TL;DRWhy This Matters
We live in an era of extraordinary material power and extraordinary inner poverty. Depression, disconnection, and ecological anxiety are not fringe experiences — they are defining features of modern life. Secular systems promised that reason alone could build a meaningful world. Science has given us tools of breathtaking precision. And yet something persists — a nagging, pre-linguistic sense that the materialist map leaves vast territories uncharted. Spiritualism, in its deepest forms, is the cartography of those territories.
What this topic forces us to confront is not whether ghosts are real or whether mediums can speak to the dead. The more unsettling question is this: what does it mean that every human civilisation in recorded history, across every continent and every era, developed some form of relationship with the invisible? That is not an anomaly to be explained away. It is a signal worth following.
The direct relevance to how we live today is both personal and collective. The tools that spiritualist traditions preserved — meditation, breathwork, ritual, communing with nature, the cultivation of inner silence — are precisely the tools that modern neuroscience is now validating as pathways to resilience, healing, and what researchers are beginning to call spiritual intelligence. The ancients were not primitive. They were solving problems we are only now learning to name.
And the connective thread from deep past to present future is this: every great civilisational pivot — the axial age of Buddha, Socrates, and the Hebrew prophets; the Renaissance; the 19th-century spiritual awakening; and arguably our own moment — has involved humanity pausing to ask again what is ultimately real. We appear to be in another such pivot. The question is not whether we will return to some form of spiritual practice. The evidence suggests we already are. The question is whether we do so with discernment and depth, or whether we mistake the costume for the tradition.
The Ancient Roots: Before Religion, There Was Relationship
Long before the great world religions crystallised their doctrines, before priests and prophets and sacred hierarchies, human beings practised forms of spirituality that were radically personal and profoundly ecological. Shamanism — arguably the oldest spiritual technology on earth, found in Siberia, the Americas, Africa, and Southeast Asia — was not a belief system so much as a methodology: a set of practices for entering altered states of consciousness, communicating with non-human intelligences, and returning with knowledge that served the community.
Animism, the broader worldview within which shamanism operated, held that the world was alive — that rivers, mountains, animals, and ancestors possessed agency and awareness. This was not naïve superstition. It was a relational ontology, a way of being in the world that understood the human as participant rather than observer. For animist cultures, to harm a river thoughtlessly was to harm a person. The ecological implications of this worldview are not lost on us now, as we stand in the wreckage of a worldview that treated nature as inert resource.
The great ancient civilisations built upon these foundations in remarkable ways. Egyptian spiritual philosophy understood the cosmos as a living, breathing moral order — the principle of Ma'at, truth and balance, was not merely a legal concept but a description of how reality itself was structured. The soul was not a vague, ethereal thing but a precise architecture of multiple components: the ka, the ba, the akh — each with its own journey and purpose. The Sumerians mapped the relationship between human and divine through myth and ritual with astonishing sophistication, their temple towers — the ziggurats — literally designed as mountains where heaven and earth could touch.
The Mayans tracked the movements of celestial bodies with precision that still impresses modern astronomers, not from purely scientific curiosity, but because they understood the cosmos as a living system of meaning in which human events were woven. Across these traditions, a common thread runs: the universe is not a dead mechanism. It is a conversation. And human beings are expected to participate.
What happened, then? Why did these intimate, participatory spiritual forms recede?
The institutionalisation of religion is part of the answer. As civilisations scaled, informal spiritual practice was gradually formalised into priesthoods, then doctrines, then orthodoxies. The personal encounter with the sacred — the shaman's flight, the mystic's union, the elder's dream — became suspect, potentially heretical, a threat to institutional authority. In the Christian West, this process was particularly pronounced. The Church's suppression of folk magic, heretical mysticism, and indigenous spiritual practice across Europe and the colonised world was systematic and often violent. What was once the common inheritance of all human beings became the property of institutions — mediated, managed, and in some cases, forbidden.
But it never disappeared entirely. It went underground. It survived in the margins — in the alchemists and hermeticists of the Renaissance, in the mystic brotherhoods, in the village healers, in the persistent folklore of rural communities who never quite accepted the official account of how reality worked.
Hermeticism, Esotericism, and the Hidden Stream
There is a tradition in Western thought sometimes called the philosophia perennis — the perennial philosophy — the idea that beneath the surface diversity of spiritual and religious traditions runs a single, universal wisdom. It appears in different languages and different symbols, but its core claims are consistent: that consciousness is primary, that the human being contains within itself a spark of the divine, and that the purpose of spiritual practice is the realisation of this truth.
Hermeticism is one of the most refined expressions of this tradition in the Western context. Attributed to the legendary figure of Hermes Trismegistus — a synthesis of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth — the Hermetic texts, particularly the Corpus Hermeticum and the Emerald Tablet, articulate a vision of reality as fundamentally unified, layered, and resonant. The famous Hermetic axiom — as above, so below — is not a mystical slogan but a precise claim about the structural correspondence between different scales of existence: the cosmic and the personal, the macrocosm and the microcosm.
Esotericism more broadly refers to the cluster of traditions — Gnosticism, Kabbalah, Alchemy, Neoplatonism, and later Theosophy and Anthroposophy — that maintained this hidden stream through the centuries in which official religion dominated. These traditions shared a conviction that reality contained hidden dimensions accessible through specific practices: contemplation, ritual, symbol, and the development of what some called the inner faculties of perception. They were, in a sense, the science of the invisible — rigorous, systematic, and transmissible, even if their methods and language looked nothing like modern laboratory science.
What is striking, in retrospect, is how consistently these traditions were suppressed. The burning of the Library of Alexandria, the Inquisition's targeting of heretics and mystics, the colonial destruction of indigenous spiritual knowledge — these were not random acts of cultural philistinism. They were systematic efforts to control access to the deepest questions. One might ask: what were the institutions afraid of?
The Hermetic answer would be: a human being who has directly experienced the unity of all things has no further need of intermediaries.
The 19th Century Awakening and the Fox Sisters
The formal movement that took the name Spiritualism emerged in a specific historical moment: the mid-19th century, primarily in the United States and Britain. Its origin story is almost too theatrical to be true. In 1848, in a farmhouse in Hydesville, New York, two young sisters — Kate and Margaret Fox — reported hearing mysterious knocking sounds and claimed to have established a communication system with a spirit. Within months, the Fox Sisters were famous, and Spiritualism as an organised movement had been born.
The context matters enormously. The 1840s and 1850s were decades of radical social ferment — abolitionism, early feminism, utopian socialism, and deep anxiety about the disenchanting effects of industrialisation and scientific materialism. Spiritualism arrived as a kind of democratic revelation. It claimed that the barriers between the living and the dead were permeable, that death was not annihilation but transformation, and — crucially — that anyone could access this truth. No church, no priest, no institution was required.
It was, in a sense, the first mass spiritual movement of the modern age. At its peak, it attracted millions of followers across the English-speaking world, including some remarkable intellectuals: Arthur Conan Doyle became one of its most passionate advocates; the physicist William Crookes attempted to study mediums under laboratory conditions; the psychologist and philosopher William James engaged seriously with psychical research, founding what would become the Society for Psychical Research in 1882.
The movement also had a pronounced social dimension. Women became its primary practitioners — mediums, speakers, and community leaders — at a time when women had virtually no access to public voice or authority. Spiritualism's egalitarian theology gave them one. Many of the most prominent suffragists and abolitionists of the period were also practising Spiritualists. The movement cannot be cleanly separated from the progressive social reform it accompanied.
It also had a shadow side. The decades following the Civil War — a conflict that left a staggering number of grieving families with a desperate need to believe their dead were accessible — saw an explosion of fraud, sensationalism, and exploitation. The Fox Sisters themselves eventually confessed to trickery (though Margaret later recanted her confession). The Society for Psychical Research spent decades investigating and debunking fraudulent mediums. The movement splintered, its intellectual credibility damaged, its popular image increasingly defined by charlatan performers rather than sincere seekers.
And yet the questions it raised never went away. Can consciousness survive physical death? Is communication across that threshold possible? What, precisely, is the relationship between mind and matter? These are not questions that science has definitively answered. They remain open — and that openness is itself significant.
The Neuroscience of Transcendence
One of the most fascinating developments of the last thirty years is the emergence of what might be called the neuroscience of spirituality — the study of what actually happens in the brain during states of meditation, prayer, mystical experience, and what researchers call self-transcendence. This is no longer fringe science. It is mainstream psychology and neuroscience.
Dr. Lisa Miller, a clinical psychologist at Columbia University and author of The Awakened Brain, has conducted some of the most compelling research in this field. Her findings suggest that the brain appears to be biologically wired for spiritual experience — that there are specific neural networks associated with states of awareness that transcend ordinary self-focused consciousness. More provocatively, her research found that people with a strong personal sense of spirituality showed measurably different brain structures and were significantly more protected against depression than those without it. Spirituality, in her framework, is not a cultural overlay on an otherwise secular biology. It is a fundamental dimension of human cognitive architecture.
This resonates with what contemplative traditions have claimed for millennia: that the capacity for transcendence is not a gift bestowed on exceptional individuals but a latent faculty present in every human being, awaiting cultivation. Shamanic practices, meditation, breathwork, plant medicine ceremonies, and ritual all appear to work, in part, by disrupting the ordinary default mode of self-referential thinking and opening temporary windows onto what mystics across traditions describe as a vaster, more unified field of awareness.
The concept of Kundalini — the energetic force described in Hindu tantric traditions as a dormant potential coiled at the base of the spine, capable when activated of producing profound states of spiritual illumination — is increasingly being discussed in the context of such neurological events. Spontaneous Kundalini experiences, reported across cultures and centuries, share striking phenomenological similarities: sensations of energy moving through the body, experiences of overwhelming light or love, dissolution of the boundary between self and world, followed often by lasting psychological transformation.
Whether one interprets these experiences through the language of ancient spiritual anatomy or modern neuroscience, the experiences themselves appear to be real, consistent, and transformative. This is not nothing. It is, in fact, one of the most important facts about human beings that mainstream culture has largely chosen to ignore.
Shamanism, Kejawen, Shintoism, and the Living World
Spiritualism, as we have been exploring it, is not a single tradition but a family of traditions — a recognition of the inadequacy of purely material explanations for human experience. Across the globe, specific traditions have preserved this recognition in forms of extraordinary depth and sophistication.
Shamanism continues to be practised in its traditional forms across Central Asia, the Americas, and parts of Africa and Oceania. Its revival in Western contexts — through neo-shamanic practitioners, plant medicine ceremonies using substances such as ayahuasca, and academic anthropological recovery of indigenous knowledge — reflects a genuine recognition that these traditions encoded hard-won wisdom about consciousness, healing, and the structure of the non-ordinary world.
Kejawen, the Javanese spiritual tradition, represents a fascinating synthesis: rooted in ancient animist and Hindu-Buddhist foundations, incorporating Islamic mysticism, and maintaining a living engagement with the inner dimensions of existence through meditation, ethical cultivation, and awareness of the interconnectedness of all things. It is a tradition that has survived colonialism and religious pressure precisely because it locates the sacred in the interior life, not in external institutions.
Shintoism in Japan preserves a vision of the world as inhabited by kami — spirits, presences, forces — not separate from nature but expressed through it. Every mountain, every river, every ancient tree is potentially the dwelling of something that demands respect and relationship. This is not superstition. It is an ecological consciousness of extraordinary sophistication, one whose practical implications — a deep reluctance to casually destroy natural landscapes — are visible in Japanese culture to this day.
Taoism offers perhaps the most philosophically precise articulation of the spiritualist worldview in its concept of the Tao ��� the underlying current of reality, ineffable, ungraspable, but palpable through stillness and alignment. The Taoist sage does not conquer nature or transcend it; she moves with it, like water finding the easiest path. In an age of maximal human intervention in natural systems, the Taoist critique of wilfulness has never been more urgent.
These traditions are not quaint relics. They are living repositories of knowledge — about consciousness, about ecological relationship, about the architecture of the inner life — that humanity can ill afford to lose.
The Questions That Remain
We began with the simplest and most unresolvable of human questions: what are we part of? And as we have traced spiritualism from its animist origins through its hermetic elaborations, its Victorian efflorescence, its neuroscientific vindications, and its living global forms, what becomes clear is that this question has never been answered to our collective satisfaction — and probably cannot be.
That is not a failure. It may be the point.
Every tradition we have touched insists, in its own language, that the most important dimension of reality is not accessible to the intellect alone. It must be lived. It must be embodied. It requires the willingness to sit in silence, to dissolve, temporarily, the ordinary story of who we are, and to open to something that exceeds our categories. This is not the abandonment of reason — the greatest spiritual intellects, from Plotinus to Ibn Arabi to William James, were among the most precise thinkers of their ages. But it is a recognition that reason, however powerful, is not the whole instrument. We have others.
What would it mean to take our spiritual inheritance seriously — not as superstition to be debunked or dogma to be adopted, but as a body of knowledge, hard-won over thousands of years, about the deepest structure of human experience? What might it mean to bring that inheritance into conversation with everything we are learning now — about the brain, about quantum entanglement, about ecological collapse, about the extraordinary fragility and preciousness of conscious life?
Are we, as the Teilhard de Chardin epigraph suggests, spiritual beings having a human experience? Or are we biological organisms that occasionally generate the illusion of transcendence? The honest answer is: we do not know. And sitting with that not-knowing — openly, curiously, without the need to resolve it prematurely in either direction — may be the most genuinely spiritual act available to us.
The doorway is always open. The question is whether we are willing to walk through it.