Posthumous Humanity: A Study of Phantoms/Chapter 7

It, is now some thirty odd years since a moral epidemic, spiritism, overran the United States. Thence it passed into Europe, and gradually spread over the entire Continent. The premonitory symptoms of this curions disease were described by Count de Rézies in his learned work, Les Sciences Occultes.' We will reproduce the following excerpt, as an historical document:

Such were the beginnings of spiritism; everybody saw the spirit of a dead man in the mysterious interlocutor of the Fox girls. Did he not so give himself out; and what interest could he have had to dissimulate as to his true civil condition? Another circumstance made this explanation quite natural. In the houses where the least doubtful posthumous manifestations occur, it has been often noticed that if we strike one or several blows on the wall or ​floor, the invisible being would repeat at once the same number of knocks, as though wishing to indicate that he was anxious to talk through an alphabet at his disposal. However, it is not difficult to see, when we scrutinize the facts very closely, that the Fox girls were the dupes of one of those so common mystifications in the history of spiritism. They belonged to that class of young electrical girls, as is proven by the part they have since played; the knocks and vibratory scratchings heard in their room resulted from an unconscious action of their mesmeric personality, for we notice the identical phenomena occurring with other electrical persons. Thenceforth the answers of the pretended defunct to the questions of the Fox girls were a simple effect of mesmerism, analogous to the talking-tables to which we shall have to revert presently.

Spiritual telegraphy, whose foundations we have just been laying above, soon made the tour of the United States. Whenever a rapping spirit made his presence heard in any house, he was cross-questioned by some member of the family, by the help of the ingenious system devised by the Fox girls, and they never made persons wait long for their answers. Soon people began to interrogate tables and stands, that they had magnetically animated, and which replied by tapping with their feet. Then came the turn of the mediums: they gave themselves out as the intermediaries of the spirits, and wrote under their dictation the replies to the ​questions propounded to the latter. These novelties, so strange and so unexpected, caught the fancy of all classes of American society, the sole talk of the entire country was about rapping spirits, talking-tables, and mediums.

However, two schools arose to explain the prodigies which any one might verify as he chose. Whilst the one tried to account for them in a rational way, that is to say, by modes of action of the mesmeric fluid as yet unfamiliar, the other—and this was the larger—saw in these mysteries the hand of supernatural beings, who had opened communication with mortals, and to assist them with their best counsels. Did they not, in fact, reply to every question put to them? However ridiculous and however hard the problems, were they not solved? As the answer was not invariably orthodox when they touched upon religious questions, the Bible Societies rose in arms, as did the Catholics; a formidable opposition was organized against the propagators of the new doctrine. The bishops of different sects launched their anathemas, and spiritism was declared a monstrous impiety. Labour lost! The impetus given by the Fox girls had been irresistible, and four years after their first appearance the mediums were counted by thousands in the United States.

In 1851 the entire country was in the hands of the new proselytes. The spirit-telegraph was working in all the towns of the new continent. ​The movement had its journals, books, correspondents, its organization and its clubs. This revolution, or, if one prefers, this moral epidemic, as it has often been termed, possessed an inherent expansive potency too great for it to stop with the Transatlantic peoples. In the course of 1862 it crossed the ocean and attacked the British Isles; the next year it invaded the Continent. We can all recollect the frenzy which turned all French heads. The only talk was about the turning-tables and the conversations that everybody had had with his stand. I shall not recur to these scenes, uniformly so very amusing. These facts are known to all the world. I shall merely summarize succinctly the chief peculiarities that one notices in the practice of these prodigies, so as to analyze them and satisfy ourselves as to the veritable nature of spiritism.

It is usually with the turning-table that one begins. Several persons seat themselves around a table, laying their hands upon the edges, and touching each other, either by the elbow or fingers, so as to make a chain, and trying thus to give the piece of furniture they are encompassing a rotary impulse, if not physical, at least mental. The table either turned or did not turn, according to the tact of the actors, or rather according to their physiological state and their moral propensities. Frequently the result was nil, the action of some being quite neutralized by the indifference, ​secpticism, or ill-will of the others. Occasionally the table would begin to move, amid the joyous exclamations of the initiated, and to the stupefaction of the sceptics. The experiment would be repeated in a thousand different ways; and those who are fond of explaining things they see tried to account for these mysteries upon scientific grounds. Some saw in it suggestions of an electric current caused by personal contact between those who made the chain; others theorized about a mechanical impulse communicated of necessity to the table by the pressure of the hands. These explanations were accepted by the most sober men, and Babinet enjoyed his day of triumph at the Academy of Sciences in developing to his colleagues speculations of this sort.

But the joy of the Academicians was of short term. While varying the experiments with the turning-tables, it was soon observed that they could. be set in motion without the necessity of making the human chain. They then tried if a single individual might obtain the same result as had, until then, been considered only possible as from a collective force, and the table continued its movements. Then it was seen to rise, balance itself, leap, go forward, retreat, and move itself in all ways. At length certain experimentalists, pushing rashness to its last limits, endeavoured to make it move without touching it at all, by a simple act of mental volition, and succeeded. To cap the marvel, the ​table obeyed a child as well as an adult, as soon as it had become thus charged, and continued to move or to raise itself, despite any weight they might pile upon it. From that moment a new phase was begun. The table raising itself at the command of the experimenter, then striking a blow upon settling again upon its feet, they would order it to give a succession of knocks and it obeyed, the desired number being made with a marvellous accuracy. If the number were a great one, the table would hurry through, as if anxious to get back to simpler numbers. Thereafter, the big table was abandoned for the little stand, as more convenient for the drawing-room, and being able to tap and rap time more gently and less riotously than the other furniture. The stand answered all questions, and, by means of a certain code of knocks previously agreed upon, would reveal the age of people in the room, the amount of money in their pockets, &c., It was no longer a mere bit of furniture made to move mechanically, but an intelligent agent who conversed with extraordinary cleverness, and amazed nearly everybody with the justness and appositeness of its answers.

One day they bethought them to ask the mysterious agent which animated the table to indicate its answers no longer by the tapping of its feet, but by means of characters traced on paper by a pencil, which they arranged in a support. Then the pencil, in its turn, became animated, moved, ​traced letters, and answered questions which were put to it. The advantages of having a moving pencil made them naturally forget the table. But its triumph was short. The fluid which animates inert bodies could much more readily act upon living persons, and, in fact, under the infuence of the atmosphere which they breathed in these strange séances, certain impressionable natures felt themselves penetrated by the invisible breath which moved the pencil, took a pen and wrote, they, also, under the control of the spirits. These were the mediums, that is to say, the intermediaries who supplanted the pencil, as the latter bad supplanted the table. Spiritism was now definitively organized.

The mysterious agent which set in motion the speaking-tables was evidently the same as that which animated the moving pencil and the medium, I mean the mesmeric personality of the sitters or of the medium himself. If it differed in its modes of action, that was a question solely of the nature of the intermediaries by which it manifested itself. It is not, in fact, difficult to see that the table is only a passive instrument, a sort of acoustic syllabary put in action by the fluid of him who interrogates. In other words, it is the mesmeric personality of the latter, which fills the office of breath-imparter in the tabular dialogue. Thus it is explained how, in its replies, the table separates with marvellous sagacity the unknown from the mistakes which may obstruct, it in the head of the questioner, like a ​geometer who corrects the known quantities in a problem badly stated. There is hardly any person who has not heard people tell of the singular dialogues carried on by a table when it is thoroughly impregnated with mesmeric influence. One of the most common amusements is to make it tell the age of persons present. Before each question, he to whom it relates confides to his neighbour, either by writing or in a low voice, the number of years he has lived, and the table is then required to reveal the figure. The answer is never long in coming. The foot that is to make the knocks begins to move, and the number counted is almost always that which has been fixed in advance. Sometimes, however, there is a slight disagreement of one or two units, and this is usually to the detriment of the party interested. At once this is a cause of laughter and joking among the audience. Some one says that the table has made a mistake, and they ask it then to repeat its calculations. But the latter is obstinate enough to repeat the same number of knocks, and the age is verified by appealing to the recollections of the subject of discussion or of persons who can give the necessary particulars, and the mirth is doubled when they see that the table is right. The same process and the same result when they ask it to guess the money that some one present has in his pocket, but who deceives himself as to the amount in his purse. The calculations of the table are always accurate. At the end of a certain séance, ​where they had made the table talk about various subjects, one present exclaimed:

"A last question to finish the evening. Let it tell us how many ears there are in the room."

They put the question, and the table immediately rapped out sixteen. The sitters count themselves and reckon only fourteen ears.

"You're mistaken," said they. "Begin again and count better."

The foot raised itself again and repeated the same number of knocks. Again they count themselves, and it is but too evident that there are only seven persons in the room.

"Again mistaken. Count once more."

The number marked by the table continuing to be sixteen, they all began asking what could be the reason of this disagreement. They are lost in conjectures over this strange fact, and they commence to doubt the intelligence of the mysterious inspirer, when one of them exclaimed:

"The table has told the truth: we forgot to count the cat sleeping by the fire."

All eyes then turned in that direction, and there indeed is a tom-cat, whose two ears made up the missing figure.

This circumstance, which is repeated daily under a thousand different forms in spiritual séances, once more reminds us of the extraordinary accuracy which the understanding sometimes acquires when it has the mesmeric agent for interpreter. We have ​observed the same phenomenon in somnambulism, the elder brother of spiritism. The sleep-talker, also, corrects an uncertain answer and manages with astounding accuracy involved computations. Therefore it is not at all impossible that the table obtains equally surprising results when it is animated by the same principle as the magnetic subject—the thaumaturgic fluid (aura).

The talking-tables were soon abandoned for the moving pencil, their action being restricted within narrow limits on account of the ultra-elementary nature of the means of correspondence. Such a spelling system made all dialogue, however brief it might be, interminably tedious. It was abandoned as soon as the spirit-telegraph was perfected by the discovery of the moving pencil; and so the latter was soon given up for the medium. Let us now give attention to the latter.

The medium has often been compared to a waking somnambule. This definition seems to us perfectly just. There are the extreme poles of the mesmeric chain, two different modes of action of a common cause, which passes from one to the other by insensible degrees. One would define it as a transformation of force analogous to that which is observed in imponderable fluids—heat, light, electricity, magnetism—which, as we know, are but different manifestations of the same agent—the ether. Women have been seen to fall into the magnetic sleep while forming part of the chain ​around the table; the electrical phenomena of attraction and repulsion show themselves in certain persons who devote themselves to the practice of spiritism; some mediums become somnambules, and vice versâ. Sometimes these two characters show themselves simultaneously, so that it is difficult to say if we are having to do with a waking or sleeping subject. Nothing else, save the method of proceeding, distinguishes the sleep-talker from the medium. The one speaks, the other writes; but both declare that they are under the influence of a mysterious control, who dictates their answers. If questioned as to its origin and personality, this unseen control sometimes declares himself a spirit without nationality, sometimes as the soul of a defunct. In the latter case he willingly calls himself the friend or the relative of the medium, and that he comes to assist him with his counsel. Here occurs one of the most surprising facts of mesmerism. If the mysterious personage is asked to trace some lines by the help of the moving pencil or the hand of the medium, he reproduces the writing, peculiarities of speech, and even mistakes in spelling which were peculiar to the friend or the relative whose posthumous representative he calls himself. Such an argument seems at first glance unanswerable, and it was upon facts of this nature that they relied to establish the theory of spiritism.

Some mediums went farther. Wishing to test ​the knowledge of their correspondents, they required of them literary compositions. They evoked Dryden and Shakespeare, by turns, in England and the United States, Goethe and Schiller in Germany, Racine and Corneille in France, and begged them to give pieces of poetry. They would have called Homer and Pindar, had there been in the spiritual circles Hellenists capable of judging them. These shades came at the first call, and stood the test triumphantly. Their productions were pronounced irreproachable, and worthy in every respect of the reputation which those authors had acquired during their life.

"You see," said they to the sceptics, "an illiterate medium, who has never written anything but prose, would be incapable of producing such poetry; it is only a Shakespeare, a Schiller, a Racine, who could write the verses that you have before you. It could only be the shades evoked who have dictated them."

The advocates of this strange theory did not perceive the no less strange consequence which must follow. The perennial survival of shades would have long since rendered this planet uninhabitable for us. The dead would occupy the place of the living; for the accumulation of the spectres of the different tribes of the terrestrial fauna, heaped at the surface of the globe since the first geological epochs, would render the air irrespirable. We could not move save in a dense ​atmosphere of ghosts. Now chemical analysis has never shown in the air the presence of either of the immediate principles which enter into the constitution of a fluidic phantasmal form elaborated in an animal economy. The mediums who pretend to converse with Dryden and Shakespeare seem to us as innocent as those who should evoke Herodotus or Sanchoniaton. For our part, we bitterly regret that these venerable shades have disappeared. If they were able to reply to our appeal, the archæologists would not do ill to turn to them every time when they are in perplexity. Would it not be more simple, for example, in order to reconstruct the history of ancient Egypt, to take a medium to the ruins of Thebes or Memphis, and there make him evoke the shades of the Pharaohs, instead of trying to excavate their monuments in order to collect the inscriptions which they conceal?^[6]

​Let us pass on to the second class of the inspirers of the mediums—the spirits. They call themselves, as the case may be, angels or devils. But they hardly show more knowledge, than the shades when one puts to them delicate questions. They feel their way, are embarrassed, shuffle, and, if one per-sists, end by getting angry. Moreover, it is not difficult to detect in their answers, especially when they relate to religious or social questions, one of the characteristics of our species, the personal equation, that is to say, the mill-mark of the human brain. Let us enter a spiritual circle in Ireland; we see the séances placed under the patronage of St. Patrick, and each time that religious subjects are broached, they are handled by the spirits in the tone of the most orthodox Catholicism. It is the very opposite in Protestant England, where the mediumistic communications almost always bear the impress of the Anglican opposition to popery: No popery! the Pope is Antichrist; Rome the great modern Babylon. It is the same in the United States and in the north of Germany, and all countries where the principles of the Reformation prevail. In Russia spiritism resumes its orthodoxy, but in its own way, that is, according to the Greek rite. In other words, the spirits are Catholic at Rome, Anglican at London and New York, Freethinkers at Paris, Lutherans at Berlin, Schismatics at Petersbourg. They should be Mahomedans at Constantinople; Brahmanical in India; Buddhistical in most ​of the Asiatic nations.^[7] There are the same diversities when their advice is asked upon social reforms. Some show themselves Conservative, but these are the minority. The major part are Communists, and proclaim the division of land. Their answers varying thus with the nationality of the interrogator, and reflecting his dominant idea, his prejudices, his tendencies, in a word, his personal equation, one is forced to conclude that the spiritual communications elaborate themselves in the very brain of the medium who stimulates them, or of the sitters with whom he is in fluidic rapport. One sees thus why the spirits change language and attitude according to the persons of the circle. Allan Kardee informs us that they are serious and full of courtesy in the presence of high-bred and thoroughly educated persons. Per contra, every time that they have to do with those who are without education, or are of a frivolous character, they exhibit only flippancy and ignorance, attract attention by their trivial expressions, become coarse, impertinent, even filthy.

Evocation of phantoms by the medium is, then, a mirage, even when they endue themselves with a visible form, as has happened with certain favoured mediums; these latter are none the less the sport of an hallucination analogous to that of the somnambules who see appearing to them whatever ​phantoms it may please the magnetizer to show them.^[8] I can give ample proofs of what I affirm. I take them from the high priest of French spiritism, Allan Kardec, whom I have mentioned above. Following is almost verbatim what he says in his Book of Mediums:

"One day the fancy took a medium to evoke 'Tartuffe.' He did not wait to be dragged in by the ears, but speedily showed himself in all his classical peculiarities! It was veritably the personage created by Molière, with his soft and hypocritical speech, his wheedling ways, his air of sugar-coated piety. When, after close examination, the medium was atisfied as to the phantom's identity, he was transported with pleasure, and said to it:

"'By the way, how is it that you are here, seeing that you never had any real existence?'

"'That is true,' answered the spectre, in the most contrite tone; 'I am the spirit of an actor who used to play the part of Tartuffe.'"

Is this clear enough? Tartuffe, being unable to show himself, for a very good reason, sends an actor in his place.

The following fact is still more conclusive, for here ​no subterfuge is possible. We are still quoting Allan Kardec:

"A gentleman had in his garden a nest of little birds. This nest having disappeared one day, he became uneasy as to the fate of his little pets. As he was a medium, he went into his library and invoked the mother of the birds to get some news of them. 'Be quite easy,' she replied to him, 'my young ones are safe and sound. The house-cat knocked down the nest in jumping upon the garden wall; you will find them in the grass at the foot of the wall.' The gentleman hurried to the garden and found the little nestlings, full of life, at the spot indicated."

It is quite likely that if the medium had evoked the spirit of the rock, the rock would have answered as easily as Tartuffe and the bird-mother. In face of such follies is it not fair to say that spiritism is the grand mystification of the century? To complete all, if one would edify oneself as to the true nature of mediumship, it suffices to ponder the following lines, which I borrow from the spiritists themselves, and which form the basis of their doctrine:

"The first necessary condition of mediumship is to possess a certain portion of vital electricity, for this fluid may be considered as the necessary agent for the production of spiritual phenomena."

We observe, in the medium as well as in the somnambule, that the same principle is at work—​the vital fluid. It attains its summum of energy in the former, for it is from him—I mean from the productive centre—that the latter draws the living force which engenders mesmeric effects; whilst the second, borrowing from a foreign source, receives it limited and diminished in its action. Thus spiritism repeats, with exaggeration, all the prodigies of the magnetic sleep. Like the somnambule, and, better than the somnambule, the medium, even if illiterate, becomes a polyglot, composes poetry, writes discourses according to the minutest rules of the oratorical art, reads the thoughts of those about him, possesses the faculty of sight at a distance, reads in the past, and sometimes succeeds in divining the future. Useless to add that we are now concerning ourselves only with really lucid subjects—in other words, with the very small minority. Even in the latter, human stupidity constantly tends to exercise its rights, and but too often succeeds in mixing itself up in the responses.

One final word about spiritism. This branch of magic was known in antiquity. We see it often mentioned in the annals of the ancient peoples, and sometimes to such great proportions that kings forbade its practice, under the severest penalties. The Fathers of the early centuries of the Church fulminated against the talking-tables. In the exorcisms of the same epoch, it is the rapping spirits (spiritus percutientes) that they were banning with their conjurational prayers. Various ​missionaries, who have visited the Buddhist populations of Asia, tell us that spiritism has been practised in those lands from time immemorial.^[9]