The awakening of Mr. de Cosnac.

Our colleague of the Society of Paris, Mr. Leymarie, having gone on a journey to Corrèze, conversed there frequently about Spiritism, receiving several mediumistic communications, among which the one we give below, and which certainly could not have been in his thoughts, for he did not know whether there had ever been in the world an individual named Cosnac. This communication is remarkable because it depicts the singular position of a Spirit who, for two centuries and a half, did not believe himself to be alive, although he found himself under the impression of the ideas and the view of the things of his time, without perceiving how much everything had changed since then. (Tulle, March 7, 1866.)

For two centuries and a half, unconscious of my position, I see without ceasing the fortified castle of my ancestors, the deep moats, the lord of Cosnac always bound to his king, to his name, to his memories of grandeur; there are pages and valets everywhere; men-at-arms setting out on a secret expedition. I follow all these movements, all this noise; I hear the groans of the prisoners and of the colonists, of the fearful serfs, who pass humbly before the lord’s house; and all this is but a dream!…

Today my eyes have opened to see everything contrary to my century-old dream! I see a large bourgeois dwelling, but without lines of defense; everything is calm. The great trees have disappeared; one would say that a fairy’s hand has transformed the feudal residence and the wild landscape that surrounds it. Why this change?… So the name I bear has disappeared, and with it the good old times?… Alas! I must lose my dreams, my desires, my fictions, because a new world has just been revealed to me! Formerly a bishop, proud of my titles, of my alliances, counselor to a king, I admitted only our personalities, only a God creating privileged races to whom the world belonged by right, only a name that was to perpetuate itself and, as the basis of that system, oppression and suffering for the serf and for the artisan. A few words were able to awaken me!… An involuntary attraction (formerly I would have said diabolical) drew me toward the one who writes. He argued with a priest who employs, to defend the Church, all the arguments that I once repeated, while he uses new words, which he explains simply and – must I confess it? it is his reasoning that allows my eyes to see and my ears to hear. n Through him I perceive things as they are and, what is stranger still, after having followed him in more than one place where he defends Spiritism, I return to the awareness of my existence as a Spirit; I appreciate better, I define better the great laws of the true and the just; I lower my pride, cause of the cataract that clouded my reason, my judgment, for two centuries and a half and, nevertheless, behold the force of habit, of the pride of race!… despite the radical change wrought in the estates of my forebears, in the customs, in the laws and in the government; in spite of the conversations of the medium who transmits my thought, in spite of my visit to the Spiritist groups of Paris, and even to those of the Spirits who are preparing for emigration to advanced worlds, or for earthly reincarnations, it required eight days of reflection for me to yield to the evidence. In this long combat between a vanished past and the present which pushes us toward great hopes, my resistances fell, one by one, like the old broken armor of our ancient knights. I come to make an act of faith before the evidence, and I, de Cosnac, former bishop, affirm that I live, I feel, I judge. Awaiting my reincarnation, I prepare my spiritual weapons; I feel God everywhere and in everything; I am not a demon, I renounce my caste pride and in my fluidic envelope I render homage to the Creator God, to the God of harmony who calls to himself all his children, so that, after lives more or less troubled, they may arrive purified in the ethereal spheres where this so magnanimous God will make them enjoy supreme wisdom. De Cosnac.

Note. – The next-to-last archbishop of Sens was named Jean-Joseph-Marie-Victoire de Cosnac, was born in 1764, at the castle of Cosnac, in Limousin, and died there in 1843. The Bulletin of the Archaeological Society of Sens, volume 7, page 301, says that he was the eleventh prelate that his family had given to the Church. Thus, there is nothing impossible in a bishop of that name having existed at the beginning of the seventeenth century. [v.

Archevêques concordataires.]

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(Reference to the Gospel passage of Matthew 13:16.)