20 Facts About Spiritualism

Spiritualism developed and reached its peak growth in membership from the 1840s to the 1920s, especially in English-speaking countries.

Spiritualism flourished for a half century without canonical texts or formal organization, attaining cohesion through periodicals, tours by trance lecturers, camp meetings, and the missionary activities of accomplished mediums.

Spiritualism is currently practiced primarily through various denominational spiritualist churches in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.

Spiritualism first appeared in the 1840s in the "Burned-over District" of upstate New York, where earlier religious movements such as Millerism and Mormonism had emerged during the Second Great Awakening, although Millerism and Mormonism did not associate themselves with Spiritualism.

Spiritualism was strongly influenced by the socialist theories of Fourierism.

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Consequently, many early participants in Spiritualism were radical Quakers and others involved in the mid-nineteenth-century reforming movement.

The surge of Spiritualism during this time, and later during World War I, was a direct response to those massive battlefield casualties.

Spiritualism was mainly a middle- and upper-class movement, and especially popular with women.

Spiritualism's is best known as a chronicler of the movement's spread, especially in her 1884 Nineteenth Century Miracles: Spirits and Their Work in Every Country of the Earth, and her 1870 Modern American Spiritualism, a detailed account of claims and investigations of mediumship beginning with the earliest days of the movement.

Spiritualism taught that after death spirits progressed to spiritual states in new spheres of existence.

Theosophy and Spiritualism were both very popular metaphysical schools of thought especially in the early 20th century and thus were always clashing in their different beliefs.

Madame Blavatsky was critical of Spiritualism; she distanced theosophy from Spiritualism as far as she could and allied herself with eastern occultism.

Spiritualists believed that without Spiritualism "the doctrine of Darwin is a broken link".

Gerald Massey said "Spiritualism will accept evolution, and carry it out and make both ends meet in the perfect circle".

Later in his life, Wallace was an advocate of Spiritualism and believed in an immaterial origin for the higher mental faculties of humans; he believed that evolution suggested that the universe had a purpose, and that certain aspects of living organisms are not explainable in terms of purely materialistic processes, in a 1909 magazine article entitled "The World of Life", which he later expanded into a book of the same name.

Already by the late 19th century Spiritualism had become increasingly syncretic, a natural development in a movement without central authority or dogma.

Spiritualism influenced art, having a pervasive influence on artistic consciousness, with spiritualist art having a huge impact on what became modernism and therefore art today.

Spiritualism inspired the pioneering abstract art of Vasily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Kasimir Malevich, Hilma af Klint, Georgiana Houghton, and Frantisek Kupka.

Practice of organized Spiritualism today resembles that of any other religion, having discarded most showmanship, particularly those elements resembling the conjurer's art.

The SPR's investigations into Spiritualism exposed many fraudulent mediums which contributed to the decline of interest in physical mediumship.