Religious sciences

Dear writer,

This assignment is to write a chapter for my thesis. The thesis is about conversion to Spiritism. The chapter is an introduction to Spiritism, general and in relation to conversion. I have already written about 1,000 words of text u can use. I also have several sources u can use and taken out some of the relevant text. This text needs to be changed accordingly and incorporated.

Best,
James
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Dec 30, 2022, 7:33 PM
Text i already have:

What is spiritualism?
Spiritualism is a historical movement that started around 1850 in America. Central in this movement
is the belief that conversations with the spirits of the deceased are possible.
To contact the spirits a medium was needed. These mediums were the people with the gift to
connect with the spirits and interpret their message. The meetings during which these conversations
took place were called seances. They took place nn half-lighted rooms with curtains hanging around.
The people who attended the séance sat around a table. The use of candle light and drapery to
create the desired ambiance of mystique was important.
There were different kinds of ways through which the spirits could pass on their message through a
medium. Rapping’s were popular at the beginning of spiritualism. Later automatic writing was added
as a method along with a list of other methods.
With the belief that spirits of the dead were still present there had to be a world view that would
facilitate such a belief. Although this was not the important point of spiritualism. A Swedenborgian
view was adopted by most spiritualists. Swedenborgians were not at all pleased with the coming of
spiritualism. Their belief rested upon the idea that Swedenborg was a prophet who alone had the
ability to converse with the spirits.

In which historical context did it originate?
The time in which spiritualism started was during the end of the civil war in America. This war cost
the lives of enormous amounts of young men. A lot of people had lost loved ones. Many parents had
lost their child during the war. The loss of a child is very hard to process. The idea that contact could
be made with their spirits was comforting.
There was not only social unrest with the war but there was also religious turmoil. There arose cults
and different offspring’s of beliefs like Mormonism. This shows the willingness from the people to
new religious forms.1 The church still had the same answers and old customs. People became
increasingly dissatisfied with the church. The newness of spiritualism was appealing. It was the time
when the electrical telegraph had made its entrance. With this new technology news could spread
very fast.

Who were the main actors in its early history?
The most important persons connected with the start of spiritualism were the fox sisters. A group of
three sisters who’s name became almost synonymous with spiritualism after rapping’s started to
occur in their presence in 1848. Margaret and Kate lived with their parents in Hydesville, New York.
There the rapping’s began. Later their sister Leah also joined.
“During the spring and summer of 1848 hundreds of people -the curious, the hopeful, those with a
will to believe- visited the house on Prospect Street in Rochester.”2
The story of the special girls and the rapping’s gathered fame quickly. This quote shows what they
had brought into motion. Also people looking to make money and advance the story of spiritualism
flocked to the sisters. Later they made tours through the country and held special seances. Both for
paying customers.
1 Dictionary of Gnosis & Western Esotericism, edited by W.J. Hanegraaff, Koninklijke Brill NV: Leiden, 2006
2 Isaac, Ernest, Fox Sisters and American Spiritualism, University of Illinois Press: Chicago, 1986. p83.
Andrew Jackson Davis was also important for the advancement of spiritualism. He created the
necessary theoretical background for the movement to become more than just a hype. He wrote
books and gave lectures in which he revealed information to the people he believed to have received
from the spirit world.

What are the main differences between spiritualism and occultism?
Spiritualism is aimed at every person. The main thing are the seances and the conversation with the
dead. These spirits can be contacted. The contacting and the seances require a medium.
Occultism is definitely not aimed at every person. A certain quality is necessary to be able to
understand the meaning of the material studied. It can not be experience by participating an event
once or twice. It needs to be really accepted in ones life. There is no use of a medium.
Spiritualism had a very broad social agenda. With progressive views on the political and social topics
of the time. This was also seen in the way the movement went about its setup. There were no
initiations and no secrets to be guarded. In general no separation. The organization of spiritualism
proved to be difficult. It was more of an individualistic undertaking.
Occultism was much more conservative. There was a hierarchical structure. Smaller local groups fell
under the influence of a larger body. New initiates had to go through initiations and would only get a
access to a portion of the total knowledge.
Spiritualism has direct sighting of happenings and personal participation in the event. Personal
understanding of the workings of these things is not required.
While occultism is aimed at the cultivation of an bigger understanding over time. Through the
reading of books and the study of material with fellow occultists.

Why do you think that spiritualism has been such a popular phenomenon?
The mystic and mysterious atmosphere draws the interest of people. The stories about mediums and
spirit manifestations were a hot topic in the newspapers. The media was responsible for the broad
familiarity of the people with spiritualism. The phenomena were talked about and people hyped each
other up.
An actual experience of the spiritual life is something people are fond off. Because the talk and
reading of spiritual things is almost ungraspable. An experience makes these matters tangible. Just
like the mass or Eucharist in church. The seances were very sensory experiences. Sounds, lights and
objects were used to make impressions for the spiritualists. It must have been pretty entertaining to
attend a séance. Direct contact with the afterlife is a thing that speaks to the imagination.
Important is the pre disposition of the practitioners. When a person is inclined to accept happenings
and occurrences more often they will have a positive experience. Getting messages from deceased
persons can give a comforting notion to people.
“Spiritualist doctrines had popular appeal because they offered a clear explanation of the meaning of
death and a guarantee of immortality and communication between the living and the dead.”3
3 Isaac, Ernest, Fox Sisters and American Spiritualism, University of Illinois Press: Chicago, 1986. p80.
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Other stuff you can use. This is text coppied from sources so this can not be included as is. Needs to be changed.

spiritism vs spiritualism?

Book what is spiritism–
cite{kardec2021spiritism}

psychology of spiritism– (very focual and argumentative against the scientific claims of spiritism.)

Modern spiritism is an attempt to apply the inductive method
to religion ; to make faith scientific ; to confirm the longings of the
heart by the evidence of the senses. In thus submitting spiritism
to the inductive method its friends forgot that to prove a religion
would be to kill it?to transfer it from the emotions, where it be
longs, to the intellect, where it can find no home. A religion proved,
dies as a religion, and becomes a scientific fact, and would take its
place side by side with astronomy and chemistry, with physics and
geology, in the organized knowledge of men.

attempt to submit it to scientific study causes it to disappear. No
religion on the globe is strong enough to bear the shock of its own demonstration.

If spiritism were content to
remain a part of religion?an undemonstrated belief without at
tempting to demonstrate itself?it might stand, as a logical possibil
ity (since science can have no deduction against it), as long as the
Copernican theory.*
Spiritism was thus organized for failure

f successful in its
object, the inductive proof of the claim that spirits manifest them
selves to the human senses, its failure as a religion would be entir

If trance, the involuntary life, and human testimony, were un
derstood universally as they are now beginning to be understood
by students of the nervous system, there would not, could not
be a spiritist on our planet ; for all would know that spirits only
dwell in the cerebral cells?that not our houses but our brains are
haunted.

% subsubsection{Trance is a strong experience.}
Trance is a very frequently occurring functional disease of the
nervous system, in which the cerebral activity is concentrated in
some limited region of the brain, the activity

in his calmest, healthi
est moments, man is a bundle of reflex actions ; what is done by the
will, purposively, voluntarily, being a fraction too small for measure
ment of his whole activity: in the brain thoughts come and go of
their will more than ours ; the mind is never wholly idle and never
fully under control ; in response to external or internal suggestion
we are always cerebrating, and corresponding to our thoughts are
muscular contractions and relaxations ; when we think, we move.
We are not always or usually conscious of our thoughts or of the
bodily movements correlated to them ; and oftentimes only by ex
pert investigation can the latter be detected, the individual himself
being of all persons the least able to analyze the activity of his own
functions

textbf{Of all the psychological questions relating to spiritism, no one
perhaps is more interesting, or has been more puzzling than this
?why so many well-balanced, scholarly, generally judicious, logi
cal, and scientific men have either enlisted under its flag or have
been hangers-on of its camp.} But this fact is in no wise peculiar
to spiritism ; delusions of all ages are seamed with the blunders of
wise and noble men ; after witchcraft and alchemy were abandoned,
if not forgotten, by the people and expelled from the peasant’s cot
tage, they were sheltered and honored in the laboratory of scholars
and the halls of colleges. To read a list of the members of the
French Academy, of the Royal Society, and of all the learned
organizations of Europe and America that have been bitten, maimed,
and prostrated by spiritism, would be like a roll-call after a series
of bloody battles. The recent trick of reading mind through in
voluntary muscular movement, the most remarkable fact in delu
sions since Mesmer’s time, illustrated the same psychological prin
ciple. The mind-reading of Brown, from beginning to end, was
the scholar’s delusion, the special failing of the man of science and
of letters, the idol on whose altars our first colleges and universities
made haste to cast their crowns.

Of nearly equal psychological interest is the question why spir
itism has so rapidly declined. Why is a faith once wellnigh uni
versal, which a century ago was at least passively held by a majority
of our citizens, now, after so many proofs of its truth, confined to
a despised and diminishing sect ? Th

science appealing to the reason, and spiritism mainly to
the emotions?they do not meet face to face, but pass each other,

Spiritism has caused dissaray in the opportunity it has given for breaking away from the
just restraints of Christianity to those not psychologically prepared
for such a change.

(relevance) but modern spiritism has the advantage
of appearing later in the world, and at a time when science was pre
pared to utilize its copious resources. Spiritism is, indeed, a precious
mine of psychology, the veins of which grow wider and richer the
longer we work them.

Of all the phases of religious belief
in the world, modern spiritism is preeminently the religion of faith,
the instincts of men that prefer believing to proving here also as
serting themselves in a most extraordinary manner.

Modern spiritism is in fact the faith of those who are
impatient with faith, and who are hungry to believe all that even
appears to be anti-Christian.*

Of even more interest to some minds than any other problem
suggested by spiritism will be, perhaps, the relations of delusions to
sociology?their part in the complex machinery of nature. The
necessity of a belief in the undemonstrable, or religion, will be ques
tioned only by those who have studied but incompletely the psy
chology of man. Is not also the belief in the demonstrably false as
necessary as it is universal ? Is it possible for society to hold to
gether without the cohesive force of some great delusion ? Do not
these three?science, superstition, and religion?constitute a trinity
of influences which in their relation to human nature practically be
come unity ?

In leaving Christianity they
had plunged in various directions, but always into a slough of superstition ; in chang
ing their faiths they had found, not liberty, but a new master, and t

cite{beard1879psychology}
The psychology of spiritism, author={Beard, George M},
journal={The North American Review

% subsection{Healing}

% subsubsection{Allan Kardec (FB)}
Alan Kardec
Born as Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail in Lyon, 1804, after his first education he went to study in Yverdon at the school of Professor Pestallozzi, already a renowned institution in Switzerland at that time. Early on he became a fervent follower of Pestallozzi’s methods and later in France this will greatly influence Rivail’s work within the public school system. As a student he was always helpful and even as a 14 year old boy he always helped his colleagues with everything he could.
After his studies in Yverdon, Rivail moved to Paris where he worked as a teacher and propagator of the Pestallozzian method. He was also a member of several scientific societies at the time.
As a scientist, Rivail published several textbooks. His plans and ideas for improving public education in France also come from that time. Some of his published works include: Theoretical and Practical Course of Arithmetic, French Classical Grammar, Grammatical Catechism of the French Language and numerous curriculum programs on physics, chemistry, astronomy and philosophy.
After a long experience as a teacher, Professor Rivail was ready to take on another task: to bring together the teachings of the higher spirits into the written spiritualistic teachings. His new mission began in 1854 when he first heard of “spinning tables”, which was becoming a common game in social circles.
Despite his studies of magnetism, Rivail was initially skeptical of what was going on.
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Other stuff you can use. This is text coppied from sources so this can not be included as is. Needs to be changed.

He then said: “Until someone can prove to me that tables have some kind of thinking ability, I can believe what they say. Until then, let me consider this a fabulous story.” After seeing the phenomena, he concluded that there was something that had to be studied first to find out what caused the physical effects. With the mediums Caroline and Julie Baudin, Rivail came into contact with the phenomenon of writing through a basket. A pencil was attached to the bottom of a breadbasket and the whole was then balanced by the fingertips of the mediums. In this way, precise answers to questions asked by those present were given. There was no doubt about it. This was a new fact worth studying. He then began to analyze the phenomena according to the experimental method, for he could notice that all those manifestations probably turned out to be the work of intelligences (spirits) who had lived on the Earth. Thus, he has collected communications from the spirits and brought them together in “The Book of Spirits”, the foundational work of the Spiritist Doctrine. Such a monumental work is not the work of a philosopher or something dictated by a mind: it is the result of the revelations of different minds, all concurring, notwithstanding the fact that they were obtained through different mediums and in different places. To separate his own works from those dictated by the spirits through the mediums, Rivail began using the pseudonym Allan Kardec for the latter. Before any communication or answer from the spirits could be accepted, everything was compared, considered and cleared of all possible instances of doubt. Basic books by Allan Kardec:The Book of Spirits Written in 1857, it is a philosophical book containing the fundamentals of the Spiritist Doctrine of the immortality of the soul, the nature of the spirits, and their communion with man, the moral laws, the present life, the future life, and the future of humanity. It was written in a completely new way at the time: Allan Kardec questioned multiple spirits, using two mediums, Caroline and Julie Baudin. With their fingers, they balanced a small basket with a pencil protruding from the bottom. In this way, the spirits gave answers to Kardec’s questions. In a similar way, the entire book was thoroughly checked, but this time with the help of more than ten mediums. The book is thus the result of a collaboration between the humans and the spirits. The Book of Spirits is the First Stone of Spiritism, its starting point. Actually, Spiritism did not exist before that, not even the word Spiritism. People then spoke of spiritualism and neo-spiritualism. The spiritualistic facts, which have always existed, have been interpreted in various ways. After the Book of Spirits appeared containing the basic principles of Spiritist Teachings, a new day began in the spiritual horizon of the world. The work has four chapters, namely: “the root causes”, “spiritual or spirit world”, “moral laws”, “expectations and comforts”. The Book of Mediums The Book of Mediums is a kind of practice book of Spiritism or a guide to mediums and spirit summoning. The teachings on the theory of all kinds of manifestations, the means of communicating with the invisible world, the development of mediumship, the difficulties and perils one may encounter in the practice of Spiritism. The book also shows the moral and philosophical consequences of the exchanges between the visible and the invisible worlds, as well as the importance of giving free what has been given for free, that is, using one’s mediumship to help one’s neighbor without receiving anything. to ask for in return.The Gospel according to SpiritismThis book contains the explanations of the tenets of the Doctrine of Christ, their agreement with Spiritism, and their applications in the various circumstances of life. The Exalted Spirits give in this book a Gospel with a modern language, easy to understand and thus it can make our lives happier by explaining issues which we could not understand well before because of the allegorical form. The beginning of the book in particular is a veritable treatise on the nature, purpose, and purpose of Spiritism.Heaven and HellThe book Heaven and Hell is about Divine Justice according to Spiritism. It is a comparative study of what the various doctrines say about the transition from the corporeal to the spiritual life, future punishments and rewards, angels and devils, the eternal punishments, and other subjects involving several examples of the real state of the soul during and after dying.GenesisThis book is a study of nature in which Spiritism shows that science and faith are part of one and the same reality. It brings science and religion together. With the exposure of the spirit world and its interrelations with the physical universe, an entirely new insight is given into countless issues that had remained inexplicable to both the Church and Science. ‘Divisions of Personality and Spiritism’ by Alfred Binet (1896) cite{alvarado2010divisions} 2. 2 On the history of these movements and of mediumship, see: Biondi, 1988; Braude, 2001; Edelman, 1995; Owen, 1990. 3. 3 On French spiritism, and on Kardec, see: Castellan, 1954; Edelman, 1995; Monroe, 2008; Sharp, 2006. In his book Recherche sur la médiumnité (1902), the French spiritist leader Gabriel Delanne (1857–1926) criticized the nineteenth-century French tendency to reduce the phenomena of mental mediumship to psychopathology, the workings of the subconscious mind, and dissociation. In his view, those he criticized were too hasty to explain away what Delanne considered to be the manifestation of spirit agency. His book is an indirect reminder of a medical and psychological tradition that attempted to explain mediumship by postulating the action of conventional psychological processes. The purpose of this Classic Text is to bring this nineteenth-century conceptual tradition to the attention of current students of dissociation through the presentation of an excerpt from the writings of Alfred Binet The notion of non-conscious mental activity was particularly developed during the nineteenth century through observations of a variety of such phenomena as hysterical anaesthesia, hypnotic state-specific memory, somnambulism, amnesia, and spontaneous and hypnotically induced secondary personalities (Crabtree, 1993; Ellenberger, 1970; Foschi, 2003; Hacking, 1995) Such a trend, another French author wrote, represented the functioning of the ‘unconscious activity of the mind’ (Héricourt, 1889).1 The emergence of spiritualism in the USA and spiritism in France brought the phenomena of mediumship to this equation, generally dividing the practice into the production of physical effects and communications from spirits.2 Although there were many examples of physical mediums – those said to produce phenomena such as raps and table levitations – mental manifestations were of more relevance for psychology and psychiatry. In France the development of spiritism, led by Allan Kardec (the pseudonyn of Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail, 1804–59), popularized the figure of the medium.3 In a widely read book, Kardec (1862: 195) asserted: ‘Every person who feels in any degree the influence of spirits is … a medium.’ Such a quality, Kardec believed, presented different levels of sensitiveness. Very many people were exposed to Kardec’s book Le Livre des esprits (1857), in which mediums conveyed information from ‘spirits’ about such topics as God, the world of spirits, reincarnation and a variety of ‘moral laws’ concerning society and behaviour. The teachings presented in the book consisted of the answers mediums gave to questions addressed to the supposed discarnate agents. It seems that mediums, as stated by an anonymous author, were the prophets of spiritism (Anon., 1863: 418). The movement and its phenomena received much criticism in the French literature (e.g., Lemoine, 1861; Littré, 1856). A physician argued that mediums were ‘weak beings, impressionable Classic Text No. 84 489 and excitable’ who exploited credulous people in salons and among high-class people (Bouchut, 1864: 44). Soon there were attempts to characterize mediumship as manifestations of the subconscious.4 According to Ellenberger (1970: 85): According to Ellenberger (1970: 85): The advent of spiritism was an event of major importance in the history of dynamic psychiatry, because it indirectly provided psychologists and psychopathologists with new approaches to the mind. Automatic writing, one of the procedures introduced by the spiritists, was taken over by scientists as a method of textbf{exploring the unconscious} … A new subject, the medium, became available for experimental psychological investigations, out of which evolved a new model of the human mind. textbf{mediusmship, want to keep this short en refer to other sources} mediumship was described as a ‘doubling of personality similar to that produced during a dream’ (Baillarger, 1861: 93). The French critic, philosopher and historian Hippolyte Taine (1828–93) referred to mediumship when he wrote that some spiritistic manifestations showed ‘coexistence at the same time, in the same individual, of two thoughts, two wills, two distinct actions, one which is conscious, another which is not conscious’ and which claims to come from the spirit world (Taine, 1878: 16). h (Gauld, 1968) An important and influential member of the Society for Psychical Research, classical scholar Frederic W.H. Myers (1843–1901), believed that ‘some of the effects which Spiritualists ascribe to spirits are referable to the unconscious action of the writer’s own mind’ (Myers, 1884: 237; original emphasis), dissociation and the subconscious mind On the latter, he wrote: ‘Automatic writing does not only serve to express sensations perceived by the second consciousness; it is likewise able to express the thoughts that this second consciousness spontaneously combines’ (Binet, 1890a: 29). The book is devoted to observations suggesting that, in some circumstances, ‘the normal unity of consciousness is broken up and several distinct consciousnesses are formed, each of which may have its own system of perceptions, its own memory, and even its own moral character’ (Binet, 1896: x).
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Divided into three parts, the first part, ‘Successive Personalities’, includes spontaneous cases of somnambulism and of double and multiple personalities, as well as of induced somnambulism. The second part, ‘Coexistent Personalities’, has chapters about the insensibility of hysterics, their automatic writing, and such topics as distraction, ideas of subconscious origin, and the plurarity of consciousness in normal individuals. The last includes studies with one common feature: ‘they throw a person into such a condition that without intending it, and often without knowing it, they tell their most secret thoughts. In other words, the person is induced to perform unconscious movements’ (p. 220). The third, and final section, is about ‘Alterations of Personality in Experiments on Suggestion’. Binet concludes by saying: ‘we have seen that a genuine breaking up of consciousness occurs both in cases of disease and also of subjects under experiment; and now and then, often with the assistance of a slight suggestion, one of these consciousnesses has succeeded in attaining the dignity of a veritable personality’ (p. 347). All of this indicated to Binet that: (a) aspects that normally constitute the self may disaggregate; (b) these elements always have a consciousness associated with them even if the self is not aware; (c) in some special conditions such elements can constitute secondary personalities. Our apparent unity, Binet (1896: 349) believed, ‘is to be sought in the co-ordination of the elements which compose it’. Recent researches have thrown new light upon [the] phenomena of spiritism, or so-called ‘spiritualism,’ by showing that these phenomena are due largely to mental disaggregation or division. Every now and then the most discreet author finds himself obliged to say that such and such an excellent medium had a nervous crisis or was soon fatigued, in consequence of delicate health. It is, moreover, generally admitted that spiritist performances predispose to nervous complications. Even when such a choice is not made … the medium still expects to converse with an intelligence distinct from his own. In a word, he is in the most favourable conditions for autosuggestion. Only there is one curious thing: the ego who consents to the performance of the suggestion is not the normal ego, but the secondary ego. It is this latter who receives the suggestion that he is such or such a person, and who, sustaining this illusion or obligingly complying with it – for we do not know exactly how it occurs – goes on to write messages in the style of the person conjured up, whose name he signs. Everything takes place as if one had been able during a moment of distraction to communicate with the subconscious and impose a new personality upon it. % subsection{Treatment} Indigenous treatment for alcoholism: The case of puerto rican spiritism cite{singer1984indigenous} After considerable neglect, indigenous therapies are in a position to gain due recognition for the role they play in the treatment of alcoholism and alcohol abuse. Although folk healers of various types and in various settings undoubtedly treat numerous alcohol cases each year, the extent and success of their practice is only now beginning to be appreciated (Singer 1982). This belated acknowledgment is an outgrowth of several developments over the last ten years in the areas of service provision, alcohol research, and primary health care policy. Most important among these developments are the following. Like many indigenous or folk healing systems, especially those that believe that illness is caused by the intervention of active, purposeful agents, such as spirits or witches (Foster 1976), healing in Espiritismo is embedded in a religious context. Religious patterns among Puerto Ricans reflect the diverse roots of the Island’s social history, Downloaded by [McGill University Library] at 04:29 07 September 2012 SINGER and BORRERO / Indigenous Treatment of Alcoholism 251 including Native American practices, the rites and rituals transported from Africa by slaves, and the customs and symbols of Catholicism. As a product of this amalgamation, Espiritismo shares many features with other syncretic, trance-possession religions of Latin America and the Caribbean. A major additional influence on the development of Espiritismo was the set of ideas popularized by the Spiritualist Revival which swept across Europe and the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, especially as expressed in the writings of the . Frenchman Leon Denizarth Hippolyte Rivail, better known by his nom-de-plume of Allan Kardec. Kardec adopted the term “spiritism” {Espiritismo in Spanish) to label the cross-cultural religious movement he helped to launch. Initially, spiritism was embraced by the intellectual and social elite. Members of this stratum brought spiritism to Puerto Rico, where it filtered down to the urban poor and peasants. During this diffusion, European spiritism merged with traditional Native American and African curing practices, and folk Catholicism, thereby transforming it into a complex religious healing system. As Macklin (1974:393) notes, the folk sector “borrowed those pragmatic aspects of the system which were useful in solving daily problems of life, illness, and death. These they transmitted in the oral tradition as well as in family and neighborhood curing and cultic rituals.” Ultimately, an indigenous healing system attuned to the sociocultural context of Puerto Rican society emerged. In addition to its healing role, Espiritismo functions as “a voluntary organization, a religion, a way of ordering social relationships, a vehicle for enhancing one’s status through development as a medium, and an identity”(Harwood 1977a:69). In Koss’s( 1976:23) evaluation, “if spiritism had not been arrested in its social evolution by Euro-American cultural imperialism in the medical sciences, it would have developed into a prestigious, more systematic and highly organized social movement” rather than its current status as a folk healing system. The Belief and Ritual System of Espiritismo Espiritismo is primarily concerned with interaction between the material world inhabited by living people and the invisible world inhabited by spirits. Spirits are believed to go through a series of incarnations, which are seen as tests of the spirit’s degree of development. Through this process, similar to the Hindu samsara, spirits ascend the spiritual hierarchy toward perfection (see Figure 1). The lowest level in this hierarchy is populated by intranquil spirits, those who left the earth in an unsettled state, because, for example, the body they were in commited suicide or was murdered. These spirits are confused and continue to cling to the material world. To aid spirits in escaping from this state of limbo, Espiritistas must perform certain rituals, such as saying prayers, and by making offerings of fruit, flowers, or candles. These rites are known as dark la luz al espihtu (giving the spirit light). If not performed, intranquil spirits may be used by a brujo (sorcerer) to cause misfortune or illness, including alcoholism. Spirits can cause problems through possession or by coming close enough to allow their negative vibrations or fluids (fluidos) to adhere to a person. Studies have suggested varying degrees of adherence to Espiritismo belief and practice in Puerto Rican communities. In his examination of 79 households in the South Bronx, Harwood (1977a:71) found that “42 (53%) had at least one person living in the household who believed in spiritism…and had at one time visited a medium, while only 10 households (13%) had no one who believed.” No clear data were collected for the remaining 27 households. Garrison (1977) reports tht 36 percent of the individuals in a random household sample admitted seeking help from a spiritual healer at one time in their lives, while 65 percent of females and 50 percent of males in an outpatient psychiatric sample and 94 percent of admissions to a psychiatric facility indicated they had sought help from Espiritistas. Recent research by the Hispanic Health Council (Schensul and Schensul 1982) found that 37 percent of a random neighborhood sample in Hartford’s Puerto Rican community believed in the effectiveness of Espiritismo treatment, while 47 percent indicated that they had had experience with this indigenous therapy (also see Lubchansky et al. 1970; Rogler and Hollingshead 1961). Garrison cautions against taking these statistics at face value, citing the following statement made by an informant to Dan Wakefield: “If you ever talk to a Puerto Rican who says he does not believe in spirits, you know what that means? It means you have not talked to him long enough.” Accordingly, a Puerto Rican coworker at the Hispanic Health Council commented, “Although I do not believe, as soon as something goes wrong you begin to wonder, ‘Did someone do something?’ And everyone is saying to you, ‘Someone must have done something to you.'” Currently, a new evolution of Espiritismo is occurring, involving the adoption of certain features of Santeria, an Afro-Cuban religion derived from the traditional beliefs of the Yoruban people of southern Nigeria (Sandoval 1979). During the period of slavery, this tradition was brought to Spanish and Portuguese colonies where, like Espiritismo, it developed as a syncretic religio-therapeutic system. Santeria practice involves the active intervention, through possession, of a number of Yoruban dieties, known in Spanish as the orichas. The contemporary synthesis of Espiritismo and Santeria has contributed to the development of a wide range of spiritist centers. Because of this diversity and the fact that “each cult group is an independent social unit”(Koss 1977:462), the healing activities and organizational features of a centro de Espiritismo can be understood best by focusing on a particular example.2 Entering Treatment at the Centro Alcohol problems are brought to the attention of the mediums in one of two ways; either an individual with a drinking problem comes to the centro or, much more commonly, a relative of an alcoholic requests help. The centro maintains an open-door policy; clients are free to drop in for a consultation without prior appointment or formal intake procedure. Moreover, because the centro is located on the main commercial street in the Puerto Rican neighborhood, it is easily accessible to a large percentage of Puerto Ricans in the city. As Garrison (1977:136) found, clients tend to provide “reasons other than their alcohol abuse… for going to the spiritist.” The most common presenting problems in the centro, however, such as interpersonal conflict, depression, and stomach pains, are often associated with abusive drinking. When the mediums are “notified” through a vision provided by their spirit familiars that drinking is a problem for a particular client—whatever the client’s presenting problem—they will focus on alcoholism during the treatment process. As mediums consult with a new client there are several behavioral clues that appear to direct their attention to the client’s drinking behavior, including evidence of domestic violence, forgetfulness, personality changes, parental absence from the home, and frequent requests for money by a family member. In cases where abusive drinking is suggested, the mediums take an alcohol history. As Marta explains, “111 start asking them how often do they drink. Do they drink every day? How much do they drink? Right there, I can tell if they are an alcoholic or one step away from becoming an alcoholic.” The mediums also conduct a preliminary examination, primarily limited to checking for visible or palpable signs of medical problems. Medical referral, a common feature of Espiritismo treatment (Harwood 1977:6), occurs if signs of disease are present. We clean their stomach [described below]. If after we clear their stomach, through our ways of knowing we find out something is wrong, like their liver is swollen, we send them right away to see a doctor. If we see swelling in the legs, if they’re all puffed up, we send them right away to the doctor because alcohol can do that….If a person has been drinking for five years, that liquor had to do something to that body and they cannot argue with me about that. So they have to have a physical to check out their blood and whatever. A lot of people wind up having diabetes….I had around five alcohol patients that after they stopped they found they had high blood pressure and diabetes. The mediums also would like to refer certain difficult patients for conventional alcoholism treatment, but as Marta remarked, “The main problem here in Hartford is I don’t know where they take alcohol patients. At the same time, they don’t want tp go either. People don’t want to go if they feel they are going to be called an alcoholic. They don’t want to accept the reality.” As this statement implies, breaking through alcoholic denial is often the first and frequently the most difficult step in the treatment process. If necessary, this is achieved through aggressive confrontation Based on the foregoing account of alcohol treatment in one centro de Espiritismo, three broad categories of appropriate treatment approaches can be identified: (1) high accessibility; (2) minimal social distance; and (3) shared ethnicity. Social Distance. The social distance between the mediums and their clients is minimal. The mediums live in the same apartment buildings, housing projects, and neighborhoods as their clients and consequently “share the day-to-day frustrations of ghetto living: unemployment, lack of adequate sanitation, housing and medical care; and estrangement from the outside world” (Ruiz and Langrod 1976:394). Further, almost all of the mediums began their involvement with Espiritismo as clients suffering from the same types of complaints they later treat in their own clients. that is specifically geared to the cultural system of the Puerto Rican community As the foregoing discussion suggests, labeling Espiritismo (or many other folk healing systems) as “traditional medicine” is problematic. Folk medicine is viable, not simply because it is a continuation of a familiar cultural heritage, but also because it is an innovative system in constant development. Its practitioners are actively involved in reshaping its beliefs and techniques, incorporating new approaches and modifying outmoded ones (Press 1978). In Mintz’s (1973:97) phrase, culture is a “resource” to be utilized, not a prison that encloses, just as “blind custom is neither blind nor customary.” The pragmatic orientation the mediums bring to treatment, while all the while keeping within meaningful cultural bounds, suggests that folk treatment is culturally appropriate not only because it employs culturally valued symbols, roles, and relationships, but because it mobilizes them in light of the everchanging context of group life and experience. To rephrase Taylor (1976), when we use terms like “traditional healers,” really we are talking about traditional practitioner roles rather than practitioners of older forms of medicine. Ruiz, P. (1979). Spiritism, Mental Health, and the Puerto Ricans cite{ruiz1979spiritism} However, Catholicism is only one aspect of the highly complex Puerto Rican belief system (Ruiz and Langrod 1976a). Depending on the author consulted, it is estimated that between 31 and 80 per cent of the Puerto Rican population of New York City also practise Spiritism as a parallel religion (Garrison 1977; Lubchansky, Egri, and Stokes 1970; Rogler and Hollingshead 1965). Exact figures are difficult to obtain because, although this religious belief is very popular among Puerto Ricans, it is not uncommon to find that middle class Puerto Ricans tend to deny the existence of such practices (Koss 1975; Wakefield 1957).
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Instruction

Health and the effects of Spiritism has to be an important aspect of the chapter.

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