Considerations on the rapping Spirit of Carcassonne.

— If one persisted in believing in the influence of the medium’s personal knowledge on the production of the verses awarded a prize by the Academy of Toulouse, one could not say the same of things materially impossible to know. Among a thousand, the following fact is a peremptory answer to that objection. We gathered it from a second letter from Mr. Sabò.

He says: “On May 4, the delegation from Bordeaux having departed, I stayed one more day in Toulouse and, during a visit I made to Mr. Jaubert, he proposed to me an experiment that I accepted with immense pleasure, for I had never seen him operate. A heavy four-legged table stood in his room; we placed ourselves facing each other and, after a few movements of the table, which obeyed his command, it returned to its normal position; then he asked me to mentally evoke a Spirit. Here are the questions he asked and the answers given by the Spirit.

Q. – Could you tell me your sex?

Answer. – Feminine. (It was true).

Q. – At what age did you leave the Earth?

Answer. – At 22 years. (This too was true).

Q. – What is your first name?

When the Spirit indicated six letters forming Félici, Mr. Jaubert thought he could guess and said: “It must be Félicie or Félicité.” Without answering his observation, I asked it to continue. The Spirit indicated an a. I was very moved and the medium feared a mystification. Reassured on the matter, having said that the name was indeed Félicia, he continued.

Q. – What degree of kinship linked you to Mr. Sabò?

Answer. – I was his wife.

This time Mr. Jaubert thought himself well mystified, for he knew that my wife still belonged to this world. I do not dissimulate that I was very content: I had just touched, if I may say so, the soul of my dear Félicia. Then I explained to Mr. Jaubert, what he did not know, that I was a widower and married again to the sister of the Spirit who had just given us an irrefutable proof of the manifestation of the soul. He was as happy as I with this result, although he told me that he had obtained facts of this nature, before which the most absolute incredulity must yield, whether it wishes to or not. To whoever says to me: “This is impossible,” I will answer with Mr. Jaubert: “Incredulous ones! Seek in good faith and you will find.

— For our part we will say to those gentlemen that they hold the absolute unbelievers in good esteem, believing that they will yield to the evidence. There are those who were born incredulous and will die incredulous, not that they cannot believe, but because they do not want to believe. Now, there is no worse blind man than he who does not want to see. Lately a learned officer said to one of our friends who was speaking to him of these phenomena: “I will never believe that a table can move and lift itself, unless propelled by the muscles of the operator. — But if you saw a table maintain itself in space without contact and without a point of support, what would you say? — I would equally not believe it, because I know that it is impossible.”

Do you believe, then, that the rapping Spirits of Carcassonne and of the whole world, without exception, will ever manage to overcome these absolute and preconceived incredulities. The best thing to do is to leave them in peace. When out of a thousand persons, nine hundred and ninety believe – which will not be long in coming – what will the other ten do? As today, they will still say that they alone have good sense and that it is necessary to lock up as madmen ninety-nine percent of the population. Let us leave them, then, this innocent satisfaction and continue on our way without troubling ourselves over the laggards.

The expression “I know that it is impossible” recalls the following anecdote: A Dutch ambassador, conversing with the king of Siam about particularities of Holland, of which the prince inquired, among other things told him that, in his country, the water froze in such a way in the coldest season of the year that men walked upon it and that, thus frozen, it would support elephants, if there were any. To which the king replied: “Mr. Ambassador, until now I have believed the extraordinary things you have told me, because I took you for an honorable and upright man; but now I am certain that you lie.” Is it not the equivalent of “I know that it is impossible”?

Certain deniers will say that the fact related above proves nothing, because if the medium was ignorant of the thing, Mr. Sabò knew it perfectly. It is, then, his thought that was being reproduced. Thus, would it be the thought of the one who was not a medium that was reflected in the table, that would have agitated it in an intelligent manner so as to make it strike the raps indicating the letters that expressed his thought, and this without his will, without the participation of his hands? A singular property of thought! Would this phenomenon alone, granting your theory, not be prodigious and worthy of the most serious attention? Why, then, disdain it? You absorb yourselves in the composition of a grain of dust, you carefully calculate the proportions of its elements and you have only disdain for so strange a manifestation of thought! If a new ray of the solar spectrum is separated, you at once study its properties, its chemical action, you calculate its angle of reflection, its refractive power; yet, if a ray of thought isolates itself, agitates matter, reflects itself like light, this does not awaken your attention! You say: “What is the use of occupying ourselves with this? It is only thought!” But how will you explain, with that theory, the facts so numerous of revelations, whether through typtology or through writing, of things completely unknown to all those present, and whose exactness was verified, among others that of Simon Louvet, related in the Review of March 1863? Of whose thought could such a communication be a reflection, considering that it was necessary to have recourse to a newspaper of six years before to verify it? Is it simpler to admit that it was the thought of the journalist than that of the Spirit Simon Louvet? Then you are very afraid of being forced to confess that the soul survives the body! And the idea of being annihilated after death smiles upon you much more than that of reviving in happier conditions and of finding in the world of Spirits the affections you will have left on Earth! If you take pleasure in the sweet quietude of ending forever at the bottom of the grave and of falling asleep in the bosom of the putrefaction of your body, what harm do those who think the contrary do you, and why persecute them as enemies of the human race? In the name of your belief you seek to do them harm; in the name of theirs they do you none, even though without it they might perhaps feel themselves avenged for your insults. Such is the condemnation of the social consequences of your doctrines.

— We do not refuse to believe, say some among you, but we can see nothing; we are even prevented from access to the gatherings where we might convince ourselves, only the entry of convinced persons being allowed. Entry to the gatherings is refused you for a very simple reason: it is that you do not wish to do what is necessary to enlighten yourselves, nor to follow the path that is indicated to you; it is that you come to the gatherings not to study coldly and seriously, but with a hostile sentiment, with the thought of making your prejudiced ideas prevail and that most of the time you bring disturbance there; that, without respect for the private, though not secret, character of the gatherings, you seek to penetrate them by cunning, to satisfy a useless curiosity and to seek subjects for your sarcasms and often soon to distort what you have seen. Such are the motives of your exclusion, which could never be too rigorous, since you would be harmful to some and without utility for yourselves. Those who wish to instruct themselves honestly must prove it by a patient and persevering good will, and the means will not be lacking to them. But one could not see that good will in the desire to submit the thing to their requirements, instead of submitting themselves to the requirements of the thing. This said, let us leave the deniers in peace, awaiting the hour when they may see the light.

— The first answer given by the Spirit Félicia might, for certain persons, seem a contradiction. She says that she is of the feminine sex and it is known that Spirits have no sex. It is true that they have no sex, but it is known that in order to make themselves recognized they present themselves under the form in which we knew them in life. For her former husband, Félicia is always a woman. She could not, then, present herself to him under another aspect, which would have disturbed his memory of her. There is more: when he enters the world of Spirits, he will find her as she was on Earth, without which he would not recognize her. But little by little the purely physical characters are effaced, leaving to subsist only the essentially moral characters. It is thus that a mother finds her child of tender age, although, in truth, it is no longer a child. Let us add further that the material characters are the more persistent the less dematerialized the Spirits are, that is, the less elevated in the hierarchy of beings. As they purify themselves, the traits of materiality disappear in proportion as thought detaches itself from matter. This is why inferior Spirits, still bound to the Earth, are, in the invisible world, more or less what they were in life, with the same tastes and the same inclinations.

— On this chapter we will make one last observation; it concerns the qualification of rapper, given erroneously, in our opinion, to the Spirit who communicates with Mr. Jaubert. Such a qualification is suitable, as we have said elsewhere [see The medium and Dr. Imbroglio], only to the Spirits we may call rappers by profession and who always belonged, by the little elevation of their ideas and their knowledge, to the inferior categories. It would not be so with this one, who proves, at the same time, the superiority of his moral and intellectual qualities. For him typtology is not an amusement; it is a means of transmission of thought, of which he makes use for not having found in his medium the faculty necessary for the employment of another. His aim is serious, whereas that of the rapping Spirits properly so called is almost always futile, when not malicious. The qualification of rapping Spirit being capable of being taken in a bad sense, we prefer to qualify them as typting Spirit, a term that refers to the language of typtology.