Hypnotisme Religion.

Preface de Camille Saint-Saens.
Paris: Librairie C. Reinwald.. 1897.

Arthur Waite's copy

First edition. 8vo. 181x115mm. pp. [4], viii, [2], 317 [1bl]. With drawings by A Collombar. 
Bound with DAREL, Th. De la Spiritualisation De L'être, Aperçus Philosophiques. Paris: Chamuel. 1898. pp. 334 [2]. Inscribed on the half title "a Monsieur Dawson Rogers. Hommage respecteuse de l'auteur". Edmund Dawson Rogers was a journalist and spiritualist from Norfolk and one of the founders of the British National Association of Spiritualists and the Society for Psychical Research. Rare, Worldcat locating only six copies.
Bound in red cloth, spine lettered in gilt. Boards rubbed and marked and spine faded. Corners bumped. Some foxing but otherwise very good. Front pastedown has the book plate of Arthur Edward Waite and Alan Gauld. The latter has inscribed his signature with the date March 1981 on the front free endpaper.
Félix Regnault was, principally, an anthropologist with an interest in prehistorical cultures. Hypnotisme Religion is an extraordinary, encyclopaedic survey of the wilder shores of religious sensibility. What polite society sees as inexplicable disorder - hysteria, dreams, miracles, vatic utterances, hypnotism and other altered states - Regnault sees as evidence of a spiritual engagement and insight. "Religion", he says, "was the first science, the first attempt to explain the incomprehensible". Darel's book inhabits similar territory but attempts a more philosophical investigation into the "action of the invisible world on the visible world, of the spirit on matter".

Ref. 5182