A Gift to Prove Life After Death

Any religious experience involving a lull in everyday consciousness, such as ecstatic communion with God or mediumship, could be reduced to a pathological form. Unfortunately, this remains a barrier to conducting authentic research in this field. Given that spiritualism is a gift confirming the existence of life after death, this harsh and pseudoscientific ruling effectively kept spiritualism out of the realm of interest for many.

It was well known, for example, that in the field of mediumship, women outnumbered men by a factor of 100 to 1. Naturally, this striking fact did not escape the medical profession. In women diagnosed with madness, the disease was associated with their reproductive system. This explained why so many women succumbed to the pathological condition of mediumship (an interesting general argument favored by the Victorian mind). Vibrancy and femininity were literally opposite concepts.

At that time, there were a few gifted mediums who truly challenged the notion that all divine manifestations were male. In the waning days of the witch-burnings, when the miracles these mediums induced became a matter of public debate, an exaggerated degree of caution obviously had to be applied.