Despite countless examples of fraud, excess, and at times sheer lunacv, to its followers it remains a matter of deepest conviction. Obviously the two overlap at times, and the choice of term depends on each practitioner’s emphasis.Īlthough spiritualism in various forms is an ancient faith, the modern movement is American in origin and dates back only to the mid-nineteenth century. Spiritism is more related to witchcraft and magic.
Spiritualism seeks to establish the survival of the soul and to communicate with the Other Side. On the other hand, what is often called “spiritism” emphasizes the physical manifestations of occult forces: lévitations, table tipping, floating trumpets, and mysterious transportation. Spiritualism, as the word suggests, concerns itself not onlv with invisible spirits (ghosts), but also with matters and values that are “spiritual” in the usual Christian sense. A spiritualist can attend a Methodist service on Sunday morning and a séance on Sunday night with no conflict of beliefs. Spiritualism, as Ixronora Piper came to understand it, is a serious religion, with prophets, philosophers, creeds, and articles of faith, (t is splintered into so manv sects and cults that generalizations about its tenets are riskv, but usually spiritualism is overlaid with a veneer of Christianity. Piper’s remarkable career it is necessary to sec her against the background of the modern spiritualist movement. Piper is that her case offers the most convincing and dramatic evidence of extrasensory perception ever recorded. Now, sixty years after her final séance, the least that ean be said about Mrs. At one period in her life she was a virtual prisoner of the Society for Pyschical Research, led about without being (old where she was, and kept completely in the dark about her next destination.Īll attempts to expose her as a fraud ended in failure, however, and efforts to explain her peeuliar power ended in conlusion. No foreign spy was ever trailed more closely. Her comings and goings were noted, her contacts observed, her mail scrutinized. But lurking in the background, just out of sight, there may be a pair of inconspicuous gentlemen, private detectives hired to shadow this harmlesslooking woman. There is nothing extraordinary about our picture. If we try to sum her up in a metaphor, she becomes a drab house sparrow slightly grayed by the factory smoke of Boston. The brown skirt and unadorned bonnet she wears give the impression of an underpaid schoolmarm. Socially and educationally she is aljove the local mill women, but it would be too flat terinç to call her middleclass. Her black shoes are sturdy, sensible, and high-buttoned. Inside the bag, one imagines, are pill boxes, patent medicines, smelling salts to counter the “vapors,” and verylittle money, for Mrs. She is carrying her inevitable black umbrella in one hand and n shabby needlepoint baq in the other. One pictures her crossing the Boston Common where she suddenly pauses to catch her breath-she was plagued by a dozen minor ailments, and shortness of breath was chronic with her. She was a shy, self-effacing lady, as wary of publicity as any other prim Bostonian.
Leonora Piper, the world’s greatest psychic medium, was outwardly the world’s most ordinary woman. WILLIAM JAMKS, 1894, in a speech made on the occasion of his becoming president of the Society for Psychical Research In the trances of this medium I cannot resist the conviction that knowledge appears which she has never gained by the ordinary waking use of her eyes and ears and Wits.” If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black you must not seek to show that no crows are it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.
#MEDIUM SEANCE TOWN OF SALEM PROFESSIONAL#
“If I may be allowed the language of the professional logic shop, a universal proposition can be made untrue by a particular instance.
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