Mediumship is for Everyone, NOT, just a chosen few !

How Mediumship Started -



Psychic predictions and phenomena can be traced back throughout history. People were tortured and burned at the stake for being 'Witches or Warlocks' when in fact all they were, were mediums, healers or psychics.



The first professional mediums date back to 1848. This was of course the Fox family from Hydesville, New York State, USA. This family was visited by the spirit of a peddler who had been robbed and murdered by the previous occupant of their house and claimed that his body was still buried in the cellar. It was proved some time later, when they dug the cellar floor up and found his remains as their spirit visitor had stated in his communications. This was the first proof, beyond doubt, that life did continue beyond that veil that we call death.



The two daughters, Margaret and Kate, realising their talent for this type of communication, hired a hall to demonstrate their abilities. They also travelled around further to demonstrate what was then a unique talent. But it wasn't long before other groups sprang up across the country. This single event is what Spiritualists consider to be the start of the Spiritualist Movement.



There were in fact, long before the Fox sisters, others who had taken up the gauntlet of studying psychic phenomena. Emmanuel Swedenborg, holds claim to being the Father of the discovery of supernatural powers. Others before the Fox sisters were Edward Irvine a Scottish Presbyterian Minister and Andrew Jackson Davis.



During the 1850's a new ambassador emerged in the form of Emma Hardinge Britton. Born in England but moved to America to work. Emma became famous as a trance medium and philosophical lecturer. She toured America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand spreading the message of Spiritualism. It was through her mediumship that spirit dictated the Seven Principles of Mediumship, believed to have come from the deceased Robert Owen, but new evidence is putting this theory into doubt. The Spiritualist National Union are still, however, using these principles today.



The first medium to operate in Britain was Mrs Haydon, who took up residence in England and held séances. But it was a group of Cambridge scholars who, in 1882 founded the Society of Physical Research and pushed the subject further into recognition. The aim was to investigate debatable phenomena without prejudice, even though that claim in itself was debatable. The first President of the SPR was Henry Sidgwick, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge University, who had enormous standing and moral authority in the intellectual circles of the day. Apart from a prodigious amount of work, he contributed “the weight which his known intelligence and integrity gave to the serious study of the subject” (quoted from Broad’s obituary after Haynes, p. 176). His chief associates in the early stages were Frederic Myers, a classical scholar but also a man of lively and wide-ranging interests, and the brilliant Edmund Gurney, the main author of what is now the classic of psychical research, Phantasms of the Living.



Among the early members were also such prominent figures as the physicist William Barrett; the experimental physicist Lord Rayleigh; Arthur Balfour, philosopher and Prime Minister in the years 1902-1905; Gerald Balfour, classical scholar and philosopher; and Eleanor Sidgwick, wife of Henry Sidgwick, herself a mathematician and later Principal of Newnham College at Cambridge. These people, and their associates, were often connected through family ties, education, friendship and interests Many were wealthy, which gave them the time to pursue their studies, but with these advantages also came a sense of obligation to put them to good use for the benefit of mankind. Like many other great Victorians who applied themselves so patiently for little reward, they sifted and corroborated reports of spontaneous cases, and learnt to spot fake mediums by sitting through many boring séances, in the pursuit of scientific explanations. With their scientific ideals and experience in investigating paranormal claims, they were fully aware of the tricks, the illusions, and the dangers of wishful thinking.



Early demonstrations of mediumship were all very physical, rapping's, table tilting, materialisations etc. Over the years these have declined in popularity to be replaced by the type of mediumship that we see today. Nowadays modern mediums work by using the mind as a receiver and relaying information to those who need it.


Mediums of the 1800s and early 1900s, especially those producing physical manifestations, were subjected to ridicule not only from the church but also the scientific community as well as other sceptics.