the guide was, they might think she had a
swelled head. Norman did, however, speak easily about his own
guide, even thanking him in the acknowledgments to his rst
book.
You cannot just go and nd yourself a guide, as Sarah
explained in her interview. But other mediums can let you know
what they sense. In this regard, the service of September ,
, was intriguing for me. It was a good crowd, with twenty-
one people in the room, six of them males, both comparatively
high numbers. Sarah was “on platform” as the day’s medium,
and I was the chair — the master of ceremonies for the service.
During the service, Sarah gave me a reading from my father’s
father. I had not known him well, so the reading could not go
very far. But then Sarah added that she had something to tell me
about my guide. She explained to the audience that she would
not give information like this in public (explicit information
about a guide, that is) and she would speak to me aer the ser-
vice. When we chatted later, she said that she did not have spe-
cic details, but that my father’s father had let her know a male
in the spirit world was helping me, although it was not himself.
* * *
Any discussion about guides can lead to a discussion about
angels, and from there we can spring forth into a thoroughly
enchanted universe. Over more than a century and a half, Spirit-
ualist visions have described an increasingly dense and detailed
metaphysical world. In his rst book, Norman Ivory ()
describes his encounters with nature spirits such as fairies and
elves as well as negative spirits like phantoms and imps; his
views on elemental spirits (salamanders for re, sylphs for air,
“e last person I acknowledge is my long time guide from spirit — Sun
Tsen. How the people in spirit can put up with the erratic emotionality of
people in physical like me is a marvel” (Ivory b, xi).
undines for water, gnomes for earth); various classes of angels
from the colossal Lords of Karma and archangels down to the
level of guardian angels; and the existence of the Great Man,
“the totality of all human spirits” ().
A major inuence on Spiritualists’ understandings of angels
and elementals, and acceptance of reincarnation, is eosophy.
Helena Blavatsky, who created eosophy in the late nineteenth
century, criticized the Spiritualist practice of communicat-
ing with the dead. Indeed, she suggested that when mediums
thought they spoke with the dead, they were likely being fooled
by elemental spirits pretending to be deceased people. Instead
of humble and sometimes banal dead folks, Blavatsky preferred
to communicate with Masters, supreme spirits associated with
Asian traditions as she imagined them. eosophy informed
much of the New Age movement of the twentieth century,
which stoked people’s senses that we control our spiritual fates,
we serve as our own spiritual authorities, and we are inherently
perfectible. In the late twentieth century, eosophy-inspired
channeling surged as gurus claimed to speak in the voices of
extrahuman beings such as Seth, Ramtha, and Atun-Re.
Some Spiritualists are troubled by their movement’s New
Age aura. Indeed, the mediumship coursebook warns that
New Age ideas have caused true Spiritualist philosophy to be
“blurred or completely lost in some areas” (Ivory and Ivory ,
–). A sharp voice on this topic is Arlene Grant, a member
of the Spiritualist community of Camp Etna in Maine, quoted
extensively in Mira Ptacin’s book on her experiences there, e
In-Betweens. For Grant, as for Norman and Lynette, Spiritualism
was more rigorous in the old days. Mediums trained seriously
back then. But now, she laments of the summer visitors to her
community, “ey dance for gods and goddesses and bullshit.
And we pay them” (Ptacin , ).
On the relationship between Spiritualism and eosophy, see the discus-
sions in Campbell (, –, –, n) and Oppenheim (,
–). On channelling, see Heelas (); Brown (); and Klimo
().
Engaging with the philosophy of Spiritualism while I was
training to be a medium pulled me in two directions. I appreci-