Note III.

According to the Spirits, of all the globes that compose our planetary system, the Earth is among those whose inhabitants are least advanced, physically and morally. Mars would be still inferior to it. They could be classified in the following order, beginning with the lowest degree: Mars and several lesser globes; Earth; (Mercury, Saturn); (Moon, Venus); (Juno, Uranus); Jupiter; not counting, of course, the thousands of unknown worlds that compose other whirlwinds, among which there exist others still far more superior.

Many Spirits who on Earth animated well-known personalities have said that they were reincarnated on Jupiter, one of the worlds that most nearly approach perfection, it having been remarkable to find, in that world so advanced, men whom general opinion would not place, here, on the same line. This, however, has nothing surprising about it, if we consider that certain Spirits, inhabitants of that planet, could have been sent to Earth to fulfill there a mission which, in our eyes, would not place them in the foremost rank. In the second place, that between the existence they had on Earth and the one they came to have on Jupiter, they might well have had others, intermediate ones, in which they improved themselves. In the third place, finally, that in that world, as in ours, there are different degrees of development, and that, among those degrees, there can be the distance that separates, among us, the savage from the civilized man. Thus, from the fact that a Spirit inhabits Jupiter, it does not follow that he is at the level of the most advanced beings, just as no one will be at the same level as a member of the Institute merely because he resides in Paris. The conditions of longevity are likewise not everywhere the same as on Earth, and age cannot be compared. Evoked, the Spirit of a person who had disincarnated some years before said that he had been incarnated for six months in an unknown world. Questioned about the age he had in that world, he answered:

“I cannot estimate it, because we do not count time as you do; moreover, the modes of existence are not the same; there we develop much more rapidly. Thus, although it is only six of your months that I have been there, I can say that, as regards intelligence, I am thirty years of the age I had on Earth.”

Many analogous answers have been given by other Spirits, and there is nothing improbable in this. Do we not see on Earth a number of animals that acquire their normal development in a few months? Why could the same not occur with man in other spheres? Let us note, moreover, that the development which man attains on Earth at 30 years of age is perhaps no more than a kind of infancy, compared with what he is to attain. He has a very short vision who takes us in all things as the models of Creation, just as it is to debase the Divinity to believe that, apart from man, nothing more is possible to God.

The mythological beliefs were founded upon the existence of beings superior to Humanity, but still possessing some of its passions. They were represented with the gifts of prescience and of the penetration of thought, and with bodies less dense than ours, transporting themselves through space and nourishing themselves on nectar and ambrosia, that is, on foods less substantial and less gross than those of mortals. Such supernatural beings, who had lived among us and who still occupied themselves with the happiness or the misfortune of men, would be mere products of the imagination? No; we find them among the inhabitants of the superior worlds; the Ancients merely made of them divinities, which they adored, as the savage adores everything that is above him. The Spirits show them to us as simple creatures that have attained a certain degree of physical, moral, and intellectual perfection. They manifested themselves on Earth, as the Spirits manifest themselves today to us; the oracles and sibyls were mediums who served them as interpreters. The intuition of these beings superior to our Humanity was not extinguished with paganism; we find them later under the names of fairies, genii, sylphs, willis, houris, gnomes, familiar Spirits (See Allan Kardec's footnote to question 188 of the definitive edition of The Spirits' Book).