The Siècle on December 26
th, 1865 brings this:
“
The high echelon of the navy has just sent a memo to the maritime cities that make weapons for the Oceania, announcing that for some time now it has been noticed a sharp increase in anthropophagy among the inhabitants of the Great Ocean. The memo advises the captains of merchant ships to take every precaution necessary to preclude their crew from falling victim of such horrible custom. About a year ago the crews of four ships were devoured by the cannibals of New Hebrides Condominium of Jervis or New Caledonia, and all measures must be taken to avoid such dismal disgrace.”
Here is how the journal Le Monde explains this recrudescence of cannibalism:
“
We had the cholera, the epizootic[1], and the chickenpox; vegetables and animals are sick. Here we have an even more painful disease that we learned from the English navy officers: the savages of Oceania, as they say, double down on their anthropophagy. Several horrible cases came to their attention. There is no doubt that our maritime authorities will also take measures because two French ships were attacked, the crews taken and devoured by the savages. It is mind boggling that every effort of civilization has been unsuccessful against such horrors. Who knows the origin of such criminal inspirations? Which commandment has been given to all those pagans, spread out over hundreds and thousands of islands in the immensities of the southern seas? Their monstruous passion seems to be appeased for a moment to resurge to the point of inciting repression and the forces of Earth. It is one of those problems that can only be explained by the Catholic dogma. The spirit of darkness acts with total freedom at certain times. Before these serious events, it agitates, stirs its creatures, support and inspires them. Great events loom. The revolution believes to be the time to crown the edifice; it prepares for the supreme fight; it charges against the key of the temple of the Christian society. It is a serious time, foreseen by nature in its full seriousness.”
We are surprised to not see Spiritism among the causes of the increase in the ferocity of the savages, like a scape goat of every illness of humanity, like Christianity was in former times. Perhaps it is implicitly understood as the works of the spirit of darkness. As the
Le Monde says, “
only the Catholic dogma can explain.”
We cannot see this as a clear explanation, nor can we see anything in common with the revolutionary spirit of Europe. We even see that dogma as a complication to the problem. The cannibals are men, and nobody doubts it. Now, the Catholic dogma does not admit the pre-existence of the soul, but the creation of a new soul at the time of birth of each body. It then follows that God creates souls there that are men-eaters, and here souls that can become saints. Why such a difference? It is a problem for the Church has never given a solution, however, it is an essential cornerstone. According to that doctrine, the increase in cannibalism can only be explained like this: At that moment, God feels like creating a larger number of cannibal souls. Such solution is weak and particularly not in line with God’s benevolence.
The difficult worsens if we consider the future of those souls. What becomes of them after death? Are the treated in the same way as the others that are conscious of good and evil? That would neither be fair nor rational. Instead of explaining it, the Church is at a stalemate, from which it can only leave by appealing to a mystery, that one cannot try to understand, a kind of
non possumus[2]that eliminates embarrassing questions. To the problem that the Church cannot solve Spiritism finds the simplest and most rational solution, in the law of plurality of existences to which all beings are submitted and that allows their progress. The souls of the cannibals, therefore, are closer to their origin. Their intellectual and moral faculties are still fuzzy and little developed, and for that very reason the animal instincts dominate.
But those souls are not destined to remain eternally in such an inferior state that would preclude them forever of the happiness of the advanced souls. They progress in reasoning, enlighten, depurate, improve and instruct themselves in successive existences. They born again in savage races while they do not surpass the limits of savagery. Once they reach a certain level they leave that state to incarnate in a little more advanced race; from this one to another and successively grow in degree, as a result of the acquired merits and the imperfections that they leave behind, until the level of perfection that the creature is entitled is achieved. The path of progress is denied to no one, so much so that the most delayed soul can aspire to the supreme happiness. But some, given their free-will, the appanage of humanity, work diligently for their own depuration and instruction, to leave behind the material instincts and the primitive diapers, for at every step of the way towards perfection they see more clearly, understand better and are happier. These advance more promptly and enjoy earlier: that is their award. Others, always as a consequence of their free-will, stay longer on their way, like lazy and of bad attitude students, or like negligent workers, arriving later, suffering more: that is their punishment, or if you like, their hell. Thus confirming, through the plurality of existences, the remarkable law of equity and justice that characterizes all works of creation. Have this theory compared to that of the Church about the past and future of the souls and see which one is more rational, more in agreement with the Divine Justice and that better explains social inequalities.
Anthropophagy is, undoubtedly, one of the lowest degrees of the human scale on Earth, because the savage that no longer eats his peer is already progressing. But where does the increase in this bestial instinct come from? We can notice, to begin with, that it is only local, and that cannibalism has, by and large, disappeared from Earth. It is inexplicable without the knowledge of the invisible world and its relationships with the visible one. Through deaths and births, they feed one another, embed one another. Imperfect men cannot provide the invisible world with perfect souls and perverse souls, by incarnating, cannot lead but to bad men. When the catastrophes, the calamities, simultaneously reach a large number of people, there is a mass arrival of souls into the world of the Spirits. Since, according to the law of nature, those souls must be born again, for their own betterment, circumstances may equally drive them back to Earth in swarms. The phenomenon in question, therefore, simply depend on the accidental incarnation in distant places of a larger number of tardy souls, and not on the maliciousness of Satan, nor on a commandment given to the people of Oceania. By helping in the development of the moral sense of those souls, during their life on Earth, a mission to civilized men, they progress. When they return to another corporeal existence to continue to progress, they will make men less evil than they were, more enlightened, of less ferocious instincts, because the progress that is realized is never lost. That is how humanity’s progress takes place gradually.
The journal Le Monde is right by saying that great events are looming. Yes, a transformation takes place in humanity. The first contractions of the birth can already be felt; the corporeal world and the spiritual world agitates, because it is the struggle between what ends with what begins. Who will benefit from such transformation? Since progress is the providential law of humanity, it can only benefit from progress. But the great births are laborious; one cannot remove the heavily rooted weed without agitation and destruction in the soil.
[1] Epizootic is a disease spread in non-human animals, similar to an epidemic in humans (T.N.)
[2] Latin, Catholic expression meaning inability to act (T.N.)
