The Witches' Book of the Dead (13 page)

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7
Spirit Mediumship: Speaking with the Dead

My first experience with spirit mediumship, the practice of receiving messages from the dead, was at nineteen years old when a friend and I attended a gathering at the local Spiritualist church here in Salem. This church specializes in mediumship and spirit communication and, instead of the style of worship you see at most churches, the dead are the focus of communion. Spirit mediums stand at the pulpit and point at people for whom they have messages and deliver them so that all can hear. The first woman who spoke on the night I attended pointed to a man who must have been ninety years old and said, “You there. You knew a Charlie once.” I had to hold myself back from snickering, because I imagined the man must have known a hundred Charlies in his day. So far, I wasn't impressed.

But then, a woman came to the pulpit and pointed to me. She said that she felt the presence of a man who had died in violence and feelings of cold. Then she named a date in April. None of this made any sense to me, so I figured we were now running at two strikes. My friend, however,
was white as a ghost. After we left, I asked her what was wrong, and she informed me that she had had a boyfriend several years before who had been murdered on the date the medium spoke of. I was truly shocked and wondered aloud how the medium would have chosen me to receive the message. I asked my friend more about the situation, and came to discover that my mother and I were living in the same apartment building as her boyfriend when he was murdered. While this incredible experience should have led me to explore the art of mediumship further, I actually stayed away from it.

For most of the first ten years or so of my twenty-three years of Witchcraft studies, I rarely dealt with the dead. The idea scared me, especially after my experience at the Spiritualist church—so my spells and rituals centered on more common magical methods and I would never have dreamed of conjuring the dead to aid me in any of it. That is, until 1998.

In 1995, I joined Shawn Poirier's Raven Moon Coven, which Leanne Marrama and I now keep alive in Shawn's absence. Shawn's family had taught him folk charms, spells, and psychic ability from a young age, but he also trained in the Spiritualist method with a gifted medium named Dottie. In 1998, I finally attended Shawn's annual Salem séance, “Messages from the Spirit World.”

The event began with an introduction to spirit mediumship. Then, Shawn led everyone in an exercise of table tipping, an old Spiritualist technique for demonstrating the presence of the dead that involves the table moving, tilting, and even levitating off the ground by solely spiritual means. The participants in the séance got up in groups of three to try their hand at it, and most of them were successful in bringing the spirits through. When it was my turn, it was me, Shawn, and Salem Witch Jody Cabot with our hands on the table. Being a skeptic, I looked at the table to see if the other two were moving it, much like I did when my friends and I played on the Ouija board as children. It wasn't long before the table was coasting across the floor, tipping, and even bouncing. I turned white as a ghost. Up until this point, magic had been a very safe and regimented process for me. This was the first
time I had personally experienced the physical manifestation of spirit. I was a believer. It was not until a few years later that I wholeheartedly embraced the spirit world, but I'll talk about that in
chapter 10
. After the table tipping, Shawn began to deliver the messages from the dead to each participant. I was absolutely blown away by Shawn's gifts. Shawn left no person without a message, and each was astounded at his accuracy. At the end of the event, we had to carry him out because he was so tired from communicating with so many spirits. Shawn had made a convert of me. I now knew the powers of the dead.

Styles of Mediumship

Spirit mediumship is the ability to communicate directly with the dead using your mind and body as the tools. It takes a variety of forms, and has most recently been popularized by such shows as
Crossing Over
with John Edward, books by Sylvia Brown, and the fictionalized television show
Medium
starring Patricia Arquette.

Most mediumship is mental; that is, the medium, in an altered state of consciousness, tunes in to the dead and receives words, images, and impressions that she then imparts to the living. Those who come to consult the psychics at OMEN, one of my shops here in Salem, often seek to contact their departed loved ones. This is the type of mediumship that my staff generally offers and also the type typically practiced by the popular mediums mentioned above. When this type of mediumship is done in a séance setting, it is referred to as “gallery style.”

Less common is trance mediumship, a much more intense practice during which the medium goes into a deep trance and allows her entire body to become temporarily possessed. This is the type of mediumship most often depicted during the séances (or spirit sittings) featured in movies and television, probably because it has more dramatic effect. For this method, the spirits speak through the medium's vocal chords, and use her body to make gestures and movements. Sometimes a medium's actual appearance
will change, and her face can even contort to mimic the shape and mannerisms of the spirit coming through.

Even more rare is physical mediumship. In these cases, truly wondrous spectacles may manifest in the physical world, such as ectoplasm, a viscous substance exuded from the medium's body that enables spirits to take on temporary form. Physical mediumship was quite popular during the peak of Spiritualism in second half of the nineteenth century. It declined during the twentieth century, but has been making a comeback in popularity in recent decades. Mediumship is still very much a part of many Spiritualist religious services; a Spiritualist minister is increasingly expected to have mediumistic abilities of mental, trance, and physical sorts, and to deliver messages from the dead to the congregation as part of the weekly worship service—though it is still primarily the mental style of gallery mediumship that you see at the churches now. During a séance held at OMEN, psychic medium Debra Freeman saw a strange, ethereal fog emanate from the back of the room and drift out of the workshop space and into the front of the shop! Participants were terrified, and Debra had to perform a spiritual cleansing to calm them down. Lorelei, a clairvoyant Witch who owns Salem's oldest Witch shop, Crow Haven Corner, did a circle to honor both my mother and hers in spirit the year my mother died. She was photographed just as she was calling the spirit and you can see a clearly visible, solid ring of ectoplasm hovering above her head in the photo.

While mediumship once seemed to be the domain of the Spiritualist church, many Witches today are mediums, and offer mediumistic services along with their traditional tools of Tarot, palmistry, runes, and clairvoyant visions. While it may seem that the Witch has adapted this practice into her repertoire—something Witches are known to be very good at—it is actually the other way around. Witches have always been spirit communicators, going all the way back to the shamans and medicine people of the ancient world.

Ancient Mediums

The first mediums were the magicians and medicine people of early tribal cultures, who traveled between the realms of the living and the dead as one might walk from one room in the house to another. Masks and costumes were worn to embody the spirits, while strange potions and ointments were used to facilitate the shift in consciousness required to swim in the tides of the Death Current. Later, when such practices became frowned upon, mediumship became the domain of the Witch, conjuring the mighty dead in the dark of night, for those who dared seek her out. Scholars usually refer to such ancient mediumistic practices as necromancy because there are often complex rituals involved in the conjuring of the spirits.

The necromantic oracles of the ancient world were essentially mediums who specialized in communicating with the dead. Throughout ancient Greece, where the practice of spirit conjuration was not as prohibited as it was elsewhere, there were temples of spirit communication known as Nekuomanteions, where oracles would conjure the dead that they might share their wisdom with the living. The oracles who served at such temples were not called Witches per se, mostly because they were part of an accepted priesthood and not practicing their arts outside of the umbrella of authority. However, the basic structure was quite similar to the mediumship practiced by Witches throughout history.

Today, spirit mediumship has largely replaced the ritualistic arts of necromancy in common spiritual practice. Witches, who traditionally have always had the power to journey into the realm of spirits, have now embraced modern mediumship as yet one more way to aid in their travels between the worlds.

The Witch as Spirit Medium

During the Witch persecutions that took place over several centuries of the last millennium, the accused “Witches” were often associated with worshipping devils and consorting with demons. However, scholarship also suggests
that there were a number of alleged Witches who were accused largely for their work with the dead, proving further the enduring connection between the Witch and the souls of the departed.

The Soulmother of Küssnacht, a part of Switzerland, was burned at the stake in 1577. For the thirteen years prior, the Soulmother, whose real name has been lost in the tides of history, was a professional spirit medium who read for people far and wide. Often, when a person died, those left behind would pay a visit to the Soulmother—quite literally, for her trade was apparently rather lucrative. Visitors would stay at a nearby boarding house (owned by a friend of the Soulmother), which suggests that the seer's reputation extended far beyond her village. The Soulmother mixed both Christian and Witchcraft symbolism to summon the dead. She would draw a magic circle and invoke the sacrifice of Jesus. Then, the spirits of the dead were said to appear, and the Soulmother would share their wisdom with her well-paying clients. Finally, the priests of Küssnacht, probably fed up with the spiritual competition, complained to the local bishop that the Soulmother was practicing Witchcraft. The bishop later referred her to the court of Schwyz, where she was tortured into confessing to the crime of Witchcraft, found guilty, and then burned alive. While the Soulmother probably didn't see herself as the devil-worshipping style of “Witch” that lived only in the fantasies of the Witch hunters, this story shows how mediumship and Witchcraft were perceived by the authorities to be one and the same.
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Born in Gerresheim, Germany, on May, 1722, Helena Curtens was one of the last Germans to be burned as a Witch. Helena was sickly from birth, and she and her father sought out places to find healing from her illnesses. At the age of fourteen, after making a pilgrimage to Kevelaer, Germany, where Catholics by the hundreds of thousands still travel today to honor the Virgin Mary, Helena began to tell those around her that she was seeing ghosts—probably of the dead, given Mary's long association with the martyrs. Soon her tales caught the attention of authorities, and under terrible torture, her story soon changed to the more traditional accounts of devil
worship. After a lengthy imprisonment and trial, she was burned at the stake at Gerresheim in August of 1738 at the age of sixteen.
⁹

According to Hungarian historian Éva Pócs, there are Hungarian Witch trial documents that refer to accused Witches who used ritual initiation and techniques of seership to communicate with the dead and other supernatural beings. These practices were collectively referred to as “Saint Lucy's Stool Techniques,” named for a ritual performed on Saint Lucy's Day during which the seer would sit on a wooden stool before a fire and see visions of the dead. Granted, those accused generally insisted that they were performing such rites for benevolent purposes, including the detection of Evil Witches, but it doesn't seem to have stopped these well-intentioned seers from being dragged to the stake for burning.
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Spiritualism and the Resurgence of Mediumship

In Western culture, mediumship fell into obscurity during the Witch persecutions due to fear of torture and execution. It never disappeared, of course, but went underground, its practices kept hidden by secretive magical families, the wealthy, and even the clergy. The Christian church discouraged any form of contact with the dead, except through the veneration of saints. But in the mid-nineteenth century, mediumship roared back to life, fueled by a renaissance of interest in occultism, ceremonial magic, mesmerism, and a popular fascination with talking to spirits. Mediumship became the primary focus of Spiritualism, a new religion that openly embraced the practice of speaking with the dead.

The modern religion of Spiritualism was born here in America, where the Fox Sisters of Hydesville, New York, created a media sensation with their spirit rappings. The Fox family lived in a house they believed to be haunted because of unexplained thumping noises at night. The story goes that teenagers Maggie and Katie discovered that the presence seemed to be intelligent and would respond to their own knockings. Soon they were channeling messages through a tedious process of rapping the letters of the alphabet—sort of like a cross
beween the Ouija board and Morse code. Their older sister, Leah, saw a marketing opportunity, and soon the Fox sisters were doing platform demonstrations and readings everywhere. Surely this emerging phenomenon was tapping into a desire of the masses, long subdued as they were by the so-called Ages of Enlightenment, to again believe in the spirit world and the hope of an afterlife.

Spirit mediumship became all the rage. There were other factors behind the explosion in popularity, but in short, mediums became the new darlings of every social class. Home séance circles sprouted everywhere on both sides of the Atlantic, and public demonstrations were given to sold-out theaters. Rapping gave way to voice mediumship, in which mediums delivered messages; and to physical mediumship, in which mediums put on displays of phenomena ranging from floating trumpets to the shocking appearances of ectoplasm. Of course, the emergence of modern Spiritualism also brought with it plenty of fraud—there are always greedy people who cast aspersions on the truly spiritual arts to take advantage of the gullible—but this new religion also made it possible for those with the real ability to communicate with spirits to finally find a place that accepted their unique gifts.