In recent times many people have been sprouting up seemingly out of nowhere claiming to be psychic mediums and have been making a very lucrative living off the assertion that psychic mediums are real. This has lead to many people questioning, “are psychic mediums real?” Without a doubt the people are real but are these gifts that they claim to have real? To understand this phenomena you would have to start by breaking down the words, digging at their history and then piecing together the missing parts and comparing them to what other spiritual beliefs around the world may hold to be true.

Let’s get to the meat and bones, the terminology of psychic medium. It is worth noting that in this terminology there are two words and we should break them down individually and see what they mean in relation to each other. The term psychic is of Greek origin, derived from psychikos, which means “of the mind” or “mental” and holds no connection to anything spiritual in particular. There are examples of the word psychikos being used within the context defined and being highly respected, Psychology being one. Psychology being the study of the mind and behaviors. Psychiatry being another such example, in which it is the branch of modern medicine focused on the study, diagnosis and treatment of mental illness. French astronomer and spiritualist Nicolas Camille Flammarion is credited with having first used the word psychic. When we look into his spiritual beliefs of modern spiritualism, it is clear that his definition lent itself more to a spiritual purpose rather than the traditional definition of psychikos. Perhaps his usage of the word in such a context sparked the frenzy of controversy surrounding the word today. Either way, in today’s understanding of the word psychic, the majority of people understand it to have a definition of “having abilities to see the future” or something to that effect.

Now for the break down of the word “medium.” According to Google Definition as provided by Oxford Languages, the word medium can be taken to mean “an agency or means to doing something” or “about halfway between two extremes” in which either definition can be used in the context of what people use the word for. As means to do something, the terminology of psychic medium could be taken to mean a sort of mind vessel. As a halfway between two extremes, the terminology of psychic medium could be taken to mean a mind that bridges two extremes. These two different definitions may seem fairly similar but they are drastically different and we will get to that in a bit. There really isn’t much left to discuss about this particular word because this one is not the controversial word. It is a widely known, understood and used word in so many different contexts. That leaves us moving into the digging into histories.

While digging into history was already partially underway in defining these words, we have to dig deeper. We have to find what exactly people meant these things to be in order to determine whether these things are real in the first place. Seeing as how Nicolas Camille Flammarion was the first to use the word on record, we should dig into that subject more. Nicolas Camille Flammarion approached modern spiritism from a scientific approach and was a known close friend of Allan Kardec, the “founder” of modern spiritism. As has been previously discussed, Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail was an appropriator of other people’s spiritual practices. He would study others, document their practices and then claim that they were his own original works behind the pen name “Allan Kardec.” The principles that he documented were largely observed due to the thorough nature of his documentation, in which he asserted a great many things about the spiritual world based on the beliefs of others. This would put our subject Nicolas Camille Flammarion in the company of someone that was known to appropriate other peoples beliefs within his lifetime and with the openly known knowledge of his practice of modern spiritism, it would put him among the ranks of the many who partook in such appropriations. Modern spiritism would give a rise to a great many people of European descent who would openly claim that they too are “psychic” and “mediums” in which they were the uniquely equipped, they had a rare ability to be the mind that contacts the spirits in the spirit world. This gift was not one available to everyone and was an exclusive to just people with the physical trait or gift of psychic ability.

Taking a step back and seeing all these pieces as a complete puzzle is a necessity to see where the pieces need to be connected. We see the terminology of “psychic medium” being brought up for the first time in recorded history by a person who practiced spiritism, who was a close friend of the founder of spiritism, who founded spiritism around the end times of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, based on his observations of spiritual practices in America and Europe, we see the rise of the term “psychic medium” to mean an elite group of people with special physical gifts that make them more than the average person, and we see that there was a distinct definition of these words among them to mean “the mind vessel of spirits.” There was even mention of people who were of Latin or Anglo Saxon descent and had already used the word “spirtism” in other languages, like Spanish having “Espiritismo”, but they did not use it in everyday forms until Allan Kardec declared it his own, thus giving rise to those same people incorporating it into their everyday life to mean everything spiritual. The delusions of grandeur had no limit as it may seem for Allan Kardec, appropriating words to define and name appropriated beliefs. Moving forward, it seems the nomenclature has become widely accepted and even respected by many due to the various people who have come forward and earned themselves a place within celebrity groups on the strength of their spiritual ability or their identity as psychic mediums.

The oddity in all of this is the definition of medium having a second meaning of “halfway between two extremes” and the people of whom the spiritual beliefs originally belonged to and their identifying with this specific definition over the other. Espiritismo is one example in which the writings of Allan Kardec reached but did not persuade. This is because Espiritismo is Spiritism in English. This spiritism predates Allan Kardec’s own and is indeed born out of the necessity to survive slavery in Cuba and the sharpening of Mediumship. There is a high possibility in which some of what Allan Kardec portrayed to be his came directly from Espiritismo and the two do go by the same name and share similar beliefs and practices. It is widely taboo for any practitioners of Espiritismo to call themselves Psychic at all, let alone Psychic Mediums, though the original definition of Psychikos would absolutely describe what exactly they are. They are people that use their mind (Psychikos), to bridge the two extremes, the world of the living and the world of the dead (Medium). To read more about Espiritismo, I would highly advise you get yourself a copy of The Espiritismo Field Manual, which goes over this subject in more detail.

To bring this article to an end I guess I would say Psychic Mediums are very real. There is just a distinction between where their beliefs come from and what they mean when they say that they are Psychic Mediums. In many cases, people that are separated from the source of spirituality tend to suffer from a less refined and accurate spiritual practice where people who are closer to the source are more refined and accurate. It is worthy of noting that in Espiritismo everyone has the capacity to be a Medium and therefore being a “Psychic Medium” is not a unique trait or rare marker of elite spiritual people. Just as those practitioners would simply call themselves “Medium” instead of “Psychic Medium” but their practice is likely to be the source of the spiritism that gave birth to the terminology of “Psychic Medium.” All this to say, no two Psychic Mediums are alike, some can be exponentially better than others and some can just call themselves Mediums.