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Speaking with the Dead

Every October someone asks whether we hold séances. We do not. But we speak with our dead all year round, at the ancestor shelf, at the Samhain table and in the quiet of our own kitchens. This page is about how we do it, why we have put the talking board away, and what to do if you are going to sit down at one anyway.

The dead in our tradition

Witches and pagans do not, on the whole, believe that the dead are gone. Some of us believe they rest in the Summerland between lives. Some believe they become part of the land, or join the ancestors who stand behind every living family. Some are not sure what they believe and keep the customs anyway, because the customs are good for the living. Nearly all of us believe that the dead can be honoured, that it does them and us good, and that the veil between the worlds is thinnest at Samhain and, by some reckonings, at Beltane.

We usually speak of three kinds of ancestor. The ancestors of blood are the family dead, back to the first people. The ancestors of spirit are the teachers, writers, friends and witches whose work made ours possible, whether or not we ever met them. The ancestors of place are those who lived and died on the land where you live now. They are often not your people at all, and you owe them courtesy, and where you can, practical help to their living descendants.

An ancestor shelf

The simplest and best way to keep company with the dead is to give them a place in your house. A shelf will do, or the top of a bookcase, or a corner of your altar.

• Photographs, names or keepsakes of those you are honouring. A recipe card in a grandmother's handwriting is as good as any portrait.
• A glass of fresh water, changed every few days. It is the oldest offering there is.
• A candle, lit when you sit with them and snuffed when you go. Never left burning in an empty room.
• Offerings on their days and on yours: a little of the first cup of coffee, a slice of the birthday cake, a glass of the whiskey they liked. Traditions differ on what happens next. Ours is to leave it a day and then give it to the earth or the compost; in many cultures the family eats it, the dead having taken what they needed. Both are respectful. The bin is not.
• Talk to them. Out loud, as you would to someone in the next room. Tell them the news. Ask their advice. This is the whole of the practice, and everything else is decoration.

You do not have to honour everyone you are descended from. If someone in your family did harm, and above all if they did harm to you, you owe them nothing, and there is no place for them on your shelf unless and until you choose to make one. The ancestors of spirit are always there instead, and so is the long line of ordinary, decent dead behind the difficult ones. Adopted people may honour both families, either, or neither. The dead are not a test of loyalty.

What we do instead of séances

The Hearth's ways with the dead are deliberately plain. At Samhain we keep the dumb supper, a meal eaten in silence with a place set for them, and in circle we say their names and the circle answers, What is remembered, lives. Some of us burn a bay leaf in the cauldron for each name, and a sprig of rosemary at the end for all of them, and keep the ashes for the garden. Through the year we write letters to the dead and read them aloud or give them to the fire. We cook their recipes. We tell their stories, with the embarrassing parts left in. We visit their graves, clear the moss from the stones and leave flowers, as Irish families do on Cemetery Sunday. When we dream of them, we write the dream down.

What all of these have in common is that they invite. We set the table and leave the door open; we do not summon. The dead may come or not as they please, and either way the living have been changed by making the invitation. That seems to us the right way round.

Séances: a short history

The séance as most people picture it, a ring of hands round a table in the dark, belongs not to witchcraft but to Spiritualism, a religious movement that began in Hydesville, New York, in 1848, when two young sisters, Kate and Margaret Fox, said that the rapping in their house was a dead man trying to speak. Within a decade there were mediums in every city in America and Britain, and the parlour séance, with its tipping tables, spirit trumpets and ectoplasm, was the height of fashion. In 1888 Margaret Fox confessed that the sisters had made the raps by cracking their toe joints. She later took the confession back, and the movement survived it. Spiritualist churches still meet today. They are a religion in their own right, with their own seriousness, and they deserve the same respect we ask for ourselves.

Fraud dogged the séance from the start. Harry Houdini spent much of the 1920s exposing false mediums, partly out of grief for his mother, whom he had hoped to reach and could not. In Britain, the last person sent to prison under the old Witchcraft Act was a medium, Helen Duncan, jailed in 1944 after a séance. The law that replaced it in 1951 was called, tellingly, the Fraudulent Mediums Act.

The talking board

The board with the alphabet, the numbers, YES, NO and GOODBYE, and the little heart-shaped pointer called a planchette, was patented in America in 1891 and sold as a parlour game. It was a good one: cheap, eerie and endlessly sociable. Parker Brothers bought the rights in 1966, and it has sat in toy shops ever since.

The planchette does move, and the people with their fingers on it are usually quite sure they are not moving it. They are. The physiologist William Carpenter named the ideomotor effect in 1852: the body makes small movements in answer to thoughts and expectations, without the mind noticing that it is doing so. The next year Michael Faraday showed that table-turning worked in just the same way, with a clever little device that revealed the sitters' hands were pushing the table before it moved. The classic test for a talking board is to blindfold the sitters and quietly turn the board round. The planchette goes on spelling with perfect confidence, but now to the places where the letters used to be.

That does not make the board meaningless. It means that what speaks through it is the sitters: their hopes, their fears, their grief, and whatever in the depths of them knows more than they do. That is much the same thing we listen for when we scry. The difference is that when you scry, you know you are the one doing the seeing. Around a board, everyone believes the voice belongs to someone else.

Why the Hearth does not hold séances

• Grief. The person who most wants a séance is nearly always someone newly bereaved, and that is exactly the person a séance can hurt most. A message spelled out on a board, or "received" by a well-meaning friend, can carry enormous weight and come from nowhere but the room. The grieving deserve better than a guessing game.
• Truth. Our covenant promises that we will not claim powers nobody has seen us use. We cannot tell a message from the dead from a message from our own hands, and we will not pretend we can.
• Consent. We do not work on the living without their permission, and we feel the same about the dead. An invitation can be declined. A summons cannot.
• Better ways. Everything we hoped a séance might give us, we have found at the dumb supper, the ancestor shelf and the spoken names, without the fear and the fuss.

Some of our members have sat with Spiritualist mediums and found real comfort there, and we would never scorn that. This is a choice about how the Hearth keeps its own dead, not a judgement on anyone else's.

If you are going to anyway

People will hold séances, especially at Samhain, and especially when they are young. If you are going to, we would rather you did it with care.

1. Choose the company. A small group, three to six people who know and trust each other. Everyone sober. Nobody in fresh grief, nobody who is frightened, and nobody who has been talked into it. Children should not take part.
2. Agree the purpose. Whom are you hoping to reach, and why? "To see what happens" is not a purpose. If you cannot answer, do not begin.
3. Choose one leader to ask the questions, keep the time, and end the session if it needs ending. Six people asking questions at once is confusing for everyone, living and dead.
4. Prepare the space. A table, a few candles safely placed, the lights low but not out, the phones off. Cleanse the room in your own way, with salt water, a besom, or juniper or rosemary smoke; not white sage, for reasons we give in borrowing well. Ground and centre together, and cast a circle or say a prayer of protection if that is your practice.
5. Invite, by name, and kindly. "Grandmother Rose, if you are willing, we would be glad of your company." Do not command. Do not call out to "any spirit who is here." You would not open your front door to whoever happened to be passing.
6. Keep the questions simple and kind. Do not ask when anyone will die, who will win anything, or about other people's secrets. Do not test the dead with trick questions. Write everything down, letter by letter if you are using a board.
7. Hold what comes lightly. Treat anything you receive as you would a dream: something to think about, not instructions to follow. If a message frightens or upsets anyone, stop.
8. If something unwelcome seems to arrive, say clearly that it is not wanted and must go, and end the session. You do not need to argue with it or be brave about it. Most unwelcome presences at a séance are fear and suggestion, which are real enough to deserve respect and are best dealt with by turning the lights on.
9. Close the door. Thank whoever came. Say goodbye, plainly. Move the planchette to GOODBYE if you are using a board. Snuff the candles, open the circle, open a window, wash your hands and eat something. Then talk it over, as yourselves, with the lights on.
10. Look after each other. If anyone becomes very distressed or confused, or seems to drift off and will not easily come back, stop at once and treat it as you would any other person in distress: lights, warmth, water, a calm voice, and a doctor if one is needed. Do not treat it as a message.