séance

Séance is French for a sitting or a session, from seoir (to sit), from Latin sedēre (to sit). In French, a séance can be any meeting — a séance de travail is a work session, a séance de cinéma is a movie showing. The word is perfectly ordinary. English borrowed it in the late eighteenth century with the general meaning of a session or meeting, and only later narrowed it to the specific meaning: a gathering where a medium attempts to communicate with the dead.

The narrowing happened in the 1840s and 1850s, when the Spiritualist movement swept the United States and Europe. The Fox sisters of Hydesville, New York, claimed in 1848 that they could communicate with a dead peddler through rapping sounds. Their demonstrations sparked a craze. Within a decade, séances — conducted in darkened parlors, with a medium in a trance, a table that tilted or rapped, and sometimes the appearance of ectoplasm — were a mainstream entertainment and a genuine religious movement.

The séance was both theater and faith. Some mediums were exposed as frauds — the Fox sisters themselves admitted to deception in 1888, then retracted the admission. Others were never caught. The cultural impact was enormous: Mary Todd Lincoln held séances in the White House after the death of her son Willie. Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the hyper-rational Sherlock Holmes, was a devoted Spiritualist who attended séances regularly.

The séance declined in the twentieth century but never disappeared. It persists in horror films, in paranormal investigation shows, and in small spiritual communities. The French word for sitting down has become the English word for the most dramatic form of sitting down — the one where you sit in the dark and wait for the dead to answer.