Michael Sage

Born in 1863 and deceased in 1931, Michel Sage was a French author associated with spiritualist and psychical-research writing. Library records credit him with a small body of books from the early 1900s into the 1930s, including Madame Piper, La zone frontière entre l'autre monde et celui-ci, L'Ascension cosmique de l'homme, and Le Spiritisme, problème scientifique.

Sage is especially remembered for the work published in English as Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research, translated from his French writing and issued with a preface by Sir Oliver Lodge. In it, he looked closely at the case of Leonora Piper, one of the most discussed mediums of the period, and at the efforts of British and American researchers to examine trance phenomena in a more organized way.

What makes Sage interesting today is the balance in his writing: he was plainly interested in spiritualist ideas, yet he also framed them as questions to be investigated rather than simply accepted. That mix of belief, debate, and early scientific curiosity gives his books a distinctive place in the history of psychical research.