Séance

'Patrick Swayze. Can you hear us?'

A Séance is supposed to be a method to communicate with the dead. It involves hiring a medium to act like a human wi-fi and connect directly with your relatives (or anyone else) who died and now lives in another world, though it is perhaps best to qualify 'live' as ghosts lead very dull post morten lives it appears.

Origins

The human desire to talk to dead people long predates M. Night Shyamalan and religion. Once people moved on from their animal ancestors and that eating dead relatives was perhaps a bad idea (exceptions aside), the wish to seek other worldy advice from beyond the grave became very popular. As I said, many religions require it. Life after death is the promise that if you kept paying into a religious sect, your spiritual salvation would greatly be augmented when it came for the final curtain call.

Talking to the dead can get you killed

You can play the trumpet via your ectoplasm in a trance.

Once one certain religion insisted that their communication with God was the only legitimate channel, all other forms of 'talking to dead people' was classified as heretical and probably demonic. Those voices you said you heard were not auntie Doris or uncle Albert but Satan himself whispering from hell. So as a consequence those who claimed a link into the spirit world were in mortal danger.

Attitudes at least in Europe began to chance in the 18th century. There were invisible sources of power on Earth but they belonged to the scientific world. Sir Isaac Newton said so and had barrels of apples to prove it. Later philosophers suggested the spirit world was what you found behind a bar counter.

'It's behind you!!'

Fakery

The art of holding a séance and performing magic tricks got combined in the late 19th century. People expected to see their dead relatives to reappear so many people who claimed they could communicate with the dead used bizarre props or black costumed helpers to provide the 'right atmosphere'. To get people to believe in complete balderdash. Others welcomed photographs to show people 'their art'. It was all becoming quite farcical. With that and the regurgitation trick to provide 'ectoplasm'...it was all becoming quite disgusting.

Seances today

If you can't afford a medium, try this Ouija board. It's like texting the dead one letter at a time.

Seances today are very different from earlier. Earlier attempts to physically 'conjuring' up the dead were precisely that. Trickey, people at the seance were expecting to see people physically present. This lead to 'mediums' regurgitating cheese cloth out of their mouths or in other examples, out of vaginas (reason why women were 'better' at this fraud then men. This material was called 'ectoplasm' which as an idea, got recycled into Ghostbusters.

Other defunct tricks included 'levitation' which was done with hidden wires. All these methods eventually boiled down to the simplier act of a medium claiming they were in contact with the dead - and using their own voices to do it.

So today your choice is hiring a medium. They come in all shapes and sizes. Some have a range of funny voices like the medium in Poltergeist.

See Also?

• No, hear only.