Mediumship | EPFL Graph Search

Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?

Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.

Mediumship is the practice of purportedly mediating communication between familiar spirits or spirits of the dead and living human beings. Practitioners are known as "mediums" or "spirit mediums". There are different types of mediumship or spirit channelling, including séance tables, trance, and ouija. Belief in psychic ability is widespread despite the absence of objective evidence for its existence. Scientific researchers have attempted to ascertain the validity of claims of mediumship. An experiment undertaken by the British Psychological Society led to the conclusion that the test subjects demonstrated no mediumistic ability. Mediumship gained popularity during the nineteenth century, when ouija boards were used as a source of entertainment. Investigations during this period revealed widespread fraud—with some practitioners employing techniques used by stage magicians—and the practice began to lose credibility. Fraud is still rife in the medium or psychic industry, with cases of deception and trickery being discovered to this day. Several different variants of mediumship have been described; arguably the best-known forms involve a spirit purportedly taking control of a medium's voice and using it to relay a message, or where the medium simply "hears" the message and passes it on. Other forms involve materializations of the spirit or the presence of a voice, and telekinetic activity. The practice is associated with several religious-belief systems such as Shamanism, Vodun, Spiritualism, Spiritism, Candomblé, Voodoo, Umbanda and some New Age groups. In Spiritism and Spiritualism the medium has the role of an intermediary between the world of the living and the world of spirit. Mediums claim that they can listen to and relay messages from spirits, or that they can allow a spirit to control their body and speak through it directly or by using automatic writing or drawing. Spiritualists classify types of mediumship into two main categories: "mental" and "physical": Mental mediums purportedly "tune in" to the spirit world by listening, sensing, or seeing spirits or symbols.

About this result

This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.

Related concepts (72)

Related lectures (2)

Materialization (paranormal)

In spiritualism, paranormal literature and some religions, materialization (or manifestation) is the creation or appearance of matter from unknown sources. The existence of materialization has not been confirmed by laboratory experiments. Numerous cases of fraudulent materialization demonstrations by mediums have been exposed. In the early 20th century a series of exposures of fraudulent activity led to a decline of materialization séances. The poet Robert Browning and his wife Elizabeth attended a séance on 23, July 1855 in Ealing with the Rymers.

Psychic

A psychic is a person who claims to use extrasensory perception (ESP) to identify information hidden from the normal senses, particularly involving telepathy or clairvoyance, or who performs acts that are apparently inexplicable by natural laws, such as psychokinesis or teleportation. Although many people believe in psychic abilities, the scientific consensus is that there is no proof of the existence of such powers, and describes the practice as pseudoscience. The word "psychic" is also used as an adjective to describe such abilities.

Spiritism

Spiritism (spiritisme; espiritismo), spiritist doctrine, Kardecism or Kardecist spiritism is a spiritualistic and reincarnationist doctrine established in France in the mid-19th century by the author and educator Allan Kardec (pseudonym of Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail). It explains, from a Christian perspective, the cycle by which a spirit supposedly returns to material existence after the death of the old body in which it dwelled, as well as the evolution it undergoes during this process.

Art Brut: Creation and Mediumship HUM-350: Art brut (outsider art)

Explores the unconventional artistic expressions of mediums and spiritists in the realm of Art Brut.

Real Analysis Fundamentals

Introduces the fundamentals of real analysis, focusing on derivatives and important proofs.