Mediumship through the glass of water

— One of our correspondents from Odessa (southern Russia) transmits to us interesting details about seeing mediumship by means of the glass of water. (See the Spiritist Review of the months of October 1864 and 1865, and June 1868.) [See also: Mediumship through the glass of water in 1706.] It seems that this faculty is very widespread among all classes of the social scale, being employed as a means of divination and of consultation by the sick. The persons who are endowed with it see, in a glass or in a bottle of water, without any magnetization, images that often change in appearance.

Here is the information that was given to us and that our correspondent obtained from an eyewitness whose veracity cannot be called into question.

“One of my friends,” he says, “an old retired colonel, a Spiritist and a writing medium, to whom I mentioned my reading of the Geneva article (June number of the Spiritist Review, 1868), recounted to me the following fact that is personal to him:

“To avoid any alteration, I will let my interlocutor speak, limiting myself simply to translating from Russian into French:

“Long before Spiritism was thought of, I lived in Nicolajeff. The daughter of my coachman, a girl of twelve, was an idiot and remained so, despite all the means employed by her parents to restore her reason.

“One day, the father came to me and asked permission to call a ruakharka (literally: wise woman), who, he was assured, could cure his daughter. Having nothing to object to, they had the ruakharka brought, and I myself went to the kitchen to attend the session.

“The woman asked for a smooth sandstone vessel, filled it with water, and set to gazing into its interior, murmuring incomprehensible words.

“Soon she turned to us, saying that the girl was incurable, advising me to look into the vessel to find there the proof of what she said.

“Taking it all for a trick, I cast an incredulous glance and, to my stupefaction, I saw reproduced the image of the sick girl, in her habitual position, that is, seated on the ground, her hands between her legs and rocking her body like the pendulum of a clock. In front of the girl stood a horrible black dog, staring at her fixedly as if it wished to throw itself upon her. “Believing I was being deceived by a well-executed trick, I put my hand into the vessel and stirred the water, which made the image disappear, but, obviously, I found nothing.

“The ruakharky abound in our households in Russia; there is not a single village, not a single hamlet, that does not have one or several of them, venerated or feared, according to the good or bad effects they produce in the neighborhood.

“At times they occupy themselves with divination, but generally they care for the sick, above all by means of the nacheptchivanié (murmur), that is, now murmuring prayers and cabalistic formulas, now laying a finger or a hand, or both hands, upon the afflicted part. In a word, one may say that there are as many ways of curing as there are ruakharky. “The majority of them do not treat all diseases, for they have specialties; at times the effects they produce are prodigious, all the more so as they only rarely employ substantial medicines.

“It is quite evident that to these ruakharky, several of whom cannot be denied a great magnetic force or even a healing mediumship, are mingled charlatans who practice the grossest superstition, to the great moral, physical, and pecuniary detriment of the poor creatures who fall into their hands. “In view of the effects, often beneficial and at times pernicious, that they produce, the people regard these ruakharky with a mixture of confidence and fear, which they know how to employ very well to their own advantage; but there are those who accept nothing.

“The above facts,” adds our correspondent, in conclusion, “prove once more that neither mediumship in its different phases, nor the employment of magnetism, are new inventions, but, quite the contrary, are disseminated everywhere, even where one would least expect to find them; that they have passed into the usages and customs of almost all peoples since the highest antiquity, and that it is only a matter of making a conscientious and reasonable sorting of the true and the false, of the laws of Nature and superstitious practices, of enlightening, and not of denying, in order to gather around the true doctrine millions of adherents, who lack only a rational teaching to be Spiritists, if not in name, at least in fact. “If you judge it useful to publish these lines, I authorize you to put my name to them, for one must not fear to state his convictions clearly, provided they are honest and loyal.

“Accept, gentlemen, the expression of my highest consideration.”

Gustave Zorn.

Merchant in Odessa (southern Russia), August 24, 1869.

Observation. – We take this occasion to congratulate Mr. Zorn for his desire to in no way conceal his quality as a Spiritist. It would be desirable that all our brothers in belief had the same courage in the face of opinion, for they would only have to gain, as would the Doctrine, in consideration and dignity.

— Having been read in a Spiritist group of Paris, this interesting account gave rise to the following communication:

(Paris, September 7, 1869.)

As your relations extend and the Spiritists scattered throughout all the centers study the popular customs of their localities, they will soon recognize that everywhere the principles of Spiritism, at times distorted but still recognizable, are deeply rooted in all primitive or traditional beliefs. There is nothing in this that can cause astonishment, but rather one more proof of the reality of the teaching of the Spirits. If, in the course of the last fifteen years, Spiritism has taken a new impulse; if, in even less time, it has been gathered into a body of doctrine and popularized throughout the whole world, it is no less true that it rests upon laws as ancient as Creation, and that, consequently, have always governed the relations between men and Spirits. From paganism, which was nothing but the poetic deification of Spiritist beliefs, and from before mythological times, the principles of the new philosophy, preserved by a few sages, were transmitted from age to age down to our days, often provoking persecution and suffering against these precursors of our beliefs, but also engraving their names in letters of gold upon the great book of the benefactors of Humanity. Each epoch had its missionaries and revealers, whose language was appropriate to the advancement and intelligence of those whom they were to enlighten.

Under one name or another, Spiritism has dominated from the origin of societies down to the present epoch; and whatever the appearances, it is still it that presides over all the philosophical movements of present times and that prepares the future. Indeed, what do they repel? a word, a form; but the spirit of the Doctrine is in all truly progressive beings and, even, perhaps in those so-called materialists, reduced to divinizing matter, because they find too small and too paltry the God they were taught to adore. In fact, it is no longer a personal and vengeful God who from now on must preside over the direction of Humanities. The form is effaced, so as to let nothing subsist but the principles. What do the obstacles and difficulties of the path matter? March courageously, obey the impulse of your rational convictions, abandon those for whom the routine teachings, half discredited, of a past that fades more each day, still suffice, and do not fix yourselves upon seeking the divine being except in the logic, the wisdom, the intelligence, and the infinite benevolence that arise at every step in the study of Nature. Clélie Duplantier. n [A. DESLIENS.]

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[v. Clélie Duplantier.]