in Roman Kralik, Peter Sajda and Jamie Turnbull (eds) Kierkegaard and the Religious Crisis of the Nineteenth Century (Acta Kierkegaardiana IV) (Sala: Kierkegaard Society in Slovakia and Kierkegaard Circle, 2009) pp.133-49
In mid-1853, the worldwide "table-turning" craze swept through Copenhagen, and while Kierkegaard is silent on the topic, we know that such important figures as Heiberg and Martensen were eager participants in "borddansen" seances. But why should the two leading Hegelians in Golden Age Denmark be so fascinated by what had initially been seen as a mere parlor-game? If we consider the epistemological and soteriological beliefs of the Spiritualist movement that grew out of these early experiments, we can see that both Spiritualism and Hegelianism are reactions to post-Enlightenment collapse of religious certainty and the desire to ground comforting beliefs about the afterlife in empirical science. And this means that Kierkegaard's critique of his age - that it hubristically wanted to replace faith with a disinterested (yet utterly optimistic) scientism, and sought to evade the concept of eschatological judgment - provides a useful basis for understanding Spiritualism's place in the 19th Century crisis of religion.