First of all, it is only right to say that Colonel de Rochas is a savant who seeks nothing but objective truth, and does so with a scientific strictness and integrity that have never been questioned. He puts certain exceptional subjects into an hypnotic sleep, and by means of downward passes makes them trace back the whole course of their existence. He thus takes them successively to their youth, their adolescence, and down to the extreme limits of their childhood. At each of these hypnotic stages the subject reassumes the consciousness, the character, and the state of mind which he possessed at the corresponding stage in his life. He goes over the same events, with their joys and sorrows. If he has been ill, he once more passes through his illness, his convalescence, and his recovery. If, for instance, the subject is a woman who has been a mother, she again becomes pregnant and again suffers the pains of childbirth. Carried back to an age when she was learning to write, she writes like a child, and her writings can be placed side by side with the copy-books which she filled at school.
This in itself is very extraordinary, but, as Colonel de Rochas says:
Up to the present, we have walked on firm ground; we have been observing a physiological phenomenon which is difficult of explanation, but which numerous experiments and verifications allow us to look upon as certain.
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 her 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 bedridden. 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 Seventh Artillery at Besançon; and he describes his gay time there, while the sleeping girl makes the gesture of twirling an imaginary mustache. 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, to a fresh silence, a new limbo; and then suddenly another voice and an unexpected person. 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 backward 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 caviling at every moment, as Jean-Claude did. Her name is Philomène Carteron.
I will now quote Colonel de Rochas:
By intensifying the sleep, 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 neighborhood, 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.