The Amazing Mediumship of The Campbell Brothers #265

Everyone's got an inner skeptic. It's just built in. But in spirit work, almost everyone has one experience that refuses to be explained away, no matter how many angles you try it from. For some, it was a message the medium had no earthly way of knowing (a name, a detail, a joke only that loved one would say). For others, it was something physical. Something that happened right in front of them and broke the rules of what's supposed to be possible.

You can't argue with what you've seen. Not really.

Many years ago, a small group gathered for a demonstration that still gets talked about today, sitting in the presence of two mediums known for something rare: Spirit Art, made physically manifest through the Campbell Brothers. What came out of that room wasn't a story or a feeling. It was evidence. Something you could hold and look at. And it's been converting skeptics ever since.  This is the story of the manifestation of the Spirit Guide, Azur through the mediumship of the Campbell Brothers.

Christina Wooten helps you access the wisdom and support of the Spirit World to elevate your life.
She is a Certified Psychic Medium and Reiki Master Teacher.  Christina is the owner of Sedona Medium and co-host of Modern Life and Spirit podcast.

She offers Psychic Medium Readings, Soul Readings, and teaches how you can start communicating and receiving messages from your Spirit Guides - through her program.
Learn more about her offerings here


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If you enjoy listening to Modern Life and Spirit podcast, please subscribe so you don't miss an episode! While you are there, you can do us a huge favor and leave us a glowing review so others may find us as well. Thanks!

Transcript

Narrator: 0:03

Welcome to the Modern Life and Spirit podcast, where we explore spiritual topics relevant to today's world. Your hosts, certified psychic medium Christina Wooten and Reiki master teacher Robert Wooten, break down how to work with spirit to create more positive growth in your life. Consider this podcast your go-to spiritual resource for navigating the modern world.

Christina Wooten: 0:28

Okay, so I need to tell you about a painting. I know that sounds weird, but just stay with me, because it is really a fascinating story. I have been to Lily Dale, New York, which, if you haven't been, it is an incredible, still active spiritualist community that is in upstate New York. It's about an hour south of Buffalo. And while I was there, I did so many amazing things. I went to the lake, I would do yoga out there, I went to walk the ferry trail, I visited Inspiration Stump. I went to the pet cemetery. I did it all. It was a really great experience. I've been there a few times now, but I would say my very favorite experience thus far is when I walked into the Maplewood Hotel, and came face to face with this enormous portrait. I mean, it is one of those things when you walk into the room, you can feel the sacredness, you can feel the energy in the space. Now, the subject of this painting is a spirit guide named Azure, and I'm telling you that there is something about standing in front of that painting that is very hard to put into words. It's, I don't know, if it's the size of it, the quality, it's the presence that it carries into the room. It is thick with spirit in there, and then you find out the story of how it got there, and that's where things get really interesting, at least to me, because I definitely geek out on this spirit stuff. All right, everybody, welcome back to Modern Life and Spirit Podcast. I'm Christina Wooten, certified psychic medium at SedonaMedium.com I'm so glad that we are going to be talking about some of the two most fascinating mediums in the history of spiritualism, and I actually wanted to talk about them last month during Pride month, but unfortunately I got really, really sick for a few weeks and was not able to record the episode, so in honor of Pride Month, but just a little bit late, we are going to be talking about the Campbell brothers today. So, first of all, let's talk about the name. They were not actually brothers, as hopefully you got from my hint there. They had no shared blood, no family connection, but what they did share was a life that they built together. They also had an incredible gift of working with spirit, creating these really remarkable demonstrations of physical phenomena. Historians believe that they called themselves brothers to help deflect some of the rumors, because two men living together, traveling together, enjoying each other's company, building a life and a practice together in the late 1800s you know, raised some eyebrows and would have been problematic. So, calling themselves brothers was a kind of protection, it was, you know, for lack of a better word, a cover story that let them keep doing their work in a world, unfortunately, that really wasn't ready for the truth of who they were. Now, I will say the spiritualist community itself was incredibly progressive, so I think within the community itself that potentially be different, but regardless, they had to hide that relationship for everyone. They lived in Lily Dale, which was at the time the heart of the American spiritualist community, but they weren't homebodies. They traveled widely, they made many trips all over Europe, and their mediumship covered a range from slate writing, spirit type writing, but what they became truly famous for was something called precipitated painting. Now, here's where I need to explain what that actually means, because it is different from what most people picture when they think of spirit art. You might be familiar with automatic writing or automatic drawing, and that's where a spirit works through the medium's hand. So, the medium is going to hold the pen and the spirit guides direct the movement. Precipitated painting is something else entirely, and. A potato painting, the medium isn't touching the canvas at all. What appears on the surface of the canvas isn't guided by their hands or by them touching or interacting directly with the canvas itself. It just materializes during the course of the seance, so the spirit isn't using the medium's hands or the bodies to direct the movement and to create the spirit art. The spirit is doing it directly, just help utilizing the energy of the medium itself. So, there's a blank canvas, there's no brushes, sometimes paint is in the room, but sometimes not. And then over the course of the seance and building the energy and the work together, something begins to appear. So the Campbell brothers did all of this in public, in front of witnesses, over and over and over again, with their hands nowhere near the canvas. It was believed that a Campbell was the primary medium for this phenomenon, where the ectoplasm, which created the portrait, was coming from his solar plexus area. So, there are reports that this would even happen when he slept, where paintings would appear on the ceiling of his bedroom, so he even changed bedrooms, and then it would happen there too, which has got to be just a wild experience for him to suddenly wake up, and on the ceiling is a whole new portrait that you've created overnight, their most famous portraits were ones people recognize, of course. So we have Abraham Lincoln, we have Napoleon, these historical figures that were rendered in great detail that just appeared on a blank canvas without a brush ever touching it. These are incredible master-level level portraits that had stunning levels of detail, but the one that really gets me, the one that I have seen, well, one of several that I've seen with my own eyes is Azure. So let's talk about the Azure painting in june 15, 1898 in Lilydale, New York, six people gathered together for a session with Alan Campbell. So, the canvas itself is blank, there is no paint visible. Alan went into a trance, and throughout the session, in a room with enough light that everyone present could see clearly, the witnesses described being able to watch the painting develop in real time. Now, if someone was actually painting this, this would have taken weeks, months, or even more to achieve it. It has this sense of, you know, a quality with so much fine layering to it, but in spirits time it just appears over the course of the sitting, so they weren't sitting in the dark waiting for a reveal, they could actually see it, the curtain was withdrawn multiple times during the sitting, and each time there is more, there's a face that's coming into focus. It's gradual, it's accumulating. The witnesses left a record of what they saw, and I went to read part of it to you, because it's worth hearing in their own words, directly from them. So, there's a quote from this report that they left about this manifestation. Says each time the curtain was withdrawn, we saw the partly finished picture of Azure. During the entire seance, there was light enough for us to see everything perfectly and note the gradual growth of the painting on the canvas. When it was complete, the curtain was pulled back one final time. Quote, the picture was complete. It presented Azure with arms uplifted in the act of speaking fully life-size. It's a life-size figure with arms raised, as if he's mid-word, like he's talking, so it really doesn't feel quite like a static portrait. It's this figure that's caught in the act of communication, and then this - this is the part that is really interesting. Quote, while we were admiring it, there came at the back of the head a six pointed star, which is now distinctly seen. End quote, so So, while they were admiring it, after they thought the painting was completely finished, the seance itself was over. They're all just standing there, looking at it, admiring it, and in this process behind. The head, it materializes out of nothing, a six pointed star. So, six people signed this statement, who were there for the sitting there for the seance on the record about what they saw. They also had the opportunity to fully inspect the room, the materials, etc. I have stood in front of this painting, and photographs really don't capture the size of it, or the quality of it, or what it feels like to be in the same room with it. There, there really is a presence to it. Something is there, and knowing the story of how it arrived, knowing that that star showed up after the painting and the sitting in the sands was all done in front of witnesses as they're staring at it makes it almost impossible to look away, I mean, to leave the room like it took all this willpower, because you just could sit there all day and process and admire and appreciate and philosophize about this level of connection with the other side. Now, the museum at Lily Dale, if you ever get a chance to go, also has other examples of their work, so there's different portraits, different styles, and seeing them together gives you a sense of just how consistent and prolific their creations were. So, this isn't a one-time anomaly. This was part of a portfolio, like a body of work that they were putting out as part of a demonstration of spirit in their mediumship, so if you ever get the chance to go to Lilydale, go, and when you do, find the Maplewood Hotel, stand in front of Azure, and see what you feel. In the meantime, I'll add a picture of the painting in the show notes for you to check out, but I want you to keep in mind that this thing is life size, it is really big, and not life-size in my little small five foot, you know, spectrum of it. It's really big, and if you are interested in this, if you want to go deeper on precipitated painting, Ron Nagy's book, Precipitated Spirit Paintings, is a really great resource. He did serious research into the paintings themselves and found some fascinating details, including images that appeared within the eyes of some of the portraits. He actually started as a skeptic when he was researching the subject, and through the course of it, I became completely convinced, so it's a really great perspective. I really have enjoyed that book over the years. I go back to it every now and then, when I just need that reminder of sometimes we think so small and what spirit is able to do in how it can influence our lives, but also how it can influence our material worlds. It's just a great perspective. One of the most interesting things I felt in the book really talked about the level of detail that were in the eyes of the paintings. So, in normal paintings, you have just impressions of the color, shapes, so forth, in the iris, in these precipitated paintings with the Campbell brothers, there's so much detail in the eyes themselves that an iridologist who studies the eyes themselves, the iris was able to dictate or determine illnesses that people would have had, and then also because we know the Campbell brothers created paintings in this way with famous figures such as Napoleon and Abraham Lincoln. They were able to compare the iridology results with the fact of was this known about that particular person, and it checked out. It's really, really interesting about it. I definitely, again, it's Precipitated Spirit Paintings by Ron Negge. All right, everyone, thanks so much for spending this time with me. Sending much love to all of you. Look forward to talking to you next time. Many blessings,

Robert Wooten: 14:22

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