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So much for survival proper. But certain spiritualists go farther and attempt the scientific proof of palingenesis and the transmigration of souls. I pass over their merely moral or scientific arguments, as well as those which they discover in the prenatal reminiscences of illustrious men and others. These reminiscences, though often disturbing, are still too rare, too sporadic, so to speak; and the supervision has not always been sufficiently close for us to be able to rely upon them with safety. Nor do I propose to pay attention to the proofs based upon the inborn aptitudes of genius or of certain infant prodigies, aptitudes which are difficult to explain, but which may nevertheless be attributed to unknown laws of heredity. I shall be content to recall briefly the results of some of Colonel de Rochas’ experiments, which leave one at a loss for an explanation.
First of all, it is only right to say that Colonel de Rochas is a savant who seeks nothing but objective truth and does so with a scientific strictness and integrity that have never been questioned. He puts certain exceptional subjects into an hypnotic sleep and, by means of downward passes, makes them trace back the whole course of their existence. He thus takes them successively to their youth, their adolescence and down to the extreme limits of their childhood. At each of these hypnotic stages, the subject reassumes the consciousness, the character and the state of mind which he possessed at the corresponding stage in his life. He goes over the same events, with their joys and sorrows. If he has been ill, he once more passes through his illness, his convalescence and his recovery. If, for instance, the subject is a woman who has been a mother, she again becomes pregnant and again suffers the pains of child-birth. Carried back to an age when she was learning to write, she writes like a child and her writing can be placed side by side with the copy-books which she filled at school.
This in itself is very extraordinary; but, as Colonel de Rochas says:
“Up to the present, we have walked on firm ground; we have been observing a physiological phenomenon which is difficult of explanation, but which numerous experiments and verifications allow us to look upon as certain.”
We now enter a region where still more surprising enigmas await us. Let us, to come to details, take one of the simplest cases. The subject is a girl of eighteen, called Joséphine. She lives at Voiron, in the department of the Isère. By means of downward passes, she is brought back to the condition of a baby at its mother’s breast. The passes continue and the wonder-tale runs its course. Joséphine can no longer speak; and we have the great silence of infancy, which seems to be followed by a silence more mysterious still. Joséphine no longer answers except by signs; she is not yet born, “she is floating in darkness.” They persist; the sleep becomes heavier; and suddenly, from the depths of that sleep, rises the voice of another being, a voice unexpected and unknown, the voice of a churlish, distrustful and discontented old man. They question him. At first, he refuses to answer, saying that “of course he’s there, as he’s speaking;” that “he sees nothing;” and that “he’s in the dark.” They increase the number of passes and gradually gain his confidence. His name is Jean Claude Bourdon; he is an old man; he has long been ailing and bed-ridden. He tells the story of his life. He was born at Champvent, in the parish of Polliat, in 1812. He went to school until he was eighteen and served his time in the army with the 7th Artillery at Besançon; and he describes his gay times there, while the sleeping girl makes the gesture of twirling an imaginary moustache. When he goes back to his native place, he does not marry, but he has a mistress. He leads a solitary life (I omit all but the essential facts) and dies at the age of seventy, after a long illness.
We now hear the dead man speak; and his posthumous revelations are not sensational, which, however, is not an adequate reason for doubting their genuineness. He “feels himself growing out of his body;” but he remains attached to it for a fairly long time. His fluidic body, which is at first diffused, takes a more concentrated form. He lives in darkness, which he finds disagreeable; but he does not suffer. At last, the night in which he is plunged is streaked with a few flashes of light. The idea comes to him to reincarnate himself and he draws near to her who is to be his mother (that is to say, the mother of Joséphine). He encircles her until the child is born, whereupon he gradually enters the child’s body. Until about the seventh year, this body was surrounded by a sort of floating mist in which he used to see many things which he has not seen since.
The next thing to be done is to go back beyond Jean Claude. A mesmerization lasting nearly three quarters of an hour, without lingering at any intermediate stage, brings the old man back to babyhood. A fresh silence, a new limbo; and then, suddenly, another voice and an unexpected individual. This time, it is an old woman who has been very wicked; and so she is in great torment (she is dead, at the actual instant; for, in this inverted world, lives go backwards and of course begin at the end). She is in deep darkness, surrounded by evil spirits. She speaks in a faint voice, but always gives definite replies to the questions put to her, instead of cavilling at every moment, as Jean Claude did. Her name is Philomène Carteron.
“By intensifying the sleep,” adds Colonel de Rochas, whom I will now quote, “I induce the manifestations of a living Philomène. She no longer suffers, seems very calm and always answers very coldly and distinctly. She knows that she is unpopular in the neighbourhood, but no one is a penny the worse and she will be even with them yet. She was born in 1702; her maiden name was Philomène Charpigny; her grandfather on the mother’s side was called Pierre Machon and lived at Ozan. In 1732, she married, at Chevroux, a man named Carteron, by whom she had two children, both of whom she lost.
“Before her incarnation, Philomène had been a little girl, who died in infancy. Previous to that, she was a man who had committed murder; and it was to expiate this crime that she endured much suffering in the darkness, even after her life as a little girl, when she had had no time to do wrong. I did not think it necessary to carry the hypnosis further, because the subject appeared exhausted and her paroxysms were painful to watch.
“But, on the other hand, I noticed one thing which would tend to show that the revelations of these mediums rest on an objective reality. At Voiron, one of the regular attendants at my demonstrations is a young girl, Louise ——. She possesses a very sedate and thoughtful cast of mind, not at all open to hypnotic suggestion; and she has in a very high degree the capacity (which is comparatively common in a lesser degree) of perceiving the magnetic effluvia of human beings and, consequently, the fluidic body. When Joséphine revives the memory of her past, a luminous aura is observed around her and is perceived by Louise. Now, to the eyes of Louise, this aura becomes dark when Joséphine is in the phase separating two existences. In every instance, there is a strong reaction in Joséphine when I touch points where Louise tells me that she perceives the aura, whether it be dark or light.”