Example 1 - LAPOMMERAY.

— In one of the sessions of the SOCIETY of Paris, during which the perturbation that generally accompanies death had been discussed, a Spirit, to whom no one had alluded and much less had anyone intended to evoke, manifested itself spontaneously through the following communication, which, although unsigned, was recognized as being from a great criminal recently struck down by human justice:

“What do you say of perturbation? Why these hollow words? You are dreamers and utopians. You are utterly ignorant of the subject with which you occupy yourselves. No, gentlemen, perturbation does not exist, except in your brains. I am quite dead, as dead as can be, and I see clearly within me, around me, everywhere!…

Life is a dismal comedy! Senseless are those who withdraw from the scene before the curtain falls. Death is terror, aspiration or punishment, according to the weakness or the strength of those who fear it, confront it or implore it. But it is also for all a bitter mockery.

The light dazzles me and penetrates, like a sharp arrow, the subtlety of my being.

They punished me with the darkness of the prison and believed they were punishing me still with the darkness of the tomb, if not with that dreamt up by the Catholic superstitions…

Well then, it is you who suffer from obscurity, while I, a social outcast, place myself on a superior plane. I want to be what I am!… Strong by thought, disdaining the counsels that buzz in my ears… I see clearly…

A crime! It is a word! Crime exists everywhere. When carried out by the masses, they glorify it, and, individualized, they consider it infamy. Absurd!

“I do not want anyone to deplore me… I ask for nothing… I will struggle for myself, alone, against this odious light.”

“He who yesterday was a man.”

This communication having been analyzed at the following assembly, in the very cynicism of its language a profound teaching was recognized, making manifest in the situation of this unfortunate one a new phase of the punishment that awaits the guilty.

Indeed, while some are immersed in darkness or in an absolute isolation, others suffer for long years the anguish of the final hour, or believe themselves still incarnate; for these, the light shines, the Spirit enjoying, and fully, its faculties, knowing itself dead and not lamenting, but rather repelling any assistance and still defying the divine and human laws.

Does this mean that they escaped punishment? By no means; it is that the justice of God is completed under all forms, and that which causes joy to some is for others a torment; 12 the light makes the torment of this Spirit, and it is he himself who confesses it, in spite of his pride, when he says: “I will struggle for myself, alone, against this odious light”; and again in this phrase: “the light dazzles me and penetrates, like a sharp arrow, the subtlety of my being.”

These words: “subtlety of my being,” are characteristic, giving to understand that he knows that his body is fluidic and penetrable by the light, from which he cannot escape, a light that penetrates him like a sharp arrow.

This Spirit is here placed among the hardened ones, by reason of the long time he took before he manifested repentance — which is also one more example to prove that moral progress does not always accompany intellectual progress.

Nevertheless, little by little he corrected himself, and later gave instructive and sensible dictations. Today, he may be placed among the repentant Spirits.

Invited to give their appreciation in this regard, our spiritual guides dictated the three following communications, worthy indeed of the most serious attention.

I.

From the point of view of existences, the Spirits in erraticity may be considered inactive and in expectancy; but, even so, they can expiate, provided that the pride and the formidable tenacity of their errors do not hinder them at the moment of progressive ascension.

You have had of this a terrible example in the last communication of that impenitent criminal, struggling with the divine justice that constrains him after that of men.

In this case the expiation, or rather the fatal suffering that oppresses them, instead of being useful to them, by instilling in them the profound significance of their penalties, exacerbates them in rebellion, and gives rise to the murmurings which Scripture in its poetic eloquence calls the gnashing of teeth; 20 this phrase, symbolic par excellence, is the sign of the sufferer cast down, yet unsubmissive, isolated in his own pain, but still strong enough to refuse the truth of punishment and of reward!

Great errors persist in the spiritual world almost always, just as do the greatly criminal consciences.

To struggle, in spite of everything, and to defy the infinite, may be compared to the blindness of the man who, contemplating the stars, would take them for the arabesques of a ceiling, just as the Gauls of the time of Alexander believed.

The moral infinite exists! And miserable and petty is he who, under the pretext of continuing the abject struggles and impostures of the Earth, sees no farther in the other world than in this one. For such a one, blindness, the contempt of others, the egoistic feeling of personality, are obstacles to his progress.

Man! it is quite true that there exists a secret accord between the immortality of a pure name, bequeathed to the Earth, and the immortality truly preserved by the Spirits in their successive trials.

Lamennais.

II.

To cast a man into darkness or into waves of light — will it not give the same result? In the one as in the other case, that man sees nothing of what surrounds him, and he will even accustom himself more easily to the shadow than to the monotonous electric brightness in which he may be submerged.

The Spirit manifested in the last session expresses the truth well when he says: “Oh! I shall know how to free myself from that odious light.” Indeed, that light is all the more terrible, horrible, the more it penetrates him completely and lays bare his most hidden thoughts.

There you have one of the harshest circumstances of such spiritual punishment. The Spirit finds himself, so to speak, in the house of glass asked for by Socrates, 4 and from this there follows yet another teaching, since what would be joy and consolation for the sage transforms itself into a shameful and continual punishment for the perverse, for the criminal, for the parricide, startled in his own personality.

My children, calculate the suffering, the terror of the hypocrites who took pleasure throughout a whole sinister existence in planning, in contriving the most hideous crimes in their inmost selves, like wild beasts taking refuge in their lair, and who today, expelled from that intimate den, cannot escape the scrutiny of their peers…

The mask of impassivity once torn from him, all his thoughts are imprinted on his brow!

Yes, and above all no repose, no asylum for that formidable criminal.

Every evil thought — and God knows whether his soul expresses it — betrays itself outwardly and inwardly, as if impelled by an irresistible electric shock.

He seeks to dodge the crowd, and the odious light lays him bare continually.

He wants to flee, and he dashes off in a frantic, desperate race, across the immeasurable spaces, and everywhere light, gazes that observe him. And he runs, and flies again in search of the shadow, in search of the night, and shadow and night no longer exist for him!

He calls upon death… But death is no more than a word without meaning.

And the unfortunate one flees always, on the way to spiritual madness — a tremendous punishment, horrible pain, struggling with himself to free himself from himself.

For such is the supreme law beyond the Earth: it is the guilty one who seeks for himself his most inexorable punishment.

How long will this state last? Until the moment in which the will, at last vanquished, bows constrained by remorse, the haughty brow humbled before the Spirits of justice and before its appeased victims.

Note the profound logic of the immutable laws; by this the Spirit will accomplish what he wrote in that haughty communication so clear, so lucid, so disconsolately egoistic, the communication that he gave you last Friday, drawing it up by an act of his own will.

Erasto.

III.

Human justice makes no distinction of individualities, as regards the beings it punishes; measuring the crime by the crime itself, it strikes the offenders indistinctly, and the same penalty reaches the sufferer without distinction of sex, whatever his education may be.

In a different manner does divine justice proceed, whose punishments correspond to the progress of the beings to whom they are inflicted; 3 the equality of the crime does not establish equality between the individuals, since two men guilty, from the same point of view, may be separated by the dissimilarity of trials, one of them plunging into the intellective opacity of the first initiatory circles, while the other has at his disposal, for having surpassed those circles, the lucidity that exempts the Spirit from perturbation.

And in this case it is no longer the darkness that punishes him, but the keenness of the spiritual light that pierces the earthly intelligence and makes him feel the pains of a living wound.

The disincarnate beings who witness the material representation of their crimes suffer the shock of physical electricity: they suffer through the senses; 6 and those who, in Spirit, are dematerialized suffer a pain far superior which annihilates in them, so to speak, in its bitterness, the remembrance of the facts, leaving subsisting the notion of their respective causes.

Thus, man can, in spite of his criminality, possess an inner progress and raise himself above the dense atmosphere of the lower layers, this by the subtilized intellectual faculties, even though he had, under the yoke of the passions, behaved like a brute.

The absence of equilibrium, the lack of balance between moral progress and intellectual progress, produce those anomalies, so frequent in the epochs of materialism and transition.

The light that tortures the Spirit is, therefore, and precisely, the spiritual ray flooding with brightness the secret recesses of his pride and uncovering for him the inanity of his fragmentary being.

There you have the first symptoms, the first anguish of the spiritual agony, and which presage the dissolution of the intellectual and material elements composing the primitive human duality, and which must disappear in the grandiose unity of the being.

Jean Reynaud.

— Besides completing one another reciprocally, these three communications, obtained simultaneously, present punishment under a new prism, eminently philosophical and rational moreover. It is probable that the Spirits, wishing to treat the subject in accordance with an example, had provoked the manifestation of the guilty one.

Alongside this living picture, based upon a fact, here, in order to establish a parallel, is the one which a preacher of Montreuil-sur-Mer, in 1864, on the occasion of Lent, drew of hell:

“The fire of hell is millions of times more intense than that of the Earth, and if by chance one of the bodies that burn there, without being consumed, were cast upon the planet, it would set it ablaze from one end to the other! Hell is a vast and somber cavern, bristling with sharp points of keen sword-blades, of exceedingly sharp razor-blades, into which are hurled the souls of the condemned.” (See the Spiritist Review, July 1864, p. 199.)