Psychomancy: Spirit-Rappings and Table-Tippings Exposed

In the 1850s, America went mad for spirits. From darkened parlors came mysterious rappings, tables that tipped at the touch of ghostly fingers, and medium after medium claiming to speak with the dead. Charles Grafton Page, a physician and relentless rationalist, went straight for the jugular. Psychomancy is his methodical, scathing dismantling of the spiritualist craze that had seized the nation. Page doesn't merely express skepticism; he dissects the phenomenon like a surgeon, exposing the tricks of traveling charlatans, the credulous press that amplified their lies, and a desperate public hungry for miracles in an age of industrial upheaval. He brings the tools of science to bear on what others wanted to believe was magic. The result is a time capsule of Victorian rationality at war with popular mysticism, and a reminder that every generation faces its own version of the supernatural du jour. For anyone curious about where skepticism comes from, or how Americans once grappled with the boundary between the real and the wished-for, this is an essential artifact.