0 someone who believes that living people can communicate with people who have died, especially someone who helps other people communicate with their dead family members: --
1 believing that living people can communicate with people who have died, or relating to this belief: --
Home became the exemplar medium, continually cited by spiritualists in support of their beliefs, and the most challenging case for critics of spiritualism to deal with.
The spiritualist medium, in other words, is a ghost's writer, somebody who lends his (or more often her) body to an immaterial spirit in order to produce a text.
Many prominent spiritualists dissociated themselves completely, while others took an uneasy wait-and-see attitude.
The ambiguity both dissociates the medium from the spirit, as required by the spiritualist protocol, and covertly establishes their commonality, not to say identity.
The novel's significance to spiritualists can be exemplified by a further detail.
The irreducible ambiguity of the spiritualist women's position consisted in the fact that they were empowered by their own powerlessness.
In the circles of the learned older ideas and presuppositions fed into and fused with newer occult and spiritualist traditions.
Yet when spiritualists appropriated the formulae of such scenes it was within a set of practices that explicitly denied the fact of death at all.
