ROLE AND INFLUENCE OF THE MEDIUM IN THE MANIFESTATIONS.

To understand the role of the medium in the manifestations, one must take account of the manner in which the transmission of the Spirits' thought operates. We are speaking here of writing mediums.

As we have already said, the Spirit has a semimaterial envelope, which we call the perispirit. The fluid condensed, so to speak, around the Spirit to form this covering is the intermediary by which it acts upon bodies; it is the agent of its material power, and it is through it that it produces the physical phenomena.

If we examine certain effects that occur in the movements of the table, of the basket, or of the planchette that writes, there is no reason to doubt an action exercised directly by the Spirit upon these objects. The basket sometimes shakes so violently that it escapes the hands of the medium; sometimes it directs itself toward certain persons in the circle, in order to strike them; at other times its movements reveal an affectionate sentiment. The same thing happens when the pencil is placed in the hand; often it is flung far away with force, or else the hand, like the basket, shakes convulsively and strikes the table in anger, even though the medium remains perfectly calm, astonished at no longer being master of himself. Let us say, in passing, that these effects generally denote the presence of imperfect Spirits. Truly superior Spirits are invariably calm, dignified, and benevolent; if they are not suitably heard, they withdraw, and others take their place. The Spirit can, then, express its thought directly through the movement of an object, the hand of the medium serving only as a point of support; it can even do so without that object being in contact with the medium. The transmission of thought also takes place through the intermediary of the Spirit of the medium, or rather of his soul, since by this name we designate the incarnate Spirit. In this case, the foreign Spirit does not act upon the hand to make it write, just as it does not act upon the basket; it neither holds it nor guides it. It acts upon the soul, with which it identifies itself. The soul, under this impulse, directs the hand by means of the fluid that composes its own perispirit; the hand directs the basket, and the basket directs the pencil. Let us note here—and this is important to know—that the foreign Spirit does not substitute itself for the soul, since it cannot dislodge it: it dominates the soul without its knowledge and impresses its will upon it. When we say without its knowledge, we mean the soul acting externally through the organs of the body; but the soul, in its condition as a Spirit, even incarnate, can perfectly well be conscious of the action exercised upon it by a foreign Spirit. In this circumstance, the role of the soul is sometimes entirely passive, and then the medium, if he is a speaking medium, has no consciousness of what he writes or says. But it may occur that the passivity is not absolute; then he has a more or less vague consciousness, even though his hand is dragged along by a mechanical movement to which the will remains foreign. If this is so, it will be said, nothing proves that it is a foreign Spirit who writes and not the medium. Here is the place to refute an error shared by some persons. We shall say, then, that it can happen that the soul of the medium communicates as a foreign Spirit would, which is easily conceived. Since we can evoke the Spirit of living persons, absent or present, and since that Spirit communicates through the writing or the speech of the medium, why would the Spirit incarnate in the intermediary not communicate as well? The facts prove that, in certain circumstances, this occurs, as in somnambulism, for example. Does it follow from this that the communication given by the soul of the medium has less value? By no means. The Spirit incarnate in the medium may be more elevated than certain foreign Spirits and thus give better communications; it falls to us to judge. In this case he speaks as a Spirit detached from matter, and not as a man. The question is whether it is not always the Spirit of the medium that emits its own thoughts, as some claim. This absolute opinion is a system that can only have its origin in an incomplete observation. For this reason it is always dangerous to conceive theories about things that we have not analyzed with the requisite depth, or of which we have been able to see only one side. Without doubt, there are cases in which the intervention of a foreign Spirit is not incontestable; but it suffices that in some it is manifest in order to conclude that another Spirit, other than that of the medium, can communicate. Now, this foreign intervention cannot be doubtful in the following examples: when a person, although knowing neither how to read nor how to write, writes as a medium; when a medium speaks or writes in a language he does not know; when, finally, which is the most common case, he has no consciousness whatever of what he writes, and the thoughts he expresses are contrary to his way of seeing things, are outside his knowledge or beyond the reach of his intelligence. On this last fact experience gives proofs so numerous and palpable that doubt is not permitted to anyone who has observed much and, above all, observed well.

Whatever, then, may be the mode of action of the foreign Spirit for the production of the writing or for the expression of thought through speech, the medium is never more than a more or less convenient instrument. This gives us occasion to make an important observation, which will answer this natural question: why do not all mediums write in every language unknown to them?

Without doubt the foreign Spirit understands all languages, for languages are the expression of thought, and the Spirit understands through thought. But to transmit that thought, an instrument is needed: that instrument is the medium. The soul of the medium, which receives the foreign communication, cannot transmit it except through the organs of its body. Now, those organs cannot have, for an unknown language, the flexibility they have for the one familiar to them. A medium who knows only French could accidentally give a reply in English, for example, if it pleases the Spirit to do so; but the Spirits, who already find human language too slow in view of the rapidity of thought, to the point of abbreviating it as much as they can, grow impatient with the mechanical resistance they encounter. This is why they do not always do it.

This is also the reason why a beginning medium, who writes painfully and slowly, even in his own language, generally obtains only brief and superficial answers. It is for this reason that the Spirits recommend that only simple questions be put through them. For questions of high import, a developed medium is needed, one who offers no mechanical difficulty to the Spirit. We would not take, for our reader, a schoolboy who merely spells out his letters. A good workman does not like to make use of poor tools.

Let us add another rather serious consideration concerning foreign languages. Trials of this kind are always made with an aim of curiosity and experimentation. Now, nothing is more disagreeable to the Spirits than the tests to which we try to subject them. Superior Spirits never lend themselves to this and withdraw as soon as we set out upon that path. As much as they take pleasure in useful and serious things, so much do they feel repugnance at occupying themselves with futile and aimless things. The unbelievers, however, will say that this aim is useful for convincing, since they can win over adherents to the cause of the Spirits. To this the Spirits reply: “Our cause has no need of those who are proud enough to deem themselves indispensable. We call to us those whom we will, and they are often the least and the most humble. Did Jesus work the miracles that the scribes asked of him? And of what men did he make use to revolutionize the world? If you wish to be convinced, you have means other than sleight of hand. Begin first by submitting yourselves: it is not the rule that the pupil should impose his will upon the master.” It results from this, save for rare exceptions, that the medium transmits the thought of the Spirits by the mechanical means at his disposal, and that the expression of that thought can, and indeed must, most often, suffer from the imperfection of those means. Thus the uneducated man, the peasant, may say the most beautiful things, express the most elevated, the most philosophical thoughts, speaking like a peasant. For the Spirits thought is everything, the form is nothing. This answers the objection of certain critics regarding the errors of style and spelling that may be censured in them and that may come as much from the medium as from the Spirit. It is a triviality to cling to such things.

If the medium, from the point of view of execution, is no more than an instrument, he exercises, from another point of view, a very great influence. Since, in order to communicate, the foreign Spirit identifies itself with that of the medium, this identification can only occur when there is sympathy and, one may say, affinity between them. The soul exercises upon the foreign Spirit a kind of attraction or repulsion, according to the degree of its similarity or dissimilarity. Now, the good have affinity for the good and the wicked for the wicked, whence it follows that the moral qualities of the medium have a capital influence upon the nature of the Spirits who communicate through him. If he is vicious, the inferior Spirits come to group themselves around him and are always ready to take the place of the good Spirits who have been called.

The qualities that attract good Spirits are: goodness, benevolence, simplicity of heart, love of one's neighbor, and detachment from material things. The defects that repel them are: selfishness, envy, jealousy, hatred, cupidity, sensuality, and all the passions by which man attaches himself to matter. A medium par excellence would, then, be one who, to facility of execution, allied in the highest degree the moral qualities.

The influence of the Spirit of the medium can be exercised in yet another manner. If it is hostile to the foreign Spirit who communicates, it may fail to interpret the latter's thought faithfully, may alter or falsify its ideas, or transmit them in improper terms. The same thing happens among us when we entrust a mission of confidence to a man of bad faith.

The mediumistic faculty, whatever its degree of development, is therefore not enough to guarantee good communications. Above all, and as an express condition, a medium sympathetic to the good Spirits is necessary. The repulsion of these toward mediums who are inferior from the moral point of view is easily understood. Do we take as confidants of our thoughts creatures whom we do not esteem?

Certain persons are truly ill-favored as regards communications. There are those who habitually receive or transmit only trivialities or coarseness, to say the least. They ought to deplore this fact as a sure indication of the nature of the Spirits who gather around them, since it is certainly not Superior Spirits who use such language. They ought, then, to make every possible effort to rid themselves of acolytes so little recommendable, unless they delight in these kinds of conversations. We advise them, in any case, to avoid making a display of this fact, for it could give a none too flattering idea of the sympathies they find in the world of the Spirits. We shall complete what we have to say about mediums as the sequence of our instructions requires.

Is it, then, absolutely impossible to obtain good communications through imperfect mediums? This is what we shall see in the following chapter.