1/1, August 1873-1876.

32 pp., 12 undated issues a volume, 4 Austrian florins.

The Verein "Geistiger Forscher" in Buda-Pest was founded by Dr. Adolf Grunhut and the von Vays in 1871. Its journal consisted in long doctrinal and moral communications from the deceased (including one from the former Grand Rabbi of Budapest and one from two scholars who still debated theological points in death). The first issue proclaimed that its religious foundation was "the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the revelations of the ancient fathers and prophets" and ts scientific basis was the revelation contained in the work of Adelma von Vay, Geist, Kraft, Stoff (Vienna, 1867). The closing note in the final issue of this journal reveals that Reflexionen was the necessary preamble for the lengthy expositions of the gospels and epistles, already in manuscript, that, by spirit guidance, were to be published in Reformirende Blatter, the successor series to this journal. Mediums in this journal, as was almost universal in early Kardecist journals, were identified only by their first names and were carefully categorized by kind ("speaking mediums," "writing mediums," etc.) with a description of their mental condition ("ecstacy," "awake-asleep" "awake," "trance," "conscious trance," "conscious high sleep," etc.). "Adelma" was a frequent medium in various mental states and this journal and its successor regularly carried communications from and accounts about her. She was the Galician (Austro-Hungarian) Baroness Adelma von Vay (1840-1925), the most original of the German-language mediums and proselytizers of spiritualism. She was introduced to her mediumship in 1865 by a medical mesmerizer who taught her automatic writing under magnetic impulse and she soon progressed to higher spirits, with whose help for many years she performed spiritual healing, especially of the poor, under the influence of the spirit of Samuel Hahnemann, and produced vast compilations of spiritual philosophy. (She had been raised Catholic but had become a Lutheran because of the general Austrian opposition to spiritualism.) Her position made her an important figure in international spiritualism and a regular correspondent to spiritualist journals in Europe and America. She instructed Col. H.S. Olcott on the intricacies of using the magic mirror, mediated both the Virgin Mary and Buddha, strove to preserve the importance of Jesus Christ and Christianity in spiritual movements of the time that were increasingly enamored with the East, and published a widely used guide to scrying, Visionen in einem Wasserglas, Budapest, 1873 and other books on spiritual philosophy. During the First World War she published Geistesnahrung in Kriegszeiten (Wiesbaden: Abigt, 1916), on the spirits as means of encouraging soldiers and their families.