A Teacher
Emma Hardinge Britten
The Seven Principles of Spiritualism
The transmission
Emma Hardinge Britten was born Emma Floyd in London on 2 May 1823. After her schoolteacher father died when she was eleven, she supported her family as a musician and trained as an opera singer, working on the stage.
She had reported clairvoyant experiences from childhood, and in the 1850s, after moving to the United States, she became deeply involved in the rapidly spreading Spiritualist movement, gaining a wide reputation as a trance lecturer who delivered addresses across America while apparently in a mediumistic state.
Britten became one of Spiritualism’s most effective organizers, orators, and historians. Her major books — Modern American Spiritualism (1870) and Nineteenth Century Miracles (1884) — remain detailed firsthand chronicles of the movement, and she helped found and edit Spiritualist periodicals.
She is most lastingly credited with articulating, through her mediumship, the Seven Principles of Spiritualism, a concise creed that — with minor revisions — is still in use by the Spiritualists’ National Union in Britain and the National Spiritualist Association of Churches in the United States. She died on 2 October 1899.
What they gave
The Seven Principles: Gave organized Spiritualism its enduring doctrinal core, including the brotherhood of humanity, continuous existence, and personal responsibility (Creation Is Finished, It's All Play).
- Movement-building: Worked as a tireless orator, editor, and organizer, helping turn loose séance enthusiasm into durable institutions and churches.
- Historian of the movement: Authored the earliest comprehensive histories of Spiritualism, preserving its first-generation record.
- Trance oratory: Modeled the trance lecturer whose public addresses were presented as inspired knowledge (All Is One), spreading the movement’s claims to mass audiences.
In their words
In truth, this same “supernaturalism” is the woof spun by the hands of a powerful though invisible existence, which incloses all human life and shapes all human destiny.
All mental progress tends to the discovery that “God’s will” is only manifest in law.
Religion, ethics, miracle, and supersensuous life, like tides, and times, and seasons, all resolve themselves at last into stern and immutable procedures of a set of mental laws as stringent as any of those that bind our physical existence.
The immortal soul of man has either been imprisoned by dreary superstition in the loathsome charnel house, or banished by ignorance to the nursery and ale house.
Ninety-nine per cent. of the world’s brightest immortals have lived, labored, and died, for the sake of the true, the good, and the beautiful, with no other reward than the tardy and remorseful appreciation of posterity.
The line they stand in
Influenced by: the philosophical Spiritualism of Andrew Jackson Davis; the post-1848 American Spiritualist wave catalyzed by the Fox sisters; the trance-lecture culture of mid-century mediumship.
- Influenced: the Spiritualists’ National Union and the National Spiritualist Association of Churches (which still use her Seven Principles); the institutional and creedal shape of organized Spiritualism worldwide.
Revelations they taught
Essential Works
- Modern American Spiritualism1870
- Art Magic1876
- Nineteenth Century Miracles1884