De Guldenstubbé, Baron L.

De Guldenstubbé, Baron L. (1820–1873)

Baron de Guldenstubbé was a Scandinavian nobleman who was the first to introduce table tipping to France in 1853. For many months he had difficulty even in getting the French people to accept the idea of séances. In 1850, when news of the American Spiritualist movement first reached France, the Baron believed he had found what for so many years he had searched for—indisputable demonstration of the immortality of the soul. After months of persistence, he got regular sitters such as the Abbé Châtel, the Comte d’Ourches, and the Comte de Szapary, to sit with his medium M. Roustan. They experienced the same rappings and other phenomena as demonstrated by the Fox sisters in America. From there the French group progressed to table tipping.

The Baron was best known, however, for his experiments with direct writing. He would leave writing materials on the pedestals of statues, in niches in churches and public galleries, and even in tombs. Writing would be discovered later, even in boxes that had been sealed with the writing materials inside. He obtained writings that purportedly came from such people as Plato, Cicero, Juvenal, Spencer, and Mary Stewart. They were written in English, French, Latin, German, or Greek. He acquired more than 2,000 specimens in twenty different languages, collected between 1856 and 1872. He gave an account of his experiments in Practical Experimental Pneumatology: or, the reality of spirits and the marvelous phenomena of their direct writing (Paris, 1857). He wrote,

On August 1, 1856, the idea came to the author of trying whether spirits could write directly, that is, apart from the presence of a medium. Remembering the marvelous direct writing of the Decalogue, communicated to Moses, and that other writing, equally direct and mysterious, at the feast of Belshazzar, recorded by Daniel; having further heard about those modern mysteries of Stratford (Connecticut) in America, where certain strange and illegible characters were found upon strips of paper, apparently apart from mediumship, the author sought to establish the actuality of such important phenomena, if indeed within the limits of possibility.

The Baron placed a sheet of blank paper and a sharpened pencil in a box which he locked. For twelve days there was nothing, but on August 13, 1856, he unlocked the box to find “mysterious characters” written on the paper. He repeated the experiment ten times more the same day and each time got results. He eventually left the box open and claims that he actually saw the letters forming as he looked at the paper. He then decided to dispense with the pencil. He “placed blank paper sometimes on a table on its own, sometimes on the pedestals of old statues, on sarcophagi, on urns, etc., in the Louvre, at St. Denis, at the Church of Ste. Etienne du Mont, etc.” All came to show writing, in various languages. Various people assisted the Baron and witnessed the events. These included Prince Leonide Galitzin, the Swedish painter Kiorboe, and the German Ambassador at the Court of Wurttemberg. As Frank Podmore stated, “the publication of Guldenstubbé’s book created a profound impression in Spiritualist circles, alike in France and in this country, and his experiments are constantly referred to by the earlier English Spiritualists as striking demonstrations of spiritual agency.”

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