Special Dossier: DEATH: The Afterlife

If many people tend to deny death, it was not on ideological principle. After the middle of the 19th century, however, a belief in Spiritualism provided large numbers of people with a philosophic and even, in many cases, a religious basis for the denial of death.

This conviction was based on what, for Spiritualists, was the indisputable fact that the spirits of the dead could communicate with the living.

Though a belief in the existence of spirits is common in many societies, Spiritualism sought to transform this belief into empirically verifiable fact. In a society making a transition from a religious to a rational, materialist worldview, Spiritualism, which combined the two positions, was particularly attractive.