Mediumistic animals

Today I will expound the question of the mediumship of animals, raised and upheld by one of your most fervent adherents. He claims, by virtue of this axiom: He who can do the more can do the less, that we can make birds and other animals mediumistic and use them in our communications with the human species. This is what you call, in philosophy, or rather in logic, purely and simply a sophism. “You can animate,” he says, “inert matter, that is, a table, a chair, a piano; a fortiori, you must be able to animate matter that is already animated, and particularly birds.” Well now! in the normal state of Spiritism, it is not so, it cannot be so.

First, let us understand each other clearly about the facts. What is a medium? It is the being, it is the individual who serves as the link between the Spirits, so that these may easily communicate with men: incarnate Spirits. Consequently, without a medium, there are no communications, whether tangible, mental, written, physical, of whatever nature they may be.

There is a principle which, I am certain, all Spiritists admit, namely that like acts with its like and as its like. Now, what are the likes of Spirits, if not Spirits, whether incarnate or not? Must we repeat it to you ceaselessly? Well then! I will repeat it once more: your perispirit and ours proceed from the same medium, are of identical nature, are, in a word, alike. They possess a property of assimilation more or less developed, of magnetization more or less vigorous, which allows us, disincarnate and incarnate Spirits, to put ourselves very readily and easily into communication. In short, what is peculiar to mediums, what is of the very essence of their individuality, is a special affinity and, at the same time, a particular force of expansion, which suppress in them all refractoriness and establish, between them and us, a kind of current, a kind of fusion, which facilitates communications for us. It is, in sum, that refractoriness of matter which opposes the development of mediumship in the greater part of those who are not mediums. I will add that it is to this refractory quality that must be attributed the peculiarity which makes certain individuals, not mediums, transmit and develop mediumship, by simple contact, in neophyte mediums or nearly passive mediums, that is, deprived of certain mediumistic qualities. Men always show themselves inclined to exaggerate everything; some – I am not speaking here of the materialists – deny a soul to animals, others in good faith attribute to them one equal, so to speak, to ours. Why should they thus seek to confound the perfectible with the imperfectible? No, no, be convinced, the fire that animates the irrational creatures, the breath that makes them act, move and speak in the language proper to them, has, for the present, no aptitude whatever to mingle, unite, fuse with the divine breath, the ethereal soul, the Spirit in a word, that animates the essentially perfectible being: man, the king of Creation. Now, is it not this fundamental condition of perfectibility that constitutes the superiority of the human species over the other terrestrial species? Recognize, then, that no individual of the other races that live on Earth can be assimilated to man, that he alone is perfectible in himself and in his works. The dog, which by its superior intelligence among animals became the friend and table-companion of man, will it be perfectible by itself, by its own personal initiative? No one would dare to affirm it, for the dog does not make the dog progress. The one among them that shows itself better educated has always been so by its master. Since the world has been the world, the otter has always built its hut over the water, following the same proportions and an invariable rule; nightingales and swallows have never built their respective nests except in the same way that their parents did. A sparrow's nest from before the flood, like a sparrow's nest of modern times, is always a sparrow's nest, built under the same conditions and with the same system of interweaving the little straws and the fragments gathered in the season of love. The bees and ants, which form little well-administered republics, have never changed their habits of provisioning, their manner of proceeding, their customs, their productions. The spider, finally, weaves its web always in the same way. On the other hand, if you look for the leafy cabins and the tents of the first ages of the world, you will find, in place of the ones and the others, the palaces and the castles of modern civilization. The garments of raw skins have been succeeded by fabrics of gold and silk. In short, at every step you find the proof of the ceaseless march of Humanity along the path of progress.

From this constant, invincible, irrefutable progress of the human species and from this indefinite stagnation of the other animal species, you must conclude with me that, if it is certain that there exist principles common to all that lives and moves on Earth: the breath and matter, it is no less certain that you alone, incarnate Spirits, are subject to the inevitable law of progress, which drives you fatally forward and ever forward. God placed the animals at your side as auxiliaries, to feed you, to clothe you, to assist you. He gave them a certain dose of intelligence, because, in order to help you, they needed to understand, but he granted them intelligence only proportioned to the services they are called to render. But, in his wisdom, he did not wish them to be subject to the same law of progress. Such as they were created they have remained and will remain until the extinction of their races. They say: the Spirits make inert matter mediumistic and cause chairs, tables, pianos to move. They cause them to move, yes; they make them mediumistic, no! for, once more I say it, without a medium none of these phenomena can be produced. What is there extraordinary in that, with the aid of one or of many mediums, we make inert, passive matter move, which, precisely by virtue of its passivity, its inertia, is suited to execute the movements and the impulses that we may wish to imprint upon it? For this, we need mediums, that is positive; but it is not necessary that the medium be present or conscious, for we can act with the elements he furnishes us, in spite of him and in his absence, above all to produce the facts of tangibility and that of transports. Our fluidic envelope, more imponderable and more subtle than the most subtle and the most imponderable of your gases, with a property of expansion and of penetrability inappreciable to your gross senses and almost inexplicable to you, uniting, wedding, combining itself with the fluidic, but animalized, envelope of the medium, allows us to imprint movement upon any furniture and even to break it in uninhabited rooms. It is certain that the Spirits can make themselves visible and tangible to animals and, often, the sudden terror they show, without your perceiving its cause, is determined by the sight of one or of many Spirits, ill-intentioned with respect to the persons present, or with respect to the owners of the animals. Still more frequently you see horses that refuse to advance or to retreat, or that rear before an imaginary obstacle. Well now! hold it as certain that the imaginary obstacle is almost always a Spirit or a group of Spirits who take pleasure in preventing them from moving. Remember Balaam's mule which, seeing an angel before it and fearing its flaming sword, persisted in not taking a step. It is that, before manifesting himself visibly to Balaam, the angel had wished to make himself visible only to the animal. But, I repeat, we do not directly make either animals or inert matter mediumistic. The conscious, or unconscious, concurrence of a human medium is always necessary to us, because we need the union of similar fluids, which we find neither in animals nor in raw matter. Mr. Thiry, it is said, magnetized his dog. To what result did he come? He killed it, for the unfortunate animal died, after having fallen into a kind of atony, of languor, consequent upon its magnetization. Indeed, saturating it with a fluid drawn from an essence superior to the special essence of its dog nature, he crushed it, acting upon the animal in the likeness of lightning, though more slowly. Thus, then, as there is no possible assimilation between our perispirit and the fluidic envelope of animals, properly so called, we would annihilate them instantly, if we made them mediumistic.

This said, I recognize perfectly that there are in animals diverse aptitudes; that certain sentiments, certain passions, identical to human passions and sentiments, develop in them; that they are sensitive and grateful, vengeful and hateful, according as one behaves well or ill with them. It is that God, who made nothing incomplete, gave to the animals, companions or servants of man, qualities of sociability, which are entirely lacking in the wild animals, inhabitants of the solitudes.

To sum up: mediumistic facts cannot occur without the conscious, or unconscious, concurrence of mediums; and only among the incarnate, Spirits like us, can we find those who may serve us as mediums. As for educating dogs, birds, or other animals, to perform such or such exercises, that is your work and not ours.

Erasto. n Observation. – With regard to the discussion that took place in the Society, on the mediumship of animals, Mr. Allan Kardec said that he had observed very attentively the experiments made in these latter times on birds, to which the mediumistic faculty was attributed, adding that he had recognized, in an incontestable manner, the processes of prestidigitation, that is, of marked cards, n employed with great skill, to give illusion to the spectator who, without concerning himself with the substance, contents himself only with the appearance. In effect, these birds do things that neither the most intelligent of men, nor even the most lucid somnambulist could do, leading one to conclude that they would be endowed with intellectual faculties superior to those of man and thus contradicting the laws of Nature. What one must most admire in such experiments is the art, the patience that was needed to train these animals, making them docile and attentive. To obtain such results, it was certainly necessary to occupy oneself with flexible natures, but, in the last analysis, only with trained animals, in which there is more habit than combination. And the proof of this is that, if they cease to train them for some time, they soon lose what they have learned. The charm of these experiments, like that of all the maneuvers of prestidigitation, lies in the secret of the processes used. Once the process is known, they lose all their attraction; this is what happened when the mountebanks wished to imitate somnambulic lucidity by the alleged phenomenon which they called second sight. In that case, there can be no illusion for whoever knows the normal conditions of somnambulism. The same occurs with the alleged mediumship of birds, easily perceived by any experienced observer. [1] Translator's note: See The Mediums' Book, 2nd part, chapter XXII, item 236.

[2]

[v. Thomas Erasto.]

[3] Translator's note: Carte forcée, in the original = constraint. In the context of the sentence, we translate it as marked cards.