Anyone in the German-speaking world who wants to see a world-known medium live will sooner or later end up at one address: Neuweilerstrasse 15, Basel. The Basler Psi-Verein runs around 300 seminars, lectures and demonstrations a year and counts some two thousand members from Switzerland and its neighbouring countries. Its history reaches back to 1967 – to a society that once staged the largest public congress on the frontier areas of science.
1967: A working group for the unexplained
It begins with Matthias Güldenstein, inspired by the Freiburg parapsychologist Hans Bender, who had brought the study of the extraordinary into the university. In 1967 Güldenstein founded the "Parapsychological Working Group Basel" (PAB) – and the first board already shows that curiosity, not credulity, set the tone: alongside Güldenstein sat the Basel chemistry professor Max Thürkauf and Dr Konrad Wolff. From 1973 the group published the journal "Parapsychika" together with the Swiss Parapsychological Society, with Güldenstein as its editor.
The Basel Psi Days: parapsychology at the trade fair
In 1983 Güldenstein and the St. Gallen professor Alex Schneider took the big step: the "Basler Psi-Tage", an international congress for the interdisciplinary discussion of the frontier questions of science, staged in cooperation with the Basel Fair. Researchers met practitioners there – mediums, sensitives, spiritual healers, shamans – and both met a broad public. In the early years the programme centred on classic psi topics such as psychokinesis, telepathy and clairvoyance. The Psi Days grew into the most traditional and largest public congress of their kind; star guests included Uri Geller, whose spoon-bending career we trace in a separate article.
Among the visitors of 1986 was a young Basel antiquarian bookseller: Lucius Werthmüller. The demonstration of a Brazilian trance surgeon would not let him go; he sought out Güldenstein – and the visitor became, in 1991, president of the society, which had taken its present name "Basler Psi-Verein" in 1990. From 1994 Werthmüller designed the programme of the Psi Days, and from 1999 to 2007 he directed them; in 2000 he received the prize of the Swiss Foundation for Parapsychology.
That the era of the Psi Days ended came down to sober figures and a changed climate. Fixed costs exceeded half a million Swiss francs a year, sponsors stayed away, and from 2002 Messe Schweiz no longer wanted to carry the event; the society then staged six editions at its own expense in Basel and Rheinfelden. In 2006 the Psi Days took place for the 24th and last time. Werthmüller named as one reason the decline of public interest in serious parapsychology – the image of the field was by then shaped by entertainment shows, not research. It is the same shift observable elsewhere: the research did not disappear, it lost its big stages.
Two houses: the society in Basel, the centre in Riehen
Alongside the society, a second pillar arose in 1984: Matthias and Eva Güldenstein founded the Psi Zentrum Basel, devoted above all to mediumship – training included. In 1998 the two went their separate organisational ways: the centre moved to Riehen, the society stayed in Basel and moved into its present home on Neuweilerstrasse in 2004. The centre now operates as the Amanar Zentrum Riehen and still trains mediums. That line of training reaches into our own directory: the Swiss medium Simone Rüegsegger, today a tutor of the International Spiritualist Federation, completed her years of mediumship training partly at the Psi Zentrum Basel and still demonstrates regularly in Riehen.
The stage of the mediums
A glance at the society's list of speakers reads like a who's who of international mediumship and consciousness research. Gordon Smith, the Glasgow barber to whom we have devoted a portrait of his own, demonstrates here, as do the Swiss medium Pascal Voggenhuber and the German physical medium Kai Mügge. The neurosurgeon Eben Alexander spoke here about his near-death experience, the biologist Rupert Sheldrake about morphic resonance, and the engineering scientist Eckhard Kruse, who measures séances with 360-degree cameras and microphone arrays, serves as the society's scientific adviser. Add international names such as James Van Praagh, Lisa Williams and Anita Moorjani, and Jana Haas – hardly a well-known medium of the present day has not, at some point, stood on a Basel stage.
The range is remarkable: the society, a registered charity since 1997, brings in bestselling authors and platform mediums as well as quiet researchers, and keeps prices deliberately accessible through memberships. What the Arthur Findlay College is to the English-speaking world, Basel has long become for the German-speaking one: the place where mediumship in all its forms can be seen, heard and learned – a chapter we place in context in our overview of mediumship in Switzerland.
After Lucius
Lucius Werthmüller died unexpectedly on 9 April 2021, at 62, after thirty years as president. He left behind not only a society but a family that carries it: his partner Sabin Sütterlin and his sons Robin and Pablo continue the work today on the team and board, while Matthias Güldenstein accompanies the society as honorary president. The programme continues at undiminished density – and with it a Basel tradition that has been asking the same question for almost sixty years: what if there is more to be found at the frontiers than the textbooks suggest?
Sources: The history page of the Basler Psi-Verein and its obituary for Lucius Werthmüller; the INFOREL profiles of the Basler Psi-Verein and the Psi Zentrum Basel; the speaker overview on bpv.ch; and the reporting on the end of the Psi Days (hpd, 2008).
For more, see our curated knowledge collection – it gathers further articles on mediumship, parapsychology and the institutions of the field.