ACCESSING YOUR INTUITION
How Would I Know If I’m A Medium?
ing how to win the battle against the wicked, illegitimate Powers that seek to keep the soul entrapped in the world and ignorant of its true spiritual nature.” From the time of Constantine into the next millennium, the Cath- olic Church’s papacy became the authority that governed. Any devi- ation from their beliefs, with an emphasis to not engage with medi- ums, was heresy punishable by death, as clearly stated in Leviticus 20:27, “A man or woman who is a medium or a necromancer shall surely be put to death. They shall be stoned with stones; their blood shall be upon them.” Joan of Arc, who had celestial visions and heard disincarnate voices, led the French army into victory against the En- glish. Joan continued to claim she heard divine voices until the very end, when in 1431, the English tried and condemned her as a heretic and burned her at the stake.
BY ANNIE LARSON
Seer, prophet, oracle, sibyl, necromancer, spiritualist, clairvoyant, witch, shaman, psychic, and medium… These are all words used to de- scribe the ability to communicate with disincarnate beings who supply information or messages to the living. Throughout history all cultures and religions have held some form of belief of life after life. We are spiritual beings having a human experience , Pierre Teilhard de Char- din, a Jesuit priest and scientist who died in 1955, reminds us. Mediumship is met with both skepticism and awe. In a 2021 study conducted by the Pew Research Center, about seventy percent of Americans say it is possible to feel the presence of someone who has died , while forty seven percent believe they can communicate with
them in some way. Religious influence may also play a role in how you approach the belief in communicating with loved ones in spirit. Indeed, we’ve seen how religion has played a role in shaping beliefs throughout history, including attitudes toward the mystical and metaphysical. From my own experience as a medium, skeptics become believers once they have lost a loved one that they wish to communicate with and experience evidentiary proof during a mediumship session. Believer, skeptic, or somewhere in between, it is worth exploring your own connection to the spirit world by first understanding what mediumship is, its historical background, and the characteristics associated with what it means to have medi- umistic abilities.
Throughout the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic Church was the theocratic authori- ty in all of Europe, until Martin Luther, tired of their corruption, posted his 95 Theses on the Castle Church door in Wittenberg, Ger- many; and thus, the Protestant Reformation was born, on October 31, 1517. It’s interesting that Luther picked the ancient Celtic festi- val of Samhain (modern day Halloween) — when the veil is very thin, and costumes are worn to ward off spirits that are allowed to walk the earth — to make his revolutionary proclamation. Coming out of the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, early Modern Europe be - gan with a wave of witch hunts, accusations, and executions. In England, King Henry VIII believed his second wife, Anne Boleyn en-
chanted him; and with her inability to produce him a male heir, Hen- ry accused her of sorcery, adultery, and incest, and she was executed in 1536. A few years later, King Henry VIII’s Act of 1541 was the first to make the “practise or exercise…[of] an Invovacons, or cojuracons of Sprites witchecraftes enchauntements or sorceries to thentent to fynde money or treasure” illegal and punishable by death. Many, mostly elderly, unwed, or independent women, were exe - cuted in a 90-year period spanning 1560 to 1670. This eventually ex - tended to the puritanical American Colonies, which were at the height of witch hunts during the Salem witch trials, in Massachusetts, from 1692 to 1693. In 1702, the Salem witch trials were declared unlawful in the Colonies, as written in “A Brief History of the Salem Witch Tri- als,” by Jess Blumberg in Smithsonian Magazine . The last innocent woman accused of being a witch was executed in Europe in 1782, after which time the suppression of mostly women accused of witchcraft began to fade. In the 1800s, as America transitioned from an agrarian society to an industrialized one, inventions like the telegraph made commu - nication across vast expanses seem like magic. It’s no wonder that a belief in mediums and communicating with the disincarnate grew. In 1848 in a farmhouse in Hydesville, New York, the Fox sisters be - gan communicating with otherworldly intelligence through a series of audible raps on their bedroom walls, and Spiritualism was born. Spiritualists believe that consciousness exists outside the human physical body, and spirits can be communicated with by virtue of a medium , or go between, between the two worlds. Like Pierre Teil-
A Brief Summary of Mediumship Throughout History Communicating with spirits is recorded as early as in the Hebrew Bible, where Saul, the king of Israel, asks the mistress of Endor (a Seer) to communicate with the spirit of the prophet Samuel (who, by the way, when he was alive, was against such sorcery ) to gain insight on defeating the Philistines. As history portends, the Endor medium didn’t give Saul good news about the battle. Saul’s sons were slain, and he committed suicide on Mount Gilboa in the 11 th century BCE. The suppression of paganism, esoteric beliefs and practices was greatly influenced by the conversion of Constantine the Great to Ca - tholicism, after he had a vision of a great illuminated cross before a battle. He won the battle, and as Emperor of Rome, he and all his sub- jects converted. To bring consistency to the Bible and unite Catholic teachings, in 325 AD Constantine created the First Council of Nicaea, where 318 Christian bishops met to mold the New Testament as we know it today. Many gospels of the Bible were discarded or destroyed; and if it wasn’t for the sale of antiquities in Egypt in the 1800s and the discov - ery of the Dead Seas Scrolls in 1946, we might not ever have known there were other gospels written with references to mystical practices. Take, for instance, the Gospel of Mary, a fragment of which resurfaced in Egypt in the late 1800s, nearly 1500 years after it was originally written. According to the account written in The Gospel of Mary of Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle, by Karen L. King, Mary comforts the disciples of Jesus by explaining his prophecy from a vision she received from him, “The Savior had explained to her the nature of prophecy and the rise of the soul to its final rest, describ -
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PATHWAYS—Winter 23—11
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