ABSTRACT
Modern spiritualism is often dated from 1851 when communication with spirits was allegedly established by rappings made at the home of the Fox sisters at Hydesville, New York State. The beginnings of modern Spiritualism are more amorphous than those of Christianity. Laura Edmonds is described - strangely, when one considers the hostility between Roman Catholicism and Spiritualism - as having been a fervent, extremely pious Roman Catholic of high intelligence and irreproachable honesty. Her father, in his Spiritual Tracts, claimed that ‘it is not infrequent, that foreigners converse with their spirit-friends through her, in their own language’. The quantity of communication by xenolalia claimed in Spiritualist literature is enormous, its quality varying from the remarkable to the absurd. Numerous and equally lacking in evidence are multitudinous stores of Spiritualist glossolalia and xenolalia recorded by Mrs Emma Hardinge in her American Spiritualism.
