To become a medium: Relatedness and apprenticeship in Australian spiritualism

Within the modern Spiritualist movement, mediums are central figures who work to connect physical and spirit worlds. By attempting to provide evidence of the survival of the human spirit after physical death, conveying caring messages from the spirit world, and giving hope to recipients, mediums pursue a spiritual mission. In this paper, I consider two models of mediumship: Wilson's argument that mediumship, like shamanism, is learned through apprenticeship, and Carstens' analysis of ‘relatedness’. Drawing on a year‐long ethnographic study conducted in 2024 with the world's oldest (and Australia's most prominent) Spiritualist congregation, the Victorian Spiritualists' Union of Melbourne, I argue that although mediumship does involve apprenticeship to a degree, it is better understood as the cultivation of new forms of relatedness crossing both physical and spiritual worlds. In addition, I show how mediumship cultivates new forms of agency and reshapes social dynamics within a Spiritualist association and in mediums' everyday lives.