In Depth:  Leslie Price

Spiritualism attempts to communicate with the dead through mediums.

It has been a feature of British life since Victorian times. The evolutionist Alfred Russel Wallace compiled a semi-textbook Miracles and Modern Spiritualism (1874). And the novelist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle proclaimed The New Revelation (1918).

British readers will not have missed the recent popular BBC series Ten Greatest Britons poll. The downside of this series is the trivialising of history. It is postmodern sentiment that puts Diana Princess of Wales and John Lennon among the greatest Brits.

The plus side, and it is considerable when we reflect on it, is that the majority who never give history a thought have watched a well documented series and will know a lot more after this series than they did before. One admitted that he now knew that Cromwell came after Queen Elizabeth I and not before!

Your name and address, of course; your age and marital status, for pension purposes.

Perhaps your race too, if racial monitoring is carried out, and there may be racial targets for your employer to meet. My employer, one of a group of bodies created by the Greater London Act 1999, is compiling new databases. For the first time in modern history, monitoring of the religion and sexual orientation of employees is to begin.

In a recent EN book review I expressed regret that the author had been taken in by the false claims of Alberto Rivera. An overseas reader asked for more details of what was perhaps the most successful religious literary hoax of the past century.

Alberto Rivera (1935-1997) was born and brought up in the Canary Islands where harassment of Protestants was much less than in mainland Spain.

This year has marked the 150th anniversary of modern spiritualism whose official birthday was March 31 1848 at Hydesville, New York State, in the family of the Fox sisters. How do we now assess that movement in the light of Scripture and history?

Although the craze, like so many, began in America, spirit messages were already quite common among mesmerists in France and elsewhere in the 1840s. In fact, mediumship may be as old as the Fall, and there is, of course, one seance in Scripture, King Saul's visit to the woman of En-Dor.

In 1947, a Gallup poll asked the British public if they believed in life after death. Of the 49% who did, 3% thought it took the form of reincarnation. In contrast, some current polls show that 33% of believers in life after death support reincarnation.

This sharp increase has not been explained, but must owe something to Asian immigration, general public exposure to Buddhism and Hinduism, and the emergence of the New Age movement from older groups like Spiritualism and Theosophy.

Astronomers may recently have detected planets around stars using stellar spectroscopy. The speculation is that contact with extraterrestrial life has become more likely. But in popular culture, it is already here.

Many channellers ('mediums' of yesteryear) claim to bring teachings from nearby star systems. One of the most intelligent British channels, Murry Hope, has 'come out' and declared that spiritually she is of alien origin. She is not the only one, and it gives a new twist to that seminal social science concept 'alienation'.