Mediumship in Theory and Practice

About the Author

André Kirsebom founded what has become the largest Spiritualist Union in Norway, the Norwegian Spiritualist Church, where he also serves as a Minister. His education includes certificates and diplomas in mediumship, healing and teaching from the Spiritualist National Union, other training, as well as a Master’s Degree in Entrepreneurship. André teaches mediumship and healing internationally, along with conducting research on these themes. Combined, these experiences form the basis for his three spiritual textbooks, guided meditations, and a spiritual novel. His approach is pragmatic and emerges from the wish to contribute to win-win outcomes for ourselves, other people and spirit.

Dedication

I want to thank and dedicate this book to my father, who was an author. He went over to the spirit world in the year 2000. He inspired me, both with his own writings while he was among us and in that he has been with me while I wrote this book. Likewise, I thank the guides that have helped me in the teaching I’ve done over many years; they have taught me a lot.

Copyright Information ©

André Kirsebom 2024

The right of André Kirsebom to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781528915502 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781528919791 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2024

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

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Acknowledgement

I want to thank the many people who have helped me on my spiritual journey. First and foremost, I want to thank my family for their support. I’ve had long working hours in my spiritual work and in writing this book. A special thanks to my children Kaja, Andrea and Linn for their patience and to my mother Annelise, who has supported me on my spiritual journey. Thanks also to PhD Marie Holm, who has translated this book and helped me get it published.

Path of Life

By using a full stop, means that

You are preparing for someone new.

By using a comma, means that

You stand still.

– André Kirsebom

Time is the soul of this world.

– Pythagoras

Introduction

This book is intended as a complete textbook in introductory mediumship, but could also be used to learn clairvoyance. The book contains many practical exercises and a substantial portion of theory. It will give you an understanding of how the spirit world works. The book is aimed at those who want to learn clairvoyance and mediumship, lead development circles, become certified and work with mediumship. It is also intended as a book that can help those who want to teach these subjects.

The book will provide you with the necessary theory to become certified as a medium. Important topics that will be addressed include differences between the various types of mediumship, ethics, history and theory of the spirit world. The theory in the book is based on three sources. The first is recognised literature. There is a wide range in the quality of what has been published on this topic. The second is the knowledge I have accumulated from courses, observations and conversations with many of the world’s best mediums. The third source is derived from how leading spiritual organisations in the world view these issues at present. We have acquired much of the information from the United Kingdom and the United States, which have the longest and strongest tradition in modern Spiritualism, but we also include information from Scandinavia and other countries.

The practical part of the book contains many exercises in both clairvoyance and mediumship. Each theme begins with a theoretical explanation about the topic before presenting the exercises which are on different levels and will therefore suit circles or courses of all levels. Within each chapter there are first some simple exercises and then some more challenging ones. The tasks are marked by level of difficulty so that it is easy to choose the right exercise for the level you are at. It is important to succeed in the whole or in part of the exercises for you to make good progress in your development. Do not wear yourself out on the more difficult exercises if you have not yet reached the required skill level, as it may weaken your confidence.

Towards the end of the book I will address three specific topics within mediumship. These themes are spiritual house cleansing, trance and physical mediumship. There will be a mixture of theory and practical mediumship in the first two topics. The chapter about physical mediumship is theoretical, since this requires more guidance.

Before starting the book, I would like to give you a word of advice in relation to your development. When you start practicing mediumship it means you also train your sensitivity. This means that you will become a more sensitive person. It is therefore important to learn how to open and close yourself in relation to energies. This requires discipline. How you can achieve this is described at the beginning of the practical part of the book. If you have problems with this, I strongly advise you to take a course or make an appointment with a good teacher.

A set of four meditation recordings has been made to match the exercises in this book, called Contact with the Spirits. If you have not already bought it, I recommend to do so. It will make it easier to improve your mediumship.

The Author

A loud bang sounded when the lightbulb in the lamp hanging above me exploded. It shattered into a thousand pieces over my head and the glass of the bulb flew around the room. Totally scared is the only way to describe the feeling I got when this happened. Just before the explosion, I was sitting philosophising about religion and spirituality. After the incident, I promised myself never to think about such things again. But let me tell you the following story as background.

I grew up in a home with different religious opinions, although it was rarely an issue. My mother was originally Christian, but did not practise her religion. My stepfather was Christian, but like many other Norwegians only went to church for important ceremonies and Christmas. My father, whom I visited on weekends and holidays, was an atheist, yet it was he who had the strongest opinions about religion. We often talked about religion, and our discussions led me to sign myself out of the Norwegian Protestant State Church as soon as I was 16 and could decide for myself. I was strongly against both the Protestant and Catholic religions. The reasons for this were many, but the most important was that the churches did not live up to their religion or to the expectations one should be able to have of them. I have never been able to understand why fences are put around churches in Norway or why the doors are locked. If this is a house of God, then the doors of the church need to be open. I am of the opinion that some churches should be always open. People need to have a place to meet with their God at any time, day or night. I also had great difficulties in comprehending the Crusades of the past and Missionaries in our modern times. In my opinion it is wrong to stand with bread in one hand and the Bible in the other.

Religion is something personal and a thing that each person must be allowed to decide for themselves, without having it imposed on them by other people. For me, much of the Christian doctrines are inconsistent. The Bible tells us how to live, while the church itself does not adhere to this doctrine. The Christians have persecuted many people throughout history and still do this with certain groups that do not fit into their beliefs. An example of this is that many clergy are still against homosexuality. These are just some of the things I disliked about the Christian religion. To include all of the reasons here would take far too long, so instead I’ll return to the story of the exploding lightbulb. (I still have the lamp; a picture of it is below).

With this angry feeling towards Christianity I sat down and philosophised about religion. While I philosophised, I said to myself that it must be possible to start a denomination that was much better than what we had. I was feeling agitated as I sat there pondering how I could achieve this, when suddenly an ordinary 60W light bulb exploded! I was terrified because I did not know what kind of forces had created the explosion. Was it God or other forces I did not know about? Regardless, I promised myself there and then that I would never think such thoughts again.

I decided to forget the idea about starting a new and better church. Still, the thought crept back the next day while I was pondering about the meaning of what happened. My conclusion was that I should take it as a sign from God to not pursue these thoughts any further, and soon I forgot about it.

It was not until I was in my mid-forties, and a half year after I started the NST (Norwegian Spiritualist Church) that I remembered this incident. In retrospect, I realise that it was intended that I should start a religious community, but I was not ready for this at the age of 17. So the spirit world’s methods of scaring me off from exploring these thoughts were indeed very effective. What’s interesting about this is that when I look back on my life, I have often been led into studies and work that prepared me to start the NST. Initially, I was not particularly fond of speaking in public. The reason for that is probably that I have dyslexia and had difficulty making presentations in class while I was in elementary and high school. But my work as a tour guide both in Spain and in Norway changed this. On the Canary Islands and Ibiza, I learned how to deal with people and to be at the centre of their attention. After I returned home from working in Spain, I continued to work as a tour manager in Norway. Here I worked for 11 summers taking tourists from the United States and other countries all around Scandinavia. This meant that I became fluent in English and good at planning. This was still the time where things had to be organised without mobile phones, which made us better at planning than people are today, where details can be fixed in a second.

I was first educated at the post-graduate level in hotel management, then in marketing and finally acquired an English MBA. Within the hotel management studies from The Norwegian School of Hotel Management, I learned much about psychology, sociology, and pedagogy and personnel administration. I received good training in all these subjects both theoretically and through practical experience. This has proven to be very useful since I work a lot with people. It takes a lot of such knowledge to build a new administration and is particularly challenging when you build up something which is based on voluntary work, where people contribute by their own free will. At NMH (Norwegian Marketing School) I learned about marketing. This was important in order to build up the organisation in an affordable, yet effective way. The Norwegian Management School (BI) was another place where I deepened my entrepreneurial skills. This has been a recurring theme through my life. I have created and worked in companies and projects ranging from sole proprietorships to large companies like Telenor, the largest telecom company in Norway. So establishing organisations is probably what I acquired the best experience in. I started several businesses of my own: a gaming company, a restaurant and my current healing and channelling practice called Aspirit. I have also been involved in establishing many other companies. One of them included the opening of a nightclub in Oslo. In addition, I have worked with several projects in Telenor. The last project I was involved with there was establishing ADSL broadband for Telenor. When I look back on all of this, it became clear that I learned all that was needed to start a spiritual community. The conclusion I have come to is that I had to gain all this experience before entering the world of spirituality and being heard by the spirit world, who have guided me ever since.

Today I work full time with healing, channelling and teaching courses. For the first time in my life, I have found a profession that I have been able to fully commit myself to and enjoy for many years. In all my previous jobs, I became bored after a short time as I don’t really like routines. In my current job I have to give my best every day, and I thrive on this. You never know what results you will achieve through your work and I cannot anticipate who will come while I’m channelling or what I will hear, or as to how the healing will work with each individual client. This means that I constantly have to be prepared for anything and to always work to the best of my ability. That’s what makes my work so satisfying. In addition, I do lots of voluntary work for both NSF and NST. To build up both the Union and the religious community is an important part of my work and this is where much of my previous working experience comes in handy.

Many who work with mediumship have had spiritual experiences since they were children. I am an exception in this respect. I grew up in a home that had no contact with the spirit world. Though my teenage years, I found myself interested in the paranormal and parapsychology. For me, this direction was natural although at that time I had no knowledge of Spiritualism. I read books by Erich von Däniken and other special books on parapsychology. It was during the Cold War that we found out that both the U.S. and Soviet were doing research in these areas. What we talked about then was psychic viewing, which means being able to see things through ESP and PR.

ESP, which means extrasensory perception, means to take in information from others. Parapsychology focuses primarily on communication between people and does not have a strong focus on the spirit world. In that sense their direction is more in line with what we call clairvoyance rather than contact with those who have passed on. I had an understanding that this was possible though, which led me to take courses about ESP through recordings.

Although the lightbulb incident was the most dramatic sign of my ability to connect with the spirit world, this was not the only occurrence. I had many mediumistic and psychic experiences during my youth. One of the most notable was when I spoke the name of a person that I knew nothing about. This happened during private lessons in Spanish I was getting from an adult female friend of the family. Since we knew each other well, we often joked around between the lessons and on one occasion I happened to say to her: Imagine if you had been a man, you could have had the name Olav. What do you think that would have been like? She became very upset with me, except I hadn’t noticed. She reprimanded me and told me I had acted badly. I had no idea what she was talking about and when I asked, she insisted that I knew only too well what I had done. About half a year later I learned that this woman had changed gender, and the name that I had mentioned was the name she used before. Unknowingly, my innocent remark had hurt her. She was sure that someone had told me her story since I had mentioned her former name. After that we lost contact and I never got the chance to talk to her about the incident.

In 2004, I started to write a book. This was a suspense novel for adolescents and young adults. In the story I included some people who had skills in healing and mediumship. While I was doing research work for this book, strange things started happening again around me. A psychic lady I interviewed told me that I had the ability to channel. Right afterwards, another lady came into the restaurant, which I managed together with my wife, and gave me a book about her life as a medium. I took these two things as a signal that I needed to pursue the matter. I found a course at the Arthur Findlay College in England. During the first course, I received clear evidence that I had strong potential for both healing and channelling. After this good experience, I decided to study healing and mediumship with the purpose of developing them. I wanted to completely change my career and start anew. Throughout my life I have always been curious and liked to dig deep into the things I was engaged in. Therefore, I saw what I was doing as more of a complete education rather than just taking some courses. To do this, I combined many practical courses to create my own educational pathway. I do not know exactly how many courses I took the first years, but it must have been about 10 between Norway, Sweden and England. Alongside the courses, I read a lot and took various theory and correspondence courses from England. To gain experience, I gradually started working in the field of healing, then with mediumship, while I continued to expand. Even now I continue to study mediumship and spirituality. Today I’m among those who possess the most knowledge in these fields in Norway. For me it is important to pass on this knowledge, which I do through my courses in healing, mediumship, spiritual house cleansing and courses for spiritual ministers.

For me it was very important to acquire a good education in the topics that I teach to others. It is especially vital because there are so many ways that spirituality can be understood. The knowledge within spirituality diverges in different directions so it’s hard to know what is correct. Many versions of the truth exist. Nevertheless, it is possible to see the differences in the quality that exists in these areas. There is a difference between the credibility of those who have conducted research in the field and people who say that they have had a subjective revelation. That does not mean a subjective or personal revelation or channelling from a guide is wrong. But those who are sceptical will want proof that the medium really has had contact and that it isn’t something that comes from the medium’s own imagination.

The easiest way evidence can be obtained, is that the medium can demonstrate that he or she can also channel the deceased, as this provides the clearest evidence that you have contact. When you know that a medium can do their job, you can also rely more on what is channelled from their guides. In England, Spiritualism has existed for more than 170 years. This means that people have had time to research and have found out how to distinguish between good and bad mediumship. There are almost a thousand spiritualist churches in the UK today where channelling is practised. This means that today we can draw on the experience and knowledge from the best mediums both past and present. This I have done. It is also important to study the different directions in contemporary spirituality, since there are several ways for it to be interpreted. It becomes really interesting when you combine this with modern knowledge from psychology, religious psychology and philosophy. In this book I endeavour to convey the foundation of the central philosophy of this field. It will provide a theoretical understanding that will assist you later on when you will work on a practical approach to your mediumship.

By 2005, I started working full time as a healer and medium. I started with healing and continued with mediumship the following year. There was demand for my work in Moss, where I started my practice. I later moved to Oslo in 2013 where I now have my office.

It was not long before I started training others in healing and mediumship. People asked me to set up courses, which I did, with help from the spirit world. In the beginning of 2006, I took courses in hypnotherapy which have been extremely valuable as an extra aid alongside healing of my clients.

One of the most important aspects in my development was that I cultivated a relationship with Spiritualism. After I signed myself out of the State Church as a 16 year old, I had not found any denomination that I felt suited me. I had a belief in the existence of a divine energy and that there was something more than this life, but this did not fit with any established religion. When I started at the Arthur Findlay College in England, this changed. I became familiar with Spiritualism and had many good experiences there. One of the most beautiful occurrences I experienced was when an older man who, during a spiritual service made contact with his beloved wife. She had passed over 10 years earlier. The medium that brought her through did a great job, and I saw how happy and touched this man was to have his first contact with her since she’d died. Tears of joy flowed in great streams down his face. This and similar happenings ensured that I understood how much good Spiritualism can do for people. One of the most important things is getting in touch with those who have passed on. This does two things for us. The first is the contact we have with them. This helps us emotionally to cope with loss and grief related to those who have passed away. The other benefit is not as apparent, but is equally important. When we can accept that we can communicate with the dead, it means that we ourselves do not need to fear death. We will understand that we also will continue to exist on the other side. This is very important for us when we grow old and have to face the fact that life eventually will end.

Apart from clear evidence from channelling, I have also met many very benevolent and spiritual people on my journeys. This made me decide to bring Spiritualism to Norway. In autumn 2006, I started to plan how I could establish this.

The idea was discussed with people who attended my courses, and after a while we started a small group who worked together to establish this. The support from the group made it possible for me to establish the Norwegian Spiritualist Church (NST), Norwegian Spiritualist Union (NSF), as well as the Norwegian Spiritualist Union Healer Association (NSH) and Mediums Association (NSFM).

Each of these organisations contributes towards fulfilling the needs that we have. Spiritualism is offered to those who want it as their religion. For me this was important because I wanted it be on the same lines as in the United Kingdom and many other places in the world.

The establishment of these organisations took place in 2007 and we have grown well since then. The Spiritualist organisation is approved by the government, and we have full marriage rights. There was substantial work involved to achieve this, but I must say it has been worth the effort. It’s great to be part of giving people the opportunity to find a religion that suits them. One of the issues that were important to me when I started the NST was that we would be an alternative to other religions and also to be accepted on equal terms. We are not better than other religions and we are not inferior. This means that we fully accept other religions. Each person can find their way to God and all roads are equally good. This does not mean we agree with all that religion does to people. We do not agree with the way many religions punish their believers, but we have full acceptance of the original core that their religion is based on. This principle has been important for me since by starting NST I did not want to create a religion that says we are better than others and that ours is the only way to salvation. We do not want to cause new religious conflicts, rather to be an option for those who want to be a Spiritualist. This has been an important principle for me right from the start and one which I practise in my daily work. The fact that I was able to start NST and develop it to what it is today, makes me both proud and humble. I thank the spirit world for this.

Further happenings

Something magical of being on a spiritual journey is that there is always new evidence emerging. While writing this book, I was in a healing circle in the village of Rena in Norway. We were six healers plus the client who was lying down on a table. Under my guidance, we worked only with red light during the healing. (Red light gives a dimmer vision). I placed myself right under the red light bulb. During the healing I decided to build up more energy so that it would be available to the spirits who were present. While I built up this energy a loud bang came from the bulb and the fuse went. Whether it was my energy or the spirit world’s is debatable, but it is clear that lightbulbs tend to react around me!

My credentials

I am an approved healer and certified platform medium from the SNU (Spiritualist National Union) in the UK. I’m also the only person in Norway who has the most degrees from the SNU. I also have CSNU (Certificates from the SNU) as Demonstrator, Healer, Public Speaker and Teacher. In addition, I have a DSNU (Diploma), which is a higher level, as Public Speaker, Healer, Teacher and Advanced Spiritualism. I work daily with mediumship and healing and specialise in spiritual house cleansing. In addition, I work with spiritual counselling, hypnotherapy, helping people stop smoking and regression in my organisation—Aspirit: www.aspirit.no

I have four published books, namely this one, plus two educational books on healing and a novel. I am writing a fifth book on spiritual awareness and providing English versions of the existing Norwegian books.

Part 1—Theory

What is Mediumship and Clairvoyance?

The definition of mediumship is when a medium is a channel between the spirit world and the human world. The definition of a clairvoyant is a person who perceives the energy of another person, the sitter, who is asking for help. The clairvoyant is merely reading the energy and aura of the sitter. If the clairvoyant also makes contact with the spirit world, such as a guide, then this person can be defined as a medium. A medium’s job is to provide contact, much like an interpreter, or as a catalyst for transmitting energy. This connection can also happen occasionally to all people. What distinguishes a medium is that they can make this contact whenever they wish with reliable results. A professional medium must be able to work anytime and anywhere. That’s when you can call it a profession.

Mediumistic contact can happen many ways and we therefore divide mediumship into several categories. The majority of these will be treated in sections of this book, but here we give you a definition of how they are different and similar to each other. The most important are the two main categories: mental and physical mediumship.

Mental mediumship

In mental mediumship, communication goes through the medium’s body and brain. Since the medium use their own mind, we call it mental mediumship. The medium uses their mental capacity to a greater or lesser degree. An example of this is channelling where a deceased loved one makes contact with a medium to give information for a sitter. Channelling is the term that we use to refer to communication with the spirit world. A person communicates through the medium, as the below sketch shows.

Channelling

Communication can occur via different senses, of which the most common are seeing, feeling and hearing. Since this communication occurs through the medium’s conscious and subconscious mind, the communication will be affected by the medium. It is affected by the medium’s knowledge, history, experiences, thoughts and opinions. Ideally, a medium will have minimal influence on the communication, but such communication is impossible without a certain degree of influence from the medium. We can evaluate the degree of clarity in the transmission by a medium. This is a percentage scale indicating how much the medium affects the communication. We will explore this further in the book in the section about trance mediumship.

When we say that communication is affected by the medium’s knowledge, it is on the basis that the medium cannot understand information that they don’t already possess. To channel something about a specific subject, a medium must be familiar with the theme to be able to explain what one sees, hears or otherwise perceives. A medium in the 1800s would describe a car like a cart without a horse, since at that time they did not know what a car was. While channelling, a medium will typically be limited by the knowledge they have.

The communication will also be affected by the medium’s culture, history and experience. If the medium grew in a Christian faith, he or she will have different views on some issues than a medium who is a Spiritualist or atheist. This is why we as mediums can interpret situations differently. A Christian medium who brings through a guide who has similarities to Mary Magdalene might interpret the guide as being Mary Magdalene, because of their religion. If a medium who is Spiritualist brings through the same guide, this medium would most likely first describe what the woman’s appearance. After this, a Spiritualist medium would proceed to find out who it is. If it is Mary, then it will become apparent or if it is someone else, the medium will find out who it is. In this way we can see that a Spiritualist medium is freer and doesn’t have expectations that only Christian or other specific spirits will come to visit us.

Mental mediumship can be divided into many subcategories. These are:

Channelling the deceased: The medium makes contact with someone who the sitter has known who has passed over. This could be a family member, friend, colleague or acquaintance.

Usually the sitter has known the person who has passed over and can therefore confirm or deny the information that comes from the medium.

Channelling of guides: Contact is made with a guide or an angel, if we can use such terms to define spirit beings. It is a spirit which you have not known in your earthly life. Because of that, proof cannot be given of who is coming through, but evidence can be provided through what is said about the sitter’s life.

Inspired speech: This occurs at spiritual gatherings where a medium channels philosophy from the spirit world. This philosophy comes from the medium’s guides. Those who work extensively with philosophy have additional guides who specialise in this.

Trance communication: Trance is more a state than a form of mediumship. When people talk about trance, they’re typically referring to trance communication. Channelling occurs most often with a guide. You can also communicate directly with the deceased, however, this is rare.

In trance, the medium will blend so much with whoever comes through that they more or less become that person during channelling. The energy then to a large extent takes control over the medium. The most common form of communication in trance is that the medium speaks, but communication can also happen via writing, drawing or painting.

Spiritual house cleansing: A blend of energy cleansing of a place and communication with the spirit world, usually with the spirit of a deceased person. For a house cleansing to be effective, the medium must communicate with the spirit or spirits that are present.

Clairvoyance: A form of mental mediumship where a psychic receives information from a person’s body, spirit, soul or consciousness. The psychic can read, that is, mentally perceive, the person’s energy. This can also be done for animals or objects.

Animal communication: The medium makes contact with the animal’s spirit or consciousness and communicates with it.

Healing: Involves both mental and physical mediumship. It is mental mediumship when the healer finds out what problems a client has. This is done through clairvoyance or mental mediumship. Sometimes the healer receives messages for the client during the healing. This is then typical channelling, which is also mental mediumship. Healing is considered mental mediumship when it is a normal healing. In these cases, the person’s energy or immune system is strengthened, and one cannot see concrete signs of improvement. Physical healing is described below.

Physical mediumship

When the medium and the spirit world create physical phenomenon. Common to all these phenomena is that they can be experienced by anyone present, whether or not they are mediums. The phenomena must be able to be observed, and when relevant, can be measured or recorded using equipment.

There are two main categories within physical mediumship. The first is normal physical mediumship to give evidence from the spirit world through the manipulation of matter and energy that can be observed. A few examples:

In the chapter on physical mediumship I go deeper into what physical mediumship is and phenomena it can produce.

Healing: Healing is the other main form of physical mediumship. When a healer works, healing can happen in many ways. Most often healing strengthens the person or their immune system so that they become better over a period of time. This is mental mediumship. Other times, healing happens very quickly and then it would be classified as physical mediumship. A better term for this type of healing is physical healing. An example of this is people who have an eye condition who suddenly regain their vision or their sight is improved. Another is cancer tumours disappearing during a healing, or a paraplegic who all of a sudden can walk again. When it comes to healing, the result must be so clear that everyone around the client will observe the change. The rules for evidence of physical mediumship generally also apply to physical healing.

Spiritualism

Many variations exist in Spiritualism, and there is not necessarily one type which is more correct than another. There are two main types of Spiritualism. One is as the SNU (Spiritualist National Union) that is an administrative body for National Spiritualism in the United Kingdom. They define Spiritualism through the seven spiritualist principles. The SNU is the largest Spiritualist association in the UK and has about 340 churches in their organisation. As well, there are many independent Spiritualist churches. Besides pure Spiritualism, you can find Christian Spiritualist churches. This is a distinct religion, but is similar to the pure Spiritualism. In total, there are around 1000 spiritual churches in the UK.

Another main type of spiritualism, inspired by the French philosopher and teacher Allan Kardec, is called Spiritism and is most prevalent in Brazil and France. Especially in Brazil, Spiritism has many followers, with around 4 million people, which is 2% of the population. Even though it is this large, most Brazilians are Catholic and in many places there is little understanding of the Spiritist religion.

Spiritualism and Spiritism are the largest spiritual religions, but in addition there are many other spiritual organisations with fewer members around the world.

Many ancient nature religions worshiped ancestors and the spirit world, based on spiritual belief. The majority of Spiritualists are in the United Kingdom and Brazil, but there are many in the USA and other English speaking countries.

Spiritualism in the United Kingdom is threefold. The SNU say that Spiritualism is a religion, philosophy, and science. These three parts integrate to make a whole and support each other. Spiritualist philosophy provides a basis for Spiritualist religion. The philosophy provides the foundation for the science that is built up around Spiritualism. When they examine elements of Spiritualism, the philosophy is used as