Spiritualism and healing

David’s facebook page: Spiritual Healing Academy

The spiritualist healing movement which is based on lies and quackery is having a damaging effect on the healing community.
Their ideology and training structures for healers frequently miss represent what they are doing.
There is no doubt that healing and psychic skills exist but to reduce them to the level of entertainment in a church setting is an injustice to all those practicing healers around the world that quietly administer their craft.

I would like to ask a question

Why around the world and in history there are no other belief systems engaged in their practices.Throughout time and up to modern day there have been many beliefs and peoples with experience in the knowledge of the esserteric, with far greater knowledge and skills.
Why do they not engage in the same activity?

After all this this movement started out of a parlour game in the 1840s.

History of Modern Spiritualism

Modern Spiritualism dates from 1848 when the Fox sisters of Hydesville New York produced knocking sounds that were alleged to be spirit messages from a spirit.

Soon after John D. Fox, his wife, and six children moved into their new home they began to hear mysterious rapping noises. Two daughters, Maggie and Kate, gradually became brave enough to clap their hands and snap their fingers in an effort to elicit these knocking sounds. A series of raps responded to their initiative.

Soon a simple code of communication was set up between the Fox sisters and the invisible spirit who apparently resided in their home. With time Maggie and Kate learned that the spirit who made these rapping noises was that of a murdered peddler whose remains were buried in the cellar of their home.

News of the Fox sisters’ sensational communication with the spirit world travelled rapidly. They had, it seemed, stumbled upon dramatic proof of life after death. Within months they were national celebrities.

Robert C. Fuller, Spiritual, but Not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America, 2002

The story of the Fox sisters led to an explosion in spiritualist activity in the USA.

Tests carried out in 1851 suggested that the girls were deliberately producing the knockings themselves, with no participation by spirits. This exposure did not slow down the growth in spiritualism, nor damage the reputation of the sisters. However in 1888 the Fox girls revealed that they had faked the whole thing.

There is no such thing as a spirit manifestation. That I have been mainly instrumental in perpetrating the fraud of spiritualism upon a too-confiding public many of you already know. It is the greatest sorrow of my life . . . When I began this deception, I was too young to know right from wrong.

Margaret Fox (1888), quoted in Joseph F. Rinn, Searchlight on Psychical Research, 1954

Margaret later said that the confession itself was a deception and returned to the promotion of Spiritualism.

The movement rapidly became very fashionable with both men and women and across all social classes and acquired the name Spiritualism in the 1850s. Some writers argue that Spiritualism was one of the first religions to become widespread through the actions of mass media.

Spiritualism was socially different from other religions of the time, particularly in the significant role played by women and lay people:

Apart from a quorum of Universalists and a few Unitarians, its leadership was almost entirely lay, often women in a time when their sex had very slim opportunities to exercise spiritual leadership in most established denominations.

It was largely a proletarian religious movement in significant alliance with that class’s new literacy and sense of a power to make itself heard and, moreover, to remake the world. Early Spiritualism therefore perceived itself as a voice of the ‘progressive’ movements of the time.

Robert Ellwood, How New is the New Age, in Perspectives on the New Age, ed James R. Lewis, J. Gordon Melton, 1992

A wide variety of spirit manifestations could be found in the cities and spiritualistic activities became a common form of ‘inspirational’ entertainment.

By the 1860s and 1870s, one could sit for spirit photographs, attend spirit lectures on a range of progressive social and religious issues, and take part in carefully orchestrated seances at which ghosts materialized, voices spoke through levitating trumpets, messages wrote themselves on sealed slates, and mediums’ bodies emitted disconcerting quantities of a strange, filmy substance known as ectoplasm.

Helen Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism, 2002

Some persons embraced Spiritualism’s philosophical aspects, others found its emotional components appealing, and still others turned to it in crisis for a sense of stability. Women flourished as leaders within its anti-official organization. Publicists expertly promoted it, exploiting its sensationalist aspects. And many people attended séances simply for entertainment, for a kick.

John Corrigan, Business of the Heart, 2002

Spiritualism was popular, not just because it could entertain and provide comfort to the believer, but also because it seemed to combine the empirical methods and discoveries of science (such as the invisible force of electricity) with the religious idea of the afterlife.

One of the most influential mediums was Daniel Dunglas Home, who produced some of the most vibrant spirit manifestations (on one occasion he is said to have levitated out of a bedroom window seventy feet above street level and back in again through the living room window ).

Home survived attempts to show that he was a fraud (although there are some reports of him being caught out ). He polarized Victorian opinion; some regarded him as the real deal, while others thought him ‘utterly contemptible’

In the attempt to provide a natural explanation for Home’s phenomena, two groups of experts were appealed to – stage conjurors and scientists – yet it seems clear that the former were unable to explain the phenomena, while scientists who tested Home concluded his phenomena were real.

Peter Lamont, Spiritualism and a mid-Victorian Crisis of Evidence, The Historical Journal, 2004

The movement gained further credibility with the support of distinguished people, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (creator of Sherlock Holmes) the scientist Sir Oliver Lodge and the journalist Hannen Swaffer.

The conclusion, then, of my long search after truth, is that in spite of occasional fraud, which Spiritualists deplore, and in spite of wild imaginings, which they discourage, there remains a great solid core in this movement which is infinitely nearer to positive proof than any other religious development with which I am acquainted.

Arthur Conan Doyle, The New Revelation, 1918

Spiritualism was not necessarily seen as a separate religious movement, but as a way of providing evidence to support religious beliefs in both life after death and the existence of the soul.

Since scientists during this period were providing fewer supernatural and more natural explanations for the universe, spiritualist manifestations provided religious people with evidence that there was more to the world than scientists had discovered.

The first Spiritualist church in the UK opened in 1853 in Keighly in Yorkshire, and the first spiritualist newspaper, The Yorkshire Spiritual Telegraph, was published in the same town two years later. The first national Spiritualist meeting in the UK was held in 1890.

In 1882 the Society for Psychical Research was founded to examine apparently paranormal phenomena using rigorous and unbiased scientific methods of investigation.

The Roman Catholic Church condemned Spiritualism in 1898, and the Anglican Communion passed the following resolution at the 1920 Lambeth Conference:

The Conference, while recognising that the results of investigation have encouraged many people to find a spiritual meaning and purpose in human life and led them to believe in survival after death, sees grave dangers in the tendency to make a religion of spiritualism…

Spiritualism nonetheless thrived:

In the late 1920s and early 1930s there were around one quarter of a million practising Spiritualists and some two thousand Spiritualist societies in the UK in addition to flourishing microcultures of platform mediumship and ‘home circles’

Steven J. Sutcliffe, Children of the New Age, 2002, p35

The Fraudulent Mediums Act of 1951 made it illegal for people to pretend to act as spiritualistic mediums for money or other reward. This act was repealed in April 2008, and fraudulent mediums are now covered by consumer protection legislation, namely The Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008.

The physical basis of all psychic belief is that the soul is a complete duplicate of the body, resembling it in the smallest particular, although constructed in some far more tenuous material. In ordinary conditions these two bodies are intermingled so that the identity of the finer one is entirely obscured. At death, however, and under certain conditions in the course of life, the two divide and can be seen separately.

Arthur Conan Doyle, The Vital Message, 1919

David’s facebook page: Spiritual Healing Academy