Esoteric Coffeehouse

Before New Age, there was Spiritualism. Just like New Age, Spiritualism started as an American counterculture movement. Just like New Age, it was a spontaneous, ‘democratic’, unorganized form of belief that did not have religious hierarchy or sacred books, at least until very late. The vestiges of Spiritualism are still with us today: ghost sightings, poltergeists, haunted houses, possessed people, mediums etc. Movies like Ghost and the Sixth Sense are but the latest manifestations of a movement that sprang in the middle of the 19th century. Even though Spiritualism waned sometime between the two World Wars, beliefs in ghost manifestations have survived. After all, a 2006 Gallup Organization poll revealed that 32% of Americans believe in ghosts (1).

At the core of Spiritualist belief was the alleged phenomenon of ghost apparitions. The dead appeared to the living in organized sessions called séances, being channeled by human beings with special paranormal gifts called mediums. The pattern was laid out through the first séance that launched the Spiritualist craze, which took place in Hydesville, New York in 1848. The Fox sisters allegedly communicated with the spirit of a dead person which heralded a new era when “the spirits clothed in the flesh are to be more closely and more palpably connected with those who have put on immortality” (2). From there on, the Spiritualist movement spread like wildfire across the United States. Mediums appeared everywhere, organizing spectacular séances where noises (rappings), table turning, automatic writing, levitation, partial or total ghost materialization and others occurred. The democratic nature of séances attracted a great number of those disgruntled with organized religion as well as women seeking liberation from Victorian conventions (3).

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