From Memory's Shrine: The Reminscences of Carmen Sylva

by Carmen Sylva

Not only tables, but chairs, sofas, all sorts of things seemed now suddenly to have become capable of walking about; it was even told of a young girl staying in our house, that holding her hand over a big glass shade that covered a clock, to her surprise the shade lifted itself up in the air to reach her hand, and remained for a time firmly fixed to it. Naturally enough, the thing being once admitted in principle, its possibility established beyond a doubt, there were no bounds, no limits to our curiosity, and every other form of amusement was cast into the background by this. It was much more interesting than simple mesmerising, and instead of being like that confined to an experiment on one person at a time, in this all could take part. We moreover obtained the proof that the force by which these results were obtained, was not entirely confined to certain more highly-favoured individuals, but lay in some degree latent in everyone, and could be immensely developed by practice. Nor was this ever attended with the least inconvenience to the experimenter, an effort of the will, a certain tension and concentration of mind, being the chief conditions of success. It was, however, also of great moment that such experiments should be undertaken in a proper spirit, i.e., seriously, with a real desire to investigate their nature and to turn them to the advantage of one’s fellow-beings, for we soon noticed that those who treated the matter as a mere joke, approaching it in a frivolous mood, generally failed in all they attempted. As might be expected, the persons whose fund of magnetism was most considerable, proved also to be those who could most easily induce in others the magnetic trance. All seemed to resolve itself into that one process of mental concentration, and someone remarked that this word “concentration” was the one most often heard, and that formulated the rule of life and scheme of education in our family. Perhaps I owe it to the habit acquired then, that I am never absent-minded, but always able to concentrate my thoughts on the matter in hand, and taking into consideration my lively imagination, I think this may be looked upon as an educational triumph!

Whilst “concentration” was thus the order of the day among us, it happened that my mother heard of the marvellous cures, recalling those told of in the Bible, being worked in Paris by a “Faith-healer,” as we should certainly now call him, since they were effected by no other means than the simple laying-on of hands. One of the patients then under treatment, and making rapid progress, was Schleiermacher’s daughter, Countess Schwerin, whose case so nearly resembled my mother’s own, that the latter could not refrain from writing to tell my father all she had heard, with the result that on his way home from America he stopped in Paris, to make further enquiries. He called on the magnetiser, whose name was Count Szápary, and begged him to undertake my mother’s case. This request met at first with a decided refusal, it being impossible for him, the Count stated, to abandon for a new patient the many now being treated by him, these being, moreover, already so numerous that he could not think of adding to them. He did, however, in the end so far modify his refusal, as to promise that in the course of a journey he was about to take, and which should lead him Rhinewards, he would certainly pay my mother a visit, and see what could be done for her.

Three days had not yet passed over our heads in Bonn since my father’s return, when the little garden gate was suddenly flung open by a stranger of distinguished presence—in spite of a slight limp (the result, we afterwards learned, of a carriage accident, some time previous, in Hungary)—and in whose thick dark moustache the first silvery threads were beginning to appear, though not yet in the rather long and wavy thick dark hair, a lock of which, escaping, was continually falling over his forehead. My father went forward to meet this gentleman, whom he introduced as Count Szápary, and who brought the scrutinising glance of his big black eyes to bear on our little group, with but little, at first sight it seemed, of the kindly smile which on better intimacy lit up his face so constantly. His own wonderful powers, which he was now bent on using for the good of mankind, had been revealed to him by chance, some might call it, in reality by his despairing efforts to procure by mesmerism the boon of sleep and respite from pain for an invalid daughter, given up by the regular doctor. To his glad astonishment, not only did the magnetic passes send the patient into a refreshing slumber, but a repetition of the experiment was equally successful, and, being persevered with, in time restored her to health. In his gratitude for his child’s life being spared, the father determined to use his gift henceforth for the benefit of others, and in order to cultivate it systematically, he went to Paris to study medicine for a time, and establishing himself there, the cures wrought by him were very soon widely talked of. There was a minute of suspense as the thoughtful, enquiring glance rested on my mother, and we trembled lest the objections urged against my father’s pleadings in Paris should still be maintained. But at that critical moment, poor little Otto happened to join us, and again the sharp restless eyes travelled from the sorely tried young mother to the unhappy child, and back again to the pale, emaciated father, already in a rapid decline, and all hesitation was at an end. The spectacle of so much suffering was decisive for the man whose whole life was given up to alleviating human misery. Without further demur he agreed to devote his time, his skill, to the case before him. “But,” he hastened to add, after a rapid examination of his patient, “your life I can perhaps save, more I cannot say, I cannot promise that you will ever recover the use of your limbs!” And indeed at that time it looked as if the one leg were completely atrophied, it was as if withered—literally reduced to skin and bone. When our new friend took his leave, it was with the promise to return in a very few weeks’ time, to accompany us himself to Paris, as he feared that without him my mother might not even survive the journey.

So we set out for Paris, my brother Wilhelm and I in one railway compartment with tutor and governess, Otto in another for himself with his faithful attendant, our good old nurse, and my mother in hers, in the hammock slung for her, with my father and Fräulein von Preen close at hand, and Count Szápary standing beside her, steadying the hammock with the one hand, whilst with the other he continued uninterruptedly making the mesmeric passes, to still the frightful paroxysms of pain, which almost threatened to prove fatal during the journey. Terrible as it was, it yet differed from former journeys undertaken under like circumstances, in the absence of the overpowering smell of chloral, ether, and other medicaments, for all such were from this moment abolished and never heard of more. It was not astonishing, when we did arrive safely and were installed in the house taken for us in the Champs Elysées, that directly he had seen his patient carried upstairs and put to bed, Count Szápary should have sought his own room, and falling exhausted on his bed, have slept on without waking for ten hours.

Next day began the treatment—no easy matter, as my mother’s extreme weakness made it necessary to proceed with the utmost precaution, and Count Szápary afterwards owned that he had more than once feared that she might die while undergoing it. But he persevered, and was rewarded at the end of six months by perceiving a faint twitching in the toes of the till then apparently lifeless foot. “Ah! you will be able to walk again after all!” he exclaimed in his delight, and continued the massage so vigorously and to such good purpose, that life seemed to return gradually to the whole of the paralysed limb, and in the course of a few weeks the patient could actually take a few steps. Only a very few at first, leaning on her companion’s arm, and with the tears streaming down her cheeks with the effort and the pain, sometimes severe enough to make her faint away before it was over. But through it all she could see us watching her, the first time she was taken into the garden, and she told us afterwards of our anxious faces, mine flushed with excitement as I ran towards her, whilst Wilhelm turned deadly pale as he tried to move away every little pebble in her way in the path. Then, a few days later, Otto also was allowed to look on, and for him it was something even more solemn and wonderful, for it was the first time in his life that he had seen his mother able to walk a step. Without a word he went up to her, took her by the hand, and walked slowly beside her the whole time, in perfect silence. For all of us it was the grandest and most impressive event of our whole childhood, something that seemed to partake of the nature of a miracle, and that brought the stories of miraculous cures in times of old quite near to us, making them a more living reality than to most people, since we had ourselves with our own eyes witnessed something similar in the person of one so near and dear to us. It will readily be believed, that our admiration and gratitude for him who had wrought this marvel knew no bounds. To say that we looked upon him as a saint, seems but a feeble expression of the feeling of veneration with which we regarded him.

Of the actual working of the cure, of the mode of treatment, we saw nothing, and heard but little; I only know that little by little, the terrible convulsions were transformed into regular exercise of the muscles, in fact into an involuntary process of therapeutic gymnastics. In course of time, not only was the cure complete, but her own fund of natural magnetism had been discovered to be so exceptional, that my mother was anxious to celebrate her restoration to health by performing a like good work for others, and began visiting Count Szápary’s other patients with him, undertaking a portion of the treatment. At her pressing invitation the lame Fräulein von Bunsen came to stay with us, and thanks to the combined efforts of my mother and Count Szápary, she also was set on her feet again and able to walk after being for five-and-twenty years considered beyond all hope of recovery!

For my mother it was the beginning of a new life in more meanings than one, for it was now her turn, after her own miraculous cure, to cultivate and turn to account in the service of humanity, the gift bestowed upon her unawares. She perhaps never became quite so strong as had been at first hoped, and, in fact, she often felt far from well, but the lameness never returned. And it very soon became clearly established, that the possession of magnetic force by no means corresponds to our physical strength or indeed to our bodily health. Concerning this, very thorough investigations were made by my father, who would not have tolerated the idea of anything being done by his wife which could possibly have been harmful to her own health. On that point there could be no shadow of doubt; our experiments in mesmerising and table-turning furnishing constant examples of the presence of these powers in a transcendent degree in persons of specially fragile build and constitutional delicacy. It was just by these that feats were accomplished, which would not merely have taxed their ordinary strength, but would have been impossible to the strongest man. All this will no longer seem so very surprising at the present day, but the period I deal with is of fifty years ago, when these marvels were not yet subjects of common parlance. No Charcot had yet made his experiments with suggestion and hypnotism; indeed, the very names were scarcely known. My father, who was so little inclined to credulity that friends and relations had dubbed him the unbelieving Thomas, gave himself up to the serious study of the question. His naturally philosophic bent found here ample matter for reflection. “I have not the dogmatic arrogance,” he was accustomed to say, “which would enable me to deny the existence of phenomena, simply because I fail to comprehend them!” Investigating them in this spirit, from the purely scientific point of view, he acquired the conviction that they were manifestations of an inner life, the proof of a persistence of thought independent of cerebral cognition, and he therefore gave to the book he wrote on the subject, the title, “Subconscious Mental Life.” I am aware that the theory he upheld is now much contested, that there are those who, while they do not dispute the genuineness of the manifestations, would ascribe them to quite another cause, looking upon them as of purely objective nature, and entirely independent of the medium. Time alone can decide which of these two schools of psychical research is the better justified. Then, at all events, it had not yet occurred to any of us to seek the explanation of these phenomena from without, everything appearing sufficiently to demonstrate their origin in our own mentality; a belief which did not, however, in the least preclude our full recognition of the superiority of the results achieved, to all similar performances by the same individual in the normal state. Our experiments were now no longer confined to mere spirit-rapping or observations made on subjects during the mesmeric trance; they were henceforth specially directed to psychography, and with the most gratifying results. It was perhaps the manifestations in this higher sphere which overcame the last barriers of my father’s incredulity; the simple manner in which they were obtained, by means of a pencil, passed through a large woollen ball, on which two persons placed their hands, absolutely preventing any possibility of fraud. Very often he made the experiment himself, together with one other person, generally a young girl whose store of magnetism was known to be above the average, and he was able thus to convince himself that the movements of the pencil, tracing characters with lightning rapidity in its course across the paper, were entirely independent of human agency.

Questions of deepest import were asked, answers on subjects either of private or of general interest obtained, and many a philosophic doubt laid to rest, by this spirit-writing. And these messages, I cannot sufficiently repeat, seemed to have as a rule little in common with the mental powers or culture of the person through whom they were transmitted, being on an altogether different plane, a higher intellectual level than that of society in general. Certainly no means was neglected of raising the tone of conversation among the ever-widening circle of friends who assembled for these séances; all frivolous chatter was banished, gossip was a thing utterly unknown, and it is hardly too much to say, that it was in a well-nigh religious spirit that most of us gathered round the table on which the manifestations took place. Among the guests in our house, was the aged musician, Neukomm, and very often, as a preliminary to the evening’s proceedings, he would seat himself at the organ, and by a soft and solemn prelude would induce in all present a frame of mind suitable to the solemnity of the occasion. As I was now in my twelfth year, and my mind unusually developed for my age, I was allowed to participate in all that went on. Above all, I loved to hear my father talk of those philosophic questions that occupied his own thoughts, and it was from this time that dated the delightful long walks we took together, in which he instructed me in the history of philosophy, explaining to me the various philosophic systems, and reading to me passages from his own writings, thereby giving me my first insight into the metaphysical problems in which his soul took refuge from the noise and bustle of the world. His dream it doubtless was, to make of me a philosopher like himself, and his enthusiasm and earnestness could not fail to arouse my interest in the themes on which he waxed so eloquent; but my own bent was a different one—the field of metaphysical speculation, as thrown open to me by my beloved and revered father, might well entice my spirit awhile,—my sojourn there could be but brief, it was in another dreamland I was eventually to find my home, and already, unknown to everyone, I had made my first excursions, my first timid flights within those realms. Everything I heard, everything I saw, each fresh addition to my store of knowledge, each wonderful revelation of the world above and beyond the perception of the senses, into which it was our privilege to obtain a glimpse by the marvellous experiences chronicled above—all this did but furnish material for my active imagination, and was absorbed, and pondered over, and woven into the intangible, unsubstantial fabric of many a future song. Meantime, the influences of the hour were naturally all-powerful in magnifying the veneration in which I held my parents. It was in truth no ordinary every-day existence which they led; and that which was most remarkable was the perfect harmony in aim and action of these two so dissimilar natures, and their admirable co-operation in furthering the well-being of their fellow-creatures, the special gifts of each being employed to the same end, my father’s theoretically, my mother’s in the direction of practical utility. Of the cures which the latter was enabled to work, I shall tell elsewhere; suffice it to say in this place, that they were effected with a swiftness, and attended with circumstances so remarkable as to surpass if anything those of Szápary himself. In later years, when the extraordinary cures wrought by Metzger and other masseurs were spoken of in my mother’s presence, it did not astonish anyone who knew her that she should calmly remark, with a pitying smile—“That is all very well, but it is nothing to what I could do! I had but to stretch out my hand and say—Rise up, thou art healed!”

The somnambulistic experiments I witnessed were perhaps more marvellous than all the rest. It would almost seem as if in the case of the somnambulist the law of gravitation were abolished, so entirely free from the trammels of material existence does the human body appear to be while in this state. Certainly my mother often appeared to us no longer to tread the earth, she seemed to float rather than walk, and any further and more complete abolition of what we are accustomed to term the laws of nature, would assuredly have occasioned among us no surprise at all. No amount of familiarity, on the other hand, could ever do away with the feeling of awe, with which my mother’s ecstatic trance invariably inspired us. Unconscious of all around, she sang and prayed—the words and melody alike of her own composition; it was a deeply moving spectacle.

Brought up in an atmosphere so highly charged with the marvellous, it has ever been impossible to me to assume a sceptical attitude towards mysteries which elude my comprehension. The word supernatural seems to me to be an absolute contradiction in terms. Who are we that we should dare to set limits to the forces of nature, and to decide that this or that occurrence is beyond her control? Did we but understand such events aright, we must needs acknowledge them to be perfectly natural. Egyptian priests of old, and Indian fakirs of the present day may alike laugh us to scorn, that in our ignorance and impotence we presume to question the existence of forces whose workings they have fathomed and turned to such good account. Recourse to the supernatural is but a return to nature. For this reason it may well be that outside the domain of surgery, wherein such incontestable triumphs have been achieved, of the whole of our modern medical practice the so-called nature-cures will in the end alone survive. They rest indeed on a purely rational basis, the treatment being none other than the art of transforming pathological phenomena into therapeutical processes.