Retrospective remembrances of a Spirit

Do you know, my friends, from what place my communication is dated? From a lost gorge, where the houses disputed their rows amid the difficulties accumulated by creation. On the slope of hills almost sheer, streets wind, arranged in tiers, or, rather, hung on the flanks of the rocks. Poor dwellings, which sheltered many generations; atop the rooftops are found gardens, where the birds sing their prayer. When the first flowers announce fine days full of air and sun, this music seems to issue from the aerial layers; the inhabitant bends and works the iron, and the foundry and its discordant noise wed their harsh and clamorous rhythm to the harmony of the good Lord's little artists. But above these irregular, disordered, original, dislocated houses, there are high mountains of an unparalleled verdure; at each step the traveler sees the horizon widen; the hamlets, the churches seem to rise out of the abyss, and this strange, wild, changing panorama loses itself in the distance, dominated by mountains crowned with snow.

But I was forgetting: no doubt you must perceive a silvery ribbon, clear, capricious, transparent as a mirror: it is the river Corrèze. Now wedged between rocks, it is silent and grave; now it escapes gay, smiling, across the meadows, the willows and the elms, offering its cup to the lips of numerous herds and its beneficent transparency to the play of the bathers; it purifies the city, which it gracefully divides.

I love this land, with its old dwellings, its gigantic bell tower, its stream, its noise, its crown of chestnut trees; I love it because I was born there, because everything I recall to your benevolent spirit is part of the remembrances of my last incarnation. Beloved kin, sincere friends always surrounded me with tender care; they aided my spiritual advancement. Having attained eminence, I owed them my fraternal sentiments; my works honored them, and when I come to visit, as a Spirit, the city of my childhood, I never fail to climb up to the Puy-Saint-Clair, the last dwelling of the citizens of Tulle, to salute the earthly remains of the beloved Spirits. Strange fancy! The cemetery is fifty feet above the city; all around the horizon is infinite. One is alone amid Nature, its splendors and God, the king of all grandeurs, of all hopes. Our forebears had wished to bring the beloved dead nearer to their true dwelling, to say to them: Spirits! free yourselves! the surrounding air calls you. Come forth resplendent from your prison, so that the enchanting spectacle of this immense horizon may prepare you for the marvels which you are called to contemplate. If they had this thought, I approve of it, for death is not so dismal as people wish to paint it. Is it not, for Spiritists, the true life, the desired separation, the welcome of the exile into the groups of erraticity, where he comes to study, to learn and to prepare himself for new trials? In a few years, instead of moaning, of covering oneself in black, this separation will be a celebration for the incarnate Spirits, when the dead person has fulfilled his Spiritist duties in every sense of the word; but they will weep, they will moan for the selfish earth-dweller, who never practiced charity, fraternity, all the virtues, all the duties so well enunciated in The Spirits' Book.

After having spoken of the dead, will you allow me to speak of the living? I am much attached to all hopes, and my country, where there is so much to do, well merits sincere wishes.

Progress, that inflexible leveler, is slow, it is true, to take hold in mountainous regions, but it knows in time how to impregnate itself into the habits, into the customs; it removes the oppositions one by one in order, at last, to allow new gleams to be glimpsed by these pariahs of labor, whose body, ever bent over an ungrateful soil, is as rough as the tracing of the furrows.

The vigorous nature of these brave inhabitants awaits spiritual redemption. They do not know what it is to think, to judge sensibly and to make use of all the resources of the spirit; only self-interest dominates them in all its rudeness, and heavy, common food lends itself to this sterility of the spirit. Living far from the noise of politics, of scientific discoveries, they are like oxen, ignorant of their strength, ready to accept the yoke and, driven by the goad, they go to Mass, to the tavern, to the hamlet, not out of interest, but out of habit, sleeping through the sermons, leaping to the off-key sounds of a bagpipe, uttering senseless cries and brutally obeying the movements of the flesh. The priest takes good care not to change these old uses and customs; he speaks of faith, of mysteries, of the passion, of the devil always, and this incoherent mixture finds a harmonyless echo in the heads of these brave folk who make vows, pilgrimages with bare feet and give themselves over to the strangest superstitious customs.

Thus, when a child is sickly, little expansive, without intelligence, they soon take it to a hamlet called Saint-Pao (say Saint-Paul); first it is plunged into a privileged water, but one that must be paid for; then they have it sit on a blessed anvil and a blacksmith, armed with a heavy hammer, strikes vigorously on the anvil. They say that the commotion experienced from the repeated blows infallibly cures the patient. This is called forging in the manner of Saint-Pao. Women who suffer from the spleen also go to bathe in this miraculous water and to have themselves forged. Judge by this one example in a hundred what the teaching of the curates of this region is. Meanwhile, take that brute and speak of self-interest; at once the cunning peasant, prudent as a savage, defends himself with assurance and confounds the most astute judge. Bring a little light into his brain, teach him the first elements of science, and you will have true men, strong in health, virile spirits and full of good will. Let the railroads cross this region and you will soon have a soil generous with wine, delicious fruits, choice grain, fragrant truffle, delicate chestnuts, the unequaled grapevine or mushroom, magnificent woods, inexhaustible coal mines, iron, copper, first-rate cattle, air, verdure, splendid landscapes. And when so many hopes ask only to spread, when so many other regions are, like this one, in a deadly prostration, we desire that, into all hearts, into all the lost corners of this world, The Spirits' Book may penetrate. Only the doctrine it contains will be capable of changing the spirit of the populations, wresting them from the absurd pressure of those who are ignorant of the great laws of erraticity, and who wish to immobilize human belief in a Daedalus, where they themselves have such difficulty finding their way. Let us all, then, labor with ardor in this desired renewal, which is to overturn all barriers and create the end promised to the generation that will soon come after us. Baluze. n Observation. – The name of Baluze is known to our readers through the excellent communications that he often dictates to his compatriot and favorite medium, Mr. Leymarie. It was during a journey of the latter to his native land that he gave him the above communication. Baluze, an erudite historiographer, born in Tulle in 1630, died in Paris in 1718, published a great number of esteemed works; he was librarian to Colbert. His biography (Feller's Dictionary) says “that the world of letters lamented in him a profound scholar and his friends an affable and benevolent man.” There is in Tulle a quay bearing his name. Mr. Leymarie, who was unaware of the history of Saint-Pao, made inquiries and obtained the certainty that these superstitious practices are still in use. [1]

[v. Étienne Baluze.]