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From Pat Deveney's database:
Echo du Merveilleux, L'.
Revue Bi-Mensuelle Illustree.
1897--1914 Semimonthly
Paris, France. Language: French. Publisher: Alfred Leclerc. Editor: Gaston Mery, scientific editor; and then his wife after his death.
1/1, January 1897-18/422,August 1914. 20 pp. Gaston Mery (1866-1909) was a journalist and politician who had edited Edouard Drumont's anti-Semitic
journal La Libre Parole and is said to have invented the term "racism." The journal grew out of a series of pamphlets Mery wrote on the apparitions of
the Virgin Mary to Marie Martel at Tilly-sur-Seulles, and the prophecies of the Voyante de la rue de Paradis in Paris. After his death the journal was managed
by his wife until the end of 1913 when the corporate owner was dissolved and the journal taken over by "a group of the friends of Mrs. Mery who were attached
to the memory of the work of her husband," who continued the journal in 1914.
The journal's stated goal was "to collect and observe facts drawn from history, without neglecting literature, but it was especially interested in contemporary
psychic manifestations which might be determined with all desirable controls." Accordingly, it tried to be "factual" in its presentation of marvelous events
(the old-fashioned cabinet materializations of Charles Miller, 1870-1943, and his final exposure, the apparitions at Tilly, dream interpretation, haunted castles,
graphology, psychometry, etc.), but its advertising content revealed the more popular audience to which the journal was directed: "Mirror Magic," the Portland-Mayer method of erasing bad memories, cartomancy, talismans, horoscopes, Chaldean Astrology, seers in the flames, and seeing-, curing-, and somnambulistic mediums practicing
under various exotic names in Paris and the provinces in the 15 years before World War I.
The journal carried articles by Papus, Sedir, "Ely Star" (Eugène Jacob, 1847-1942), Albert de Rochas, "Paul Vulliaud" (Alexandre-Paul-Alcide Wulliaud, 1875-1950),
Camille Flammarion, Jules Lemaitre,"Jules Bois" (Henri Antoine Jules-Bois), J.K. Huysmans, Albert Jounet, Charles Nodier, et al. It featured occasional sheet music
("Chante des immortels"), articles on the dowsing rod, the haunting of Stanislas de Guaita, Nostradamus, haunted houses, vampires, extensive reviews of current periodicals,
chiromancy, cartomancy, reports on local French visionaries and healers, etc. In 1910 it published scathing exposures of Alberto de Sarak (Sarrak), Comte de Das—for
which the journal, and others, were sued for 50,000 francs.
By 1910 the journal must have been experiencing a loss of subscribers because it offered a premium for renewal of "the right to a free consultation with one of its principal
soothsayers." Dorbon 5733. BNF; Yale University; University of Colorado; LOC.
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