Table turning was Spiritualism's first mass practice and, for a brief period in the early 1850s, arguably the most widely performed ritual act in the Western world: sitters gathered around an ordinary table, rested their fingertips lightly on its surface, and waited for it to tilt, rotate or rap out answers to questions, one rap for yes and a fixed code of raps standing in for letters of the alphabet to spell out longer messages.
The craze crossed the Atlantic from the United States to Britain and continental Europe with remarkable speed, drawing participants from every social class and reportedly reaching royal courts and government cabinets, a fad so pervasive that contemporary newspapers and satirical magazines treated it as a defining oddity of the age rather than a fringe curiosity.
Unlike the trance and physical mediumship that came to dominate later Spiritualist practice, table turning required no trained or specially gifted medium at all, only a willing group and a light table, which is precisely what made it spread so fast: any household could attempt it after dinner without seeking out a professional, and its low barrier to entry did as much as any missionary effort to carry Spiritualist ideas into homes that formal Spiritualist churches never reached directly.