Switzerland has the longest continuously lived tradition of mediumship and spiritual healing work in Europe. It rests on two roots that are rarely told together: an old Alpine folk line that today appears on the official Swiss register of living traditions, and an urban Spiritualism cultivated in Zurich, Basel and Geneva since 1850. A third reason why mediumistic work functions here so naturally is legal: Switzerland never enacted a Heilpraktiker-style restrictive law of the kind Germany has.
Two roots, one country
Anyone looking for a medium in Germany or Austria moves within a subculture. Anyone looking in Switzerland encounters a milieu that has developed without rupture over generations – in the countryside as much as in the city.
The rural line comes from the Alps and is anchored in both Catholic and Reformed peasant life. The urban line arrived from England and America from the mid-19th century onwards and met a curious, scientifically interested audience in the Swiss educated classes. Both lines still exist in parallel today.
The Alpine root: "Wenden", "Beten" and "Le Secret"
In Appenzell and the Toggenburg it is called "Wenden" or "Anbeten". In French-speaking Switzerland, especially in the canton of Fribourg, the Jura and the Valais, it is called Le Secret – the secret. The same thing is meant: a transmitted prayer-formula, usually passed on orally from a predecessor, with which a healer stops bleeding, cools burns ("taking the fire out") or removes warts – often from a distance, by phone, or simply with a person's name and date of birth.
This is not perceived as esotericism in Switzerland but as part of basic rural healthcare. When a cow scalds itself on the Alp or a child gets hot water on the arm, in Appenzell people often first call "the Wenderi" or "the Wender" – and only then the emergency number. Several Swiss hospitals in French-speaking Switzerland and the Jura keep internal, semi-official lists of people who command Le Secret and call them in for burn patients alongside conventional medicine. Nurses ring them directly from the ward. This is well documented, including by Swiss public broadcasters (SRF, RTS) and the French-Swiss daily press.
Since 2012 this tradition has been listed by the Swiss Federal Office of Culture on the List of Living Traditions of Switzerland – the Swiss implementation of the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. Le Secret is therefore state-recognised cultural heritage, not folklore and not superstition.
The urban root: Spiritualism since 1850
From 1848, with the Fox sisters in New York, modern Spiritualism spread rapidly across Europe. In Switzerland it fell on particularly fertile ground. Around 1900 Zurich, Basel and Geneva had an unusually high density of spiritualist circles, reading societies and lectures on trance, table-tipping and afterlife communication.
The most prominent example is C. G. Jung. His Basel dissertation of 1902 is titled "On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena." Its subject is a trance medium – Jung's own cousin, Helene Preiswerk. Jung never let go of mediumship; it runs through his work from the dissertation to his late writings on synchronicity. Swiss psychology therefore did not start out "neutral" towards the subject; it took it seriously as an object of research.
In contrast to mere fortune-tellers, the Swiss mediums of the urban tradition were early on after something specific: evidential mediumship. The clean demonstration that the consciousness of a deceased person continues after death – through names, dates and details the medium cannot know. This is precisely the line that Pascal Voggenhuber later brought into the German-speaking world from the Arthur Findlay College.
Historical landmarks: Paracelsus, Anna Göldi, Jung
Paracelsus (1493/94–1541), born in Egg near Einsiedeln, was a physician, natural philosopher and the most important Central European bridgehead between Alpine healing tradition and learned medicine. His concept of an "invisible world" that acts into the body is in essence the theoretical precursor of what modern Swiss spiritual healers do in practice.
Anna Göldi (1734–1782) was executed in the canton of Glarus as the last person in Europe to be put to death after a regular court trial for "witchcraft". She was no witch but a maid – yet her case is the dark side of the same story: wherever women with second sight became visible, the political risk in Europe was real for centuries. Glarus officially rehabilitated her in 2008.
C. G. Jung (1875–1961) closes the arc into the 20th century. With him, mediumship in Switzerland becomes for the first time the systematic object of an academic discipline – depth psychology. Later experimental mediumship research still builds on this foundation today.
Why Switzerland became an "island": the missing Heilpraktiker law
The decisive difference from Germany is legal. In 1939 Germany enacted the Heilpraktikergesetz, a Nazi-era law still in force today which makes commercial healing without state authorisation a criminal offence. For mediums and spiritual healers in Germany this means, to this day: be careful with diagnoses, be careful with treatment promises, be careful with the word "healing".
Switzerland never enacted such a law. Health policy is organised cantonally, and Switzerland is a republic of commercial freedom. As long as a medium or spiritual healer hands out no prescription drugs and does not pretend to be a doctor, the work is legal and transparent in most cantons. In some cantons – above all Appenzell Ausserrhoden – spiritual healing is even explicitly recognised: NaturheilpraktikerIn TEN has been a federally recognised profession since 2015, and at the cantonal level there are licences for spiritual-energetic healing methods.
The result: Swiss mediums could work openly, in their own practices and with signs on the door, over generations. This has massively stabilised quality, training and professional ethics – while the same work fell into a legal grey zone just across the border.
Today's carriers – five who stand for the breadth
Switzerland is today the most important German-speaking market for mediumistic work. A few names that we cover at length on the blog illustrate the full range:
- Sam Hess (1951–2025) – 35 years a forester in a mountain village, clairvoyant from childhood, raised in the old Alpine line. Books at AT Verlag, several documentary films. A pure representative of the rural root.
- Pascal Voggenhuber – bestselling author, trained at Arthur Findlay College, formerly a police officer. Brings the British evidential mediumship tradition into the German-speaking world.
- Christina von Dreien (b. 2001 in the Toggenburg) – young bestselling author, sold-out lectures, a YouTube audience in the hundreds of thousands. A new generation that grows up with this subject as a matter of course.
- Anouk Claes and Dr Jakob Bösch – integrated spiritual healing in a Swiss psychiatric clinic in Baselland. The chief physician's sign and the healer's sign side by side. A documented case of integrative medicine in the German-speaking world.
- Martin Zoller – Swiss remote viewer with documented use in police and missing-persons cases (including a plane wreck in Bolivia, 1999).
What these people share: they work in public, under their real names, with professional biographies, often with publisher ties in the Swiss book trade (AT Verlag, Govinda, Lüchow, Giger). You do not find this density and naturalness in any other German-speaking country.
Associations, training, professional ethics
Swiss mediums today organise themselves in several associations and schools. The Swiss Society for Parapsychology (SGPP), founded in 1966, is the oldest scientific organisation on the topic in the German-speaking area. Alongside it there are professional associations and schools for spiritual healing, energetic therapy and mediumistic counselling – such as Pascal Voggenhuber's own training house or providers teaching to the curriculum of the Arthur Findlay College.
The OdA KT (Organisation of the Working World for Complementary Therapy) and the higher federal examination NaturheilpraktikerIn TEN have created, for the entire complementary-medicine field – including spiritual-energetic practitioners who choose to register within these structures – a federal qualification grid that does not exist in this form in Germany or Austria.
What this means for seekers
- More choice, higher quality. Anyone searching for a medium in Switzerland is dealing with a mature, differentiated market – not with isolated cases at the edge of legality.
- Clearer professional profiles. Training, ethics codes and associations are traceable; serious due diligence is possible. Our piece "How do I recognise a reputable medium?" shows how.
- Two traditions, two styles. Whoever prefers the rural-Alpine line (quiet, close to nature, prayer-based) will find something different from whoever prefers the British evidential line (public, with a clear method, names-dates-facts).
- Lower threshold. Appointments are often available faster in Switzerland because the supply is denser – and the price ranges are transparent.
Switzerland is not "more open" to mediumship because its population is more religious. It is more open because a few hundred years of practice without legal persecution have never allowed trust in its own tradition to break.
Sources and further reading
- Swiss Federal Office of Culture (BAK), List of Living Traditions of Switzerland: entry "Geheimnisheilen / Le secret / Wenden" (added 2012, updated since).
- C. G. Jung: Zur Psychologie und Pathologie sogenannter occulter Phänomene, dissertation, Basel 1902.
- Edwin Beeler (dir.): Die weisse Arche (documentary, 2016) – Swiss folk healers and clairvoyants, including Sam Hess.
- O'Neil Bürgi (dir.): Fenster zum Jenseits (documentary, 2012).
- SRF / RTS: several TV reports on Le Secret in Swiss hospitals (including Hôpital fribourgeois, CHUV Lausanne).
- Walter Hauser: Der Justizmord an Anna Göldi, Limmat Verlag, 1998 – standard work on the Glarus witch trial of 1782.
- HeavenConnect articles: Sam Hess, Pascal Voggenhuber, Christina von Dreien, Anouk Claes / Jakob Bösch, Martin Zoller, British Spiritualism, Arthur Findlay College.