Mars

Mars is a planet inferior to the Earth, of which it is a crude sketch; it is not necessary to inhabit it. Mars is the first incarnation of the crudest demons. The beings who inhabit it are rudimentary; they have the human form, but without any beauty; they have all the instincts of man, without the nobility of goodness.

Given over to material needs, they eat, they drink, they fight, they mate. But since God abandons none of his creatures, in the depths of the darkness of their intelligence there lies latent the vague knowledge of themselves, more or less developed. This instinct is sufficient to make them superior to one another and to prepare the emergence of a more complete life. Theirs is short, like that of the ephemeral insects. Men, who are only matter, vanish after a brief evolution. God has a horror of evil and tolerates it only as serving as a principle of good. He shortens its reign, over which the resurrection triumphs. On this planet the land is arid; little greenery; a somber foliage, which spring does not renew; a uniform, gray day. Only apparent, the Sun never lavishes its festivities; time flows by monotonously, without the alternations and the hopes of the new seasons; it is not winter, it is not summer. Shorter, the day is not measured in the same way; the night reigns longer. Without industry, without inventions, the inhabitants of Mars consume life in the search for food. Their crude dwellings, low like a hovel, are repugnant by the neglect and the disorder that reign within them. The women stand out against the men; more forsaken, more famished, they are no more than their females. They have only the maternal sentiment; they give birth with ease, without any anguish; they feed and keep their children at their side, until the complete development of their strength, and they drive them out without regret and without longing. They are not cannibals; their continual battles have no other object than the possession of a tract of land more or less abundant in game. They hunt on the endless plains. Restless and unstable like beings devoid of intelligence, they move about incessantly. The uniformity of the season, the same everywhere, entails, consequently, the same needs and the same occupations; there is little difference between the inhabitants of one hemisphere and the other. For them death represents no terror or mystery; they regard it merely as the putrefaction of the body, which they burn immediately. When one of these men is about to die, he is soon abandoned; then, alone and lying down, he thinks for the first time; a vague instinct assails him; like the swallow forewarned of the coming season, he feels that not everything is ended, that something unknown is about to begin again. He is not intelligent enough to suppose, to fear, or to hope, but he reckons, in haste, his victories and defeats; he thinks of the number of prey he has brought down and rejoices or grieves according to the results obtained. His wife—they have only one at a time, though they may exchange them whenever it suits them—crouched at the entrance, throws pebbles into the air; when they form a little mound, she judges that the hour has come and ventures to look inside; if her predictions have come true, if the man is dead, she enters without a cry, without a tear, strips him of the animal skins that wrap him, goes coldly to inform her neighbors, who carry off the body and incinerate it as soon as it cools. The animals, which everywhere suffer the human reflections, are wilder, crueler than anywhere else. The dog and the wolf are one and the same species, incessantly at war with man, who, against them, gives himself over to fierce combats. Moreover, less numerous, less varied than on the Earth, the animals are the miniature of themselves.

The elements have the blind fury of chaos; the furious sea separates the continents with no possible navigation; the wind howls and bends the trees to the ground;

the waters submerge the ungrateful lands, which it does not fertilize; the terrain does not offer the same geological conditions as the Earth; fire does not warm it;

volcanoes are unknown; the mountains, scarcely elevated, offer no beauty; they weary the eye and discourage exploration; in short, everywhere, monotony and violence; everywhere the flower without color and without perfume, everywhere man without foresight, killing in order to survive. [See:

Preliminary Observations.]

Georges.

Observation. – To serve as a transition between the picture of Mars and that of Jupiter, there would be needed that of an intermediary world, the Earth, for example, but which we know sufficiently well. Observing it, it is easy to recognize that it is closer to Mars than to Jupiter, since, even within the very bosom of civilization, there are still found beings so abject and so devoid of sentiments and of humanity, living in the most absolute brutishness and thinking of nothing but their material needs, without ever having turned their gaze toward heaven, who seem to have come directly from Mars. [ALLAN KARDEC.]

[OUR OBSERVATIONS: Here an analysis of the message concerning Mars becomes necessary in light of the new information we have regarding that orb. With the implementation given by the Spirits to the Kardecian work through the mediumship of Francisco Cândido Xavier, we have news of Mars through two messages, one from Maria João de Deus, mother of the medium, in the book Letters from a Dead Woman, and another through Humberto de Campos in the book New Messages, both of which ought to be read by us for a fair appraisal of their content and of the manner in which Maria João de Deus and Humberto de Campos express themselves. Comparing them with that of Georges concerning Mars, it is not difficult to know on which side the expression of truth lies, for the information contained in the messages of Maria João de Deus and Humberto de Campos formally contradicts what this Spirit wrote on the same subject. One observes in him [Georges] his little care in treating serious matters, as we shall see: 1st — “Mars is a planet inferior to the Earth, of which it is a crude sketch; it is not necessary to inhabit it. Mars is the first incarnation of the crudest demons.”

“Mars is a planet inferior to the Earth” — We have no news regarding Mars given by the Spirits to Allan Kardec except here; Kardec would have published in the Spiritist Review any other information concerning Mars just as he published it concerning Jupiter. Apart from this message of Georges speaking of Mars, the subject is treated only by the Codifier himself in the Review of March 1858 when he himself speaks of Jupiter and other worlds, and in a note of his to question No. 188 of The Spirits' Book; therefore, any appraisal regarding the evolutionary state of this world would be rash, up to that point. “It is not necessary to inhabit it.” — A presumptuous assertion from the individual point of view, and one that casts doubt upon the designs of God regarding our destinies.

“First incarnation of the crudest demons” — We know from the Spiritist Doctrine that in their first human incarnation Spirits are simple and ignorant, and cannot therefore be classified as “the crudest demons,” for they have not yet been able to acquire the understanding either of good or of evil.

2nd — “God has a horror of evil and tolerates it only as serving as a principle of good.” Spiritism reveals that God in his omniscience created man simple and gave him free will, knowing that through the misuse of his free will he could generate evil. See question 630 of The Spirits' Book. This expression of Georges shows well the transposition that man is accustomed to make in comparing his poor human sentiments to the expression of the thought of God. The whole communication reveals, as it were, the novelist's desire to paint an impressive picture in his work, but not the care and the circumspection of the wise Spirits. Konrad Jacques.]

[See also, by the same Spirit, in the Review of August 1862:

The Planet Venus.]