PDF version - Geae

CHAPTER VII
MANIFESTATIONS AFTER DEATH
In the preceding examination we have followed the spirit of man through the different phases of
extrication. Ordinary sleep, somnambulism, transmission of thought, telepathy under all forms: we have seen
its sensitiveness and its means of perception increase, in the measure that its ties to the body relaxed. We are
going to see it now in the state of absolute liberty - that is to say, after death, manifesting itself at the same
time physically and intellectually to its earthly friends. No chasm separates them in the different psychic states.
Whether these phenomena take place during or after the material life, the cause is identical in its laws and in
its effects.
Let us eliminate the idea of the supernatural, which has long been looked upon with suspicion by
science. The old adage, ‘Nature makes no breaks,’ verifies itself once more. Death is not a break; it is a
separation and not a dissolution of the elements that compose the earth man. It is that passing from the world
visible to the world invisible, whose limits are purely arbitrary, and due simply to the imperfection of
ourselves. The life of each one of us in the Beyond is the natural and logical prolongation of actual life, the
development of the invisible parts of our being. There are links in the psychic domain as in the physical. We
have seen in the two orders of apparitions, whether living or deceased, that it is always the etheric form - this
vehicle of the soul, the reproduction or the picture of the physical body - which becomes perceptible to the
medium. Science, according to Curie, Lebau, and Becquerel, familiarizes itself day after day with the subtle
and invisible states of matter, with its fluids, in a word, utilized by the spirits in their manifestations, and well
understood by them.
Thanks to recent discoveries, science has entered into contact with a world of elements, of forces, and
of powers unsuspected, and the possibilities of forms of existence long unknown at last appear to him. The
scientists who have studied spiritual phenomena - Sir W. Crookes, R. Wallace, R. Dale Owen, Sir Olive
Lodge, Paul Gibier, Myers, Aksakof - have testified to numerous apparitions of the dead. The spirit of Katie
King was materialized during three years in the home of Sr. William Crookes, member of the Royal Academy
of London, and was photographed on 2nd March 1894 in the presence of a group of experimenters, as he
relates in his book Researches. Myers speaks of 231 cases of apparitions of the deceased. Among them was
one announcing an imminent death. A commercial traveler had a vision one morning of a sister dead nine
years. When he related this to his family it met with incredulity and skepticism; but in describing the vision he
mentioned a scratch on her face. This detail caused the mother to faint. After coming to consciousness, the
mother related how she had inadvertently made this scratch on her daughter’s face as she lay in her coffin, and
had covered it with powder, so that no person in the world knew of the occurrence. The fact that it had been
seen bye the son impressed upon the mother the veracity of the vision, which she believed was a forerunner of
her own death. In fact, she died some weeks later.
In a report made before the ‘International Congress of Psychology’ in Paris, 1900, Dr. Paul Gibier,
Director of the Pasteur Institute, spoke of the materialization of phantoms obtained by him in his laboratory in
presence of regular assistants in his biological work and of several ladies of his family. These were given the
special mission of watching the medium, Mme. Salmon; of disrobing her before the séance, in order to verify
her garments, always black, while the phantoms appeared in white. The medium was also locked in a metallic
cage, and Dr. Gibier kept the key; yet under these conditions, in a half-light, numerous forms of various
heights appeared, from little children to those of tall stature. The formation was gradual, and took place before
the eyes of all the assistants. Interrogated, they spoke, declaring themselves personalities who had lived on
earth, whose mission it now was to demonstrate the existence of another life.
In Paris, 23rd September 1900, Doctor Bayal, Ex-Governor of Dahomey, and Senator of Bouches-du-
Rhône, described the apparitions he had witnessed at Arles. The phantom of Arcella, a young Roman girl
whose tomb is at Arles, was materialized in the presence of many people, among whom were the poet Mistral,
and a general of the division, a noted doctor, and others. Professor Milesi, of the University of Rome, testified
in the Revue of Psychic Studies, 11th September 1904, to the materialization of his sister three years after her
death. ‘She appeared with the exquisite smile which was habitual to her,’ he said. In an article in the Figaro,
9th October 1905, Mr. Charles Richet, of the Academy of Medicine of Paris, Member of the Institute, wrote;
45