spiritualityBy DailyDestiny Editorial Team

Mediumship: How Mediums Describe Contacting the Dead

Mediumship is the practice of communicating with people who have died, and mediums describe it as receiving an intelligence outside their own mind rather than reading the sitter in front of them. This guide covers mental and physical mediumship, what counts as evidence, how Spiritualism built the practice, and how critics explain it.

What Is Mediumship and What Do Mediums Claim to Do?

Mediumship is the practice of communicating with people who have died, with the medium acting as the point of contact between a living sitter and a discarnate communicator. Practitioners describe impressions arriving from outside their own thinking: images they did not construct, a voice-like impression cutting across their train of thought, sensations belonging to another body, or a sudden certainty about a name. The vocabulary is precise. The living person receiving the reading is the sitter, the dead person communicating is the communicator, and the medium's regular helper is the guide, or in older texts the control. The connection is the link. Mediumship divides into two families requiring different training. Mental mediumship happens inside the medium's mind and covers almost every modern reading, while physical mediumship produces effects everyone present can see or hear. Within mental work, evidential mediumship is the branch treating verifiable detail as the whole point.

Communication with the dead is neither modern nor Western, which matters when people assume mediumship began in Victorian parlors. Korean mudang, Chinese spirit-writing at the planchette, Afro-Caribbean traditions in which an ancestor mounts a devotee, and Tibetan oracles who speak in trance all place a person as the channel. What Victorian Spiritualism added was a particular framework: individually named dead people, speaking as themselves, producing checkable facts, in a setting borrowing the vocabulary of experiment. That framing is why the English-speaking version is preoccupied with evidence in a way possession traditions are not, and why the same medium may open with a prayer and then ask an audience to verify a car registration.

What is the difference between mediumship and channeling?

Mediumship delivers communication from specific dead humans, while channeling delivers teaching from sources presented as non-human: group intelligences, ascended masters, or an abstract higher self. The output differs sharply. A mediumship reading produces a grandmother, her burned hands from the bakery, and a remark about the house sale. A channeling session produces philosophy and instruction with no checkable personal detail. Jane Roberts speaking as Seth and Esther Hicks speaking as Abraham are channeling in this sense.

What is a spirit guide in mediumship?

A spirit guide in mediumship is a discarnate helper the medium works with regularly, described as organizing which communicators come forward and how strongly the link forms. Older Spiritualist literature called the role the control, because the guide was understood to take over the medium's speech during trance. Gladys Osborne Leonard, one of the most closely studied British mediums, worked with a control she called Feda, and Estelle Roberts with one known as Red Cloud. Many modern mediums treat a guide's identity as unverifiable and beside the point.

What Is the Difference Between a Medium and a Psychic?

The medium vs psychic distinction turns on the source of the information rather than the strength of the ability: a psychic reads the sitter, and a medium reads someone who has died. In the traditional formulation every medium is psychic but not every psychic is a medium. The psychic faculty is the receiving equipment, sensitive to the energy, circumstances and possible futures attached to the living person in the chair. Mediumship uses that same equipment on a different signal, one the tradition holds is broadcast by a mind no longer in a body. The difference is audible within a minute. A psychic reading talks about your job, your relationship and what is coming. A mediumship reading brings a person: how they died, what they looked like, and something only you and they would recognize.

The medium vs psychic distinction also decides how badly a reading can go wrong. A psychic reading that misses describes a life that is not yours, and the sitter shrugs. A mediumship reading that misses attaches a wrong identity to a dead person the sitter loves, which is why evidential training is strict about guessing. It decides what to ask for at booking too. If you want to know whether to take the job, book a psychic reading. If you want your father, book mediumship and say so. Mediums who work both ways usually ask at the start which you want, and announce the switch aloud, which marks a trained practitioner.

What is psychic overlay in a mediumship reading?

Psychic overlay is the recognized failure mode where a medium stops receiving from the communicator and starts reading the sitter instead without noticing. It produces readings that sound impressive and prove nothing, because the material is drawn from what the sitter already knows and feels. The tell is subtle: information stops being odd and starts being relevant, specific detail dries up, and everything offered is a current worry. The correction is to break the link deliberately and rebuild it by asking the communicator for something the sitter has no reason to be thinking about.

Can a psychic become a medium?

Most teachers hold that a psychic can develop into a medium with training, because mediumship is treated as a discipline layered onto the same sensitivity rather than a separate gift. The work involved is learning to recognize the difference in feel between information coming from the sitter and information coming from a communicator, which students usually describe as a change in direction or weight. Some psychics never want to make that move and say plainly they have no wish to work with the dead.

What Is Mental Mediumship and How Do Mediums Receive Information?

Mental mediumship is communication received entirely inside the medium's mind, and it accounts for nearly every reading given today. Mediums sort impressions by sense. Clairvoyance is seeing, split between subjective clairvoyance, where the image appears in the mind's eye, and the rarer objective form where the medium reports seeing something apparently in the room. Clairaudience is hearing, divided between an inner voice indistinguishable in volume from thought and an apparently external sound. Clairsentience is feeling, and it does the heaviest lifting: mediums describe taking on the communicator's posture, illness and temperament in their own body, which is how a heart condition or a stiff left leg arrives. Claircognizance is knowing without sensory content, and it usually delivers names and dates. Clairalience and clairgustance, smell and taste, show up for pipe tobacco, hospital disinfectant or a particular perfume.

Above ordinary mental mediumship sit the deeper states the tradition calls inspirational, overshadowed and trance work. Inspirational speech is mildest, with the medium fully present but speaking material arriving faster than they are composing it. Overshadowing describes the communicator drawing close enough to alter expression, posture and voice while the medium stays aware. Trance mediumship involves the medium's own consciousness withdrawing so that speech proceeds without their direction, and deep trance leaves no memory afterward. Trance develops slowly, usually over years of weekly sitting, and produces philosophy far more often than personal evidence. It is also hard to assess, since a change in voice tells an observer nothing about where the material originated.

What are the clairs in mediumship?

The clairs are the sensory categories mediums use to sort impressions, named from the French word for clear. Clairvoyance covers seeing, clairaudience hearing, clairsentience feeling, claircognizance direct knowing, clairalience smell and clairgustance taste. The categories change the wording of a reading: an image of a wedding ring is reported differently from the felt sense of a marriage. Teachers use the framework diagnostically, asking which clairs are already open so exercises can target the closed ones. It is a working vocabulary rather than a claim about anatomy.

What does blending with spirit mean?

Blending is the state where the communicator's presence merges with the medium's awareness closely enough that the medium feels that person's character from the inside. A blended medium may adopt a posture, expression or turn of phrase belonging to the dead person, and sitters frequently identify a relative from the mannerism before any factual evidence arrives. Teachers describe blending as the difference between reporting on someone and standing beside them. Students who blend too deeply fall silent, and those who hold back too far get only fragments.

What Is Physical Mediumship and Why Has It Become So Rare?

Physical mediumship is the branch producing effects perceptible to everyone in the room rather than impressions inside one person's mind, and it has nearly disappeared. The classic phenomena include raps answering questions, table movement and levitation, direct voice heard away from the medium's body, trumpets that fly and amplify speech, apports said to arrive from nowhere, independent writing, touches and materialization. Ectoplasm is the substance nineteenth and early twentieth century mediums claimed to exude as the material for these forms. The conditions have not changed since the Victorian period: near darkness or dim red light, the medium seated inside a curtained cabinet, a fixed group meeting weekly for years, and a strict rule against sudden light or grabbing. Physical mediumship became rare for reasons the tradition itself acknowledges, above all the record of exposed fraud.

The history of physical mediumship mixes celebrated careers with documented cheating. Daniel Dunglas Home held seances through the mid nineteenth century, often in reasonable light and before educated witnesses, and was never caught in fraud, which is why his name still anchors every argument about the subject. Eusapia Palladino produced strong effects and was repeatedly caught using her hands and feet whenever investigators relaxed their controls. Mina Crandon, sitting as Margery in Boston, became the center of a bitter dispute involving Harry Houdini, who spent his later years exposing mediums. Helen Duncan, a Scottish materialization medium found to have used cheesecloth, was convicted in 1944 under the Witchcraft Act of 1735.

What is ectoplasm supposed to be?

Ectoplasm is described in physical mediumship as a substance drawn from the medium's body and from the sitters, said to be visible in dim red light as a pale mass emerging from the mouth or nose and used as raw material for touches, moving objects and materialized forms. Practitioners hold that it is destroyed by white light, which is the stated reason for darkness and for the rule against grabbing. Investigators who obtained samples in historic cases repeatedly found ordinary fabric, chewed paper and butter muslin.

Why do physical mediumship seances take place in darkness?

Physical mediumship circles sit in darkness or dim red light because practitioners hold that the substance producing the phenomena is destroyed by white light and that sudden exposure can injure the medium. Critics answer that darkness is also the condition under which conjuring is easiest, and that the injury rule conveniently blocks the one test that would settle matters. The Scole experiments in Norfolk during the 1990s were run partly to address this, and produced years of argument over whether the controls held.

What Is Evidential Mediumship and What Counts as Evidence?

Evidential mediumship is the branch that judges a reading by specific, verifiable detail delivered before the sitter confirms anything, and it is the standard most modern training aims at. Evidence is built in sequence. Identification comes first: the relationship to the sitter, an age at passing, a physical description, the manner of death, sometimes a name. Personality follows, which is where the mannerism, the temper and the catchphrase belong. Then come shared memories, ideally something small and unpromising, because a wedding is generic while a chipped blue teapot is not. Then come present-day facts about the sitter's life the medium had no ordinary route to knowing, such as building work started last month or an unsigned document in a drawer. The message comes last. The discipline separating evidential mediumship from ordinary readings is the rule against questions.

Evidence is graded within the tradition, and experienced sitters learn to grade it too. An older woman with chest trouble who passed peacefully is weak, because it fits an enormous number of families. A woman who kept her rings on the windowsill above the kitchen sink, who shows the medium a burn scar inside her right forearm, and who is talking about the argument over the piano is strong. Mediums separate detail the sitter cannot yet confirm from detail that is simply wrong, using the phrase put it in your pocket for anything meaning nothing at the time.

What counts as strong evidence in a mediumship reading?

Strong evidence in evidential mediumship is detail that is specific, unlikely to fit another family, and given before the sitter confirms anything. Names, occupations, unusual objects, a scar in a stated location, and present-day facts about the sitter's household all qualify. Weak evidence fits most bereaved people: an older relative, a chest problem, a feeling of pride in the sitter, a birthday coming up. A useful test is whether a stranger could have said the same thing to the person sitting behind you and been equally right.

Why do evidential mediums avoid asking questions?

Evidential mediums avoid questions because every question invites the sitter to supply information, and information supplied by the sitter cannot afterward count as evidence. Asking did she pass with something in the chest turns a claim into a guess with a confirmation attached. The trained form is a statement: she is giving me pressure across the chest and a struggle for breath in the last days. Tutors drill this because questioning is also the core technique of cold reading.

What should a sitter say during an evidential reading?

A sitter should limit themselves to yes, no and I do not know, and volunteer nothing until the medium has finished a piece of evidence. Filling a silence with my mother had three sisters and the youngest drowned gives away material the rest of the reading will reflect back. Do not soften a near miss into a hit on the medium's behalf, since an ambiguous statement counted as correct is worth nothing afterward. Write down anything that does not fit, because a note made during the sitting beats a memory of it a week later.

What Is Spiritualism and How Did the Movement Begin?

Spiritualism is the religious movement built around the claim that the dead can and do communicate, and spiritualism mediumship is the organized form the practice took in the English-speaking world. The conventional starting point is Hydesville, New York, in 1848, where the young Fox sisters, Kate and Margaret, reported rapping noises in their farmhouse that answered questions through an agreed code. The story spread with remarkable speed, helped by newspapers and a public already primed by the writings of Andrew Jackson Davis. Mediumship moved from parlors into churches, and the service format still used today emerged: hymns, a prayer, an address on Spiritualist philosophy, then a demonstration in which the medium delivers short messages to the congregation. The movement surged twice on bereavement, first around the American Civil War and again after the First World War and the influenza pandemic.

Institutional Spiritualism produced structures that still shape how mediums train. In Britain the Spiritualists' National Union operates a network of churches and a system of graded awards and certificates for mediumship, speaking and healing, and it runs the Arthur Findlay College at Stansted Hall in Essex, the best-known residential training center in the world for this subject. In the United States the camp tradition survives at Lily Dale in New York and Camp Chesterfield in Indiana, where registered mediums give readings through the season. The Seven Principles displayed in most British Spiritualist churches are attributed to Emma Hardinge Britten.

Who were the Fox sisters and did they confess to fraud?

The Fox sisters were Kate and Margaret Fox, whose reported communication with a rapping presence in Hydesville, New York, in 1848 is treated as the founding event of Spiritualism. Margaret publicly confessed in 1888 that the raps had been produced by cracking her toe joints, demonstrated the method on stage, then retracted the confession the following year. Both sisters died in poverty soon after. The episode is the single most-cited item in debates about spiritualism mediumship, with each side leaning on the confession or the retraction.

What happens in a Spiritualist church service?

A Spiritualist church service usually runs about ninety minutes in a fixed order: an opening hymn and prayer, a second hymn, an address on Spiritualist philosophy given by the visiting medium, then a demonstration of mediumship taking roughly half the service. Working from the platform, the medium indicates someone in the congregation, asks permission to come to them, delivers evidence and a message, and moves on. Nobody is guaranteed a message and mediums cannot take requests. Services are open to visitors and cost nothing beyond the collection.

How does Spiritism differ from Spiritualism?

Spiritism is the branch codified in France by Allan Kardec, whose The Spirits' Book of 1857 set out a system in which mediumship serves moral education and spirits progress through repeated lives. The decisive difference from Anglo-American Spiritualism is reincarnation, which Kardec's system requires and which most British and American Spiritualist bodies have left open. Spiritism grew far larger in Brazil than in France. The wider question of rebirth is covered in Reincarnation: How Different Traditions Describe Rebirth.

What Actually Happens in a Mediumship Sitting?

A mediumship sitting typically runs thirty to sixty minutes and follows a recognizable shape whether it happens in a front room, an office or over video. The medium usually explains the ground rules first: answer yes, no or I do not know, offer nothing extra, and say when something does not fit. A short attunement follows, which may be a spoken prayer, a silence, or the medium closing their eyes for a minute. The medium then describes a communicator, generally opening with the relationship and a physical or personality sketch, and waits for the sitter to place them. Evidence arrives in pieces, with the medium checking after each one whether it lands. Once identity is established the sitting shifts to the message, which tends to be shorter and less specific than sitters expect. The medium closes by breaking the link deliberately.

Formats are worth distinguishing before booking. A private sitting is one-to-one and gives the most time to a single sitter. A platform demonstration gives brief messages to a few people out of an audience, with no guarantee of being chosen, and a gallery reading sits between the two. Whatever the format, mediums generally decline to predict a death, diagnose a medical condition, tell a sitter to stop treatment, or produce a named person on demand. Medical advice may also break the law depending on jurisdiction.

Can a medium guarantee a specific person will come through?

No competent medium guarantees a named person, and such a guarantee is among the clearest warning signs a sitter can look for. The tradition holds that the medium does not summon anyone: communicators are said to come or not, and the medium works with whoever presents. Sitters who arrive fixed on one person often leave disappointed even after strong evidence, because everything else registered as the wrong answer. Anyone promising a particular relative for a fee is selling certainty the practice does not claim.

Should you record a mediumship reading?

Recording a mediumship reading is normal practice and most mediums encourage it, since sitters in an emotional state retain very little. Ask permission first; almost all agree and some record it for you. The recording is also the only honest way to evaluate the sitting afterward, because memory reshapes a reading over the following days, promoting near misses into hits and quietly dropping whatever did not fit. Playing it back a week later is the single most useful thing a sitter can do.

How Do You Become a Medium?

The standard answer to how to become a medium in the Spiritualist tradition is that you join a development circle and sit in it weekly for years. A mediumship development circle is a closed group led by an experienced medium, meeting on the same evening in the same room, working through exercises and giving each other practice readings under supervision. Beneath the exercises sits the core discipline, usually called sitting in the power, a long silent attunement performed alone as well as in the circle and treated by most teachers as more important than any technique. Students are pushed to speak what they get without editing, because the commonest obstacle is an analytical mind discarding an impression before it reaches the mouth. Feedback is the other half, which is why students practice on strangers rather than friends. The Spiritualists' National Union operates graded awards, and residential courses at the Arthur Findlay College are the best-known structured route.

Progress in mediumship is slow and uneven, and honest teachers say so at the start. A common pattern runs strong early, then a long flat stretch where nothing works, then a slow return with better discipline. No examination certifies ability in any objective sense, so the qualifications that exist certify training and conduct rather than accuracy. Serious students keep a record of what was given, what was confirmed on the spot, and what was rejected, with no retrospective softening. The long unfoldment involved resembles the training described in Akashic Records: What They Are and How People Claim to Access Them.

What is a mediumship development circle?

A mediumship development circle is a closed group of students meeting weekly under an experienced leader to train the faculty in a controlled setting. Closed means fixed membership, since teachers hold that a stable group builds a stronger working atmosphere and because trust is needed before students will speak impressions that sound absurd. A typical evening opens with attunement, moves through silent sitting, then runs exercises such as working blind with a photograph. The leader corrects fishing, questioning and psychic overlay on the spot, which cannot be replicated alone at home.

What does sitting in the power mean?

Sitting in the power is the foundational exercise of Spiritualist mediumship training: a long silent attunement in which the student does nothing but stay present with the sense of connection, asking for no information and expecting no communicator. Sessions run twenty minutes to an hour and are done alone as well as in the circle. Teachers describe it as building the strength of the link rather than practicing a technique. Students report warmth, expansion, heaviness in the hands, or nothing at all, and the instruction is always to keep sitting.

How long does it take to become a medium?

Most Spiritualist teachers put serious development at several years of weekly circle work before a student is fit for public platform work, with two to five years the range usually quoted for a basic working standard. Some students give recognizable evidence within months while others sit for years with little, and teachers treat that spread as normal. Physical mediumship and trance take substantially longer, often a decade of uninterrupted weekly sitting, and many circles never see the phenomena they sit for.

How Do Critics Explain Mediumship, and Do Cold Reading Objections Hold Up?

Critics explain mediumship through documented techniques that produce convincing readings without any contact with the dead, and anyone taking the subject seriously should understand them. Cold reading is the core: opening with high-probability statements, watching the sitter's reactions closely, and steering toward whatever draws a response. Barnum statements are the fuel, being descriptions vague enough to fit almost anyone while feeling personal. Shotgunning is rapid-fire delivery of many names, initials, ailments and dates so hits stand out and misses are forgotten. Hot reading is different and worse, involving research done in advance from social media, obituaries or booking forms. Alongside the techniques sit ordinary features of cognition: subjective validation, retrofitting, where a miss becomes a hit once the sitter supplies an interpretation, and memory drift, which makes a reading sound sharper a week later.

The stronger version of the criticism is not that every medium is a fraud but that the practice has no method for telling a genuine result from a lucky one. Serious practitioners have some sympathy with that, which is why evidential training bans questioning and why some mediums have volunteered for blind conditions in which they read for a sitter they cannot see or hear. Results from such tests have been argued over rather than settled, and the dispute usually lands on whether the imposed conditions suppress the effect, a claim critics regard as unfalsifiable. The historical record supplies ammunition: the Fox sisters' confession, the cheesecloth found on Helen Duncan, and Houdini's exposures.

What is cold reading and how does it work?

Cold reading is a set of conversational techniques for producing an accurate-seeming reading about a stranger using no prior information. The reader opens with statements applying to most people in the situation, such as an older relative who passed with a problem in the chest, reads the sitter's face and breathing to see what registered, then narrows toward whatever drew a reaction. Ambiguity is deliberate, since a mention of a J name can be claimed by John, Jane, June or a street. A cold reader can give a devastatingly accurate reading and know nothing whatsoever.

What is hot reading and how does it happen online?

Hot reading is the use of information researched in advance and presented as though received from a communicator, and online booking has made it far easier than it was in the era of theater seances. A full name and an email address can lead to social media accounts, obituary pages, memorial fundraisers and genealogy records, supplying names, dates, causes of death and family relationships within minutes. A sitter who wants to close this route can book under a first name only and offer nothing before the sitting.

Is It Safe to See a Medium While You Are Grieving?

Seeing a medium while grieving carries real risks alongside whatever comfort it offers, and the risks are practical rather than supernatural. Grief makes people financially vulnerable, and the documented harm in this field is overwhelmingly financial: escalating fees, readings that end just as something important is arriving, and the curse-removal scam in which a cheap sitting reveals a problem that a much larger payment will fix. It also makes people vulnerable to dependency, and trained mediums decline to see the same bereaved sitter repeatedly, because a weekly reading substitutes for mourning rather than supporting it. There is also the risk of a bad answer, since a medium may deliver something about the death or the sitter's own conduct that lands hard on someone with no resources to absorb it. A reading is not bereavement care.

The positive case practitioners make deserves stating fairly. Sitters who report a strong reading often describe a shift not in belief but in the quality of the grief, from unfinished to bearable, and bereavement literature has long recognized that spontaneous experiences of contact with the dead are common and generally associated with comfort rather than pathology. What the honest version of the practice does not claim is that a reading fixes anything. On how traditions frame dying itself, see Ram Dass: Be Here Now and the Path of the Heart.

How soon after a death should you see a medium?

Most experienced mediums advise waiting at least six months after a death before booking a sitting, and many decline to read for someone in the first weeks. Early grief makes a sitter desperate for one particular outcome, which distorts how everything is received and makes disappointment far heavier. It also makes a sitter easy to exploit. The strongest argument stands regardless of belief: choosing who to trust and how much to pay in acute grief is a decision made at the worst possible moment.

What are the warning signs of a fraudulent medium?

The clearest warning signs are a guarantee that a named person will come through, a fee that grows during or after the sitting, any claim that a curse or blockage must be removed for extra payment, pressure to book a series, and medical advice of any kind. Add a medium who asks a stream of questions rather than making statements, and who reacts badly when told something does not fit. Payment demands attached to fear are the most reliable indicator of a scam.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is mediumship real?

Whether mediumship is real depends on what you count as proof, and it has never been demonstrated to the satisfaction of mainstream science. Sitters report readings containing names, scars and household objects the medium had no ordinary route to knowing, while skeptics answer that cold reading, guessing, information leaked online and generous memory account for the same results. What is not disputed is that mediumship is practiced seriously by thousands, that some of it has been proven fraudulent, and that a single reading can be judged on its own merits by counting what was given before the sitter confirmed anything.

Can anyone learn mediumship?

Most mediumship teachers claim the faculty is common and the discipline is rare, so almost anyone can develop something while few reach platform standard. Spiritualist teaching treats it the way a music school treats singing: everyone has a voice, training decides what it becomes. People who stall hit the same two walls: an analytical mind that edits every impression before it is spoken, and nowhere to practice on strangers who give honest feedback.

How much does a mediumship reading cost?

Mediumship reading prices run from nothing to several hundred for an hour with a medium who has a waiting list, and price is a poor guide to quality. Spiritualist churches give short platform messages free beyond the collection, and many run inexpensive private sittings. Independent mediums charge by the session for thirty to sixty minutes. Warning signs matter more than the number: a medium who quotes a low fee, then reveals that removing a curse or completing the message requires a much larger second payment, is running a known scam.

Do mediumship readings work over video or phone?

Mediums who work at distance say video and telephone readings work as well as sitting in the same room, because the link they describe forms between the medium and the communicator rather than the medium and the sitter's body. Many now run their entire practice online. Skeptics point out that remote sittings make hot reading easier, since a booking form and a social media profile supply names, dates and family details in advance. A sitter wanting a cleaner test can book under a first name only.

Can a medium contact a pet?

Many mediums say animals come through in readings, usually alongside a human communicator rather than as the main link, and animal communication is treated as a related but separate skill. A medium working with a deceased pet describes breed, coloring, size, temperament, habits such as which chair the animal claimed, and the circumstances of its death. Some specialists work with living animals too, which is closer to a psychic reading than to mediumship, since a living creature is not a discarnate communicator. Say at booking if you want a pet in the sitting.

Why did nobody come through in my mediumship reading?

A reading where the person you hoped for does not appear is common, and mediums explain it several ways: the link failed to establish, another communicator came instead, the medium was tired, or the sitter's expectation was so fixed that anything else registered as failure. An honest evaluation also has to allow the blunter explanation, which is that the medium had nothing. Either way, do not pay again immediately, and do not accept a higher fee for a second attempt. Grief makes people generous with second chances, and predatory practitioners rely on it.

Do religions object to mediumship?

Several major religious traditions prohibit mediumship outright. Orthodox Jewish and mainstream Christian teaching both point to biblical passages forbidding consultation with the dead, including the account of Saul and the medium at Endor, and the Catholic Church treats attempts to contact the dead as forbidden divination. Islam rejects it similarly. Spiritualism answers by operating as a religion in its own right, with churches, ministers and a doctrinal statement, and by reading the same scriptures as evidence that such communication happened.