ABSTRACT
Early Spiritualism was not based on any authoritative set of writings; it flourished through people seeking a liberal pathway to God. Spiritualism quickly spread geographically, but in doing so culturally evolved, differing in many respects, yet always sharing an underlying belief that there is an afterlife and that this can be accessed through the skills of a medium. Spiritualism was established in Melbourne, Victoria in the 1870s, and it was from Melbourne that Spiritualism spread to Western Australia in the late nineteenth century (Gabay 2011). None of those early churches now survives, but some threads lead to the establishment of others somewhat later. My research for this chapter is based in the lively Spiritualist community in Perth, Western Australia and follows on from an extensive multidisciplinary ethnographic undertaking spanning five years in which I worked with several Spiritualist groups, attending their services, circles, retreats and workshops. I focus here on the participation observation of trance mediumship circles in order to explore how the body is seen as the existential ground of culture (Csordas 1990), how Spiritualism manifests the social memory of illness on the body of those suppressed (Kleinman and Kleinman 1994), and how spiritual healing can serve as a remedy for dis-ease. I show this through the ritual of trance healing in which the medium voluntarily becomes unconscious, and the healer receives the power to heal from the spirit, which is transferred to the patient.
