Spiritist or Spiritualist

Are these the same? If not could someone explain the difference.. Thank you

As far as I know, they are equivalent, except that Spiritism postulates that humans are essentially immortal spirits that temporarily inhabit physical bodies for several necessary incarnations to attain moral and intellectual improvement, while Spiritualists may not accept the reality of more than one necessary incarnation, as in my own case.

Hi Normy,

Other differences occur, they do not really practice evidential mediumship in the way we see at every Spiritualist centre but are heavily involved in getting communication from Spirit via trance. Interestingly they are much more involved with EVP and ITC than we are.

The basis of Spiritism is still contained with the volumes of work assembled by Allan Kardec from the written material from a wide range of then writing mediums (or assembled from written words via the Planchette). Their view of reincarnation, as provided by Kardec, can be quite punitive which is another step away from our views, whether or not we accept reincarnation.

Overall I am a lot less comfortable with Spiritism compared to Spiritualism. However there are some elements they study which we should remind ourselves of at times, especially their interest in Psychology and concerns about people becoming obsessed over Spirit. This is probably really important when you are pushing people into trance which is a place where the human sub conscious can get all to active with it, not Spirit, providing the communication.

I think that we can forget to readily that in the late 19th and particularly the early 20th century people with mental issues were encouraged not to get involved with mediumship or psychic work. There are good reasons for that but in the modern world its all to easy to forget this.

Reincarnation is an optional belief for Spiritualists: for Spiritists, it's integral to their system. Spiritists ('otherwise', perhaps?) seem to be more Christian than do Spiritualists: at least, Jesus' teachings seem to be more a part of their system. They place more evidence on individual spirit development -- they are more like most religions, in that respect -- and less on mediumistic messages.

Spiritualism started in the USA -- where it is no longer popular -- in 1848, and spread to Britain, where it still is popular.

Spiritism started in France in the later 19th century, spread to other European countries -- in none of which is it popular today-- and to Brazil and the Philippines. It is very popular in both of these countries today.