Mediumship

Mediumship in Spiritism and Spiritualism is the ability of certain people —known as mediums— to mediate communication between dead people and living human beings.

Traditionally, Theosophists have been opposed to this practice, which was regarded as "abnormal" by Mahatma K. H. H. P. Blavatsky defined it as follows:

Mediumship. A word now accepted to indicate that abnormal psycho-physiological state which leads a person to take the fancies of his imagination, his hallucinations, real or artificial, for realities. No entirely healthy person on the physiological and psychic planes can ever be a medium. That which mediums see, hear, and sense, is "real" but untrue; it is either gathered from the astral plane, so deceptive in its vibrations and suggestions, or from pure hallucinations, which have no actual existence, but for him who perceives them. "Mediumship" is a kind of vulgarised mediatorship in which one afflicted with this faculty is supposed to become an agent of communication between a living man and a departed "Spirit." There exist regular methods of training for the development of this undesirable acquirement.

H. P. Blavatsky considered that "on the whole, mediumship is most dangerous". She wrote:

The medium’s moral state determines the kind of spirits that come; and the spirits that come reciprocally influence the medium, intellectually, physically, and morally. The perfection of his mediumship is in ratio to his passivity, and the danger he incurs is in equal degree. When he is fully “developed” — perfectly passive — his own astral spirit may be benumbed, and even crowded out of his body, which is then occupied by an elemental, or, what is worse, by a human fiend of the eighth sphere, who proceeds to use it as his own. But too often the cause of the most celebrated crime is to be sought in such possessions.

Besides its dangers, the development a medium has to go through is regarded as the opposite to the one promoted by the Mahatmas:

Mediumship is the opposite of adeptship; the medium is the passive instrument of foreign influences, the adept actively controls himself and all inferior potencies.

Spirit guides

Mediums' "spirit guides", also called "controls", are entities thought to remain as disincarnate spirits, acting as a teacher or protector of the living medium. In this view, spirit guides can include dead people, saints or other enlightened individuals, gods, angels, nature spirits, and even animals.

H. P. Blavatsky and the Mahatmas frequently warned that most of the times the spirit guides are shells, elementals, and elementaries:

Often [the "control"] is but a shell in its preliminary stage of dissolution, when most of the physical intelligence and faculties are yet fresh and have not begun to disintegrate, or fade out. A “spirit,” or the spiritual Ego, cannot descend to the medium, but it can attract the spirit of the latter to itself, and it can do this only during the two intervals—before and after its “gestation period.”

If the medium is of a spiritual nature there can be some rare cases where he can get in touch with a spiritual entity, by raising his consciousness to that realm:

A pure medium’s Ego can be drawn to and made, for an instant, to unite in a magnetic (?) relation with a real disembodied spirit, whereas the soul of an impure medium can only confabulate with the astral soul, or “shell,” of the deceased. The former possibility explains those extremely rare cases of direct writing in recognized autographs, and of messages from the higher class of disembodied intelligences. We should say then that the personal morality of the medium would be a fair test of the genuineness of the manifestation.

Further reading

• Mediumship at Theosopedia