Table-turning

Table-turning (also known as table-tapping, table-tipping or table-tilting) is a type of séance in which participants sit around a table, place their hands on it, and wait for rotations. The table was purportedly made to serve as a means of communicating with the spirits; the alphabet would be slowly called over and the table would tilt at the appropriate letter, thus spelling out words and sentences. The process is similar to that of a Ouija board. Scientists and skeptics consider table-turning to be the result of the ideomotor effect, or conscious trickery.

When the movement of Modern Spiritualism first reached Europe from America in the winter of 1852–1853, the most popular method of consulting the spirits was for several persons to sit round a table, with their hands resting on it, and wait for the table to move. If the experiment was successful the table would rotate with considerable rapidity, and would occasionally rise in the air, or perform other movements.

Whilst most spiritualist ascribed the table movements to the agency of spirits, two investigators, Count de Gasparin and Professor Thury of Geneva conducted a careful series of experiments by which they claimed to have demonstrated that the movements of the table were due to a physical force emanating from the bodies of the sitters, for which they proposed the name ectenic force. Their conclusion rested on the supposed elimination of all known physical causes for the movements; but it is doubtful from the description of the experiments whether the precautions taken were sufficient to exclude unconscious muscular action (the ideomotor effect) or even deliberate fraud.

In England table-turning became a fashionable diversion and was practised all over the country in the year 1853. John Elliotson and his followers attributed the phenomena to mesmerism. The general public were content to find the explanation of the movements in spirits, animal magnetism, odic force, galvanism, electricity, or even the rotation of the earth. Some Evangelical clergymen alleged that the spirits who caused the movements were of a diabolic nature. In France, Allan Kardec studied the phenomenon and concluded in The Book on Mediums that some messages were caused by an outside intelligence as the message contained information that was not known to the group.

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