How Spiritism Arrives Without Being Sought
Young peasant lady, inconscient medium
It is a fact, attested by experience, that the Spirits act upon persons that are totally oblivious to the Spiritist ideas, unsuspectingly. We have already mentioned several examples in this Spiritist Review. We do not know a single genre of mediumship not revealed spontaneously, even that of writing. How can the following event be explained by those that attribute all those manifestations to imagination or charlatanism?
The little village of E…, in the Department of Aube, up until recently had been much favored, in these days of moral epidemic, for being preserved from the disgrace of Spiritism. The very name of this diabolic work had never even reached the ears of its peaceful inhabitants, undoubtedly because the local priest had not yet preached against it. But the one that counts, and misses the guest, counts twice; he should not have counted on the absence of the Spirits that require no license to operate. Here what happens about four months ago.
In the village there is an almost illiterate seventeen-year-old woman, daughter of a poor and honest crop grower with whom she works everyday in the fields. One day, on returning to their hut, she felt totally disturbed; she then felt like writing, something she never did since the days of school. Write what? She knew nothing; she only wanted to write. Another bizarre idea was to look around to find a pencil and a piece of paper, although she knew that there was none in the cabin. While trying to make sense of those ideas she saw an extinguished ember by the fireplace; she felt irresistibly attracted to get that, and then she was guided by an invisible to force to the whitened wall. Her leg was suddenly and mechanically raised and she wrote this, in very legible characters: “Find paper and pens for you will use them to correspond with the Spirits.” Strange thing the fact that although she had never heard about manifestations of Spirits, she was not surprised with what had just happened. She told her father who then discussed with one of his friends, a simple farmworker like him, but a man of great discernment. That friend came to carefully examine the situation; then, like an experienced Spiritist, although as ignorant about the matter as the girl’s father, he questioned the manifesting Spirit and that signed the name of a Russian general. The latter invited them to talk to the Spiritist in Troyes to obtain more information about it, and so they did. Since then the girl is a writing medium and in addition to that she obtains remarkable physical effects. A Spiritist group was formed in the village, and willing or not, that is how Spiritism has been sought after.
The letter from our correspondent that reports the fact, ends by saying this: “Couldn’t we say that the more the jokers endeavor to trick themselves, the more the Providence, as if to confuse them, daily pours manifestations that challenge their denial every interpretation of the skeptical?”
The Parisian Society of Spiritist Studies received the following about the subject matter:
Parisian Society, November 27th, 1865 – medium Mr. Morin
God’s power is infinite and employs every means to promote a doctrine that is in everything. A double phenomenon took place here as I will try to explain. The young woman was suddenly surrounded by a powerful fluid that led her to temporarily abandon her day to day activities. Before the manifestation of the phenomenon there was a preparation of the patient; she was magnetized and guided, by the will of the Spirit, to find an instrument that was knowingly absent in the house. When she bent over in the fireplace to get the piece of charcoal to replace the pencil, she was only executing a movement driven by the Spirit. It was neither her instinct nor her intelligence acting, but that of the Spirit that utilized the young lady like an adequate instrument to his own fluid. Up until that moment, she was not, say, a medium; it was only after the first written warning that she really became one, and no longer forced by the Spirit that forced her to act. Her mediumship, thereafter, became semi-mechanic, she knew and understood what she was writing but she could not explain it in words. Besides, the physical effects happened in such a powerful way that any idea of prestidigitation must be ruled out.
Before the first effects, there was nothing that indicated her aptitude for that kind of phenomenon. Had those effect been the first ones to reveal her mediumship, they could have been misinterpreted by superstition. The man that, like a seasoned Spiritist, asked questions to the Spirit, he was himself guided by a force of similar nature as the one that impelled the medium to write. That force, whose origin he could not understand, doubled his capacity of evocation, adding his desire to learn to the memories of gatherings for the manifestation of the soul of the dead. It is only a serious study of the principles of the doctrine that teach these newcomers the real, positive and natural side of things, keeping out any interpretation of marvelous and supernatural. These are the two main roles of the event, that unwillingly played their role. They were the more powerful instruments in the event, the more ignorant and exempt of preconceived ideas.
As you can see, my friends, everything concur to cast light and the most illiterate can give lessons to the most knowledgeable ones.
Guide to the medium.
