De Vesme, Count Cesar Baudi (1862-1938)

A distinguished European author and psychical researcher, de Vesme was born November 12, 1862, in Turin, Italy. He was secretary general of the Société des Amis de l'Institut Métapsychique Internationale (Paris) from 1934 to 1938. He was drawn to the study of psychical phenomena upon reading the narrative of the following incident:

"One night in 1871 cries of despair were heard from M. de M.'s mother. She was found in a state of terror, declaring that she was carried by spirits to the foot of her bed. At seven o'clock the following morning Col. Daviso, a stranger [,] called. He was informed at a spiritistic séance that the spirits were about to play a trick upon a lady in the house of M. de M. He came to verify the information."

In 1898, after the death of Giovanni Ermacora, the renowned psychical researcher Cesare Lombroso entrusted de Vesme with the editorship of the Rivista di Studi Psichici. He arranged for a simultaneous French edition under the title Revue des Etudes Psychiques which he also edited. In 1905 this journal was merged with the Annales des Sciences Psychiques, of which Charles Richet and Dr. X. Dariex were the directors, and de Vesme became its editor in chief. He made extensive studies with Eusapia Palladino, Stanislawa Tomczyk, Eva C., and other famous mediums. He acknowledged mediumistic phenomena and sympathized with the Spiritualist hypothesis. He still had serious reservations, however.

In 1930 de Vesme published an excellent book on predictions in games of chance (Le Merveilleux dans les jeux de hasard ) that is extensively quoted by Richet in L'Avenir et la Premonition. His main work, however, was A History of Experimental Spiritualism (1931), a book lauded by the French Academy of Science. Versions appeared in English, Italian, and German. The first volume of this two-volume work, Primitive Man, discusses the nature and origin of religious beliefs. The second, Peoples of Antiquity, deals with the experimental elements in the spiritualistic doctrines of early civilizations.

De Vesme died July 18, 1938, in Paris.

Sources:

De Vesme, Cesar. A History of Experimental Spiritualism. 2 vols. London, 1931.