Food For Thought

Can Anyone Be a Psychic Medium?: An Easy Analysis

Have you ever wondered how to communicate with the dead? Perhaps you have seen a psychic medium in action and wondered – how do they do it? Did they have to perform some satanic ritual to unlock their mediumistic powers, or can anyone be a psychic medium?

Can anyone be a psychic medium

Every day there seems to be another article or a news story about a spookily accurate clairvoyant or psychic medium. Every city supposedly has their very own psychic who can talk to the dead (or something along those lines at least!). If there are so many psychics out there, surely that means that psychics are real? If psychics are real, then who can become a medium?

Psychic mediums have been around for centuries but have recently become even more popular. Psychic mediums are everywhere, from your local tv stations to blockbuster Hollywood movies. There are so many kinds of mediums out there, each so different in their methods and origin stories, that it can be hard to tell what’s real and what isn’t.

So, if you want to find out ‘can anyone be a psychic medium,’ then keep reading. Follow us as we explore ‘Can anyone be a psychic medium: history, facts, and fiction.

What Is a Psychic Medium?

Psychic Mediums are said to practice the art of (allegedly) mediating communication between the spirits of the dead and living human beings.

There are several ways in which a psychic medium can supposedly communicate with the dead. The most well known (and most often depicted in film and media) method of mediumship is when the medium is ‘possessed’ by the spirit. This type of mediumship is called channeling.

In this type of mediumship, the spirit speaks directly to living using the body of the medium. It is, however, the rarest of all the methods used by psychic mediums to convene with the dead. Another, lighter form of channeling is when the medium establishes a ‘direct line’ to the ‘spirit world’ so the dead can ‘speak’ to the medium.

More common forms of mediumship involve the medium ‘hearing’ the thoughts of the dead either through their own psychic abilities or by ‘activating’ a spiritual object like an ouija board or an amulet.

So, can anyone be a psychic medium? Many people are skeptical about whether psychic mediums are even real!

Are Psychic Mediums Real?

Daytime television is bursting with clairvoyants and psychic mediums alike. The sheer number of mediums and psychics makes one wonder, ‘can anyone be a psychic medium?’.

The debate of ‘can anyone be a psychic medium’ is only just overshadowed by the argument over whether mediumship is real at all. Some people are firm believers that psychics are real and can convene with the dead, and others are just as steadfast in their beliefs that mediumship is a scam and a hoax.

No facts nor logic can convince either of these extremists to change their opinions. Normal people like us, on the other hand (who don’t spend their limited time and energy debating the validity of psychic mediums), need to see some facts and figures before we can decide for ourselves.

Four in ten Americans believe in psychics, and it is a 2.2 billion dollar industry in the United States alone! These facts may make it seem like psychics must be real- after all, how could they make so much money if they were all fake? But in reality, the mediumship industry has proven to be predatory and unreliable at best! To understand why this is, let us look at why people find psychic mediums so appealing.

People usually contact psychic mediums when they have lost a loved one and would like to gain a few extra moments with them at any cost. Very rarely are people paying hundreds of dollars to visit psychics just for the fun of it! So already, this industry seems unethical because it is preying on people’s grief and suffering.

Secondly, t.v psychics often make mistakes! There are countless stories of journalists and investigators debunking psychic mediums by showing them photos of living people and asking them what they believed has happened to them.

In one infamous instance, a reporter asked a psychic medium about a girl in a photograph. The psychic said the girl in the photograph was missing and most likely died when the girl in question was, in fact, the reporter asking her the questions!

More nefarious ‘psychic medium’ businesses attempt to ‘locate’ missing children using their psychic abilities. These people heartlessly exploit the suffering of parents and use it for profit. In fact, some psychics can give ‘verdicts’ on the missing children, telling the parents that their children are dead or alive when they have no actual evidence!

One heartbreaking case of a fake ‘psychic detective’ was when a kidnapped girl in captivity watched a clairvoyant on tv tell her mother that she was dead! The girl said she was devastated. The psychic would say those things, and she could only hope that her mother would not give up on the search! Luckily, the girl is now safe and reunited with her mother.

However, some psychics seem to make spookily accurate readings, so surely there must be some legitimate psychics out there?

To see why this is false, let us look at the two main techniques used by modern-day celebrity psychic mediums.

Techniques Used by Psychic Mediums:

Cold Reading:

‘Cold Reading’ is the most common of the two main techniques used by psychic mediums today. Cold reading boils down to taking high probability guesses amongst a large crowd. Mediums will ask a crowd of people vague questions like ‘has anyone lost a loved one with an ‘a’ or’ in their name’ or ‘I am sensing a loved one who had problems in the head or chest area. These guesses are so generalized that it is almost certain to elicit a response in a large enough crowd!

After they pinpoint a member of the audience using this method, the psychic medium will directly ask them who their lost one is and then make a generalized comment like ‘they are proud of you, love you, are watching over you.’ It may be hard to fool someone with this trick normally, but when people are hurt and grieving, they are more likely to believe the mediums because they tell them what they want to hear.

Furthermore, celebrity psychics tend to ‘explain away’ or ‘style out’ any mistakes they make to continue the facade of legitimacy.

If they make an incorrect guess about how someone died, for example, the medium could say they were getting confused with another spirit in the room or that the spirit is warning the client of how they were going to die and not how the spirit died! If you are in pain and suffering, you would believe these people and their explanations regardless of how sketchy they may be.

This is why people view psychic mediums with such malice. Celebrity mediums are essentially con artists and scammers that have made millions by exploiting the pain of widows and orphans.

Hot Reading:

Hot reading is used less often during psychic medium shows and performances but is much more convincing than cold reading (because cold reading can often lead to mistakes).

Hot reading involves researching a client beforehand. This could be done during one on one sessions where the client books an appointment days before the actual session, thus giving the psychic medium plenty of time to research them, or it could be done for popular celebrities whose lives are fairly well known.

For example, you may have posted on Instagram that you lost a grandmother and that you enjoyed their handmade cookies. The psychic would research this beforehand and then amaze you when they tell you that your grandmother misses baking for you.

Similarly, if a celebrity like Harry Styles mentions that his step-father died of cancer, then the medium could mention this during a televised session or interview and wow the audience.

Hot reading is even more deplorable than cold reading because it invades the privacy of the client and feels even more like a scam than cold reading!

So if you are planning on becoming a t.v medium, then the answer to ‘can anyone be a psychic medium’ is yes, once you learn the tricks! Although, you may not feel great about yourself after the fact!

But these money-mad celebrity psychic mediums are not the only people who practice mediumship. Mediums have existed for a long time in many cultures, long before the modern-day scam artists. So before we can find out for sure ‘can anyone be a psychic medium,’ we need to determine if those ancient psychic mediums are real.

History of Psychic Mediums:

Attempts to communicate with the dead have been recorded even in early human history. All the major continents have documented some form of mediumship. Cultures across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas have their own version of psychic mediums. It seems like the question ‘can anyone be a psychic medium’ is as old as time!

In the West, mediumship became quite popular in the 19th-century, after the rise of spiritualism as a religion. Modern spiritualism is believed to have started from the practices and lectures of the Fox sisters in 1848 New York. The mediums Paschal Beverly Randolph and Emma Hardinge Britten were among the most celebrated psychics in the mid-19th century due to their riveting ‘trances’ (being ‘possessed’ by the spirits of the dead).

Allan Kardec was the one who coined the term Spiritism in and around the 1860s. He even wrote a five-book collection called Spiritist Codification about what he claimed were conversations with spirits by selected mediums.

However, mediumship fell out of favor with the public after the exposure of the fraudulent physical mediums such as the Davenport Brothers and the Bangs Sisters (who were found to be using stage magic tricks to fake mediumship). Still, religion and its beliefs continue despite this. Physical mediumship and seances may have fallen out of practice, but platform mediumship (like cold reading) have replaced them.

Of course, mysticism, science, and history have always had a rocky relationship. What was once witchcraft is now science, and what was once science is now an outdated pagan fairytale. Mental illness was once called ‘being possessed by the Devil’ but is now called schizophrenia, multiple personality disorder, or autism. Similarly, we may eventually find out that those psychic mediums of yore were something else entirely.

However, it is still possible that these psychic mediums exist. In these cases, ‘the answer to can anyone be a psychic medium’ is – probably not!

Still, answering the question ‘can anyone be a psychic medium’ is difficult because every culture has its own rules regarding the subject.

Can Anyone Be a Psychic Medium?

Some cultures believe that the answer to ‘can anyone be a psychic medium’ is yes. They believe that mediumship is a science that can be studied and learned. Some regions of the world even have schools and institutions that teach regular priests, pandits, and spiritual leaders how to become psychic mediums.

Other cultures believe the answer to ‘can anyone be a psychic medium’ is no. They believe mediumship is a gift that is found in one in a thousand people. Some might even believe that mediums can pass on their gift like an inheritance.

All of this is assuming, of course, that psychics are real. As we have learned, modern psychic mediums are definitely not real, and there is very little evidence to support the idea that psychic mediums used to exist in the past. So far, psychics seem like hearsay, so the question ‘can anyone be a psychic medium’ is invalid!

Today, many institutions insist they can teach you how to become a psychic medium ( those institutions are usually the reason why people ask ‘can anyone be a psychic medium’ in the first place!).

Since we know that it is unlikely that mediumship actually exists, you should be wary of these institutions! Unless these ‘schools’ are teaching you how to defraud the public (using hot reading and cold reading), they are trying to scam you out of your hard-earned money.

So, unfortunately, there is no answer to ‘can anyone be a psychic medium’ because we cannot prove that psychic mediums exist at all! However, con artists masquerading as psychic mediums do, indeed, exist, and anyone can be one! Although ‘celebrity scammer’ does not exactly sound like an attractive career prospect.

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Published by
Ishita Sharma