Cures of obsessions.

— They write to us from Cazères, on January 7, 1866:

“Here is a second case of obsession, which we brought to a good end during last July. The obsessed woman was twenty-two years old and enjoyed perfect health. In spite of this, she was suddenly seized by a fit of madness. Her parents had her treated by physicians, but uselessly, for the malady, instead of disappearing, became ever more intense, to the point that it was impossible to restrain her during the crises. Seeing this, the parents, on the advice of the physicians, obtained her admission into an insane asylum, where her state experienced no improvement whatever. Neither they nor the patient had ever occupied themselves with Spiritism, which they did not even know. But having heard of the cure of Jeanne R…, of which I told you, they came to seek us out to learn whether we could do anything for their unfortunate daughter. We answered that we could affirm nothing before knowing the true cause of the malady. Our guides, consulted at the first session, said that the young woman was subjugated by a very rebellious Spirit, but that we would end by leading him back to the good path, and that the resulting cure would give us the proof of the truth of this affirmation. Consequently, I wrote to the parents, 35 km distant from our town, saying that their daughter would be cured and that the cure would not be long in coming, without, however, specifying the time. “We evoked the obsessing Spirit for eight days in succession and we were quite happy to change his evil dispositions and to make him renounce tormenting the victim. Indeed, the patient was cured, as the guides had announced.

“The adversaries of Spiritism repeat incessantly that the practice of this doctrine leads to the madhouse. Well then! We can tell them, in this circumstance, that Spiritism brought out of it those who had entered there.”

— Among a thousand others, this fact is a new proof of the existence of obsessive madness, whose cause is entirely distinct from pathological madness, and before which Science will fail so long as it persists in denying the spiritual element and its influence upon the economy [the organism]. Here the case is quite evident: here is a young woman, presenting the characteristics of madness to such a degree that the physicians were deceived, and who is cured leagues away, by persons who had never seen her, without any medicament or medical treatment, solely by the moralizing of the obsessing Spirit.

There are, then, obsessing Spirits, whose action may be pernicious to reason and to health. Is it not certain that if the madness had been occasioned by some organic lesion, this means would have been powerless? Should it be objected that this spontaneous cure may be due to a fortuitous cause, we would answer that if we had only one fact to cite, it would no doubt be rash to deduce from it the affirmation of so important a principle; but the examples of similar cures are very numerous. They are not the privilege of one individual and are repeated every day in diverse regions, indubitable signs that they rest upon a law of Nature.

We cited several cures of this kind, notably in the months of February 1864 [Cure of an obsession] and January 1865 [New cure of a young obsessed woman of Marmande], which contain two complete and eminently instructive accounts. Here is another fact, no less characteristic, obtained in the group of Marmande.

— In a hamlet some leagues from this town, there was a peasant afflicted with a madness so furious that he pursued people with blows of a pitchfork, to kill them, and who, for lack of people, attacked the domestic fowl. He ran incessantly through the fields and no longer returned home. His presence was dangerous; thus, it was easy to obtain authorization to commit him to the insane asylum of Cadillac. It was not without keen sorrow that the family found itself obliged to take this course. Before taking him there, one of his relatives, having heard of the cures obtained in Marmande, in similar cases, went to seek out Mr. Dombre and said to him: “Sir, I have been told that you cure the mad; that is why I have come to seek you.” Then he told him what it was about, adding: “As you see, it pains us so much to separate ourselves from that poor J…, that I preferred first to see whether there was not a means of preventing it.” “My good man,” said Mr. Dombre to him, “I do not know who gives me this reputation; it is true that I have sometimes managed to restore the reason of poor wretches, but this depends on the cause of the madness. Although I do not know you, I will see whether I can be of use to you.” Having gone immediately with the individual to the house of his habitual medium, he obtained from his guide the certainty that it was a case of grave obsession, but that with perseverance it would come to a good end. Then he said to the peasant: “Wait a few more days before taking your relative to Cadillac; we are going to occupy ourselves with the case; come back every two days to tell us how he is.”

That same day they set to work. At first, as in similar cases, the Spirit showed himself little tractable; little by little he ended by becoming humanized and, finally, renounced tormenting that unfortunate man. A very particular fact is that he declared he had no motive of hatred against that man; that, tormented by the need to do evil, he had attached himself to him as he would to any other; that now he recognized he had been wrong and asked God’s pardon. The peasant returned two days later, and said that the relative was calmer, but had not yet returned home and was hiding in the hedges. At the following visit, he had returned, but was somber and kept himself apart; he no longer sought to strike anyone. A few days later, he went to the fair and conducted his usual business. Thus, eight days sufficed to bring him to the normal state, and this without any physical treatment. It is more than probable that if they had shut him up with madmen, he would have lost his reason completely.

— Cases of obsession are so frequent that there is no exaggeration in saying that in the insane asylums, more than half have only the appearance of madness and that, for this very reason, ordinary medication is powerless.

Spiritism shows us in obsession one of the causes that disturb the economy [the organism] and, at the same time, gives us the means of remedying it: this is one of its benefits. But how was this cause recognized, if not by the evocations? Thus, the evocations serve for something, whatever its detractors may say.

It is evident that those who admit neither the individual soul, nor its survival, or who, admitting it, do not realize the state of the Spirit after death, must regard the intervention of invisible beings, in such circumstances, as a chimera; but the brutal fact of the malady and of the cures is there. The cures effected at a distance, on persons who were never seen, without the employment of any material agent, could not be charged to the account of imagination. The malady cannot be attributed to the practice of Spiritism, since it strikes even those who do not believe in it, and also children, who have no idea of it. Yet, here there is nothing marvelous, but natural effects, which have existed in all times, which then were not understood, and which are explained in the simplest manner, now that the laws by virtue of which they are produced are known.

Do we not see, among the living, evil beings tormenting others who are weaker, until they make them ill and even kill them, and this with no other motive than the desire to do evil? There are two means of restoring peace to the victim: to remove her from the authority of his brutality, or to develop in them the sentiment of good. The knowledge we now have of the invisible world shows it to us peopled with the same beings who lived on Earth, some good, others evil. Among the latter, there are some who still take pleasure in evil, in consequence of their moral inferiority, and who have not yet stripped themselves of their perverse instincts; they are in our midst, as when living, with the sole difference that, instead of having a visible material body, they have an invisible fluidic one; but they are no less the same men, with little developed moral sense, always seeking occasions to do evil, fastening themselves upon the victims they manage to subject to their influence. From incarnate obsessors that they were, they become disincarnate obsessors, all the more dangerous because they act without being seen. To drive them away by force is not an easy thing, since one cannot seize their body. The only means of dominating them is moral ascendancy, with the help of which, by reasoning and wise counsels, one manages to make them better, to which they are more accessible in the state of Spirit than in the corporeal state. From the instant they are brought to renounce voluntarily the torments they provoke, the malady disappears, when caused by obsession. Now, it is understood that it is neither the douches, nor the remedies administered to the patient that can act upon the obsessing Spirit. Such is the whole secret of these cures, for which there are no sacramental words, nor cabalistic formulas: one converses with the disincarnate Spirit, one moralizes him, one educates him, as one would have done when he was incarnate. The skill consists in knowing how to take him by his character, in directing with tact the instructions given to him, as an experienced instructor would do. The whole question is reduced to this: Are there or are there not obsessing Spirits? The answer is in what we said above: The material facts are there.

— Sometimes people ask why God permits evil Spirits to torment the living. With all the more reason one might ask why He permits the living to torment one another. People too much lose sight of the analogy, the relations, and the connection existing between the corporeal world and the spiritual world, which are composed of the same beings in two different states. There is the key to all these problems reputed supernatural.

We should no more be astonished at obsessions than at the maladies and other ills that afflict Humanity; they form part of the trials and miseries due to the inferiority of the milieu, where our imperfections condemn us to live, until we are sufficiently improved to merit leaving it. Men suffer here the consequences of their imperfections, since, if they were more perfect, they would not be here.