Spiritism

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The belief system that explores the communication with the spirits of deceased individuals and asserts their influence on the living
2. A doctrine that emphasizes the potential for interaction with spiritual beings after death, impacting our reality
3. A philosophical movement centered around the idea of communicating with the souls of the deceased, claiming their presence affects the living world

Etymology: Spiritism is a deliberately built word, and its most telling fact is that the "-ism" is the least of it: the suffix arrived from Greek by way of Latin and French, while "spirit" carries the older and more tangled history. The base traces back to Latin "spīritus," meaning "breath," from "spīrāre," "to breathe," a root that also gave English "inspire" and "respiration." Breath was the original sense, and only later did the word come to mean the vital principle, then the soul, and finally a disembodied being. The "-ism" ending comes from Ancient Greek "-ismós," a suffix used to form nouns of action, doctrine, or condition, which passed into Latin and then into English. Attaching it to "spirit" produced a term for a doctrine or system of belief centred on spirits. The formation is a plain compound of a noun and a suffix, so the word's story lies less in any single twist of meaning than in how a word for breath came to name a belief about the dead and the unseen.

Synonyms: spiritualism, mediumship