Mediumship

Practitioners of mediumship and psychic work describe their information as arriving by distinct routes, and the vocabulary for those routes is a set of French-derived compounds built on clair, clear.

Clairvoyance is clear seeing: images, scenes or symbols perceived without the eyes, and almost always described as appearing in the mind rather than in the room. Clairaudience is clear hearing, ranging from an inward voice or a phrase that arrives unbidden to what is reported as external sound. Clairsentience is clear feeling, the broadest of the three, taking in bodily sensation, emotional impression and the sense of a presence; a medium who reports a tightness in the chest and offers it as the manner of someone's death is working clairsentiently. Less common terms extend the pattern, claircognisance for knowing without any route to the knowledge, and clairalience and clairgustance for smell and taste, which are usually invoked over a deceased person's tobacco or perfume.

Two distinctions are worth holding on to.

The first is between psychic and medium, and practitioners themselves draw it firmly. A psychic is described as reading the living, a person, a situation, a decision, a future, while a medium is specifically claimed to communicate with the dead. Most mediums say they are also psychic; almost none say the reverse follows.

The second is that all of these words describe how information is said to arrive, not what is being claimed about where it comes from. A practitioner reporting clairaudience is reporting the form of an experience. Whether the voice originates outside the practitioner is a separate question, and it is one on which practitioners are not uniform: some describe an external communicator quite literally, others speak of an inner faculty and are content to leave the metaphysics open. The vocabulary accommodates both, which is part of why it has spread so easily.

The words themselves are recent. Clairvoyance enters English from French in the early nineteenth century in the context of mesmerism, before Spiritualism existed to use it. The full set, with its subdivisions and its accompanying advice on identifying which sense is one's strongest, is a twentieth and twenty-first century elaboration, standardised largely through the popular literature and the paid teaching courses that go with it.

Mediumship makes claims of two kinds, and they have very different standing.

The first is a claim about experience: that practitioners undergo something distinctive, and that sitters find the encounter meaningful. That much is not seriously disputed by anyone. The historical and sociological work on Spiritualism describes a movement that gave many people, women in particular, a public platform they had no other route to in the nineteenth century, and the consolation offered to the bereaved is a real effect whatever its source.

The second is a claim about information, that a medium can state facts about a deceased person which they had no ordinary means of knowing. That is testable, and it has been tested continuously since the founding of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882, an organisation established for precisely this purpose by people who largely hoped to confirm it.

The record is long and the outcome is not favourable. Where controls have been tight, the medium blind to the sitter, the sitter blind to which of several readings is theirs, the statements scored by people who do not know their source, results have generally not exceeded chance, and the studies that reported positive effects have proved difficult to replicate. Fraud has also been found often enough to bear on the question: several of the most celebrated physical mediums of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were caught outright. Catching one does not settle the case against another, but it does affect how the field's own testimony should be weighed, and the investigators of the period said so themselves.

Cold reading is the standard alternative account of a successful sitting. It names a set of techniques, high-probability guesses, statements broad enough to fit most people, close attention to the sitter's reactions, and reliance on the sitter to supply the specifics and afterwards to misremember who supplied them, which together can produce a convincing reading from no information at all. It has been demonstrated deliberately, by sceptics and by stage performers who make no paranormal claim whatever. It does not demonstrate that any particular medium is using it.

The replies from practitioners deserve stating fairly. Many hold that the faculty is unreliable and will not perform to order, that laboratory conditions suppress it, and that a reading is a relationship rather than a transfer of data. Those are coherent positions and some of them are probably true. They also, followed through, place the claim permanently beyond the reach of testing, and that consequence should be named rather than left to be inferred.