flat piece of wood equipped with two wheeled castors and a pencil-holding aperture, used to facilitate automatic
writing. The use of planchette to produce written messages give rise to belief that the devices foster communication
with spirits as a form do "mediumship". The devices were popular in seances during the Victorian era.
19th-century, at a time when age-old religious notions found challenge in sweeping scientific discoveries and industrial advancements that rocked the firm footholds of faith. A public primed by decades of charismatic mesmerists, psychic healers, animal magnetists, and phrenologists plunged communion headlong into new religious territory when the young Fox Sisters claimed communion with spirits through the mysterious raps heard in their Hydesville, New York home in early 1848. With the veil between the living and the dead seemingly parted, the belief in and experimentation with spirit communications spread at a rate previously unseen at the time, aided by advances in telegraph technology and an unprecedented cooperative media. A grand new age of both science and religion were at hand, one that would find them again at the greatest odds, but also with a common enemy that threatened the
sanctity of both.
Against this backdrop, homegrown spiritual experimentation became the most popular of parlor pastimes. Table
tipping was all the rage, as participants could now spread their outstretched hands on top of the nearest piano
stool or dinette, and likely experience mysterious raps, unexplained tilting and other strange movements as the
tables exhibited seemingly intelligent responses to questions. The popularity of the pastime was addictive and spread
rapidly. By 1851, one Philadelphia observer reported that some 50 or 60 seance circles had been formed in the city
and a Cincinnati newspaper editor estimated more than 1,200 mediums operating more than 1,200 mediums
operating in his city alone. Even those along the western frontier were hooked, and in 1853" another journalist
remarked that "it was not by any means unusual on entering a log cabin to find the good, simple people seated
around the rude table upon which the raps were being made. " Table-tipping and spirit rapping soon reached
England and spread to the Continent, and on both sides of the Alantic, inventive new ways to communicate with
the "so-called dead" we're imagined and made reality.
PLANCHETTE
7-3-1-5-3-8-5-2-2-5
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https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q ... _79YqxLQRb
http://www.mysteriousplanchette.com/His ... tory1.html
