While many today may confuse the quasi-religious movement with being spiritual as we know it today, spiritualism was a religious movement that began in the 1840s in Western New York and remained until about 1920. Spiritualism is the belief that we can communicate with the dead and that there is nothing Satanic or strange about it.
This happened around the time of a second-wave of American religious awakening when other, new sects were developing in Central and Western New York as well as other parts of the United States, running the gamut of conservative to liberal from Mormonism to utopian free love cults. Many of these new religious movements were feminists and abolitionists.
Interestingly, spiritualism has remained in Western New York, largely centered around the psychic village of Lily Dale, NY. Renowned psychic Cedric Grant Bouchard went to college in nearby Buffalo and apparently had an experience at Lily Dale that made him realize that he was destined to be a psychic.
In fact, most modern psychics you’ll meet come from the spiritualist tradition of psychic work. Even though debunkers like Harry Houdini eventually made spiritualism fall out of favor (though more so did the Great Depression), the tradition remained.
One of the most interesting features of spiritualism is the use of séance and mesmerism, now known as hypnotism, and the fact that most of the leaders and celebrities of spiritualism were women. In fact, may mediums, astrologers, like Cora Scott and Alice Bailey would write profound philosophical works and attribute them to spirits speaking through them, which in a way legitimized esoteric and intellectual writing coming from women, and while fields like astrology are still largely dominated by men, psychic work is largely the realm of women.
And though the spiritualism movement has pretty much died out, it actually helped usher in an era of feminism.
