TURNING TABLES
GASPARIN, Agénor Étienne, Comte de.
Des tables tournantes du surnaturel en général et des esprits par le Cte Agénor de Gasparin.
Paris, Bonaventure and Ducessois for E. Dentu, 1854.
Three parts in two vols, 8vo; pp. I: xxiv, 564, [2 (contents, blank)]; II: [iv], 579, [1 (blank)], [2 (contents, blank)], [2 (printer’s advertisements)]; with half-titles to both vols; small dampstain to head of first quire of vol. I, early repair to title-page of vol. II with light offsetting, minor marginal foxing; nevertheless a very good set in brown roan-backed boards with brown embossed cloth sides sewn on two sunken cords, spine ruled in gilt and blind and lettered directly in gilt; spine sunned, hinges and extremities lightly worn; early twentieth-century stamp of the Union Chrétienne de Jeunes Filles in Nîmes to title-pages, modern booklabel of Tamara Lo to front free endpapers.
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Des tables tournantes du surnaturel en général et des esprits par le Cte Agénor de Gasparin.
Scarce first edition of Gasparin’s early experiments in table-turning – a form of séance in which tables appear to rotate or levitate of their own accord – which would prove highly controversial and integral to the nineteenth-century Spiritualist movement.
The experiments of Agénor de Gasparin (1810–1871) were among the most important of their time, amidst an increasing fascination with supernatural phenomena. In the first volume, Gasparin chronicles twelve table-turning séances conducted between September and December 1853 in which participants would sit with their hands on a table and wait for rotations. Gasparin reports heavy tables crashing across the room, attributing the phenomenon not to involuntary muscular action, spiritual activity, or the work of the Devil, but to a physical force emanating from the sitters.
Many of Gasparin’s contemporaries claimed to have utilised the technique to communicate with spirits, who would rotate the table in answer to questions posed by a medium, while some, including the Cambridge theologian Nathaniel Stedman Godfrey, claimed to have communicated with evil spirits and fallen angels, publishing eerie conversations with the evil dead in pamphlets that warned of their danger. Gasparin argues in his scientific exploration of the phenomenon (and of the supernatural in general, as set out in his appended essay on Spiritualism) that table-turning is a legitimate scientific phenomenon and thus cannot be the work of infernal forces; his table-turning experiments were, however, swiftly co-opted in literary and psychical circles, inspiring Spiritualists and such authors as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Charles Dickens.
The printer’s advertisements in the second volume list a curious combination of works on European politics and the occult (including cults and secret societies, resurrection of the dead, and hypnotism).
OCLC and Library Hub find only two copies in the UK (BL, CUL).
Caillet II, p. 136. See Flammarion, Mysterious Psychic Forces (1909).
