Table-turning

Table-turning, a phenomenon attributed, with other more eccentric movements of furniture, to the agency of spirits (see SPIRITUALISM), but practised also in America and Britain from about 1850 as a kind of social pastime; the motion of a table under the finger-tips of a closed circle of 'believers' standing round the edge of the table being referred to a mysterious or occult origin, and not, as by the more sceptical, to the collective but involuntary muscular action of the circle of friends.