The nineteenth-century seance movement that sought the spirit world through physical mediumship, which Steiner read as a materialistic detour, not a path.
Spiritism in Anthroposophy is the nineteenth-century mediumistic seance movement that sought to prove the existence of a spiritual world through physical phenomena: rappings, table-turning, materializations, and the speech of entranced mediums. In his Berlin lecture The History of Spiritism (GA 52, 30 May 1904), Rudolf Steiner traced its lineage from Emanuel Swedenborg through the American seer Andrew Jackson Davis and the rappings of 1848 to the French systematizer Allan Kardec. He read it as a child of the materialistic age: a demand that the supersensible be verified through the senses, in the same laboratory manner used to confirm magnetism or light. For Steiner this was a category error. The spiritual cannot be reached by dragging it down into sensory proof; it asks instead for the development of spiritual organs of perception. Spiritism is therefore not a wrong belief so much as a wrong method, the materialistic shadow of a genuine longing for the worlds beyond the senses.
In Steiner's Own Words
The personality from whom the entire spiritualist movement originated is one of the most remarkable in the world: Swedenborg. The entire 18th century was under his influence. Even Kant grappled with him. The personality who was able to bring the modern spiritualist movement into being had to be someone like Swedenborg. He was born in 1688 and died in 1772. In the first half of his life, he was a natural scientist who was at the forefront of the natural sciences of his time.
What it Means Today
Steiner's reading is confirmed, oddly enough, by the historians who take Spiritism most seriously. Ann Braude, in Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Beacon Press, 1989), dates the movement precisely to 31 March 1848, when Kate and Margaret Fox of Hydesville, New York, announced that the knocks in their farmhouse answered questions. Braude shows that the movement spread not as a return to ancient mystery wisdom but as a thoroughly modern experiment: empirical, democratic, and obsessed with evidence. Mediums were tested like scientific instruments, seances were logged like laboratory runs, and the dead were asked to perform on demand. This is exactly the posture Steiner names in GA 52, the demand that the supersensible justify itself by the same sensory proof used for magnetism or electricity.
Thalira synthesis: Spiritism is the root chakra of the spiritual search, the moment longing for the eternal grips the table-leg rather than the will. Steiner's correction was never to deny the phenomena, many of which he granted, but to refuse the method that read a knock as knowledge. The Anthroposophical path runs the other way: instead of pulling spirit down into a darkened parlour, the seeker develops the inner organs by which the spiritual becomes as directly perceptible as colour is to the opened eye. Spiritism asked the spirit to descend to the senses. Steiner asked the seeker to ascend.
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