Three words get used almost interchangeably in listings, and two of them describe genuinely different sessions. Knowing which is which before booking saves a disappointment nobody needs.
What follows describes the practice as practitioners describe it, and then says separately what the evidence does and does not establish. Both halves belong in the same article.
Psychic and Intuitive
A psychic reading is about you. The practitioner says they perceive information about a living person, a situation or a decision by means other than the ordinary senses. The subject is your life: circumstances, relationships, work, choices, what is ahead.
Intuitive is now largely a softer word for the same thing, usually signalling a reflective or coaching style rather than a predictive one. No body defines the difference. Treat psychic and intuitive as overlapping self descriptions rather than as technical categories, and read what the practitioner says about their sessions instead of reading the label.
Mediumship
A medium says they perceive and relay communication from people who have died. The subject is not your situation but somebody who is gone.
Practitioners generally hold every medium to be psychic and not every psychic to be a medium. Many offer both and will say which mode they are working in at a given moment.
Evidential mediumship is the term for a session where the medium aims to give specific checkable detail first, names, occupations, physical characteristics, shared memories, before delivering any message. Inside the practice, the evidence phase is treated as the quality standard.
Channelling
Channelling is described as allowing a non-physical presence to communicate through the practitioner, usually through their voice. Two things distinguish it from mediumship in practitioners’ own accounts: the communicator is usually a guide or other entity rather than a named relative, and the mechanism is described as the entity using the practitioner rather than the practitioner relaying impressions.
Practitioners distinguish trance channelling, where the practitioner is deeply withdrawn and might not recall the material, from conscious channelling, where they remain aware. The boundary is drawn differently by different teachers.
The Clair Senses
Clair is French for clear. Each term names a channel through which practitioners say information arrives, and most describe having a dominant one rather than only one.
Clairvoyance: clear seeing. Information arrives as images, symbols or scenes, described as seen internally rather than with the eyes.
Clairaudience: clear hearing. Information arrives as words, names or sounds, usually described as heard internally.
Clairsentience: clear feeling. Information arrives as physical sensation or emotion, for example a pain in the place somebody had one.
Claircognizance: clear knowing. Information arrives as a sudden conviction with no image, sound or sensation attached.
Clairalience and clairgustance: clear smelling and clear tasting. A smell or a taste with no physical source, and practitioners describe both as rare.
Somebody describing themselves as primarily clairsentient is telling you how their material tends to arrive, which is worth knowing because it shapes how a session sounds.
What Happens in a Session
A private sitting runs one to one, in person, by phone or online. It usually opens with what the practitioner is and is not promising, and a careful one says plainly they are unable to guarantee which communicator, if any, arrives. A mediumship sitting then moves through an evidence phase and a message phase.
Platform mediumship is the same work in front of a group, most often in a Spiritualist church service or a public demonstration. The medium describes a communicator, finds which person in the room it belongs to, gives evidence and a message, and moves on. Time per person is short, so the material is briefer than in a private sitting.
In both formats your role is participatory. You are asked to confirm, deny, or say you are unable to place something. Knowing this before you sit down is worth more than any other line in this article, and the reason is in the next two sections.
Where This Comes From
Modern Spiritualism is conventionally dated to March 1848 in Hydesville, New York, where two sisters, Margaret and Kate Fox, reported communicating with a spirit through rapping sounds. Their public sittings set off a movement which had reached San Francisco and London within five years.
The history includes its own reversal, and an article leaving it out would be selecting. In 1888 Margaret Fox publicly stated the raps had been produced by cracking her joints. About a year later she withdrew the confession. Both the confession and the withdrawal are documented, and neither one on its own is the story.
Training, Certification, and What They Mean
Several organisations teach and assess this work, and the ones below are long established.
- The Spiritualists’ National Union in the United Kingdom, established in 1901, which runs courses and an accreditation scheme with certificates in areas such as demonstrating, private readings and speaking.
- The Arthur Findlay College at Stansted Hall in Essex, founded in 1964 and run by the Union, which teaches mediumship, healing, philosophy and trance.
- The National Spiritualist Association of Churches in the United States, founded in 1893, formed partly in response to widespread fraud.
- The College of Psychic Studies in London, founded in 1884 as the London Spiritualist Alliance.
A certificate from one of these means the holder completed a syllabus, was assessed by the organisation’s own assessors against its own standards, and signed a code of conduct. It gives you a named body to complain to, which is a real thing to have.
It does not mean state licensing, medical qualification, or any outside validation of the abilities claimed. These are private membership bodies certifying against their own criteria, and there is no statutory regulator of mediumship in the United Kingdom or the United States.
How to read a credential in a field with no licensing is the subject of credentials, training, lineage, and experience.
What the Evidence Establishes, and What It Does Not
This section states a position and attributes it, because leaving it out would be a choice as well.
There is no evidence accepted by the wider scientific community for mediumistic contact with the dead, for clairvoyance, or for foreknowledge of events. The recurring problem in the research is independent replication. The best known body of work, the ganzfeld experiments, has not replicated consistently, and one of the parapsychologists behind the most cited positive analysis later agreed with his critic: those experiments alone did not support the claim.
Controlled tests of mediums specifically have not found the claimed abilities. Some researchers report positive findings using blinded protocols, those results are disputed on method, and the disagreement is about method rather than about honesty.
Researchers who have looked for ordinary explanations point to cold reading, where a practitioner infers and tests, to the tendency people have to accept statements fitting almost anyone as personally specific, and to remembering the hits and forgetting the misses. The confirm and deny structure of a sitting is what those explanations rest on. Practitioners dispute the account. Both positions are in the published literature.
What a reading offers without any of this being settled is a structured, attentive conversation about something you care about, usually grief. Whether anything further is happening is not a question the evidence answers.
What the Labels Do Not Prove
- Calling yourself a medium is a description, not a qualification.
- A certificate proves a syllabus was completed, not an ability.
- A long waiting list proves demand.
- Accurate detail in one sitting does not establish a mechanism.
- A session which moved you deeply was still a session, and the two questions are separate.
Questions Worth Asking Before You Book
- Is this a psychic reading, a mediumship reading, or both?
- What do you promise, and what are you unable to promise?
- What happens if nobody comes through?
- What do you need from me beforehand, and why?
- Is the session recorded, and by whom?
One more thing worth knowing, and it holds whatever you believe. A careful practitioner in this field will not diagnose an illness, will not tell you to stop a treatment, will not offer to remove a curse for a fee, will not press you to book again, and will state their fee before you sit down.
The pattern where fear arrives followed by a payment is set out in fixed outcomes, curse removal, and pressure to rebook.