Voice and agency in Spiritualist mediumship: or, who speaks when spirits speak?

Spiritualist mediums simultaneously claim and disclaim responsibility for their actions by foregrounding and backgrounding their own agency and that of spirits. They take credit for producing words, healings, writings, and paintings, yet attribute these expressions to sources in the spirit world. This dual pattern has persisted historically, even as mediums' voices shifted from imitating spirit speakers to a casual, non-imitative conversational style. Examining how agency moves metaphorically in relation to mediums' expressive actions reveals how they cultivate in audiences the sense that they are not truly the speakers, yet no one else could speak as they do.

Study at a glance

Abstract

In Spiritualism, mediums ritually foreground and background their agency and that of people in the spirit world in the same act. Spiritualist mediums take responsibility for the expressions they produce for audiences: the words they formulate or convey, the healing they transmit, and the writings and paintings their hands bring into the world. Yet they deny responsibility at the same time by attributing it to people in the spirit world; the signs mediums receive in their minds and bodies and the messages and healing energy they attempt to transmit are said to come from sources other than themselves. The pattern of foregrounding and backgrounding agency is historically durable even as the voice of the medium has changed from being imitative of spirit speakers’ qualities to being casually conversational and not imitative. Attending to the ways agency moves metaphorically in relation to mediums’ expressive actions gives insight into the ways mediums cultivate audiences’ senses that they are not really the ones speaking, yet no one else could speak the way they do.