Seance

Seance

Noun · /ˈseɪ.ɒ̃ns/ · a meeting at which people attempt to contact the spirits of the dead

Definition

A seance — also spelled séance with an accent — is a gathering, typically in a darkened room, in which a group of people attempt to make contact with the spirits of the deceased, usually through the services of a medium. The medium is believed to act as a channel between the living and the dead, conveying messages, manifesting phenomena, or entering a trance state. Seances became especially fashionable during the nineteenth-century Spiritualist movement and have remained a recognisable cultural concept ever since, appearing in literature, film, and popular culture as shorthand for the uncanny, the mysterious, or the dubious.

Origin

Seance is a direct borrowing from French, where it means a sitting or a session — from the verb seoir, meaning to sit, which derives from Latin sedere. In French, seance simply means any formal meeting or session: une seance de cinema is a cinema screening, une seance de travail is a work session. English borrowed the word in the nineteenth century specifically for the Spiritualist context, narrowing its meaning considerably. The broader French sense of a sitting or session survives in a handful of English technical terms but the dominant English meaning is firmly the occult gathering.