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Updated: June 28, 2025
While Brandon felt the chains not of love, but of habit, dropping off him, and wished that Elsie Melville was beside him, and not sitting between her cousin and another Australian, who was talking to her vigorously on his favourite subject of spirit-rapping and table-turning, and she was listening so patiently, and making little smart speeches he could tell quite well by the expression of her eyes, though he could not hear the low sweet voice distinctly enough to tell exactly what she said.
They will make each other believe in spirit-rapping, table-turning, the mesmeric fluid, electro-biology; that they saw the lion on Northumberland House wagging his tail; that witches have been seen riding in the air; that the Jews had poisoned the wells; that but why go further into the sad catalogue of human absurdities, and the crimes which have followed them?
The most curious thing about his appearance was his eyes: they were large, black, and had a peculiar dull dead lustre." "Did they shine in the dark? I knew a fellow at Oxford whose eyes did. Chairs ran after him." "I never noticed; I don't remember. 'Psychically, as you superstitious muffs call it, Bolter was still more queer. At that time we were all gone on spirit-rapping.
He felt the tide of psychic force beating upon the high shores of his heart. He was conscious of a constitutional change sweeping like a tempest over his protoplastic tissue. He felt that the secret fountains of his being were troubled by the angel of spirit-rapping, and that his gross, unbelieving nature stepped down, bathed, and was healed.
It did not hold very long, even with the novelists; for the English taste this esotericism was too exotic. Somebody suggested that the old table-turning and spirit-rapping, which had homely associations, might be re-considered in a scientific light, and the idea was seized upon. Superstition pranked in the professor's spectacles, it set up a laboratory, and printed grave reports.
The most absurd things of the 19th century, I think, were these: the decree at Rome of the infallibility of the Pope; England's bolstering up the Turkish Empire for fear of Russia attacking India; Lord Beaconsfield's administration altogether; the financial policy of the American green-back party; the belief in spirit-rapping, in the first principles of Herbert Spencer's philosophy, and in the sufficiency of Darwin's theory of natural selection to account for the ascent from lower to higher species; the shot-gun quarantine in the South against yellow fever; the toleration of the waltz, in otherwise civilized society, when even Lord Byron denounced it; and the unreformed spelling of the English language.
To show there is such a territory, we have only to name a few of its inhabitants, such as mesmerism, animal magnetism, odylism, hypnotism, mind-reading, faith-cures, clairvoyance, spiritism, including table-rapping, spirit-rapping, most of which have been used in connection with medicine.
This man gave himself out to be an American; but many persons suspected that his native land was Germany, and some said he was a secret agent of that court, which had emissaries all over France, in search of useful information. The empress, having heard of Home's strange feats of table-turning and spirit-rapping in fashionable salons of the capital, was eager to witness his performances.
As little could the wisest man have foreseen this mighty revolution, as thirty years ago such a thing as Mormonism could have been anticipated in America; as little as it could have been foreseen that table-turning and spirit-rapping would have been an outcome of the scientific culture of England in the nineteenth century.
In society in general, the strange circumstantial rumour of the Queen's death, which, being set afloat on Easter Monday, when no business was doing, was not the offspring of the money market. Mr. and Mrs. Beecher Stowe and spirit-rapping, both of which have arrived in England. The universality of the latter phenomena renders it a curious study.
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