A manifestation before death.

— The following letter was addressed to us from Marennes, last January:

Mr. Allan Kardec, I believe I would have failed in my duty if, at the beginning of this year, I had not come to thank you for the kind remembrance that you have been so good as to keep of me, addressing to God new prayers for my recovery. Yes, sir, they were salutary to me, and in them I well recognize your good influence, as well as that of the good Spirits who surround you; for, since May 14, I was obliged to keep to my bed from time to time, in consequence of malignant fevers that had put me in a very sad state. For a month I have been better; I thank you a thousand times, begging you to thank, in my name, all our brothers of the Society of Paris, who were willing to join their prayers to yours. As you know, I have often had manifestations. But one of the most extraordinary is that of the fact I am going to relate.

Last May, my father came to Marennes to spend a few days with us. Scarcely had he arrived when he fell ill and died at the end of eight days. His death caused me a grief all the more keen in that I had been warned of it six months before, but had given it no credit. Here is the fact:

In the preceding month of December, knowing that he was to come, I had furnished a little room for him, and my wish was that no one should sleep there before him. As soon as I expressed such a thought, I had the intuition that whoever lay down in that bed would die there, and this idea, which pursued me incessantly, gripped my heart to the point that I no longer dared to go to that room. However, in the hope of ridding myself of it, I went to pray beside the bed. I thought I saw there a shrouded body; to make sure, I lifted the cover and saw nothing. Then I told myself that these presentiments were nothing but illusions or results of obsessions. At the same instant I heard sighs like those of a person who is expiring, then I felt my right hand strongly pressed by a warm and moist hand. I left the room and there no longer dared to enter alone. For six months I was tormented by this sad warning, and no one slept there before the arrival of my father. It was there that he died. His last sighs were the same as those I had heard, and, before dying, without my asking him, he took my right hand and pressed it in the same manner that I had felt six months before; his had the tepid sweat that I had likewise noticed. I cannot, then, doubt that it was a warning that was given. I have had many other proofs of the intervention of the Spirits, but which it would be too long to detail to you in a letter. I will recall only the fact of a discussion of four hours that I had last August with two priests, and during which I felt myself truly inspired and forced to speak with a facility at which I myself was surprised. I regret not being able to relate to you this conversation. It would not surprise you, but it would amuse you.

Receive, etc.

Angelina de Ogé.

— There is a whole study to be made of this letter. First of all, we see in it an encouragement to pray for the sick, then a new proof of the assistance of the Spirits through the inspiration of the words that one ought to pronounce in circumstances in which one would be much embarrassed to speak if one were left to one's own forces. It is, perhaps, one of the most common kinds of mediumship, and one that comes to confirm the principle that everyone is more or less a medium without suspecting it. Surely, if each one referred to the various circumstances of his life and observed with care the effects that he feels or of which he was a witness, there would be no one who would not recognize that he has had some effects of unconscious mediumship. But the most salient fact is that of the warning of the death of the father of Madame de Ogé, and the presentiment that pursued her for six months. No doubt, when she went to pray in that room, and believed she saw a body on the bed, which she found to be empty, one might, with some verisimilitude, admit the effect of a wounded imagination. The same could be the case with the sighs that she heard. The pressure of the hand could also be attributed to a nervous effect, provoked by the overexcitement of her mind. But how to explain the coincidence of all these facts with what happened at the time of her father's death? Incredulity will say: pure effect of chance; Spiritism says: a natural phenomenon due to the action of fluids whose properties have until now been unknown, subject to the law that governs the relations of the spiritual world with the corporeal world. Spiritism, by linking to the laws of Nature the greater part of the phenomena reputed supernatural, comes precisely to combat the fanaticism and the marvelous, which they accuse it of wanting to revive; it gives of those that are possible a rational explanation, and demonstrates the impossibility of those that would be a derogation of the laws of Nature. The cause of an immensity of phenomena lies in the spiritual principle, whose existence they come to prove. But how can those who deny this principle admit its consequences? He who denies the soul and extracorporeal life cannot recognize its effects. For Spiritists, the fact in question has nothing surprising about it and is explained, by analogy, with a multitude of facts of the same kind, whose authenticity cannot be contested. Nevertheless, the circumstances in which it was produced present a difficulty; but Spiritism has never said that it had nothing more to learn. It possesses a key whose applications it is still far from understanding in their entirety; it applies itself to studying them, in order to arrive at a knowledge as complete as possible of the natural forces and of the invisible world, in the midst of which we live, a world that interests us all, because all, without exception, must enter into it sooner or later, and we see every day, by the example of those who depart, the advantage of knowing it beforehand. We could never repeat it too much: Spiritism makes no preconceived theory; it sees, it observes, it studies the effects and from the effects it seeks to go back to the causes, in such a way that, when it formulates a principle or a theory, it always rests upon experience. It is, then, rigorously correct to say that it is a science of observation. Those who pretend to see in it nothing but a work of imagination prove that they are ignorant of its first words.

If the father of Madame de Ogé had died, without her knowing it, at the time when she felt the effects of which we speak, those effects would be explained in the simplest manner. Detached from the body, the Spirit would have come to her to warn her of his departure from this world, and to attest his presence by a sensible manifestation, with the aid of his perispiritual fluid; this is very frequent. We understand perfectly that here the effect is due to the same fluidic principle, that is, to the action of the perispirit; but how could the material action of the body, which occurred at the moment of death, be produced identically six months before that death, when nothing ostensible, illness or other cause, could give a presentiment of it?

— Here is the explanation on this subject, given at the Society of Paris:

“The Spirit of the father of that lady, in a state of detachment, had a foreknowledge of his death and of the manner in which it would occur. His spiritual sight embracing a certain space of time, for him it is as if the thing were present, although in the waking state he retained no remembrance of it. It was he himself who manifested to his daughter, six months before, under the conditions that were to be produced, in order that, later, she might know that it was he and that, being prepared for an approaching separation, she would not be surprised by his departure. She herself, as a Spirit, had knowledge of this, because the two Spirits communicated in their moments of liberty. It is this that gave her the intuition that someone was to die in that room. This manifestation occurred likewise with the object of furnishing a subject of instruction concerning the knowledge of the invisible world.”