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Paper short abstract

Among British Spiritualists, contact with the eternal is fundamentally oriented around the daily and unextraordinary presence of the dead. Ritual practice, and cosmology itself, are constituted via ordinary ethical relations and the provision of care between mediums, sitters, and spirits.

Paper long abstract

British Spiritualists experience the presence of the dead in everyday micro-moments of attentiveness, becoming progressively ‘attuned’ towards awareness of spirits. Perceiving the dead as accompanying the living constitutes an ethical relation of care between humans and spirits. Presence emerges through fleeting sensations, affects, coincidences, dreams, and a sense of ‘never walking alone.’ Eternity is not a rupture, but paradoxically an ordinary overlap between the timeless spirit-world and lived human temporality. Resisting normative separations between ritual and everyday reality, I show how collective mediumship events normalise spiritual presence beyond church settings. Séances, occurring in deliberately well-lit rather than darkened rooms, encourage regular conversation, laughter, and joking with the dead. Rather than constituting extraordinary moments of transcendence, mediumship consolidates ordinary relationality, allowing the dead to become known as ever-present companions in daily life. At the same time, Spiritualists’ insistence upon everyday spiritual connection shapes ritual action in a circular manner, as pragmatic worldly considerations determine which human-spirit relations come into view. Mediumship is fundamentally an ethical practice, oriented around providing healing to the bereaved through evidence that the deceased live on. Spirits who are not kin of ritual participants are deliberately ‘sent away,’ as they cannot fulfil this ethical duty. Mediumship paradoxically circumscribes transcendence: only spirits embedded in kinship networks and human temporalities acquire cosmological significance. Care relations, rather than sovereign spiritual agency, determine the presence of the so-called transcendent, positioning mediums as ethical “mediants” (Appadurai 2015). In Spiritualism, I contend, ethical reciprocity and co-participation most centrally underpin lived experiences of eternity.