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).