Mediumship

Existing treatments for alcohol and substance dependence are of limited efficacy and acceptability to users. Since such dependence is associated with high co-morbidity and mortality rates alternative treatments should be urgently evaluated. Ibogaine, a hallucinogenic alkaloid, derived from Tabernanthe iboga, a plant unique to the rainforests of West Africa, is already associated with a large underground treatment scene. This paper aims to explore this issue.

This document collects three previously published essay reviews that discuss five books: Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body (2005). James L. Pearson, Shamanism and the Ancient Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Archaeology (2002). David Sloan Wilson, Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society (2002). Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (2005). Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson, eds. The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative (2005). Taken together they cover music, drawing and painting (on rock), and literature and cover periods from human pre-history, through the emergence of modern man, to contemporary culture and society.sha

Despite increasing interest in pathological and non-pathological dissociation, few researchers have focused on the spiritual experiences involving dissociative states such as mediumship, in which an individual (the medium) claims to be in communication with, or under the control of, the mind of a deceased person. Our preliminary study investigated psychography–in which allegedly “the spirit writes through the medium's hand”–for potential associations with specific alterations in cerebral activity.

The temples of the Vale do Amanhecer (Valley of the Dawn) in Brazil and across the world are intended as 'spiritual emergency units' where mediums and their spirit guides provide patients with free assistance for health, relational, spiritual, and material matters concerning the person’s wellbeing. The therapeutic practice is known as 'disobsessive healing' and involves the release of causal spiritual agents considered to be affecting the person’s wellbeing. This paper discusses the Vale do Amanhecer’s etiology of illness and how mediums understand disobsessive healing as a complementary epistemology of healing, discerning spiritual and pathological experiences. Then, it examines how patients may draw their therapeutic trajectories across biomedical and spiritual contexts, sometimes developing mediumship as part of their therapeutic process. Approaching these therapeutic practices from the standpoint of affect and bodily experience may undermine the prominence of 'belief' in the study of non-biomedical approaches to healing, shedding light upon the relational, embodied, and lived-through dimensions of the notions involved in the therapeutic process.

Meditation and hypnotherapy are promoted for reducing stress, and theorists suggest that humans have an evolved capacity to engage in meditation because of the hypnotic influence of hearth and campfires during cognitive evolution.  These theories presuppose that fire is universally relaxing, though this has not been empirically verified.  This study tested the hypothesis that the properties of hearth and campfires influence a relaxation response. Using a randomized crossover design, pre- and post-test blood pressure measures were compared among 166 adults with respect to viewing simulated muted fire, fire with sound, and control conditions.  Results indicated significant blood pressure decreases in all conditions, with a moderate but significantly greater systolic decrease in the fire with sound condition.  This confirms that hearth and campfires are relaxing but not due to the visual component alone.  These findings complement theories of cognitive evolution, and have important therapeutic implications.

Although there has been significant work done on the creation of sacred space in residential housing, not enough attention has been paid to a particular segment of Chinese religion leadership in Singapore – spirit mediums – and the processes in which they practice within the political ideology of the modernist Singaporean state. In this paper, I will show how spirit mediums operate within " unofficially sacred " spaces, specifically house temples that subvert and resist functionalist policies of the Singapore state. Using two visually focussed, participant-observation case studies, I will argue that this subversion is sustained in two interrelated ways—one, through the visual comport-ment of the spirit medium's body through behavior and aesthetic markers and two, through the social prominence of the spirit medium when he or she is in a trance. These two factors come together to temporally displace the importance of the physical location, allowing a spirit medium to operate in any location, " official " or " unofficial. "

This essay explores some of the theoretical repercussions of the debate concerning the growth-oriented dimension of the personality that took place in the late nineteenth-century psychologies of transcendence.  The French-Swiss-English-American psychotherapeutic axis,  a ‘loose-knit alliance’ of cutting-edge scientists, investigated occult and paranormal phenomena ranging from somnambulism, hypnotic trance states, double consciousness, and multiple personalities to mediumship and pathological schizophrenic fantasies. Their insights into the complex phenomena of psychic dissociation posited a subliminal region that was not only a reservoir of trauma, but also source of a potentiality beyond normal consciousness, a notion which was continued and developed in Jung’s psychology.

While historians of spiritualism have been eager to focus on its political and social implications, less attention has been given to the fact that spirit communication was also a matter of visual spectacle. This article aims to analyse spiritualist séances as a form of spectacular entertainment. Relying on a wide array of spiritualist sources, it argues that séances were meant not only as moments of religious and scientific inquiry, but also as a brilliant amusement where theatrical effects embellished an exciting shared experience. The intermingling of religion and entertainment can thus be seen as one of the defining characteristics of the spiritualist experience. After sketching the history of the presence of spiritualist mediums on the stage and discussing the involvement of professionalism in mediumship, the article will then focus on the trance as a specific performance strategy. It will examine how the trance combined issues of automatism, theatricality and absorption, and contributed to the coexistence in spirit séances of spectacular features and claims of authenticity.

In the movement known as Spiritualism, successful performances of "mental mediumship" are rarely smooth. At services held by the Canberra Spiritualist Association, mediums attempt to provide evidence of life after death by describing a deceased person's character in ways recognizable to audience members. A medium's verbal performance de-emphasizes heteroglossia while developing vivid spirit characters. Audience members sometimes do not understand or accept what the medium says, but small "failures" in performance help build a larger sense that mediums and audiences are working to gather evidence. As they work, mediums foreground and background their agency at the same time, displaying their fluency in spirit

This article describes constructions of dybbuk, the Jewish variant of spirit possession, and its roots in sixteenth-century Kabbalist thought. Based on the analysis of documented early cases, this paper examines the possession idioms from psychological and socio-cultural perspectives by describing two case reports herein conceptualized as trance possession disorders. A comparison with the phenomenology of Dissociative Identity Disorder shows a striking resemblance between the syndromes. This culture-bound condition is discussed both in terms of its intra-psychic dynamics and its societal functions.

Can photography capture what our eyes cannot see? Since mid-Victorian times there have been numerous claims made for photographs that apparently show spirits or ghosts. But in reality, are they hoaxes or irrefutable proof of an ethereal world beyond our own?

In Photography and Spirit, John Harvey examines these mesmerizing images of phantoms, psychical emanations and religious apparitions. Drawing on 80 images taken between the 1860s and today, he explores images of spirits from the various perspectives of religion, science and art. Some of the images were taken by scientists, others by commercial and amateur photographers, and still others by robotic surveillance devices. The diverse origins of these photographs have inspired a multiplicity of conflicting interpretations.  Harvey’s analysis tests the connections between the images, the human imagination and larger cultural traditions. He shows that images which are often considered to be no more than fringe objects or an embarrassing and best-forgotten anomaly of photographic practice are revelatory artefacts of history, and draws from them thought-provoking insights into the connections between the material and spiritual worlds, representations of grief, and our enduring fascination with the supernatural.

Photographic images of ethereal spirits render the border between what is real and what is fantastical indistinguishable. Photography and Spirit challenges our preconceived notions and offers an intriguing new perspective on the nature of photography.
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The Anastenaria are Orthodox Christians in Northern Greece who observe a unique annual ritual cycle focused on two festivals, dedicated to Saint Constantine and Saint Helen. The festivals involve processions, music, dancing and animal sacrifices, and culminate in an electrifying fire-walking ritual. Carrying the sacred icons of the saints, participants dance over hot coals as the saint moves them. The Burning Saints presents an analysis of these rituals and the psychology behind them.

Based on long-term fieldwork, The Burning Saints traces the historical development and sociocultural context of the Greek fire-walking rituals. As a cognitive ethnography, the book aims to identify the social, psychological and neurobiological factors that may be involved and to explore the role of emotional and physiological arousal in the performance of such ritual. A study of participation, experience and meaning, The Burning Saints presents a highly original analysis of how mental processes can shape social and religious behaviour.

If narratives that uphold secular humanism have led to an "unparalleled catastrophe" as Sylvia Wynter notes in an interview with Katherine McKittrick, then it is time to unwrite them. In this essay, I examine the dead as a category that exceeds metaphysical classifications of subject and object and provides alternate possibilities of communication and hybridity. To do so, I call on work by Claire Colebrook, Jacques Derrida, John Durham Peters, Eve Tuck, and Unica Zürn, among others, with the cultural work and words of Sylvia Wynter as a guide and galvanising force. Here, I repopulate the life/death seam with gorgons, witches, fates, and revenge stories. If ghosts are seen simply as other beings, albeit taboo ones like bacteria, or require alternate cultural narratives like villains, or exist both in the symbolic sphere of the mystical and the so-called natural world like roses, what kinds of methodologies can be opened? What do the dead have to say and how do we listen?

Global Tribe explores the visionary arts dance movement of psytrance, which has mushroomed globally since its beginnings in Goa in the 1970s/1980s. Based on extensive international research, as the first detailed work on psychedelic trance, the book investigates the diverse roots and global proliferation of this music and festival culture. Consideration of comparative aesthetics, spiritual technologies and controversies with studied attention to internal dynamics will strike appeal among those holding academic and popular interests at the intersection of ritual, music and culture.

This paper investigates the relationship between psychoactive substances and so-called paranormal phenomena falling within the study of parapsychology. It is primarily concerned with extrasensory perception (ESP)—telepathy, precognition, and clairvoyance—as well as out-of-body experiences (OBEs) and near-death experiences (NDEs). Psychokinesis (PK), aura vision, encounter experiences, and sleep paralysis only make a very limited contribution to this review as they are seldom related to psychoactive drugs within the parapsychological literature. The paper borrows widely, but by no means exhaustively, from parapsychology as well as transpersonal studies, anthropology, ethnobotany, phytochemistry, psychiatry, psychotherapy, psychopharmacology, and neurobiology, particularly neurochemistry. It is organized into neurochemical models of paranormal experience (section 1), field reports of intentional and spontaneous phenomena incorporating anthropological, historical and clinical cases, and personal accounts (section 2), surveys of paranormal belief and experience (section 3), experimental research (section 4), and a methodological critique of the experimental research with recommendations for further work (section 5).

The lexicon of fuzziness -including terms like hybridity, 1 liminality, 2 and montage 3 -is now in common use to describe what individual selves and collective bodies are supposedly undergoing in our age of globalization. Some theorists, for instance the feminist philosopher Donna Haraway, have singled out the "cyborg" -presumably the most fuzzy of beings -as an emblem for our time. 4

""On December 28, 1895, German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen disclosed his discovery of X rays to the public. Just a few months later, Guglielmo Marconi successfully demonstrated his wireless system at Salisbury Plain, England. This article traces the relations between the early histories of wireless and X ray technology. It does so by highlighting the role played by psychic research to open the connections between different technologies and knowledges. The disclosure of occult connections between them contributes to locate the cultural reception of wireless around 1900 in a wider cosmology of rays and invisible forces.

French Version
Le 28 Decembre 1895, le physicien allemand Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen révélait au monde sa découverte des rayons X. Quelques mois plus tard, Guglielmo Marconi faisait une démonstration de son système de télégraphie sans-fil en Angleterre, à Salisbury Plain. En examinant la parapsychologie comme un champ propice à la mise en relation entre les technologies et les connaissances les plus hétéroclites, cet article reconstruit les liens entre la télégraphie sans-fil et les rayons X. L'étude de ces liens occultes permet de situer la reception culturelle de la transmission sans-fils autour de 1900 dans une cosmologie des rayons et forces invisibles.""

RESUME
    L’article analyse les processus de patrimonialisation qui, dans l’État nord-indien de l’Uttarakhand, concernent différents types de rituels basés sur la pratique de la possession. Lorsqu’ils font l’objet de discours et de pratiques de conservation, ces rituels sont considérés comme des performances esthétiques. Plutôt que les importantes fonctions de ces pratiques au sein de l’expérience ordinaire des gens ou du paysage thérapeutique, ce sont certains de leurs éléments esthétiques tels que la musique, le chant, la danse, qui sont mis en valeur. La possession, partie intégrante des rituels lorsqu’ils sont pratiqués dans leur contexte d’origine, tend à être effacée, lorsqu’elle n’est pas réduite à une forme de théâtralisation. Cet article montre que ce processus sélectif découlant d’une volonté de patrimonialisation n’est pas dépourvu de conflictualité. Certains habitants des villages de cette région pratiquent la possession au cours de l’exhibition sur scène de rituels qui tendent à l’exclure. D’autres critiquent des performances qui offrent une version dénaturée de la possession même. En définissant la possession comme un des éléments culturels qui méritent de les représenter, ces acteurs sociaux contrecarrent les efforts des élites et démontrent leur détermination à faire entendre leur voix à l’intérieur du discours patrimonial.

SUMMARY
    This article analyses the conflicting aspects of the process of patrimonialization of possession based rituals in the North Indian State of Uttarakhand. The rituals are often altered in the heritage-making process. Rather than the important functions they hold within people’s ordinary experience or within the local therapeutic landscape, only some of the rituals’ esthetic aspects such as music, dancing, and singing are put forward. Although it is an integral component of the rituals when practiced within their original context, possession tends to be removed altogether when not reduced to being dramatized on stage. Despite such attempts to have it muted, local villagers practice possession during staged exhibitions of rituals which are often considered as being denatured. By defining possession as a cultural element worthy of representing them, these social actors thwart elitist efforts and demonstrate their aspiration to participate actively in heritage-defining discourses.

Recent interpretations of rock art have often focused on these images as a somewhat exclusive record of shamanic experiences. Consideration of decorated animal-human figures (Patterned Body Anthropomorphs - PBAs) within the Coso Rock Art Complex in eastern California, in conjunction with the mythology of Kawaiisu, other Numic and Tubatulabal groups, suggests an alternative (or perhaps complementary) view. Coso PBAs may be representations of an important supernatural — possibly the netherworld master of the animals. This interpretation, if valid, provides further support for Coso rock art as a manifestation of a hunting religion complex. Such a complex prominently featured animal ceremonialism and functioned in part as a means to envision a supernatural agent that had special powers controlling the movements of animals and restoring game to the human world.

Mediums are individuals who report experiencing regular communication with the deceased; the phenomenon of mediumship has been reported in cultures all over the world since time immemorial. The current study examined similarities and differences in the reported experiences of secular American mediums (those not associated with any formal religious organization) during mediumship readings involving communication with the deceased and during psychic readings for/about the living. Participant responses to two counter-balanced, open-ended online survey items were quantitatively analyzed using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) text analysis software and qualitatively analyzed using a content analysis methodology. Participants included 113 self-identified mediums and 14 Windbridge Certified Research Mediums; over 90% were white females; their average age was 54.2 ± 9.6 years; 97% reported being able to distinguish between mediumistic and psychic experiences; and 122 provided complete survey responses. Statistically significant differences between descriptions of mediumistic and psychic experiences were seen regarding the proportion of words included in the LIWC categories of: social processes (11.76% ± 5.8% vs. 9.93% ± 5.64%, p=0.004); perceptual processes (6.63% ± 4.31% vs. 4.81% ± 3.81%, p<0.001); ingestion (0.23% ± 0.57% vs. 0.05% ± 0.20%, p<0.001); past-focused time orientation (3.09% ± 3.23% vs. 2.06% ± 3.19%, p=0.001); religion (0.90% ± 0.11% vs. 0.34% ± 0.09%, p<0.001); and insight (5.06% ± 2.97% vs. 6.48% ± 4.30%, p=0.002). The proportion of words describing positive and negative emotions, present-focused and future-focused time orientation, health, and money were not different. Qualitative content analysis found three overarching, summative themes regarding mediumistic communication: preparation, communication triangulated, and experience of the communication. Four overarching, summative themes emerged from the text regarding psychic readings for the living: establishing the connection, experiencing the connection, content of the reading, and psychic information flowing from various sources. Perhaps most interesting is the finding that experiences of psychic connections during readings for the living included “non-specific discarnates” as a source of information; this strongly calls into question theoretical frameworks that posit separating mediums’ experiences into categories that do and do not involve communication with the deceased as well as the continued use of terminology reflecting such a separation.

A category of religious experience that still preserves much of the original blurring and fusion between art and religion is mediumistic or spirit painting. Performed by spiritualist mediums in different locations around the world, this form of religious experience is characterized by the supposed ability of an individual to serve as an instrument for deceased artists to continue to perform their works. Little scientific research has been conducted concerning this topic. We present a brief analysis of painting activity performed by Jacques Andrade, a Brazilian medium. Born in 1945, Andrade, who has been active in the Brazilian Kardecist movement for many years, has dedicated most of his religious life to mediumistic painting at his center (The Leonardo da Vinci Salon of Mediumistic Art). Data about the medium were collected on several different occasions, from 1998 to 2013, and include psychophysiological measures (hand temperature, heart rate, bilateral skin conductance, muscle tension, and electrical brain activity), psychological measures (Dissociative Experiences Scale, Tellegen Absorption Scale, Revised Transliminality Scale, and Childhood Trauma Questionnaire), artistic material, observational data (photographs of paintings, observations of the medium in action), and some basic socio-demographic and biographical information. Basically we sought to evaluate: a) general aspects of the painting technique and style employed by the medium, b) the main features of his pictorial production, and c) the general behavior shown by the medium during the mediumistic activity. In an effort to combine and integrate our findings about this case, we propose a biopsychosocial approach to the study of what might be called creative dissociation.

In October 2015, I supervised a series of séances in Hanau,
Germany, with the Felix Experimental Group (FEG) physical medium Kai Mügge. The purpose was to try to obtain better documentation of Kai’s table levitations than my team was able to achieve in Austria in 2013
(Braude 2014). Although that goal was not met over the course of four séances, we nevertheless witnessed some interesting phenomena that are difficult to explain away normally given the control conditions imposed at the time. These include object movements beyond the reach of the sitters, a very strange “exploding” sound from the séance table, and some extended levitations in which the table seemed to sway or swim in midair. But what may be most interesting about this series of séances is the way the phenomena reflect the complex, and tortured, underlying psychodynamics of the occasion. Indeed, what readers need to know about the FEG phenomena has as much to do with the personalities involved as with the phenomena themselves. As a result, this report focuses as much on the background to the investigation as on the investigation itself.

Edmund Jones (1702-93) was a Welsh Independent minister, Calvinist, visionary, prophet, topographer, and religious historian. Like many Protestant reformers and Puritan divines before him. Jones was fascinated by the occult. Throughout his life he amassed what he believed to be convincing evidence for the existence of good and evil apparitions (including ghosts, demons, fairies, witches, angels, and giants) and of the 'invisible world'. Apparitions of Spirits in Wales contains the testimonies of many witnesses to supernatural encounters in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Wales, from abductions by fairies, and appearances of ghosts, devils and witches, to poltergeist activity. The stories here evoke a spiritually dark landscape in which the malevolent dead and damned wander. and present a fascinating insight into how ordinary eighteenth-century folk visualized the spirit world.

This new edition presents Jones's narratives in an updated and accessible form. John Harvey has collated Jones's second book of apparitions, published in 1780, along with the text of an earlier but now lost volume cm the same subject, and material from Jones's 1779 study of the parish of Aberystruth. Together they represent the most comprehensive compilation of Jones's accounts of apparitions ever before published.

CONTEXTO: Mediunidade, uma experiência humana disseminada pelas diversas sociedades ao longo da história, pode ser definida como uma experiência em que um indivíduo (chamado de médium) alega estar em comunicação com, ou sob influência de, uma personalidade falecida ou outro ser não material. Desde o século 19 há uma substancial mas negligenciada tradição de investigações científicas sobre mediunidade e suas implicações para a natureza da mente.
OBJETIVO: Discutir a importância histórica e atual da mediunidade para o problema mente-cérebro, focando em estudos que investigam as origens e as fontes das comunicações mediúnicas.
MÉTODOS: O artigo inicia-se com uma breve discussão filosófica sobre o que seria evidência para identidade pessoal e sua persistência além do cérebro, então apresenta e analisa as evidências proporcionadas por estudos em mediunidade, incluindo uma análise mais detalhada de dois médiuns muito produtivos: Leonora Piper e Chico Xavier.
RESULTADOS: Estudos bem controlados, antigos e recentes, sugerem que médiuns podem exibir habilidades e conhecimentos compatíveis com personalidades falecidas e improváveis de terem sido obtidos por meios ordinários.
CONCLUSÕES: O uso de métodos de pesquisa contemporâneos em experiências mediúnicas pode proporcionar a necessária ampliação e diversificação da base empírica para o avanço de nosso entendimento do problema mente-cérebro.

This paper will explore shared symbols in Western shamanism, their meanings and signification. Shamanism is a contested and multivalent term, so first there will be a theoretical delimitation of what is meant by Western shamanism. The definition presented is a religious practice found in contemporary Western society. Symbolism will then be analysed through three main categories. The first category of symbols will be the use of darkness/light metaphors, and their meaning and importance in Western shamanism. Then the symbol of soul loss and retrieval will be analysed, and the image of the journeys and what this is supposed to achieve. Finally, the practice of symbolic appropriation will be tackled by analysing the use (and abuse) of symbols from other cultures. What this will demonstrate on the one hand is the Western origin of the shared symbols used in Western shamanism and on the other hand how this origin is concealed with non-Western symbols, used as a strategy of legitimation.

‘Performer as Medium: Connecting Past and Present in Improvisation’, is a practice-led research project undertaken between 2013-2016 at the Victorian College of the Arts as a Master of Fine Arts (Dance) by research. There are two components of the research: a performance outcome and an exegesis. ‘Moths are Calling’ (38min) was performed and documented in July 2014, and is available for perusal via video format. It is accompanied by this exegesis of 20,000 words.

This practice-led inquiry explores performer as medium, and more broadly, performance as a practice connecting past already lived experience, and the present. It is centred in the experience of my solo performance practice that is philosophically concerned with the ontology of the everyday and the ordinary.

The inquiry adopts an experiential approach in which the creative and performance practice is sustained, while strategically adopting phenomenological, autobiographic, and ethnographic stances to interrupt, problematize and inform the creative work. This bricolleur approach to methods has a characteristically emergent implication, allowing for unfolding, a degree of plasticity and adaption that is further and continuously informed by an on-going survey of relevant practitioners and literature.

—The case of the Brazilian medium Carlos Mirabelli is one of the most tantalizing and frustrating in psychical research. If his phenomena— especially his psychokinetic manifestations—occurred as reported, he was probably the greatest physical medium of all time. Mirabelli reportedly moved objects (including very large objects) without contact, levitated himself while bound to a chair, and dematerialized and transported objects of all kinds (including himself) to distant locations. Mirabelli also reportedly produced numerous different full-figure materializations in bright daylight, and these were often recognized as deceased relatives, acquaintances, or well-known public figures by those attending the séance. Sitters would watch them form; attending physicians would carefully examine them for up to 30 minutes and report ordinary bodily functions; photographs of the figures would be taken; and then they would slowly dissolve or fade before everyone's eyes. However, Mirabelli was also clearly guilty of fraud on occasion, including his notorious use of a doctored photo ostensibly showing him to be levitating. His case therefore presents an all-too-familiar challenge to psi research—namely, how to assess cases of so-called " mixed " mediumship.

Ghosts are figuratively roaming in J. M. Coetzee's well-known postcolonial novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, which is set in an undefined time full of strife and unrest. In the novel, being mysterious and threatening to the Empire, the barbarians represent the spectral others. This paper is concerned with the question of how to approach the figurative ghosts of the barbarians and deal with their haunting when they usually appear in a horrified, irrational or obscure way. I will suggest that the concept of a medium, which refers to a person who acts as gobetween between the living and the spiritual world, can be used more figuratively as an attitude that presupposes a mode of negotiation through which a person approaches the spectral other and establishes a mutual understanding with it. In addition, I will argue that the protagonist, the Magistrate, plays the role of "passive medium," which refers to a person who originally belongs to the class of the authorities, or is restricted to the dominant cognitive frame, but is haunted by the foreignness of the repressed other and forced to establish identification with this ghostly other. By examining how the Magistrate experiences his emotional and social ambivalence in his encounter with his inner otherness as well the external otherness, I investigate how the concept of passive medium functions productively to challenge the hierarchy between the Empire and the barbarians, self and other, and to re-imagine a dialogic world to come. KEYWORDS ghost; medium; trance; J. M. Coetzee; postcolonial Lee The Magistrate as the Passive Medium 25 柯慈《等待野蠻人》中之靈媒角色與他者翻譯 李佳穗 荷蘭萊登大學文學系博士候選人 摘要 在文學和文化研究領域中，幽靈的概念已被廣泛引申為他者(如土著、 移民、罪犯、少數族裔、邊緣人)，被壓迫的、不可見的、被消音的族群以 及歷史，近年來受到德希達《馬克思的幽靈》一書的啟發，陸續有研究強調 霸權永遠無法驅逐被壓抑的幽靈，因此這些幽靈會不斷纏繞當下，迫使主體 反思並追求正義的可能。但是，纏繞主體的幽靈往往處於邊緣，無法被看見 以及被理解，因此，本文將提出「靈媒」此一概念，證明它不僅作為連結自 我與他者，當權者與被壓迫者、文明與蠻荒、主流與非主流之間的中介者， 也可以被視為企圖建立多元社會的原則與態度，提供不同情境下對立與鬥爭 的解決之道。 筆者將以南非作家柯慈著名的後殖民作品《等待野蠻人》為例，分析書 中主角，即管理帝國邊界的地方官，如何在面臨帝國對土著的剝削和酷刑 中，以及與野蠻人的交涉中，重新檢視自我身分和帝國二元論述的正當性， 進而轉換立場，扮演起靈媒的角色；由於地方官在思想和語言上還是受制於 帝國的固有思維，因此無法真正了解野蠻人的歷史、語言與想法，但透過深 入蠻荒、遭逢酷刑以及夢境等脫離主體意識的過程(trance)以及消極反抗 (negation)和誤讀(mistranslation)等策略，主角被動地保留及傳達了野蠻 人的聲音，並赤裸地呈現帝國論述本身的幽靈性，筆者將稱他為「被動的靈 媒」(the passive medium)，並深入探討此一特定概念如何提供讀者另一種 自我與他者對話的模型與希望。 關鍵詞：鬼魂、靈媒、通靈、柯慈、後殖民 23.1 ○ © Fiction and Drama 23.1 December 2013 26 The Magistrate as the Passive Medium in J. M. Coetzee's

A finales del siglo XIX, mediante el estudio científico de los fenómenos espiritistas, nuevos enfoques médicos y psicológicos se aplicaron a la mediumnidad. La idea del médium espiritista fue sustituida por la noción del médium como un ser desequilibrado, capaz de emanar fuerzas psíquicas inconscientemente. Este trabajo analiza la redefinición de la mediumnidad a través de unos polémicos artículos del médico catalán Víctor Melcior. Esta microhistoria sir- ve, por un lado, para situar el debate local dentro del contexto científico internacional y, así, mostrar las relaciones entre el espiritismo, la medicina y la psicopatología del momento. Por otro lado, permite analizar las reacciones de algunos espiritistas a las teorías de Melcior, así como las consecuencias que este debate tuvo para el espiritismo en general.

[California Dreamin'. The Invention of Neoshamanism as a Mediumistic Trial of the 20th Century]

Mediumism ― i.e. the testing of the capabilities and potentials of technical media and human mediums — was throughout the extended 19th century, the subject of a controversy which was staged as a great public debate between religious and secular interests. This debate was lessened when a psychological and immanent reading of negotiated mediumistic effects became dominant in the public sphere. Thus human trancemediums have been increasingly assigned to an obsolete archaic period, while technical media have been assigned to progressive modern times. In this perspective, human mediums and technical media are not coequal instruments in gaining knowledge of the world anymore. Instead altered states of consciousness only lead to knowledge of the particular persons themselves. In spite of this process of immanentization and the near dissolution of the great debate, the testing of mediumistic capabilities and potentials of humans and technology has not disappeared even in the 21st century. While in the 20th and 21st century, mediumistic trials have been conducted in smaller and less public settings than in the 19th century, this has resulted in new controversies. From ist beginning, mediumism has been a transatlantic approach and, following the contemporary actors and controversies, has especially led to California as a region in which new institutions of the mediumistic trial of the 20th century were invented, popularized, and globalized. As the invention of neoshamanism shows, the debate, at least partly, has nearly reached the level it had in the 19th century.