223 - (1). Is the medium, at the time he is exercising his faculty, in a perfectly normal state?

"He is sometimes in a state of crisis, more or less decided; it is this which fatigues him, and makes him need rest. But, more frequently, he is in his normal state; especially if he is only a medium for writing"

 

(2). Can written or verbal communications be given, medianimically, by the spirit of the medium himself? "The soul of the medium may communicate like any other; if it attains a certain degree of liberty, it recovers its qualities as a spirit. You have a proof of this in the souls of living persons who come to visit you and communicate with you by writing or otherwise, even, in some cases, without your calling them. Among the spirits whom you evoke, some are re-incarnated, in this world or in other worlds; in such cases they speak to you as spirits, and not as men. Why may it not be the same with the spirit of a medium?"

 

- Does not your explanation confirm the opinion of those who believe that all communications emanate from the spirit of the medium, and not from other spirits?

"That opinion is only wrong because held too exclusively.  It is certain that the spirit of the medium can act of itself; but that is no reason why others should not act also by his means."

 

(3). How are we to know whether the spirit who communicates is that of the medium, or some other?

"By the nature of the communication. Study the circumstances of the case, and the language employed; and you will learn to distinguish. It is chiefly in somnambulism or trance that the spirit of the medium manifests himself, because he is then in a state of greater freedom; it is more difficult for the medium's spirit to manifest himself; 50 to say, apart from his human personality, when he is in the normal state. Besides, mediums often reply to questions by answers which you cannot possibly attribute to the mediums themselves; and I therefore say to you, observe and reflect."

 

Remark. - When a human being speaks to us, we have no difficulty in deciding whether what he says comes from himself or whether he is, expressing the ideas of another; it is the same in regard to mediums.

 

(4). Since the spirit of the medium may have acquired, in anterior existences, knowledge which he has temporarily lost sight of; under his present corporeal envelope, but which he remembers as a spirit, may it not be that he derives, from the recesses of his own nature, the ideas which appear to exceed the limits of his understanding?

"That often happens in somnambulic crises and in trance; but I would again remind you that there are manifestations which exclude all doubt in regard to the fact of our intervention. Continue your observation for a sufficient length of time, meditate on what you see, and you can have no doubt upon this subject."

 

(5). Are the communications which emanate from the medium's own spirit always inferior to those given by other spirits?

"Not always; for other spirits may be of an order inferior to that of the medium, and may therefore make communications of less value than those given by the latter.

This is often seen in somnambulism, in which state it is usually the somnambulist's own spirit who manifests; and yet very good things are often said by somnambulists."

 

(6). When a spirit communicates through a medium, does he transmit his thought directly, or does he use the incarnated spirit of the medium as his intermediary?

"The medium's spirit acts as the interpreter of the communicating spirit, because he is linked with the body, which, in such cases, plays the part of speaker, and also because there must be a conductor between you and the disincarnate spirits who communicate with you, just as, for the transmission of a telegraphic message, there must be a wire connecting the points of transmission and of reception, and, at the ends of the wire, an intelligent person who transmits, and another who receives, the message conveyed by the electric fluid."

 

(7). Does the spirit of the medium exercise an influence over the communications which he transmits from other spirits?

"Yes. If he is not in sympathy with them, he may alter their replies and assimilate them to his own ideas and propensities; but he does not influence the spirits themselves: he is only an inexact interpreter."

 

(8). Is it for this reason that certain spirits have a preference for certain mediums?

"Yes. Spirits seek for interpreters in sympathy with themselves, and able to transmit their thought correctly. When there is no sympathy between them, the spirit of the medium becomes an antagonist and produces resistance; he is an unwilling interpreter, and, as such, is often an unfaithful one. The same thing occurs among yourselves, when a message is conveyed through a careless, hostile, or unfaithful messenger."

 

(9). We see that such may be the case with intuitive mediums, but we do not see how it can be so with mechanical mediums.

"You do not rightly understand the part that is played by a medium. There is, in this matter, the action of a law which you have not yet discovered. You must remember that, in order to effect the movement of an inert body, the spirit requires a certain quantity of animalised fluid which he borrows from the medium, for the purpose of lending a momentary vitality to the material object he wishes to make use of; and which he thus renders momentarily obedient to his will. In the same way, in order to transmit an intelligent communication, he must have an intelligent intermediary, and this intermediary is furnished him by the spirit of the medium."

 

- This explanation appears to be hardly applicable to what are called "talking tables," for it would seem to imply that, when inert objects, such as tables, planchettes, etc., give intelligent answers, the spirit of the medium is a mere cipher.

"Such an inference would be erroneous. A disincarnate spirit can lend a momentary, factitious life to an inert body, but it cannot give it intelligence; no inert body was ever intelligent. It is therefore the spirit of the medium that receives the thought, without being aware of it, and transmits it by successive steps through various intermediaries."

 

(10). It would seem from these explanations, that the spirit of the medium is never completely passive?

"He is passive when he does not mingle his own ideas with those of the communicating spirit, but he is never an absolute nullity his co-operation as an intermediary is always necessary, even in what you call mechanical medium-ship."

 

(11). Is there not a greater probability of the spirit's thought being correctly transmitted by a mechanical medium than by an intuitive one?

"Undoubtedly there is; and, therefore, for some kinds of communications, a mechanical medium is to be preferred; but when you are sure of the genuineness of the faculty of an intuitive medium, it is of little importance. Everything in this matter depends upon circumstances; what I wish to impress on your mind is the fact that less precision is necessary in some sorts of communications than in others."

 

(12). Among the different explanations put forth in regard to spirit-phenomena, there is one which attributes medianimity to inert bodies, to the planchette, for example, which serves as the instrument for writing; the communicating spirit being supposed to identify himself for the time being with the object employed by him for transmitting his message, and thus to render it momentarily, not only alive, but intelligent. Hence the term inert mediums; given by those who hold this view of the subject, to the inert objects employed by spirits in manifesting themselves. What do you say to this hypothesis?

"There is but one thing to be said about it, viz., that if the communicating spirit transmitted intelligence to the planchette as well as life, the planchette would be able to write of itself without the co-operation of the medium. For an inert body to become intelligent would be as impossible, in the nature of things, as it would be for an intelligent being - a man - to become a machine. Such a supposition is only one of the fancies that are engendered by preconceived ideas, and are dissipated by experience and observation."

 

(13). Yet a well-known phenomenon seems to confirm the opinion that there is, in the inert bodies thus temporarily vitalised, something more than mere vitality, something that looks like a kind of intelligence; for the inert bodies thus vitalised by the spirit's will frequently appear, by their movements, to express anger, affection, and various other sentiments.

"When an angry man shakes a stick, the stick is not angry, nor is the hand angry that holds the stick; it is the thought which directs the hand that is angry. The table, or planchette, is no more intelligent than is the stick; they obey an intelligence, but they have neither intelligence nor sentiment. In short, a spirit does not transform himself into a table or a planchette, nor does he even enter into them."

 

(14). If it be irrational to attribute intelligence to the objects in question, may they nevertheless be considered as a variety of mediums, designated by the term, inert mediums?

"Such a question is one of words, and has little interest for us, provided you yourselves understand the meaning you attribute to it. You are quite at liberty, if it pleases you, to call puppet a man."

 

(15). Spirits possess only the language of thought; they have no articulate language; and accordingly, for them, there is but one language. This being the case, could a spirit express himself through medianimic agency, in a tongue which he has never spoken when in the flesh; and if so, whence would lie derive the words which, in such a case, would be employed by him?

"You answer your own question when you say that spirits have but one language, viz., the language of thought; for that language is understood by all intelligences, by men as well as by spirits. The errant spirit, in addressing himself to the incarnate spirit of the medium, speaks to him neither in French nor in English, but in the universal language, which is that of thought; in order to translate his ideas into an articulate tongue, and to transmit them in that tongue to you, he obtains the words he needs from the vocabulary of the medium's brain."

 

(16). If this be the case, the spirit should be able to express himself only in the language of the medium; yet we have communications written or spoken in languages unknown to the medium; is there not a contradiction in this?

"You must remark, first, that all mediums are not equally fit for this sort of exercise and, next, that spirits only lend themselves occasionally to this sort of effort, when they judge it to be useful. In ordinary communications they prefer to employ the native language of the medium, because, in doing so, they have less of physical difficulty to overcome."

 

(17). Does not the aptitude of certain mediums, who write or speak in a foreign language, result from the fact that this language is one which has been familiar to them in a previous existence, and the intuition of which they have preserved?

"That is sometimes the case, but it is not a rule; for the spirit can, in some cases, and by an extra effort, surmount the physical resistance which he encounters. This occurs when a medium writes, in his own tongue, words which he does not understand."

 

(18). Can one who, in his normal state, is ignorant of the art of writing, write as a medium?

"Yes; but it is evident that, in such a case, the communicating spirit has a greater mechanical difficulty to overcome, because the medium's hand is unaccustomed to the movements necessary for the tracing of letters. It is the same with drawing mediums who, in their ordinary state, do not know how to draw."

 

(19). Can an unintelligent medium be used for transmitting communications of a high order?

"Yes; just as a medium can be made to write or speak in a language that he does not understand. Medianimity, properly speaking, is independent of the intelligence as well as of the moral qualities; and, when no better instrument is at hand, a spirit does the best he can with the one he finds within his reach. But it is natural that, for communications of importance, he should prefer the medium who presents the fewest physical obstacles to his action. Moreover, an idiot is often only such through the imperfection of his organs, and his spirit may be far more advanced than you suppose it to be; a fact shown by evocations that have been made of idiots, both dead and living."

 

Remark - We have several times evoked idiots in the flesh, who have given indisputable proofs of their identity, and who have nevertheless given very sensible and even intelligent answers. Idiocy is a punishment for the spirit thus incarnated, and who suffers from the restraint imposed on him by an imperfect corporeal organisation. An idiot may therefore offer, as a medium, greater facilities for spirit communication than could he supposed by those who are unaware of the fact of reincarnation. (See the Revue Spirite, July, 1860, Phrenology and Physiognomy)

 

(20). Whence comes the aptness of certain mediums for writing verses, notwithstanding their ignorance of the rules of versification?

"Poetry is a language; mediums may be made to write in verse as they may be made to write in any other language that is not known to them. Besides, they may have been poets in a previous existence, and, as you have already been told, knowledge when once acquired is never lost by a spirit, who is destined to attain to every species of perfection. What they have formerly known gives to incarnate spirits, when acted upon by us, various facilities which they do not possess in their ordinary state."

 

(21). Is it the same with mediums who have a special aptitude for drawing, music, etc.?

"Yes; for drawing and music may be considered as languages, since they are ways of expressing thought, spirits make use, among the instruments furnished by the aptitudes of a medium, of the one which offers them the greatest facility."

 

(22). Does the expression of thought through poetry, drawing, or music, depend on the special aptitude of the medium, or on that of the communicating spirit?

"Sometimes on that of the medium, sometimes on that of the spirit. Superior spirits possess all aptitudes, inferior spirits have only a narrow range of knowledge and of power."

 

(23). How is it that a man, who has possessed transcendant talent in a former existence, no longer possesses it in a subsequent one?

"Such is not always the case, for, on the contrary, it often happens that a man perfects, in a new corporeal existence, what he had commenced in a previous one; but a transcendant faculty is often purposely allowed to slumber for a time, in order to leave to its possessor greater freedom for developing, in a given incarnation, some other faculty. The faculty thus allowed to slumber remains with him as a latent germ, which will spring up again at a later period, but, of which, meantime, some traces usually remain with him, if only as a vague intuition."

 

224. The disincarnate spirit undoubtedly comprehends all languages, because all languages are the expression of thought, and it is thought that a spirit comprehends; but, in order for him to transmit thought, an instrument is indispensable: the medium is that instrument. The soul of the medium, which receives the communication of the disincarnate spirit, can only transmit that communication through his bodily organs; and those organs cannot be so flexible to an unknown tongue as to the tongue with which he is at present familiar. A medium, who understands only his native tongue, may, occasionally, be made to reply in some other tongue, if it pleases the communicating spirit to perform that feat; but spirits, who find human language too slow for their rapidity of thought, and who abridge that language as much as possible, chafe under the mechanical resistance which they encounter in their mediums, and therefore do not always give themselves the trouble to speak in the language that may be desired by us. For the same reason, a medium, during his novitiate, writing slowly, and with difficulty, even in his native tongue, generally obtains only short and simple answers; the spirits themselves recommending questioners to put only very simple questions when they employ the medianimity of a beginner. For the treatment of questions of high import, spirits require a fully developed medium, presenting no mechanical obstacle to their action. An author does not employ, as his amanuensis, a child who is only learning to spell. A good workman does not like to work with ill-made or unsuitable tools.

 

To sum up the foregoing statements: - With few exceptions, a medium transmits the thought of the communicating spirit by such mechanical means as are at his disposal, and the expression of the thought thus transmitted is necessarily, in most cases, more or less impaired by the imperfection of those means; for which reason the uncultured medium, though he may be made to transmit the grandest, sublimest, most philosophical thoughts, will usually do so in language reflecting his lack of culture. This fact furnishes an answer to the objection sometimes brought against spirit-messages, on the score of the incorrectness of style and orthography observable in some of them, but which proceed as often from the medium as from the spirit. It is puerile to attach undue importance to trifling and superficial imperfections of this kind, and no less puerile to take pains to reproduce such inaccuracies with minute exactness, as we have sometimes seen done, under the impression that, coming from a spirit, they ought to be respected. Such inaccuracies of diction may therefore be corrected without scruple; those, at all events, which do not mark, on the part of the communicating spirit, some distinguishing characteristic that it may be useful to preserve as a proof of identity. For instance, we have seen a spirit constantly write the name James as Jame (without the s) when speaking to his grandson, because he had been in the habit of writing it thus during his earthly life, although the latter, who was his medium, knew perfectly well how to write his own name.

 

225. The following dissertation, dictated spontaneously by a disincarnate intelligence, who has constantly shown his superiority by the excellence of his communications, gives a clear and complete summary of the explanations hitherto made, by our friends in the other life, in regard to the part performed by the medium in the work of spirit manifestation.

"Whatever may be the specialty of writing-mediums - whether mechanical, semi-mechanical, or merely intuitive, - our mode of communicating through them does not essentially vary. In point of fact, we communicate with incarnate spirits, just as we do with disincarnate ones; that is to say, solely by the radiation of our thoughts.

"Our thoughts have no need to be clothed in words in order to be understood by spirits, for all spirits perceive the thought which we desire to communicate, through the mere direction of that thought towards them, and they perceive it in the ratio of the development of their own intellectual faculties; that is to say, such and such a thought will be understood by such and such spirits, because their own advancement enables them to understand it, while that same thought will not be perceived by other spirits, because it awakens no remembrance, no answering consciousness, in their feeling or their mind, and is therefore not perceptible by them. This being the case, an incarnate spirit, even if of slight advancement, is better fitted to serve as our intermediary, for the transmission of our thought to other spirits in flesh, than a disincarnate spirit of the same degree of advancement could be; for the incarnate spirit lends us a fleshly body as an instrument, which cannot be done by a disincarnate spirit.

 

"But, when we find a medium with a brain well-furnished with knowledge acquired in his present life, and a spirit rich in latent acquisitions, derived from his anterior existences, and of a nature to facilitate our communication, we naturally prefer to make use of such a one; because, with such a medium, we communicate much more easily than with a medium of narrow intelligence, and whose stock of anterior knowledge is small.

 

"We will try to illustrate our meaning by a few concise explanations.

 

"Through a medium whose intelligence has been sufficiently developed by the experiences of present and anterior lives, we are able to flash our thought, instantaneously, from our soul to his, by a faculty inherent in the very nature of the soul. We are able to do this, in such a case, because we then find, in the medium's brain, the elements fitted to give to our thought its appropriate clothing of words, whether the medium be intuitive, semi-mechanical, or purely mechanical. Thus, whatever may be the diversity of the spirits who communicate through a given medium, the communications obtained by him, though proceeding from various spirits, usually present a characteristic peculiarity of form and colour due to his own personal individuality. Although the thought transmitted may be entirely foreign to him, although the subject treated of may be beyond his usual range of ideas, although what he says may not have proceeded in any way from his own mind, the form of our communication will, nevertheless, be modified by the influence of the qualities and properties which constitute his own personal individuality. It is precisely as when you look at landscapes or other objects through coloured spectacles, whether green, white, blue, or red; though the landscapes or other objects thus seen are altogether different from one another, they all assume, nevertheless, a uniform tint imparted to them by the colour of the glasses through which you see them. We are the light, lighting up those landscapes or other objects, moral or philosophical, through glasses of various colours; so that our luminous rays (forced, as they are, to pass through media more or less colourless and translucent, that is to say through mediums more or less intelligent and manageable) cannot reach the object we desire to light up, without borrowing the tint, that is to say, the peculiar personal form, of the medium. Let me illustrate my meaning by yet another comparison: - We, spirits, are like musicians who wish to play an air of our composing, and who may have, at hand, either a piano, a harp, a violin, a bassoon, or a flute. It is evident that we might execute our air on either of these instruments, and that it would be understood by our auditors, no matter on which instrument we played it although the various instruments differ greatly in the quality of the sound they emit, our composition, on whichever instrument we played it, would be identically the same, except in the special quality of the tone derived from the nature of the instrument employed. But if we had at our disposal only a penny whistle, we should find it very much more difficult to execute our air so that our audience could comprehend it.

 

"In the same way, when we are obliged to make use of unadvanced mediums, our work is much more complicated, difficult, and tedious, because, in such a case, we are forced to employ inadequate means; and because we are then compelled, so to say, to set up our thoughts, as though putting them into type, communicating them, not only word by word, but letter by letter, which is tiresome and fatiguing for us, and constitutes a restraint on the rapidity and completeness of our manifestations.

 

"We therefore rejoice when we find mediums who are already prepared, well furnished with the requisite tools, and provided with materials ready for use; in a word, good instruments, for then our perispirit, acting instantaneously on the perispirit of him whom we medianimise, has only to give an impulsion to the hand which serves us for holding the pen or the pencil; while with inferior mediums, we are obliged to perform a task similar to that which we perform when we communicate by raps, that is to say, by pointing out, letter by letter, each word of the sentences which constitute the translation, into human language, of the thought we desire to impress upon you.

 

"This is why we have preferred to address ourselves, for the promulgation of spiritism and the development of medianimity, mainly to the educated classes, although it is in those classes that we find the greatest number of the incredulous, the recalcitrant, the immoral. But, just as we leave the production of tangible manifestations, rappings, carryings, etc., to backward and juggling spirits, so the less serious among you prefer those phenomena which strike the eyes or the ears, to communications which are purely intellectual and spiritual.

 

"When we desire to dictate a spontaneous communication, we act upon the brain of the medium, upon the materials that we find therein; and we blend our own materials with the fluidic elements which we thus procure from him: and we do this without his knowing anything about it. It is as though we took from his purse the money it contains, and arranged the different pieces in the order that suits ourselves.

 

"But when a medium wishes to consult us on any particular subject, he should reflect on that subject beforehand, in order to be able to question us methodically; thus facilitating for us the work of answering his questions. For, as you have already been told, your brain is often in inextricable disorder; and it is then both troublesome and difficult for us to move in the maze of your thoughts. When questions are to be asked by a third party, they should be communicated beforehand to the medium, so that he may identify himself with the spirit of the person who is to evoke us, thus impregnating himself, so to say, with his thought; and we are then enabled to reply with much greater ease, because, through the affinity existing between our perispirit and that of the medium, we are thus brought into a nearer relation with the party by whom we are to be questioned.

 

"It is true that we are sometimes able to treat, say, of mathematics, or some other subject, through a medium who appears to be ignorant of it but, in such cases, the knowledge required is often possessed by the medium's spirit, in a latent state, that is to say, stored up in the personality of his fluidic being, although it is not included in the consciousness of his human personality, for the reason that his present human body is an instrument ill-adapted, or even antagonistic, to that particular branch of knowledge. It is the same with our communications in regard to astronomy, poetry, medicine, your various languages, and all the other branches of knowledge in your world. But when we have to employ mediums who are really ignorant of the subject to be treated of; we are obliged to resort to the troublesome method alluded to just now, viz., that of putting together the letters of each word, as is done by the type-setter.

 

"As I have already said, spirits, among themselves, have no need to clothe their thoughts in words; thought is perceived and communicated by spirits, simply because thought exists, in them, as an attribute of their spiritual being. Corporeal beings, on the contrary, can only perceive a thought when it is clothed upon with words, or some other forms of expression. While you need letters and words, the substantive, the verb, the sentence, in order that a thought may thus be conveyed to your understanding, no visible or tangible sign is needed by us.

"ERASTES AND TIMOTHY"

 Remark - This analysis of the part performed by mediums, and of the processes by the aid of which spirits communicate, is as clear as it is logical. It shows us that spirits derive, not their ideas, but the material necessary for expressing their ideas, from the medium's brain; and that, consequently, the richer this brain is in materials, the easier is it for them to communicate through its possessor. When a spirit expresses himself in the language familiar to the medium, he finds, already formed, in the medium's brain, the words with which to clothe his ideas; if he would express himself in a language which the medium does not understand, he does not find the needed words, but simply letters, and he is therefore obliged to dictate his message, letter by letter, exactly as we should have to do, if we tried to make a man, who does not know a word of German, write in that language. If the medium can neither write nor read, he does not possess even the letters required for the formation of words; and the communicating spirits are then obliged to guide his hand, as we do with a child who is learning to write. In such cases, there is evidently a greater amount of physical difficulty, and difficulty of another order, to be overcome. Phenomena of the kind we are considering, are possible, and, as we know, often occur; but such a mode of procedure is ill adapted for the giving of lengthened communications, and spirits naturally prefer instruments more manageable, or to employ their own expression, mediums "provided with good tools and materials" for their special purposes. If those who ask for such phenomena, as proofs of spirit-action, had studied the subject theoretically beforehand, they would understand the exceptional character of the conditions required for obtaining them.