Psychics and Mediums

A Philosophical Etymology Gone Wrong

Modern Psychics and Mediums: Divorced from their Philosophical origins

Lost in Translation:

The Unfortunate Philosophical Fate of "Psychic" & "Medium"

How two perfectly respectable words, one beloved by Plato, one admired by Newton, were kidnapped by the Victorians and put to work in velvet-curtained parlours, reading the fortunes of credulous duchesses.

Imagine, if you will, that the word “cardiac”. meaning of or pertaining to the heart. had been co-opted in the late nineteenth century to describe a popular confidence trick involving playing cards. Or that “solar,” meaning of the sun, had come to mean “a bloke who reads your horoscope for fifteen pounds at a village fête.” You would be rightly appalled. You would write letters to newspapers. You would form committees.

And yet, something of precisely this character has befallen two perfectly innocent, philosophically distinguished words: psychic and medium.

Their stories are, in equal measure, a triumph of human intellectual ambition and a cautionary tale about what happens when serious ideas meet a credulous public, a sensationalist press, and rather too many people willing to pay good money to be told their deceased Aunt Mildred is terribly pleased with how the garden is coming along.

Part One: Psyche, Soul, and the Magnificent Greek Muddle

We begin, as all proper etymological investigations must, with the Greeks — specifically with the word psychē (ψυχή), which is the fountainhead from which our modern “psychic” eventually trickled, via several rivers of philosophical speculation, into the rather murky pond it currently inhabits.

psychē (ψυχή)

Greek · from psychein, 'to breathe' or 'to blow'

The animating principle of life; breath; the soul considered as the essential self; the seat of consciousness, emotion, desire, and moral purpose. Also: a butterfly. (The Greeks were thorough.)

The original meaning of psychē was, extraordinarily, simply breath, the animating exhalation that distinguishes the living from the dead. This is not so peculiar when one considers that the Latin equivalent, anima, shares the same root concept: that which breathes is alive; that which breathes no more is, regrettably, no longer with us in any practical sense.

But the Greeks, being the Greeks, could not leave a perfectly good word alone.

Homer used psychē to mean the shade or ghost of a deceased person. The thin, vaporous remnant that drifted down to Hades, which Homer described as a rather gloomy place where shades flitted about, being generally miserable. This Homeric soul was not, it must be stressed, a source of useful advice about property investments or romantic prospects. It was simply what was left over when the person had finished with the inconvenient business of being alive.

Then Plato arrived, and everything became considerably more interesting, and considerably more complicated.

"Plato's psychē was the immortal, rational, divine core of every human being — the philosopher's eternal companion. He would be baffled to learn it now refers to a woman in Swindon who contacts the departed for £40 a session."

For Plato, the psychē was the immortal, rational, divine part of the human being — the true self, the philosopher-king within each of us, the element capable of apprehending the eternal Forms that constitute ultimate reality.

In dialogues such as the Phaedo, Republic, and Phaedrus, Plato developed an elaborate account of the soul as tripartite: reason (logistikon), spirit (thymoeides), and appetite (epithymētikon). The rational soul, he argued, was immortal precisely because it could contemplate timeless, unchanging truths, and only that which participates in the eternal can itself be eternal.

This is, by any measure, a magnificent intellectual edifice. The psychē for Plato was not a party trick; it was the very ground of human dignity, the reason why philosophy matters, and the justification for living the examined life.

Aristotle, characteristically, took a more empirical view. For him, the soul (psychē) was the form of the body — not a separate substance trapped within flesh like a butterfly in a jam jar, but the organising principle that makes a body what it is.

The soul of an eye, he suggested memorably, would be its capacity to see. There can be no soul without a body, and no body — in the biologically relevant sense — without a soul. It is a neat, if philosophically demanding, position, and it meant that Aristotelian souls did not, as a rule, survive death in any personally significant sense.

The word psychikos — the adjectival form, meaning “of or pertaining to the psychē” — therefore meant, depending on which Greek philosopher one favoured, something like “of the rational soul,” “of the animating life principle,” or “of that which makes you distinctively and importantly you.” It was a serious word, used in serious contexts.

Part Two: St Paul Wades In

The word's journey took an unexpected turn when it passed through the hands of St Paul, who used psychikos in his first letter to the Corinthians in a rather unflattering sense. For Paul, the psychikos person — the “soulish” or “natural” person — was actually the lower form of human being: one governed by merely earthly concerns, as opposed to the pneumatikos (spiritual) person, who was governed by the divine spirit.

"The natural person," Paul writes, "does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him." The psychic person, in the Pauline framework, was therefore somewhat dim, spiritually speaking, more concerned with the mundane than the divine. This is, one notes with some amusement, precisely the opposite of what psychics now claim about themselves.

Part Three: Nineteenth Century — Enter the Parlour

For roughly two millennia, the word “psychic”, which entered English via Latin psychicus from Greek, was used primarily in philosophical and theological contexts. It appeared in learned treatises on the soul, in debates about the relationship between mind and body, and in the emerging science of what we might now call psychology.

Then came the Victorian era, which, with characteristic energy and profound lack of embarrassment, took these philosophically nuanced concepts and redeployed them in the service of spiritualism.

The Victorians were, in many respects, caught between worlds: the old religious certainties were being dissolved by Darwin and geological science, while the new scientific certainties felt cold and mechanistic. Into this anxious gap stepped the Spiritualist movement, which promised something irresistible: scientific proof of survival after death. Séances were conducted by candlelight. Tables rapped. Ectoplasm was produced — subsequently determined, in every documented case, to be muslin or regurgitated gauze, but never mind that. The bereaved, of whom the Victorians had an abundant supply (death rates being what they were), were deeply receptive.

It was in this context that “psychic” acquired its modern meaning. The Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882 by a distinguished group that included the philosopher Henry Sidgwick, used the word “psychical” to describe phenomena that seemed to involve the soul or mind operating beyond the ordinary limits of the body, such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and apparent communication with the dead. The word was meant, at least initially, as a scientific-ish term for a class of phenomena under investigation.

The subtle irony is exquisite: a word meaning “of the rational, philosophically sophisticated soul” was being applied to activities which Plato, who believed the true philosopher should purify the soul from bodily entanglements, would have regarded with considerable scepticism.

Part Four: The Medium Is the Message (Gone Wrong)

The word “medium” presents an equally instructive case of philosophical high-jacking, though its story is somewhat different in character. Less a kidnapping, perhaps, than an opportunistic loitering.

medium

Latin · neuter of medius, 'middle, intermediate'

The middle point or degree; a middle course; the substance or channel through which phenomena are transmitted; an intervening agency or means. In biology, a nutrient substance in which cultures are grown. In printing: a size of paper. In clothing: between small and large. In Spiritualism, a person who charges considerably more than you'd expect for sitting very still in the dark.

The Latin medium is simply the neuter form of medius, meaning “middle.” It is a beautifully exact word with a distinguished career across many disciplines. In optics and natural philosophy, a “medium” was the substance through which light, sound, or other phenomena travelled. Air is the medium of sound, water is the medium of certain waves, and the aether was, until Einstein emphatically abolished it, believed to be the medium of light through the cosmos.

This is where the philosophical depth lies, and it is more interesting than it might appear. The concept of a medium in natural philosophy was bound up with profound questions about how causation works, how one thing can affect another at a distance, and what the underlying fabric of reality consists of. Newton puzzled mightily over action at a distance, how gravity could act through the vacuum of space without any obvious medium, and the question of mediums and their properties occupied some of the greatest minds in early modern science.

Aristotle's De Anima (On the Soul) also uses the concept of a medium in a psychologically interesting way: perception requires a medium between the perceiving organ and the object perceived. Sound requires air as its medium; colour requires the transparent medium through which light travels to the eye. Perception is not direct contact but always mediated.

One might say, then, that “medium” in the Aristotelian sense is the very stuff of how minds connect with the world, which is, philosophically, a rather profound concept. The medium makes connection and communication possible across a gap. It is the bridge, the between, the connective tissue of experience.

"Newton puzzled over the medium through which gravity acts. The Victorians solved this problem by putting a woman in a turban in the middle of it, charging a shilling, and calling her 'the medium.' Newton would have been unimpressed."

— Speculative, but not unreasonably so

Now, the Spiritualists took this idea and did the following with it. They decided that the gap between the living and the dead required a human being to act as the connecting substance. This person — sensitive, permeable, positioned appropriately between the world of the living and the world of the departed — would be called “the medium.” It is, in a peculiarly literal way, not entirely unreasonable as a metaphor.

The problem is that the original philosophical concept of a medium is entirely material and empirically investigable. Air transmits sound; we can measure this. The postulated medium between the living and the dead, on the other hand, has proven somewhat less amenable to measurement, despite the best efforts of the Society for Psychical Research and a remarkable number of investigations involving infrared cameras and suspicious quantities of cheesecloth.

Part Five: The Deeper Distortion

What makes the fate of these two words genuinely philosophically interesting — as opposed to merely amusing — is that the distortion is not random. It is, in a peculiar way, a symptom of something real.

The concept of the psychē arose, in part, from the human experience of consciousness as something that feels irreducibly first-personal, interior, and different in kind from the physical objects of the world.

Descartes — who knew his Greek — formalised this intuition into the distinction between mind (res cogitans) and body (res extensa). This distinction, whatever its philosophical problems, captures something genuinely puzzling about experience: your pain is not the same kind of thing as a rock, even though it is somehow correlated with the physical state of your nervous system.

The Spiritualists, in a sense, took this genuine philosophical puzzle — the hard problem of consciousness, avant la lettre — and offered a spectacularly un-philosophical solution: the soul is simply a different kind of stuff that can float free of the body and have conversations. It is the philosophical equivalent of solving the problem of traffic congestion by inventing a flying car that doesn't actually work.

The richness of both words points toward real mysteries about the nature of mind, consciousness, communication, and the relationship between the living and the material world. Current usage of “psychic” and “medium” answers these mysteries in the most direct way imaginable — and, unfortunately, in the way most convenient for those who charge by the hour.

Part Six: What They Ought to Mean

Let us close with a modest proposal. Given the etymological richness of these terms, ought we not to consider restoring them to something closer to their philosophical dignity?

A properly psychic person, in the original Platonic sense, would be one who has cultivated the rational soul to its highest degree — a philosopher, a scientist, a mathematician, a person committed to the examined life. They would be “psychic” in the sense of being deeply attuned to the workings of mind and reason. This is, one notes, not a profession with obvious mass market appeal, which perhaps explains why the less demanding version prevailed.

A proper medium — in the Aristotelian and natural philosophical sense — would be anyone or anything that facilitates genuine connection and understanding: a gifted teacher, a skilled translator, a work of literature, a piece of music that communicates what words cannot. The medium, in this sense, is not a person who claims to relay messages from your late grandfather, but anyone who makes genuine communication and shared understanding possible across any gap.

These are, it turns out, rather noble callings — far nobler than the crystal-ball alternative. One would not wish to be unkind about those who currently bear these titles. But one does, perhaps, wish they knew that the words they have inherited carry a rather more magnificent history than is generally appreciated — that behind the velvet curtain and the vaguely significant pronouncements about “someone whose name begins with J,” there lies the entire philosophical tradition of the Western world, politely clearing its throat.

Plato sought to understand the soul's immortality. Aristotle wanted to understand how any mind could know the world beyond itself. Newton wanted to understand what propagates through the void. These are the questions that gave us our words.

It is, perhaps, for the best that they cannot be contacted to comment.

— ✦ —

¹ The Society for Psychical Research (1882) counted among its members William James, Henri Bergson, Arthur Balfour, and John Couch Adams (co-discoverer of Neptune). The calibre of credulity was, one must admit, impressive.

² Aristotle, De Anima, II.7: on the medium in perception. He would have been horrified by subsequent applications of the concept.

³ The Greek word for butterfly — psychē — may reflect the ancient intuition that metamorphosis resembles the soul's transformation after death. Or they simply liked butterflies. Both are valid interpretations.

⁴ St Paul, 1 Corinthians 2:14: 'The psychikos person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God.' Modern usage, remarkably, tends to position psychics on precisely the side Paul was criticising. Irony is rarely so precisely calibrated.

⁵ Marshall McLuhan's 1964 formulation 'the medium is the message' is itself a philosophically sophisticated use of the word. He was not, to the best of our knowledge, thinking of séances.

Alan /|\