William Stainton Moses

William Stainton Moses (1839-1892) was an English cleric and spiritualist medium.

Moses was born in Donington near Lincoln. He was educated at Bedford School, University College School, London and Exeter College, Oxford. He was ordained as a priest of the Church of England by Bishop Samuel Wilberforce in 1870.

Moses attended his first séance with Lottie Fowler in 1872. Charles Williams and Daniel Dunglas Home were the next mediums he visited. Five months after his introduction to spiritualism, he claimed to have experienced levitation. The automatic scripts of Moses began to appear in his books Spirit Teachings and Spirit Identity. The scripts date from 1872 to 1883 and fill 24 notebooks. All but one have been preserved by the London Spiritualist Alliance.

Moses published Psychography. A Treatise on One of the Objective Forms of Psychic or Spiritual Phenomena in 1878. In it, he coins the term "psychography" (from psycho and graphy) for the spiritualist concept of channeling messages from the dead via automatic writing (also known as "independent writing", "direct writing" or "spirit writing").

Moses was one of the first vice-presidents of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). Other early members included Frederic W. H. Myers, Henry Sidgwick and Edmund Gurney. In 1886 and 1887 in a series of publications the SPR exposed the tricks of the medium William Eglinton. Because of this, some spiritualist members including Moses resigned from the SPR.

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