The Night-Side of Nature; Or, Ghosts and Ghost-Seers

by Catherine Crowe

But Dr. Passavent, who has written a very philosophical work on the subject of vital magnetism and clear-seeing, asserts, that it is an error to imagine that the ecstatic condition is merely the product of disease. He says, that it has sometimes exhibited itself in persons of very vigorous constitutions, instancing Joan of Arc, a woman, whom historians have little understood, and whose memory Voltaire’s detestable poem has ridiculed and degraded, but who was, nevertheless, a great psychological phenomenon.

The circumstance, too, that phenomena of this kind are more frequently developed in women than in men, and that they are merely the consequence of her greater nervous irritability, has been made another objection to them—an objection, however, which Dr. Passavent considers founded on ignorance of the essential difference between the sexes, which is not merely a physical but a psychological one. Man is more productive than receptive. In a state of perfectibility, both attributes would be equally developed in him; but in this terrestrial life, only imperfect phases of the entire sum of the soul’s faculties are so. Mankind are but children, male or female, young or old; of man, in his totality, we have but faint adumbrations, here and there.

Thus the ecstatic woman will be more frequently a seer, instinctive and intuitive; man, a doer and a worker; and as all genius is a degree of ecstasy or clear-seeing, we perceive the reason wherefore in man it is more productive than in woman, and that our greatest poets and artists, in all kinds, are of the former sex, and even the most remarkable women produce but little in science or art; while on the other hand, the feminine instinct, and tact, and intuitive seeing of truth, are frequently more sure than the ripe and deliberate judgment of man; and it is hence that solitude and such conditions as develop the passive or receptive at the expense of the active, tend to produce this state, and to assimilate the man more to the nature of the woman; while in her they intensify these distinguishing characteristics; and this is also the reason that simple and child-like people and races are the most frequent subjects of these phenomena.

It is only necessary to read Mozart’s account of his own moments of inspiration, to comprehend not only the similarity, but the positive identity, of the ecstatic state with the state of genius in activity. “When all goes well with me,” he says—“when I am in a carriage, or walking, or when I can not sleep at night, the thoughts come streaming in upon me most fluently: whence, or how, is more than I can tell. What comes, I hum to myself as it proceeds. Then follow the counterpoint and the clang of the different instruments; and, if I am not disturbed, my soul is fixed, and the thing grows greater, and broader, and clearer; and I have it all in my head, even when the piece is a long one; and I see it like a beautiful picture—not hearing the different parts in succession as they must be played, but the whole at once. That is the delight! The composing and the making is like a beautiful and vivid dream; but this hearing of it is the best of all.”

What is this but clear-seeing, backward and forward, the past and the future? The one faculty is not a whit more surprising and incomprehensible than the other, to those who possess neither; only we see the material product of one, and therefore believe in it. But, as Passavent justly observes, these coruscations belong not to genius exclusively—they are latent in all men. In the highly-gifted this divine spark becomes a flame to light the world withal; but even in the coarsest and least-developed organizations, it may and does momentarily break forth. The germ of the highest spiritual life is in the rudest, according to its degree, as well as in the highest form of man we have yet seen;—he is but a more imperfect type of the race, in whom this spiritual germ has not unfolded itself.

Then, with respect to our second source of information, I am quite aware that it is equally difficult to establish its validity; but there are a few arguments in our favor here, too. In the first place, as Dr. Johnson says, though all reason is against us, all tradition is for us; and this conformity of tradition is surely of some weight, since I think it would be difficult to find any parallel instance of a universal tradition that was entirely without a foundation in truth; for with respect to witchcraft, the belief in which is equally universal, we now know that the phenomena were generally facts, although the interpretations put upon them were fables. It may certainly be objected that this universal belief in ghosts only arises from the universal prevalence of spectral illusions; but if so, as I have before observed, these spectral illusions become a subject of very curious inquiry; for, in the first place, they frequently occur under circumstances the least likely to induce them, and to people whom we should least expect to find the victims of them; and, in the second, there is a most remarkable conformity here, too, not only between the individual cases occurring among all classes of persons, who had never exhibited the slightest tendency to nervous derangement or somnambulism, but also between these and the revelations of the somnambules. In short, it seems to me that life is reduced to a mere phantasmagoria, if spectral illusions are so prevalent, so complicated in their nature, and so delusive as they must be if all the instances of ghost-seeing that come before us are to be referred to that theory. How numerous these are, I confess myself not to have had the least idea, till my attention was directed to the inquiry; and that these instances have been equally frequent in all periods and places we can not doubt, from the variety of persons that have given in their adhesion, or at least that have admitted, as Addison did, that he could not refuse the universal testimony in favor of the reappearance of the dead, strengthened by that of many credible persons with whom he was acquainted. Indeed, the testimony in favor of the facts has been at all periods too strong to be wholly rejected; so that even the materialists, like Lucretius and the elder Pliny, find themselves obliged to acknowledge them; while, on the other hand, the extravagant admissions that are demanded of us by those who endeavor to explain them away, prove that their disbelief rests on no more solid foundation than their own prejudices. I acknowledge all the difficulty of establishing the facts—such difficulties as indeed encompass few other branches of inquiry; but I maintain that the position of the opponents is still worse, although, by their high tone and contemptuous laugh, they assume to have taken up one that, being fortified by reason, is quite impregnable, forgetting that the wisdom of man is pre-eminently “foolishness before God,” when it wanders into this region of unknown things;—forgetting, also, that they are just serving this branch of inquiry, as their predecessors, whom they laughed at, did physiology; concocting their systems out of their own brains, instead of the responses of nature—and with still more rashness and presumption, this department of her kingdom being more inaccessible, more incapable of demonstration, and more entirely beyond our control; for these spirits will not “come when we do call them;”—and I confess it often surprises me to hear the very shallow nonsense that very clever men talk upon the subject, and the inefficient arguments they use to disprove what they know nothing about. I am quite conscious that the facts I shall adduce are open to controversy: I can bring forward no evidence that will satisfy a scientific mind; but neither are my opponents a whit better fortified. All I do hope to establish is, not a proof, but a presumption; and the conviction I desire to awaken in people’s minds is, not that these things are so, but that they may be so, and that it is well worth our while to inquire whether they are or not.

It will be seen that these views of a future state are extremely similar to those of Isaac Taylor, as suggested in his physical theory of another life—at least, as far as he has entered upon the subject;—and it is natural that they should be so, because he seems also to have been a convert to the opinion that “the dead do sometimes break through the boundaries that hem in the ethereal crowds; and if so, as if by trespass, may in single instances infringe upon the ground of common corporeal life.”

Let us now fancy this dispossessed soul entering on its new career, amazed, and no more able than when it was in the body to accommodate itself at once to conditions of existence for which it was unprepared. If its aspirations had previously been heavenward, these conditions would not be altogether new, and it would speedily find itself at home in a sphere in which it had dwelt before; for, as I have formerly said, a spirit must be where its thoughts and affections are, and the soul, whose thoughts and affections had been directed to heaven, would only awaken after death into a more perfect and unclouded heaven. But imagine the contrary of all this. Conceive what this awakening must be to an earth-bound spirit—to one altogether unprepared for its new home—carrying no light within it—floating in the dim obscure—clinging to the earth, where all its affections were garnered up: for where its treasure is, there shall it be also. It will find its condition evil, more or less, according to the degree of its moral light or darkness, and in proportion to the amount of the darkness will be its incapacity to seek for light. Now, there seems nothing offensive to our notions of the Divine goodness in this conception of what awaits us when the body dies. It appears to me, on the contrary, to offer a more comprehensible and coherent view than any other that has been presented to me; yet the state I have depicted is very much the hades of the Greeks and Romans. It is the middle state, on which all souls enter—a state in which there are many mansions; that is, there are innumerable states—probably not permanent, but ever progressive or retrograde; for we can not conceive of any moral state being permanent, since we know perfectly well that ours is never so; it is always advancing or retroceding. When we are not improving, we are deteriorating; and so it must necessarily be with us hereafter.

Now, if we admit the probability of this middle state, we have removed one of the great objections which are made to the belief in the reappearance of the dead: namely, that the blest are too happy to return to the earth, and that the wicked have it not in their power to do so. This difficulty arises, however, very much from the material ideas entertained of heaven and hell—the notion that they are places instead of states. I am told that the Greek word hades is derived from æides, invisible; and that the Hebrew word scheôl, which has the same signification, also implies a state, not a place, since it may be interpreted into desiring, longing, asking, praying. These words in the Septuagint are translated grave, death, and hell; but previously to the Reformation they seem to have borne their original meaning—that is, the state into which the soul entered at the death of the body. It was probably to get rid of the purgatory of the Roman Church, which had doubtless become the source of many absurd notions and corrupt practices, that the doctrine of a middle state or hades was set aside: besides which, the honest desire for reformation, in all reforming churches, being alloyed by the odium theologicum, the purifying besom is apt to take too discursive a sweep, exercising less modesty and discrimination than might be desirable, and thus not uncommonly wiping away truth and falsehood together.

Dismissing the idea, therefore, that heaven and hell are places in which the soul is imprisoned, whether in bliss or woe, and supposing that, by a magnetic relation, it may remain connected with the sphere to which it previously belonged, we may easily conceive that, if it have the memory of the past, the more entirely sensuous its life in the body may have been, the closer it will cling to the scene of its former joys; or even if its sojourn on earth were not a period of joy, but the contrary, still, if it have no heavenward aspirations, it will find itself, if not in actual wo, yet aimless, objectless, and out of a congenial element. It has no longer the organs whereby it perceived, communicated with, and enjoyed, the material world and its pleasures. The joys of heaven are not its joys; we might as well expect a hardened prisoner in Newgate, associating with others as hardened as himself, to melt into ecstatic delight at the idea of that which he can not apprehend! How helpless and inefficient such a condition seems! and how natural it is to us to imagine that, under such circumstances, there might be awakened a considerable desire to manifest itself to those yet living in the flesh, if such a manifestation be possible! And what right have we, in direct contradiction to all tradition, to assert that it is not? We may raise up a variety of objections from physical science, but we can not be sure that these are applicable to the case; and of the laws of spirit we know very little, since we are only acquainted with it as circumscribed, confined, and impeded, in its operations, by the body; and whenever such abnormal states occur as enable it to act with any degree of independence, man, under the dominion of his all-sufficient reason, denies and disowns the facts.