I. Verbal Martian Automatisms
I have described in the preceding chapter, and will not now return to it, the birth of the Martian language, indissolubly bound up with that of the romance itself, from the 2d of February, 1896, up to the inauguration of the process of translation by the entrance of Esenale upon the scene on the 2d of November following (see pp. [154]-165). During several months thereafter the Martian language is confined to the two psychological forms of apparition in which it seems to have been clothed during the course of that first year.
First: Verbo-auditive automatism, hallucinations of hearing, accompanying visions in the waking state. In the case of spontaneous visions, Hélène notes in pencil, either during the vision itself or immediately afterwards, the unintelligible sounds which strike her ear; but to her great regret many of them escape her, since she is sometimes only able to gather the first or the last phrase of the sentences which her imaginary personages address to her, or scattered fragments of conversations which she holds with herself; these fragments themselves often contain inaccuracies, which are ultimately rectified at the moment of translation, Esenale having the good habit of articulating very clearly each Martian word before giving its French equivalent. In the case of the visions which she has at the seances, Hélène slowly repeats the words she hears without understanding them, and the sitters make note of them more or less correctly.
Secondly: Vocal automatism (“verbo-motor hallucinations of articulation,” in the cumbersome official terminology). Here again it is the sitters who gather as much as they can of the strange words pronounced in a state of trance, but that is very little, since Hélène, in her Martian state, often speaks with a tremendous volubility. Moreover, a distinction must be made between the relatively clear and brief phrases which are later translated by Esenale, and the rapid and confused gibberish the signification of which can never be obtained, probably because it really has none, but is only a pseudo-language (see pp. [p. 154]-159).
A new process of communication, the handwriting, made its appearance in August, 1897, with a delay of perhaps eighteen months as to the speech (the reverse of Leopold’s case, who wrote a long time before speaking). It is produced, also, under two forms, which constitute a pendant to the two cases given above, and also complete the standard quartette of the psychological modalities of language.
Thirdly: Verbo-visual automatism—that is, apparitions of exotic characters before Hélène’s eyes when awake, who copies them as faithfully as possible in a drawing, without knowing the meaning of the mysterious hieroglyphics.
Fourthly: Graphic automatism—i.e., writing traced by the hand of Hélène while completely entranced and incarnating a Martian personage. In this case the characters are generally smaller, more regular, better formed than in the drawings of the preceding case. A certain number of occasions, when the name has been pronounced by Hélène before being written, and especially the articulation of Esenale at the moment of translation, have permitted the relations between her vocal sounds and the graphic signs of the Martian language to be established.
It is to be noted that these four automatic manifestations do not inflict an equal injury upon the normal personality of Mlle. Smith. As a rule, the verbo-auditive and verbo-visual hallucinations only suppress her consciousness of present reality; they leave her a freedom of mind which, if not complete, is at least sufficient to permit her to observe in a reflective manner these sensorial automatisms, to engrave them on her memory, and to describe them or make a copy of them, while she often adds remarks testifying to a certain critical sense. On the contrary, the verbo-motor hallucinations of articulation or of writing seem to be incompatible with her preservation of the waking state, and are followed by amnesia. Hélène is always totally absent or entranced while her hand writes mechanically, and if, as seldom happens, she speaks Martian automatically, outside of the moments of complete incarnation, she is not aware of it, and does not recollect it. This incapacity of the normal personality of Mlle. Smith to observe at the time or remember afterwards her verbo-motor automatisms denotes a more profound perturbation than that she experiences during her sensory automatisms.
The Martian handwriting only appeared at the end of a prolonged period of incubation, which betrayed itself in several incidents, and was certainly stimulated by various exterior suggestions during a year and a half at least. The following are the principal dates of this development.
February 16, 1896.—The idea of a special handwriting belonging to the planet Mars occurs for the first time to Hélène’s astonishment in a Martian semi-trance (see [p. 161]).
November 2.—Handwriting is clearly predicted in the phrase, “Astané will teach me to write,” uttered by Hélène in a Martian trance, after the scene of the translation by Esenale (see [p. 166]).
November 8.—After the translation of text No. 3, Leopold, being questioned, replies that Astané will write this text for Mlle. Smith, but the prediction is not fulfilled.
May 23, 1897.—The announcement of Martian handwriting becomes more precise. “Presently,” says Astané to Hélène, “thou wilt be able to trace our handwriting, and thou wilt possess in thy hands the characters of our language” (text 12).
June 20.—At the beginning of a seance, a Martian vision, she demands of an imaginary interlocutor “a large ring which comes to a point, and with which one can write.” This description applies to M. R., who has with him some small pocket-pens of this kind, capable of being adjusted to the end of the index-finger.
June 23.—I hand Hélène the two small pocket-pens which M. R. has brought for her, but they do not please her. After trying to use one, she throws it away and takes up a pencil, saying that if she must write Martian, the ordinary means will suffice as well as those peculiar pocket-pens. In about a minute she falls asleep, and her hand begins automatically to trace a message in Leopold’s handwriting. I then ask that individual whether the pocket-pens of M. R. do not meet the exigencies of Martian, and whether Mlle. Smith will some day write that language, as has already been announced. Hélène’s hand thereupon responds in the beautiful calligraphy of Leopold: “I have not yet seen the instrument which the inhabitants of the planet Mars use in writing their language, but I can and do affirm that the thing will happen, as has been announced to you.—Leopold.”
June 27.—In the scene of the translation of text 15, Hélène adds to her usual refrain, “Esenale has gone away; he will soon return; he will soon write.”
August 3.—Between four and five o’clock in the afternoon Hélène had a vision at her desk, lasting ten or fifteen minutes, of a broad, horizontal bar, flame-colored, then changing to brick-red, and which by degrees became rose-tinted, on which were a multitude of strange characters, which she supposes to be the Martian letters of the alphabet, on account of the color. These characters floated in space before and round about her. Analogous visions occur in the course of the weeks immediately following.
August 22.—Hélène for the first time writes in Martian. After various non-Martian visions Mlle. Smith turns away from the window (it rained hard, and the sky was very gray) and exclaims, “Oh, look, it is all red! Is it already time to go to bed? M. Lemaître, are you there? Do you see how red it is? I see Astané, who is there, in that red; I only see his head and the ends of his fingers; he has no robe; and here is the other (Esenale) with him. They both have some letters at the ends of their fingers on a bit of paper. Quick, give me some paper!” A blank sheet and the pocket-pen are handed to her, which latter she disdainfully throws down. She accepts an ordinary pencil, which she holds in her customary fashion, between her middle and index-finger, then writes from left to right the three first lines of [Fig. 21], looking attentively towards the window at her fictitious model before tracing each letter, and adding certain oral notes, according to which there are some words which she sees written in black characters on the three papers—or, more correctly, on three white wands, a sort of narrow cylinder, somewhat flattened out—which Astané, Esenale, and a third personage whose name she does not know but whose description corresponds with that of Pouzé, hold in their right hands. After which she again sees another paper or cylinder, which Astané holds above his head, and which bears also some words which she undertakes to copy (the three last lines of [Fig. 21], p. [205]). “Oh, it is a pity,” says she, on coming to the end of the fourth line, “it is all on one line, and I have no more room.” She then writes underneath the three letters of line 5, and without saying anything adds line 6. Then she resumes: “How dark it is with you ... the sun has entirely gone down” (it still rains very hard). “No one more! nothing more!” She remains in contemplation before that which she has written, then sees Astané again near the table, who again shows her a paper, the same, she thinks, as the former one. “But no, it is not altogether the same; there is one mistake, it is there [she points to the fourth line towards the end] ... Ah, I do not see more!” Then, presently she adds: “He showed me something else; there was a mistake, but I was not able to see it. It is very difficult. While I was writing, it was not I myself, I could not feel my arms. It was difficult, because when I raised my head I no longer saw the letters well. It was like a Greek design.”
At this moment Hélène recovered from the state of obscuration, from which she emerged with difficulty, which had accompanied the Martian vision and the automatic copy of the verbo-visual text. But a little later in the evening she only vaguely remembered having seen strange letters, and was altogether ignorant of having written anything.
The very natural supposition that the three first words written were the names of the known personages (Astané, Esenale, Pouzé), who bore them on their wands, led to the discovery of the meaning of many of the Martian characters and permitted the divining of the sense of the three last words.
Fig. 21. Text No. 16; seance of August 22, 1897.—First Martian text written by Mlle. Smith (according to a visual hallucination). Natural size. [Collection of M. Lemaître.]—Herewith its French notation. astane
esenale
pouze
mene simand
ini.
mira.
The new alphabet was enriched by certain other signs on the following days, thanks to the echos of that seance in the ordinary life of Hélène, who happened on several occasions to write not the true Martian as yet, but French in Martian letters, to her great stupefaction when she found herself after a while in the presence of these unknown hieroglyphics.
Fig. 22. Examples of isolated French words (française, lumière, prairie) automatically traced in Martian characters by Mlle. Smith in her normal handwriting. See also [Fig. 1], p. 56.
The first manifestation of that graphic automatism, being as yet concerned only with the form of the letters and not the vocabulary, dates from the day after the following seance:
August 23.—“Here,” wrote Hélène to me at noon, sending me some memoranda from which I have taken the three examples of [Fig. 22]—“here are some labels which I made it my business to make this morning at ten o’clock, and which I have not been able to finish in a satisfactory manner. I have only just now emerged from the rose-colored fog in which I have been continuously enwrapped for almost two hours.”
Three weeks later a complete automatic Martian handwriting was produced in a seance at my house, of which the following is a summary.
September 12, 1897.—At the end of a quite long Martian vision, Mlle. Smith sees Astané, who has something at the end of his finger and who signs to her to write. I offer her a pencil, and after various tergiversations she slowly begins to trace some Martian characters (Fig. 23). Astané has possession of her arm, and she is, during this time, altogether anæsthetic and absent. Leopold, on the contrary, is at hand, and gives various indications of his presence. At the end of the sixth line she seems to half awaken, and murmurs, “I am not afraid; no, I am not afraid.” Then she again falls into a dream in order to write the four last words (which signify “Then do not fear,” and which are the response of Astané to her exclamation).
Almost immediately Leopold substitutes himself for Astané and traces on the same sheet, in his characteristic handwriting (considerably distorted towards the end): “Place thy hand on her forehead,” by means of which he indicates to me that the time has arrived to pass on to the scene of translation by Esenale.
Fig. 23. Martian text No. 17; seance of September 12, 1897. Written by Mlle. Smith incarnating Astané (then Leopold for the French words at the end). See the translation, p. [222]. Too many l’s at the end of the first line immediately produced the scrawls intended to strike them out. (Reproduction one-half natural size.)
Fig. 24. Martian alphabet, summary of the signs obtained. (Never has been given as such by Mlle. Smith.)
We may conclude from these successive stages that the Martian handwriting is the result of a slow autosuggestion, in which the idea of a special writing instrument, and its handling, for a long time played the dominant rôle, then was abandoned, without doubt, as impracticable to realize. The characters themselves then haunted for several weeks Hélène’s visual imagination before they appeared to her on the cylinders of the three Martians in a manner sufficiently clear and stable to enable her to copy them and afterwards to be capable of subduing her graphomotor mechanism. Once manifested outwardly, these signs, which I have assembled under the form of an alphabet in [Fig. 24], have not varied for two years.
Moreover, some trifling confusion, of which I shall speak a little later, shows well that the personality which employs them is not absolutely separated from that of Hélène, although the latter, in a waking state, might hold the same relation to Martian which she holds to Chinese—that is, she knows its general very characteristic aspect, but is ignorant of the signification of the characters, and would be incapable of reading it.
Hélène’s Martian handwriting is not stereotyped, but presents, according to circumstances, some variations in form, especially in the size of the letters.
This may be established by Figs. 21 to 32, in which I have reproduced the greater part of the texts obtained by writing. When the Martian gushes forth in verbo-visual hallucinations, Hélène transcribes it in strokes of large dimensions, lacking firmness, full of repetitions (Figs. 21, 26, 31), and she always remarks that the original, which is before her eyes, is much smaller and clearer than her copy. In the texts which have come automatically from her hand—i.e., supposedly traced by the Martians themselves—the handwriting is really smaller and more precise. Here again are some curious differences. Astané has a calligraphy less voluminous than that of Esenale, and Ramié has a much finer one than Esenale (Figs. 28 and 29).
It would be altogether premature for me to launch myself upon the study of Martian graphology, and, therefore, leaving that line to my successors, I take up the texts which have been collected in their chronological order.