One of our corresponding members from Maine-et-Loire, Dr. C…, sends us the following:
“Here we have a curious example of mediumistic faculty applied to paining, manifested many years before Spiritism was known and even before the dancing tables.
About three weeks ago I was explaining Spiritism and the relationships between humans and the invisible world to a lawyer of some friends of mine in Bressuire, a person that totally ignored the basics of the Doctrine. He then told me the story below as if holding a strong relationship with what I was explaining to him:
In 1849, he said, I visited Saint-Laurent-sur-Sèvres village and its two monasteries with a friend, one of them for men the other for women. We were kindly welcomed by Father Dallain, superior of the first one and that also had authority upon the second. After having visited both convents he said:
Now, gentlemen, I want to show you one of the most curious things of ladies monastery. He then sent for an album in which we enjoyed watching water paintings of great perfection. The motives were flowers, landscapes and maritime views. He then said:
These such well collected paintings were made by one of our young religious ladies who is blind. And he then said this about a beautiful flower arrangement with a blue button of rose: Some time ago and in the presence of the Marquee de La Rochejaquelein and several other visitors I called the blind religious lady and asked her to paint something on a table nearby. She was given paint, paper, pencils and brushes and immediately started this arrangement that you see. During her work an object was interposed between her eyes and the painting, sometimes a cardboard, sometimes a clipboard but her hand continued moving with the same calm and same regularity. Someone mentioned that the arrangement was a bit too narrow and she replied: That is fine. I will make a button to come out of that void. While she worked with that objective the carmine color was replaced by the blue. She did not notice the change and that is why you see a blue button of rose. Father Dallain was remarkably knowledgeable and intelligent as well as tremendously charitable. I have never met someone else that had inspired in me more sympathy and veneration.”
In our opinion the fact does not unequivocally demonstrate a mediumistic action. Given the language of the young lady it is clear that she saw something otherwise she would not have said: I will make a button to come out of this void. But it is also unequivocally certain that she did not see through her eyes considering that she continued the work despite the fact that she had the eyes covered by the obstacle before them. She acted consciously and not mechanically, like a medium. Hence, it seems evident that she was guided by the second vision. She saw through the eyes of the soul, abstraction made of the eyes of the body. It is possible that she was in a kind of awaken somnambulistic state.
Similar phenomena have been observed many times but people were satisfied by considering them remarkable. The cause could not have been discovered because the phenomenon is essentially associated to the soul and it was necessary to recognize the existence of the soul first. Even after admitting that it was not good enough for it lacked the knowledge of the properties of the soul and the laws that govern its relationships with matter.
By revealing the existence of the perispirit Spiritism gave us the knowledge of the physiology of the Spirits, if we can say so. Therefore it gave us the key to a number of incomprehensible phenomena that in the lack of better reasons were qualified as supernatural by some or of a bizarre nature by others.
Can nature present bizarre things? No, because bizarre is a caprice. Since nature is the works of God it must not show caprices without which nothing would be stable in the universe. If there is a rule without exception it must certainly be the one that governs the works of the Creator; exceptions would mean the destruction of the universal harmony. All phenomena are connected to a general law and something only looks bizarre to us because we are observing from a single point whereas if we consider the whole we will acknowledge that the irregularity of that point is only apparent and depends on our limited point of view. Having said that we say that the phenomenon above is neither wonderful nor exception. That is what we are going to explain now.
Given our current state of knowledge we cannot conceive the soul in its fluidic, perispiritual envelope. The intelligent principle completely escapes our analysis. We only know it by its manifestations that take place with the support of the perispirit. It is through the perispirit that the soul acts, perceives and transmits. Once detached from the corporeal envelope the soul or Spirit is still a complex being.
According to experience, the theory teaches us that the vision of the soul, as with all other perceptions, is an attribute of the whole being. In the body it is circumscribed to the organ of sight and that is why we need the help of light and everything that is in light’s path intercepts it. That is not what happens to the Spirit to whom there is no obscurity or opacity.
The comparison below may help to understand that difference. In day light the human body receives light rays from all sides; inside that luminous fluid the visual horizon extends everywhere around. If the person is placed inside a box with a small aperture everything will be darkness around with the exception of the point through which light is allowed in. The vision of an incarnate Spirit is like the latter. The vision of a discarnate Spirit is like the former. Such a comparison is fair from the point of view of the effect but it is not fair when taking into account the cause since the source of light is not the same to the corporeal creature as it is to the Spirit, or even better said, it is not the same light that allows them to see.
Therefore, the blind person above saw through the soul and not the eyes. That is way the obstacles placed between her eyes and the painting did not bother her more than to a clairvoyant person that had a transparent crystal placed before her eyes and the vision. That is also the reason why she could work both during the day and at night. The spiritual fluid radiated around her, penetrating everything, bringing the image to her soul rather than to her retina. In that case, someone may question, how come she did not notice the color change? First it is possible that she was thoroughly concentrated in filling out the place where she wanted to have the flower. Besides the vision of the soul does not attend the same mechanism of that of the body hence there could be effects that we don’t realize. Furthermore we must notice also that our colors are produced by the refraction of our light. Since the properties of the perispirit are different from those of our environmental surroundings it is likely that the refraction in that case did not provoke the same effects; that the colors may not cause the same impressions as they do onto an incarnate soul. Thus, she could well see pinkish in her mind something that looked blue to us. The replacement of colors is a well-known phenomenon in ordinary visions. The most important fact is to attest the vision without the help of the eyes.
From the above it can be seen that such a manifestation does not imply a mediumistic action but at the same time it does not exclude the assistance of a strange Spirit in certain cases. The young lady could then be or not be a medium and that could be revealed by a more careful study.
A blind person enjoying such a faculty would be a precious object of observation. One would need, however, to know well the theory of the soul, the perispirit and consequently somnambulism and Spiritism. These things were not known in those days and even today it would not be in places where they are considered devilish that they could be studied. Neither could it be done in places where the very existence of the soul is denied.
There will certainly come a day when people will realize that there is a spiritual physics as people are starting to acknowledge the existence of a spiritual medicine!
