In a bibliographic article about Méry published in the
Journal Littéraire from September 25
th, 1864 there is the following passage:
“
There are singular theories that for him are convictions. He then believes that he has lived many times; he remembers the minimal details of his preceding lives and describe them with a tone of certainty that is imposed with certain authority. That is how he was friends with Virgilio, Horace and knew Augustus Germanicus and fought the wars of Gallia and Germania.[1] He was a general and commanded the Roman lines when they crossed the Rheine. He recognized placed where he had camped on the mountains and in the vales the battle fields where he fought. He remembers conversations at the house of Mecenas, great object of sorrow. He was called Minius.One day in his present life he was in Rome visiting the library of Vatican. He was received by young people, novices dressing long black cloaks speaking in the purest Latin. Méry was a good Latinist with respect to the theory and written language but had not yet tried to speak the language of Juvenal. Hearing these modern Romans, admiring that magnificent language much in harmony with the monuments and customs of the time it was used, it seemed that a veil fell out from his eyes; he had the impression that he had spoke that language on other times with friends that also spoke that divine language. Full and impeccable sentences left his mouth; he immediately found the elegance and correction; finally he spoke Latin as he speaks French; His Latin soul was like his French soul. None of that could have happened without learning, and if he had not been a vassal of Augustus, if he had not lived that century of splendors, if he had not improvised a science, impossible of acquiring in a couple of hours.Another of his passages on Earth took place in India and that is why he knows it very well. That is why none of his readers doubted that he had lived in Asia when he published Guerre du Nizan. His descriptions are lively, his pictures original, and he touches with his finger the minimal details and it is impossible that he had not seen what he tells because it contains the truth. He states that he entered that country with a Muslim expedition in 1035. He lived there for fifty beautiful years and established himself there definitely. He was also a poet there but less educated than in Rome and in Paris. First a fighter then a dreamer he kept the fascinating images of the sacred river and the Hindu rites in his soul. He had several dwellings, in the city and in the country side; he prayed in the temples of the elephants; he knew the advanced civilization of Java and saw standing the splendid ruins that he mentions and that are still much unknown. One needs to hear him saying that poetry for those memories are true poems at the style of Swedenborg. He is very serious, make no mistake about it. This is not a prepared mystification to deceive the listeners, it is a convincing reality.How about his remarkable doctrines of history! His humor is fine, casting a new light onto everything that he touches. His reports are romances that almost lead us to tears after being almost unable to refrain the laughter. All of that turns Méry into one of the most wonderful men of his time and even of those in which his wandering soul waited its turn to take a body and again have people talking about them in future generations.”
Pierre Dangeau.
The author of the article does not add any thought to that. After having exhalted the great merit of Méry and his great intelligence it would have been inconsequent to define it as madness. If then Méry is a sensible man, of an elevated intellectual value, if the belief of having already lived before is a conviction, if such a conviction is not the product of his own system but the result of a past memory and a material fact, isn’t that something that should draw the attention of any serious person? Let us see the innumerable consequences led by such a simple fact.
Mr. Méry has already lived and that must not be an exception because the laws of nature are the same to all and hence every person must also have lived; if he lived it is not certainly the body that is reborn but the intelligent principle, the soul, the Spirit, we therefore have a soul. Considering that Méry kept the memory of several existences since the places bring him back the memory of what he saw in the past, with the death of the body the soul is not lost in the universal whole. It therefore keeps its individuality, the conscience of its self.
Mr. Méry remembering what he had been two thousand years ago what became of his soul in the interval? Was is lost in the depth of infinity or space? No because it would not have found her past individuality. Then it must have stayed in the earthly atmosphere, living a spiritual life in our environment or in the space that surrounds us until taking a new body. Considering that Méry is not alone in the world there must be a whole invisible and intelligent population around us.
Born again for the corporeal life, after a more or less lengthy interval, does the soul is reborn in its primitive state, in the state of a new soul or does it take advantage of the ideas acquired in its previous existences? The past memory resolves a question from this point of view: if Mr. Méry had lost the acquired knowledge he would not be able to speak that language that he formerly spoke; when looking at places they would not bring back any memory.
But if we have already lived why wouldn’t we live again? Why would this existence be the last one? If we are born with the an already realized intellectual development we are helped by the intuition of the ideas that we bring, like an arsenal that helps us in the acquisition of new ideas, that makes learning easier. If a person is a partial mathematician in one life that person will require less work to become a full mathematician in a next life. It is a logical consequence. If the person became partially good, if corrected some defects, she will need less effort to become even better and so forth. Nothing that we acquire in intelligence, knowledge and morality is lost. Irrespective of dying young or old; irrespective of having had time to enjoy the current life we will harvest the fruits in a next life. The souls that today animate the civilized French could have well been the souls that animated the barbarian Franconians, the Ostrogoths and Visigoths, the savage Galatians, the Roman conquerors, the fanatics of the Middle Ages, but that moved one step ahead in every existence and that will advance even further.
There we have solved the great problem of progress of humanity, a problem that sees the clash of many philosophers. It is resolved by the simple fact of the plurality of the existences. But how many other problems will be resolved by the solution to this problem? How many new horizons are not opened by this? It is a whole revolution in beliefs and ideas.
That is how a serious and thoughtful person will reason. An event is just a starting point from where she finds the consequences. Now, what are the thoughts that Mr. Méry’s case awakens in the writer of the article? He summarizes that in these words: “
There are singular theories that for him are convictions.”But if that author only sees something bizarre in all this, not much worthy of his attention, the same would not apply to everybody else. One person finds a brute diamond on her path but gives no attention because ignores its value; another way will appreciate it and take advantage of that.
The Spiritist ideas are produced in all forms these days; they are at the top of the agenda and the press, not confessing, register them in profusion believing that they are only feeding their columns of mockery. Isn’t that remarkable that every adversary of the idea, without exception, works diligently to its propagation? They would like to mute what they are forced to say by the force of things. That is what the Providence wishes – for those that believe in the Providence.
Some will say that our argumentation is based on an isolated fact that is not a law and that if the plurality of the existences is an inherent condition to humanity why is it that not everybody remembers, like Méry? Here is how we respond: take the burden of studying Spiritism and you will understand. Therefore we will not repeat what has been said a hundred of times about the uselessness of the memory of the past to take advantage of the experience acquired in previous lives and the danger of that memory for the social relationships.
There is, however, another cause of forgetfulness, kind of physiological, due at the same time to the materiality of our body and the identification of our little advanced Spirit with matter. With the depuration of the Spirit the material links are less tenacious and the veil that covers the past is less dense. The faculty of the retrospective memory is then consequence of the development of the Spirit. The fact is rare in our planet because humanity is still too materialistic but it would be a mistake the supposition that Mr. Méry is a unique example. God allows, from time to time, that this happens so as to lead mankind to the knowledge of the great law of the plurality of the existences, the only one that explains the origin of good or bad qualities, shows justice in the miseries that are endured here and traces the path to the future.
The uselessness of the memory to take advantage of the past is what poses more difficulty to those that have studied Spiritism. To the Spiritists it is an elemental question. Avoiding repetition of what has been said about it the following comparison might facilitate understanding.
The schoolboy goes through the series of classes from the eighth to philosophy.
[2] What he has learned in the eighth is used to learn what is taught in the seventh. Suppose now that at the end of the eighth he has lost all memory of the time spent in this class, his mind will be no less developed, and furnished with acquired knowledge; only he will not remember where or how he has acquired them, but, because of the progress he has made, he will be able to enjoy the lessons of the seventh. Suppose further that in the eighth he was lazy, angry, and indocile, but that having been chastised and moralized, his character was broken, and that he became laborious, gentle, and obedient, he will bring these qualities into his new class which, for him, will appear to be the first. What good would it do to him if knowing that he was punished for his laziness, if now he is no longer lazy? The bottom line is that he is at the seventh grade better and more capable than he was in the eighth grade. So it will happen from class to class.
So, what does not happen to the schoolboy or the mankind in several periods of present life does happen to him like in a memory of a previous life: that is the whole difference but the result is exactly the same although in much larger scale.
(See another example of memory of the past reported in the Spiritist Review, July 1860)
[1] Roman terms employed to describe Gaullic and Germanic regions in Europe (TN)
[2] Notice that the succession of classes in France goes from highest to lowest number so that 8
th comes before 7
th and so forth. For example even in modern days the 6h Grade School year in France (or 6ème, age 11) comes before the 5th Grade School year (or 5ème, age 12) (TN)
