Unveiling the Mysteries of Psychic Phenomena: Insights from J. Malcolm Bird

J. Malcolm Bird, Every major faith, he observes, has pictured death as a doorway into a larger existence, and every one of them has drawn the same boundary around that doorway: the barrier between the living and the dead is an impenetrable veil. Communion with the divine is permitted and frequent; return visits by the dead, or mortal excursions into the realm of the dead, are treated as miraculous interventions so rare that one occurrence marks an epoch.

Spiritualism, in Bird's account, denies the absolute character of that barrier. Dating its origin from Hydesville, New York, in the middle of the nineteenth century, it teaches that under appropriate conditions the veil is pierced and intercourse between the two realms proceeds freely. Bird stresses that this is not a trivial variation on older creeds but a fundamental departure from a universal standard, and that the gap between the two positions must…