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.”
2
I thought it well to give the report of one of these experiments almost in extenso, because those who maintain the palingenesic theory find in these the only appreciable argument which they possess. Colonel de Rochas renewed them more than once with different subjects. Among these, I will mention only one, a girl called Marie Mayo, whose history is more complicated than Joséphine’s and whose successive reincarnations take us back to the seventeenth century and carry us suddenly to Versailles, among the historical personages moving around Louis XIV.
Let us add that Colonel de Rochas is not the only mesmerizer who has obtained revelations of this kind, which may be henceforth classed among the incontestable facts of hypnotism. I have mentioned his alone, because they offer the most substantial guarantees from every point of view.
What do they prove? We must begin, as in all questions of this kind, by entertaining a certain distrust of the medium. It goes without saying that all mediums, by the very nature of their faculties, are inclined to imposture, to trickery. I know that Colonel de Rochas, like Dr. Richet and like Professor Lombroso, was occasionally hoaxed. That is the inherent defect of the machinery which we must perforce employ; and experiments of this sort will never possess the scientific value of those made in a physical or chemical laboratory. But this is not an a priori reason for denying them any sort of interest. As a question of fact, are imposture and trickery possible here? Obviously, even though the experiments be conducted under the strictest supervision. However complicated it may be, the subject can have learnt his lesson and can cleverly avoid the traps laid for him. The best guarantee, when all is said, lies in his good faith and his moral sense, which the experimenters alone are in a position to test and to know; and for that we must trust to them. Besides, they neglect no precaution necessary to make imposture extremely difficult. After taking the subject, by means of transverse passes, up the stream of his life, they make him come down the same stream; and the same events pass in the reverse order. Repeated tests and counter-tests always yield identical results; and the medium never hesitates or goes astray in the labyrinth of names, dates and incidents.[[16]]