Spiritualism has inaugurated the era of woman, Mary Davis proclaimed. She recalled the common birth date of the new religion and women’s rights in 1848. Spiritualist conventions called for the Emancipation of women from all legal and social disabilities. Consistently those who assumed the most radical positions on woman’s rights became Spiritualists.

Spiritualists Advocated for Women’s Rights

Not all feminists were Spiritualists, but all Spiritualists advocated women’s rights. Women were equal to men within Spiritualist practice, polity, and ideology. By providing a form of religious practice in which truth revealed itself to individuals without recourse to external authority. In the mid 19th century there were eleven million spiritualists out of a population of twenty-five million.

The mid-19th century spiritualist movement was the cyclonic force of the feminist movement. In manner of dress, the right to speak in public forums, to own their own money, to be spiritual leaders, and to declare a woman’s right to equality, the spiritualists cleared the path. In Spiritualism the place of worship was relocated to the home from church, or temple. Spirit circles gathered around parlour tables, a most appropriate place for women to preside.

Reminiscent of the Witch Burnings a Century Earlier

The medical society deemed mediumship a manifestation of a medical disorder causing rebellion against gender roles. On the other hand, Spiritualism taught women to exercise self-healing properties of her own nature and to develop a more egalitarian relationship with her doctor. The persecution the young female medium suffered at the hands of so called psychic investigators was reminiscent of the earlier witch hunts. Mediums were bound to chairs, locked in small cupboards almost naked, supposedly to assure sitters they weren’t hiding any tricks in their skirts. Despite this stress, mediums were expected to provide proof that they communed with the spirit world.

Equality between the sexes was forwarded from the spiritualists as a spiritual imperative from the spirit world meaning that it was divinely inspired. Spiritualists believed, as one advocate put it, that woman’s freedom is the world’s redemption.
The seeds of modernism, psychoanalysis, communications, human rights, longevity were all brought from the unseen world to the seen in this most glorious age.
The her/his tory of religion has taught us that the further we move in time away from the original spiritual message, the more it morphs, disintegrates, and ultimately decays. Spirituality is a dynamic force and has the power to alter the consciousness of humans, the course of our collective destiny and ultimately our ability to thrive. It’s temple is the heart, its expression is in the actions we take every day of our lives.

“Woman’s Era is here; her right to half the knowledge of the universe, as well as half of the opportunities of living, is daily receiving more and more evidence, because of her ability to demonstrate that she is that other half of the intelligence that man has failed to reveal.”

Psychosophy by Mrs. Cora Richmond 1888

Testimonial Snippet

“You may remember doing a Tarot Reading for my Granddaughter Corrie. During our Christmas celebration this year she informed me that everything you had predicted played out. She confided that she thought the reading was “right off the wall” until it all started to unfold just the way you had laid it out. She said to thank you as being prepared or aware of some of the outcomes helped immensely. So THANK YOU Kathleen for helping her “escape” some of the consequences of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Cheers Freya”
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