Summary: Weekday Worldviews is the first sociological investigation of the relationships between worldviews and psychological wellbeing amongst those attending public psychic events in England. Often hosted in pubs and working men’s clubs on weekday evenings, psychic nights frequently attract women in working-class areas and are quite common, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. Revitalising a tradition made popular in the late 19th century, these mediumistic events see attendees receiving comforting messages from the dead, cometimes accompanied by physical manifestations (e.g., levitating objects). Theatrical mediumship shows have also gained popularity recently, e.g. Séance by theatre company Darkfield. Both types of ‘psychic’ events are billed as entertainment, but they ask audiences to suspend disbelief for the possibility of connection to the spirit world. Although mediums have been studied by psychologists, anthropologists and historians, sociologists have mostly overlooked this socio-cultural phenomenon, while scholars more generally have failed to investigate the motives, markers, and derived meanings for those in the audiences of these events.
Our project offers a unique look at a grassroots phenomenon that is currently growing at a rapid rate, both in England and abroad. Using mixed methods (survey, observation, interview, comparison), we investigate the attitudes and worldviews of patrons of psychic events (local ‘readings’ and ticketed ‘shows’), analysing patterns of belief and their implication for understanding the relationship between science, spirituality, and wellbeing. We utilise a ‘bottom up’ approach emphasising the significance of locality, gender, and class to highlight the complex intersection of experience, demographics, and worldviews as lived in late modernity (Taves and Asprem, 2018). Our primary research questions are:
- Do scientific and religious/spiritual worldviews co-exist amongst the audience of public psychics/séances, and if so, how are these beliefs held and enacted?
- Does the growth in interest in public psychic events relate to socio-cultural factors such as the decline in institutional religion in Britain, or in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as class, locality, and gender?
- What is the relationship between attendance at public psychic events and the perception of mental wellbeing?
Understanding the audience of public psychic nights will shed needed light on how belief is cultivated in an era of declining institutional religion, questioning whether institutional religious decline creates a void filled by alternative spiritual experiences which affirm individual significance, filial connection, and agency and whether fixed binaries of ‘science’ and ‘spirituality’ in relation to worldviews are unrepresentative of lived reality (Herbert and Bullock, 2020).
