MADAME ANAIS GOURDON
A very young woman, remarkable for her sweetness of temper and her eminent moral qualities, died in November of 1860. She belonged to a family of miners, employed in the coal mines near St. Etienne, a circumstance that has to be borne in mind in estimating her position as a spirit.
(Evocation.) – Here I am.
Q. Your husband and father have requested us to evoke you; they will be very glad to receive a communication from you.
A. I am as glad to give it, as they will be to receive it.
Q. Why were you taken away from your family at such a young age?
A. Because I had completed my terrestrial trial.
Q. Do you sometimes go to see them?
A. I am very often with them.
Q. Are you happy as a spirit?
A. I am very happy. I wait patiently, filled with confidence and love. The spirit world has no terrors for me, and I wait for the budding of my white wings.
Q. What do you mean by “wings”?
A. I mean, by this expression, that I wait to become a fully purified and resplendent spirit, like the celestial messengers whose brightness dazzles me when I obtain a sight of them.
Remark – The “wings” of angels, archangels, seraphim, that is to say, of the pure spirits, are evidently only an attribute imagined by men, to indicate the rapidity with which they transport themselves through space; for the ethereality of their nature enables them to dispense with anything like a support in moving from one point to another. They may, however, show themselves to men with such accessories, in order to conform to human notions in regard to them, just as other spirits take the appearance they had upon the Earth, to ensure recognition.
Q. Is there anything you would like to have done by your relatives?
A. I should like them, whom I love so dearly, to cease distressing me with the spectacle of their grief, since they know that I am not lost to them, and try to think of me with cheerfulness and hope, so that their remembrance of me may be light and fragrant in their hearts. I passed away from Earth like a flower; my rapid passage should leave behind it no trace of sadness.
Q. How is it that your language is so poetic, so little in keeping with the position you occupied upon the Earth?
A. It is because it is my soul that is speaking to you. I had acquired much in my previous incarnations. Refined spirits are often made to incarnate themselves among the roughest people, in order to give them a glimmering of the refinements that they will acquire and understand at a later period of their existence.
Without this explanation – so reasonable and so entirely in harmony with the solicitude of the Creator for His creatures – it would be impossible to account for the elegant and poetic expressions employed by the spirit of one who had been brought up in the midst of the most prosaic surroundings. We often encounter this anomaly in life, where we see spirits of evident advancement incarnated among persons who are in every way inferior to them, in order to aid the latter to advance. We also see its opposite when backward spirits are incarnated among persons superior to them in order that they may be brought more quickly forward. An additional benefit to superior spirits who are incarnated among inferior persons is that their contact with lower natures also serves as a useful trial. What other theory than that of our successive existences can solve the problems presented by these anomalies?
