Concept
In Spiritism and Spiritualism, the role of the medium is to be an intermediary between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Mediums claim to be able to listen to and relay messages from spirits or allow a spirit to control their body and speak through it directly or by using automatic writing or drawing.
Spiritualists classify types of mediumship into two main categories: "mental" and "physical". Mental mediums are believed to "tune in" to the spirit world by listening, sensing, or seeing spirits or symbols. Physical mediums are believed to produce materialization of spirits, apports of objects, levitation, and other effects such as knocking, rapping, bell ringing, etc. by using "ectoplasm" created from the cells of their bodies and those of seance attendees. During seances, mediums are said to go into trances, varying from light to deep, that permit their minds to be controlled by spirits.
Mediumship is also part of the belief system of some New Age groups. In this context, and under the name "channelling", it refers to a medium (the channel) who is said to receive messages from a "teaching-spirit".
Read more about this topic: Mediumship
Famous quotes containing the word concept:
“The concept is interesting: to see, as though reflected
In streaming windowpanes, the look of others through
Their own eyes.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“The new concept of the child as equal and the new integration of children into adult life has helped bring about a gradual but certain erosion of these boundaries that once separated the world of children from the word of adults, boundaries that allowed adults to treat children differently than they treated other adults because they understood that children are different.”
—Marie Winn (20th century)
“The latest creed that has to be believed
And entered in our childish catechism
Is that the All’s a concept self-conceived,
Which is no more than good old Pantheism.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)