Spiritualism- How it brought the afterlife into society.

Spiritualist beliefs began in the 1700's when Emanuel Swedenborg had a spiritual awakening in his fifties. He claimed he was told by God to write a new doctrine that would reform Christianity. He taught that heaven and hell was not the only afterlife, but that life after death was divided into a series of worlds or states in which a spirit will gradually progress. Swedenborg had also said that spirits could mediate between God and humans.

Margaret and Kate Fox, of Hydesville, New York, claimed to be able to communicate with with the spirit of a murdered peddler. These sisters helped bring the aftlerlife into the open, a skeleton was later found in the basement of their home helping their story. Their story caused a stir of public opinion.

Seances then became a popular form of entertainment, and many other mediums claimed they too could communicate with the dead. Along with this, public performances started to show on the streets of North America and not to far behind, Europe too had signs of spiritualism. Some even claimed to levitate and manifest objects out of thin air.

By the 1850s the Spiritualist movement was beginning to grow strong on both sides of the Atlantic. The world of the 1920s had a much higher prominence of spiritualism, even Europe being heavily effected, though the UK was most prominent.

With the beginning of Mormonism and radical Quakerism, Spiritualists began to gain a higher belief that humans could communicate with Gods and Angels. Spiritualism then began to decline due to claims of fraud and witchcraft, along with deadly and humiliating results to some of the public believers.

Today there still is, and ever increasing, spiritualists. More and more people come out to tell about their spiritual experiences, and mediums are becomnig more prominent. Though today the paranormal  is being stictly broken down by the scientific world to further try and prove that the spiritual realm exists or not.  Spiritualists themselves use the church to help explain what they believe is in the afterlife. While paranormal investigators use science and modern equipment to help bring the afterlife to this modern world in a way that everyone can see, online, and on the television. Today it is very easy to find information about the paranormal, spiritualists helped bring the afterlife into the public eye, now to be seen as something much more common in our culture today.