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About this book
"The spirit-rapper; an autobiography" by Orestes Augustus Brownson is a fictional autobiography written in the mid-19th century. It examines the rise of mesmerism and modern Spiritualism through the first-person account of a scientifically minded New Yorker who is drawn from curiosity into clairvoyance, spirit-rapping, and table-turning. Alongside ministers, reformers, and social radicals, he probes the claims and perils of these phenomena, weighing science, faith, and moral consequences. The opening of the narrative presents a prefatory statement that the work blends fact with fictional “machinery” to scrutinize spirit-manifestations and their links to reformist enthusiasms. The narrator then recounts his sober scientific education and early scepticism, his introduction to a French mesmerist’s convincing demonstrations, and a circle of interlocutors debating whether the effects arise from imagination, a human “demonic” force, or something darker.
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