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When the Extraordinary Hits Home
what a participant sees for him- or herself is very nearly identical to
what their neighbor sees.
In the closed group, even more dramatic examples of convergence
may occur. One evening, Jocelyne saw black tulips for Nancy. At the
end of the evening, when the lights came back on, Carole (a business-
woman in her late forties) pulled a gift-wrapped bouquet of black tulips
out from under her chair, a birthday gift for Nancy. It happens quite
often that person A feels a headache when reading for person B, who
in turn is picking up on the real headache being experienced by per-
son C. Mediums often work together in the church, and it is common
to see one add details to what the other has seen. In the closed group,
Sylvie (a medium in her sixties who gives clairvoyance at church ser-
vices) and Michel often see the same spirits, as in the example given
at the beginning of this article.
When I ask Sylvie about such incidents, she laughs: “Yes, it happens
a lot, there’s something between us, maybe you could say we’re on the
same wavelength; I don’t have his level of knowledge, we’re very dif-
ferent, but we connect on the level of clairvoyance.”
Zaretsky has described the way Spiritualists talk among themselves
as a “distinct system of communication,” one that is often deemed
“incomprehensible” by outsiders ( 1974 , 167 ). It is not surprising that
Spiritualist discourse would seem hermetic to a non-participating ob-
server (the role Zaretsky adopted in his study). For example, color
symbolism frequently comes up in Spiritualist readings. Michel might
ask his students to see a color that another participant needs and ex-
plain why. Quite often, students perceive in terms of color even when
this is not the objective of the exercise. The same color can mean dif-
ferent things for different people on different occasions. Green, for
example, can mean love or healing, among other things. With expe-
rience, one learns to see clairvoyantly in terms of color, to interpret
one’s own color symbolism and to follow that used by others.
Spiritualism offers an ongoing dialectic of the idiosyncratic and the
shared. Each clairvoyant medium sees a bit differently from all oth-
ers, each healer works in his or her own way, though all frame their
activities in generally the same terms, as spiritual gifts from God used
to serve others and developed with the help of spirit guides. The sch
