Presentiments and prognostics

— We take from the same article of the aforesaid newspaper the facts below, which accompany the account of the healer Gassner, because Spiritism can draw from them a useful subject for instruction. The author of the article follows them with reflections worthy of note, in these times of scepticism with regard to extra-material causes.

“Gassner had enjoyed great favor with the empress Maria Theresa, who consulted him many times, giving some credit to his inspirations. It is related (See the Memoirs of Mme Campan) that at the time when the idea had been conceived of uniting the daughter of Maria Theresa to the grandson of Louis XV, the great empress called Gassner and asked him: ‘Will my Antoinette be happy?’ “After having reflected at length, Gassner turned singularly pale and persisted in keeping silent.

“Questioned again by the empress and, then, seeking to give a general expression to the idea with which he seemed strongly occupied, he answered: Madam, there are crosses for all shoulders.

“The marriage took place on May 16, 1770; the dauphin and Marie Antoinette received the nuptial blessing in the chapel of Versailles (Marie Antoinette had arrived at Compiègne on the 14th). At three o’clock in the afternoon the sky covered with clouds, and a torrential rain inundated Versailles; violent thunderclaps rumbled, and the crowd of curious onlookers that filled the garden was obliged to withdraw.”

“The arrival of Marie Antoinette at the palace of the kings of France (Let us read the Public and private life of Louis XVI, by Mr. A*** and de Salex; Paris, 1814, p. 340), was marked by one of those prognostics which generally only those remember who have seen them realized with the passing of time.

“At the moment when this princess, entering for the first time into the courtyards of the castle of Versailles, set foot in the marble courtyard, a violent thunderclap shook the castle: Omen of misfortune! Cried the marshal of Richelieu.

“The night was sad in the city and the illuminations produced no effect.

“Add to this the terrible accident that occurred on May 30 in the rue Royale, on the day of the celebration that the city of Paris gave in the place Louis XV, for the marriage of the dauphin and the dauphine. Anquetil raises to 300 the number of the dead on the spot, and to 1,200 that of those who succumbed in the hospitals or at home a few days later, or who were left crippled.”

“In 1757 (See the Affiches de Tours, 25th year, no. 14 – Thursday, April 5, 1792), madame de Pompadour had brought before Louis XV an astrologer who, after having calculated the position of the stars at the moment of his birth, said to him: Sire, your reign is famous for great events; the one that will follow it will be so for great disasters.”

“On the day of the death of Louis XV there was at Versailles a horrible storm.

“What an accumulation of prognostics!

“For eight years the queen did not conceive. – On December 19, 1778 a daughter was born, Marie Thérèse Charlotte (later called by the title of her husband, madame the dauphine, duchess of Angoulême). Three years later, on October 22, 1781 Marie Antoinette gave an heir to the crown. On that occasion the city of Paris offered a celebration to the queen, in which was displayed the most sumptuous munificence.

“That celebration took place on January 21, 1782. Eleven years later the commune of Paris gave the people the spectacle of the death of the king. The queen was imprisoned, awaiting the realization of Gassner’s vision.

“Since we have touched upon these delicate questions, listen still to the revelations of Mme Campan. – It was May 1789; the 4th and 5th had impressed minds in diverse ways; four candles lighted the cabinet of the queen, who was recounting some notable incidents that had occurred during the day. – One candle went out of itself; I lighted it again, said Mme Campan; soon the second, then the third also went out; then the queen, pressing her hand in a movement of dread, said: ‘Misfortune may make me superstitious; if this fourth candle goes out like the others, nothing will be able to prevent me from looking upon this sign as a sinister omen…’ The fourth candle went out!!! “A few nights before, the queen had had a horrifying dream, by which she had been profoundly shaken.

“Certainly the strong minds laugh at all these prognostics, at all these prophecies, at this gift of anticipated vision. They do not believe, or pretend not to believe! But why, then, in all epochs, have there been personages of some value, of some importance who, without any interest whatever, affirmed facts of this kind, which they declared absolute, positive?

“Let us cite a few examples:

“Théodore-Agrippa d’Aubigné, grandfather of Madame de Maintenon, relates in his Memoirs that he had had in his service, in Poitou, a deaf-mute from birth endowed with the gift of divination. “One day, he says, the girls of the house having asked him how many more years the king (Henry IV) would live, the time and the circumstances of his death, he fixed for them three years and a half and designated the city, the street and the carriage, with two stabs that he would receive in the heart.” “A few words still about this same Henry IV.

“What judgment can we form about the dark presentiments, very, very constant, that this unfortunate prince had of his cruel destiny? – asks Sully in his Memoirs, book XXVII. – They are of a singularity that has something terrifying in it. I have already reported with what repugnance he had permitted the ceremony of the queen’s coronation to take place before his departure; the more he saw the moment approach, the more he felt fear and horror redouble in his heart; he came to open it entirely to me, in that state of bitterness and dejection from which I drew him as from an unpardonable weakness. His own words will give an impression entirely different from any that I could give: – “Ah! my friend, he said to me, how this consecration displeases me; I do not know what it is, but my heart tells me that some misfortune will happen to me.” He sat down, saying these words, in a low chair, which I had had made on purpose for him and, given over to all the blacknesses of his ideas, he drummed on the case of his spectacles, dreaming profoundly. “If he came out of that reverie, it was to rise abruptly, striking his hands on his thighs and to cry out: “By God! I shall die in this city, I shall never leave it again; they will kill me; I see clearly that they place their last resort in my death. Ah! cursed consecration, you will be the cause of my death!”

– “My God, sire, I said to him one day, to what idea do you give yourself over? If it persists, I am of the opinion that you suspend this consecration, coronation, journey and war. Do you wish it? It will soon be done.

– “Yes, he said to me at last, after I had sustained that discourse to him two or three times; yes, suspend the consecration, and let me hear no more of it; by this means I shall have my mind cured of the impressions that certain warnings have left there. I shall leave this city and shall fear nothing more.

“By what sign would one recognize that secret and imperious cry of the heart, if it were not recognized by these: “I will not hide from you, he said to me again, that I have been told that I should be killed in the first magnificence that I should make and that I would die in a carriage, and it is this that leaves me so fearful.”

– “It seems that you had never told me this, sire, I answered him. Several times I was surprised, hearing you cry out in a carriage, seeing you so sensitive to a small danger, after having seen you so many times intrepid amid cannon and musket fire and among lances and naked swords; but, since this opinion troubles you to this point, in your place, sire, I would leave tomorrow at once; I would have the consecration done without you, or would postpone it to another occasion, and for a long time I would not return to Paris, nor enter into any carriage. Do you wish me to dispatch someone to Notre-Dame and to Saint-Denis, to have everything stopped and to dismiss the workmen? – “I do indeed wish it, the prince said to me again; but, what will my wife say? for she has this consecration marvelously in her head.

– “She will say what she wishes, I answered, seeing how much my proposal had pleased the king. But I believe that when she learns of the conviction in which you are, that the consecration may cause so much harm, she will no longer persist.

“I awaited no other order than to have the preparations for the coronation interrupted. It was with true regret – I find myself obliged to say it – that whatever efforts I made I could never convince the queen to give this satisfaction to her husband.

“I pass over in silence the solicitations, the supplications and the contestations that I employed during three whole days to try to bend her. The prince found himself obliged to yield. But Henry returned no less strongly to his first apprehensions, which he ordinarily expressed to me by these words, frequent in his mouth: – Ah! my friend, I shall never leave this city; they will kill me here! O cursed consecration, you will be the cause of my death!’ “That consecration was made at Saint-Denis, Thursday, May 13, and the queen was to, on Sunday, the 16th of the same month, make her entry into Paris.

“On the 14th the king wished to visit Sully, a visit that he had announced to him for the morning of Saturday, the 15th. He took his carriage and went out, modifying his itinerary several times on the way, etc., etc.

“Péréfixe, his historian, observes that “heaven and earth had given only too many prognostics of what would happen to him.”

“The bishop of Rodez places among the number of these prognostics an eclipse of the Sun, the appearance of a terrible comet, earthquakes, monsters born in diverse regions of France, rains of blood that fell in some places, a great plague that had afflicted Paris in 1606, apparitions of phantoms and several other prodigies. (See: History of Henry the Great, by Hardouin de Péréfixe, bishop of Rodez; Life of the duke d’Epernon, Mercure français, Mathieu, l’Estoile, etc.) “Let us stop! We would write a volume, volumes, so abundant are the facts. But is it necessary to have recourse to the accounts of others? Let each one ask himself; let each one invoke his own recollections and answer with loyalty and frankness, and each one will say: There is within me an unknown one that is ourselves, that at the same time commands my matter-self and obeys it. – That unknown one, Spirit, soul, what is it? how is it? why is it? Mystery; series of mysteries; inexplicable mystery. As all in Nature, in the organism, in life, are not life and death two impenetrable mysteries? Sleep, this rehearsal of death, is it not an inexplicable mystery? The assimilation of foods, which become ourselves: inexplicable, incomprehensible mystery! Generation: mysterious obscurity! That passive obedience of my fingers, which trace these lines and obey my will: darkness whose depth God alone can fathom and which lights up, of itself, with the light of truth! “Bow your heads, children of ignorance and of doubt; humble this proud one, which you call reason; free-thinkers, suffer the chains that constrain your intelligence; bend your knees: God alone knows!”

— We must consider in these facts two quite distinct things: the presentiments and the phenomena considered as prognostics of future events.

One could not deny the presentiments, of which there are few persons who have not had examples. It is one of those phenomena whose explanation matter, alone, is impotent to give, because if matter does not think, neither can it have presentiments. It is thus that materialism at every instant collides against the most common things that come to contradict it.

To be warned in a hidden manner of that which happens afar and whose knowledge we can have only in a more or less near future by the ordinary means, it is necessary that something detach itself from us, see and hear what we cannot perceive by the eyes and the ears, in order to refer its intuition to our brain. That something must be intelligent, since it understands and, many times, from a present fact it foresees the future consequences; it is thus that at times we have the presentiment of the future. That something is no other thing than ourselves, our spiritual being, which is not confined in the body, like a bird in the cage, but which, similar to a captive balloon, momentarily moves away from the earth, without ceasing to be bound to it. It is principally in the moments when the body reposes, during sleep, that the Spirit, taking advantage of the little rest that the care of its envelope leaves it, partially recovers its liberty and goes to draw in space, among the other Spirits, incarnate like itself, or disincarnate, and in that which it sees, ideas whose intuition it brings back upon awakening.

This emancipation of the soul frequently occurs in the waking state, in the moments of absorption, of meditation and of reverie, in which the soul seems to be no longer preoccupied with the Earth; it occurs, above all in a more effective and more ostensible manner, in persons endowed with what is called double sight or spiritual vision.

Beside the personal intuitions of the Spirit, one must place those that are suggested to it by other Spirits, whether in waking, or during sleep, by the transmission of thought from soul to soul. It is thus that one is often warned of a danger, solicited to take such or such direction, without the Spirit thereby ceasing to have its free will. They are counsels, and not orders, because it is always master of its will.

The presentiments have, then, their reason for being and find their natural explanation in the spiritual life, which we do not cease for an instant to live, because it is the normal life.

— It is no longer the same with the physical phenomena, considered as prognostics of happy or unhappy events. In general these phenomena have no connection with the things that they seem to presage. They may be the precursors of physical effects that are their consequence, as a black point on the horizon may presage to the sailor a storm, or certain clouds announce a hailstorm, but the signification of these phenomena for things of the moral order must be classed among the superstitious beliefs, which could never be combated with too much energy. This belief, which reposes absolutely upon nothing rational, makes it so that, when an event arrives, one remembers some phenomenon that preceded it, and to which the impressed mind links it, without caring about the possibility of relations that exist only in the imagination. They do not think that the same phenomena are repeated daily, without anything ill-fated resulting therefrom, and that the same events arrive at every instant without being preceded by any supposed precursory sign. If it is a matter of events that concern general interests, credulous narrators or, most often, officious ones, in order to exalt their importance in the eyes of posterity, amplify the prognostics, which they strive to render more sinister and more terrible, adding to them supposed disturbances of Nature, of which earthquakes and eclipses are the obligatory accessories, as did the bishop of Rodez apropos of the death of Henry IV. These fantastic accounts, which often had their source in the interests of the parties, were accepted without examination by popular credulity which saw, or to which they wished to make see, miracles in these strange phenomena.

— As for common events, most often man is their first cause. Not wishing to confess his own weaknesses, he seeks an excuse by putting to the account of Nature the vicissitudes that are almost always the result of his improvidence and of his lack of skill. It is in his passions, in his personal defects that he must seek the true prognostics of his miseries, and not in Nature, which does not deviate from the route that God traced for it for all eternity. In explaining by a natural law the true cause of presentiments, Spiritism demonstrates, by that very fact, what is absurd in the belief in prognostics. Far from giving credit to superstition, it takes from it its last refuge: the supernatural.

[1] [Mémoires de Mme Campan - Google Books.]

[2] [Vie privée et publique de Louis XVI, roi de France - Google Books.]

[3] [Madame de Maintenon - Google Books.]

[4] [Mémoires Por Duc de Sully, Société des sciences, lettres et arts de Nancy - Google Books.]

[5] [Histoire du roi Henri le Grand, par Hardouin de Beaumont de Péréfixe - Google Books.]