The press

(Spontaneous communication. – Spiritist Society of Paris, February 19, 1864. – Medium: Mr. Leymarie.)

— The press was invented in the fifteenth century. Like so many other inventions, known or unknown, it was necessary to take the cup and drink the gall. I do not come to you, Spiritists, to recount my troubles and sufferings; for in those times of ignorance and sadness, when your fathers had upon their breast the nightmare called feudalism and a theocracy blind and jealous of its power, every man of progress had too much of a head. I wish only to say a few words to you concerning my invention, its results, and its spiritual affinity with you, with the elements that make your expansive force. The mother-revolution, which bore in its flanks the mode of expression of Humanity, stripping human thought of the past, of its symbolic skin, is the invention of the press. Under this form thought mingles in the air, spiritualizes itself, will be indestructible. Mistress of the future centuries, it takes its intelligent flight to link all the points of space and, from that day, it dominates the old manner of speaking. The primitive peoples needed monuments representing a people, mountains of stone saying to those who know how to see: Here is my religion, my faith, my hopes, my poetry. Indeed, the press replaces the hieroglyph; its language is accessible to all, its apparatus is light; for a book asks only a little paper, a little ink, a few hands, whereas a cathedral demands several lives of a people and tons of gold.

Permit, here, a digression. The alphabet of the first peoples was composed of pieces of rock that iron had not touched. The stones raised by the Celts are also found in Siberia and in America. They were confused human remembrances, written upon durable monuments. The Hebrew galgal, n the cromlechs, n the dolmens, the tombs, later expressed words.

Then came tradition and the symbol. These first monuments no longer sufficing, they created the edifice and architecture became monstrous; it fixed itself like a giant, repeating to the new generations the symbols of the past. Such were the pagodas, the pyramids, the temple of Solomon.

It is the edifice that enclosed the word, that mother-idea of the nations. Its form and its situation represented an entire thought, and it is for this that all symbols have their great and magnificent pages of stone.

Masonry is the written, intelligent idea, belonging to all men united by a symbol, taking Hiram for patron and constituting that freemasonry n so defiled, which bore within itself the germ of liberty. It knew how to sow its monuments and the symbols of the past throughout the whole world, replacing the theocracy of the first civilizations with democracy, that law of liberty.

After the theocratic monuments of India and of Egypt come their sisters, the Greek and Roman architectures; then the Romanesque style so somber, representing the absolute, unity, the priest; the crusades brought us the ogive and the lord wishes to share, awaiting the people who will know how to take his place; feudalism sees the commune born and the face of Europe changes, because the ogive dethrones the Romanesque; the mason becomes an artist and makes poetry of matter; the privilege of liberty is granted in architecture, because then thought had only this mode of expression. How many seditions written upon the facade of the monuments! It is for this that the poets, the thinkers, the disinherited, all that was intelligent, covered Europe with cathedrals. As you see, until poor Gutenberg, architecture is the universal writing. In its turn, the press topples the Gothic; theocracy is the horror of progress, the mummified conservation of the primitive types; the ogive is the transition from night to twilight, in which each one can read the stone easily; but the press is full day, toppling the manuscript, demanding a vaster space, which henceforth nothing will be able to restrict.

Like the Sun, the press will fecundate the world with its beneficent rays; architecture will no longer represent society; it will be classical and Renaissance, and that world of artists, divorced from the past, opens rude breaches in the human theogonies, in order to follow the route traced by God; it ceases to be the simple artisan of the monuments of the Renaissance, to become sculptor, painter, musician; the force of harmony is consumed in books and, already in the sixteenth century, that press of Nuremberg is so robust, so strong, that it is the advent of a literary century; it is, at the same time, Luther, Jean Goujon, Rousseau, Voltaire; it engages in old Europe that slow but sure combat which knows how to reconstruct after having destroyed. And now that thought is emancipated, what power could write the architectural book of our epoch? All the billions of our planet would not suffice and no one could raise again what is in the past and belongs to it exclusively.

Without disdaining the great book of architecture, which is the past and its teaching, let us thank God who knows, in the propitious epochs, how to put in our power a weapon so strong that it becomes the bread of the Spirit, the emancipation of the body, the free will of man, the idea common to all, science, an A-B-C that fecundates the earth, making us better. But if the press emancipated you, electricity will make you truly free; it is electricity that will dethrone the press of Gutenberg, to put into your hands a power far more formidable, and this before long. The Spiritist science, that safeguard of Humanity, will help you to understand the new force of which I speak. Gutenberg, to whom God gave a providential mission, will doubtless form part of the second, that is, of the one that will guide you in the study of the fluids.

Soon you will be ready, dear friends; it is not enough, however, that you be merely fervent Spiritists: it is also necessary to study, so that all that has been taught you about electricity and the fluids in general may be for you a grammar known by heart. Nothing is foreign to the science of the Spirits; the more solid your intellectual baggage, the less you will be surprised by the new discoveries. Since you are to be the initiators of new forms of thought, you must be strong and sure of your spiritual faculties. I had, then, reason to speak to you of my mission, sister of yours. You are the elect among men. The good Spirits give you a book that goes round the Earth, but, without the press, you would be nothing. For you, the obsession that conceals the truth from men will disappear; but, I repeat, prepare yourselves and study in order to be worthy of the new benefit and in order to know more intelligently than the others, so as to spread it and make it accepted.

Gutenberg. n Observation. – Through the diffusion of ideas, which it has rendered imperishable and which it spreads to the four corners of the world, the press produces an intellectual revolution that no one can ignore. Because this result was foreseen, it was, at first, qualified by some as a diabolical invention; it is one more relation that it has with Spiritism, and of which Gutenberg omitted to speak. Indeed, it would seem, were one to listen to certain people, that the devil holds the monopoly of the great ideas: all those that tend to make Humanity take a step are attributed to him. It is known that Jesus himself was accused of acting through the intermediary of the demon, who, in truth, must take pride in all the good and beautiful things that are taken away from God to be attributed to him. Was it not he who inspired Galileo and all the scientific discoveries that made Humanity progress? According to this, he would need to be very modest not to consider himself the master of the Universe. But what may seem strange is his lack of skill, for there is not a single progress of Science that does not have the effect of ruining his empire. It is a point upon which they have not reflected enough.

If such was the power of this entirely material means of propagation, how much greater will be that of the teaching of the Spirits, communicating everywhere, penetrating where access to books is forbidden, making themselves heard even by those who do not wish to listen! What human power could resist such a force?

This remarkable dissertation provoked, within the Society, the following reflections, on the part of another Spirit.

ON ARCHITECTURE AND THE PRESS, APROPOS OF GUTENBERG'S COMMUNICATION.

(Spiritist Society of Paris. – Medium: Mr. A. Didier.)

The Spirit Gutenberg defined very poetically the positive and so universally progressive effects of the press and the future of electricity; nevertheless, in my capacity as a former builder of castles, towers, ramparts, and cathedrals, I permit myself to set forth certain theories on the character and the aim of medieval architecture.

All know, and now illustrious professors of archaeology have taught, that religion, naive faith, raised with the genius of man those superb Gothic monuments scattered over the surface of Europe; and here, more than ever, the idea expressed by the Spirit Gutenberg is full of elevation.

Nevertheless, we deem it well to emit our opinion, not against, but in its favor.

The idea, that light of the soul, real spark that communicates will and movement to the human organism, manifests itself in diverse manners, whether through art, through philosophy, etc. Architecture, that elevated art which, perhaps, best expresses the nature and the genius of a people, was consecrated, in the impressionable and believing nations, to the worship of God and to the religious ceremonies. The Middle Ages, strong in feudalism and in belief, had the glory of founding two arts essentially different in their aim and their consecration, but which express perfectly the state of their civilization: the strong castle, inhabited by the lord or by the king; the abbey, the monastery, and the church; in a word, the military and the religious architectural art. The Romans, essentially administrators, warriors, civilizers, universal colonizers, forced as they were by the expansion of their conquests, never had an architecture inspired by their religious faith; only avidity, the love of gain and of executive power, made them build those formidable heaps of stone, symbol of their audacity and of their intellectual capacity. The poetry of the North, contemplative and nebulous, allied to the sumptuousness of Oriental art, created the Gothic genre, at first austere and little by little florid. Indeed, we see in architecture the realization of the religious tendencies and of feudal despotism. Those ruins famous from so many human revolutions, more than time, still impose themselves by their grandiose and formidable aspect. It seems that the century that saw them rise was hard, somber, and inexorable, like them; but from this one must not conclude that the discovery of the press, by dint of developing thought, has simplified the art of architecture.

No; art, which is a part of the idea, will always be a religious, political, military, democratic, or princely manifestation. Art has its role, the press has its own; without being exclusively a specialist, one must not confuse the aim of each thing; one must only say that one must not mix the different faculties and the diverse manifestations of human thought.

Robert de Luzarches. n [1]

Translator's note: Our emphasis. [Galgal: Hebrew Zodiac.]

[2] Translator's note: Our emphasis.

[3] [See references to Gutenberg in the next article: Spiritism and Freemasonry.]

[4] [v.

Gutenberg.]

[5] [v.

Robert de Luzarches.]