Pretty creepy, France. This illustration is lampooning the great tables tournantes (table-turning) craze in France in 1853, when a fervor over experiments in the strange autonomous movements swept the nation. Here, two women have applied the theories to a small child, which is levitating between them, in what might be one of the earliest depictions of a sort of “light as a feather, stiff as a board“ experiment . Luckily, there’s a detractor racing to the scene to put an end to it, but it wouldn’t be the first use of a child medium in Spiritualism. #séance #occult #lightasafeather #lightasafeatherstiffasaboard #tablestournantes #tableturning #tabletipping #spiritualism