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progressively back to periods anterior to normal life, with the intellectual and physiological characteristics of
those epochs. It is not memories which are awakened but successive states of personality which are evoked. It
is certain that in continuing these magnetic operations beyond birth, the subject can be put into analogous
states corresponding to former incarnations.’
In the Annals of Physical Science, July 1905, other remarkable experiments with a trance medium are
related fully. Mlle. Marie Mayo was the daughter of a French engineer: she had been reared at Bayreuth,
where she learned to read and write in the Arabic language. Then she came to France to live with and aunt.
The enumeration of her statements during trance fill fifty pages of the Annals, and were testified to by eminent
doctors and other men of note.
Mlle. Mayo went back of her earth life, and reviewed three incarnations. She had been twice a man,
and had died by drowning in one incarnation: she went through all the agony of this death while in trance, until
Colonel de Rochas wakened her. Then again, in trance, she proceeded to more distant incarnations, and said
her name was Madeline de Saint Marc; that she had married an attaché to the Court of Louis XIV, that she
knew Mlle. De la Vallière. M. Scarron, Molière, and Racine, and that she had died at the age of forty-five.
During her waking hours this medium had no knowledge of Mlle. de la Vallière. During one of her
incarnations her name was ‘Line’, and she declared herself about to become a mother, and, greatly to the
amazement of Colonel de Rochas, her physical body became enlarged, and she went through all the spasms of
childbirth. Later, she wept, saying her husband had died. Mlle. Mayo was on various occasions put into trance
state and asked to return to former incarnations, and on each occasion the same conditions and states were
repeated without change. With each existence which she described, her attitudes, language, gestures, and
appearance changed. When she described masculine incarnations, she spoke in a masculine voice. Mlle. Mayo
was a simple young girl in her normal state and incapable of dissimulation. She possessed no knowledge of
psychology or pathology, as was attested by the physician of the family, one of the witnesses of these
extraordinary séances. It would require a vast talent and art to simulate the dramatic scenes which took place
in the presence of these experimenters who were watching for every evidence of error or fraud; such a role
could not have been carried out by a young person possessing no experience in life, and with only a limited
education. In our estimation, these experiences, joined to many others of a similar nature, are sufficient to
establish at the base of the ME a sort of crypt where is accumulated an immense reservoir of memories.
The long past of the soul has left its ineffaceable traces, which alone can tell us the secret of the origin
of evolution, the profound mystery of human nature. In a group of researchers at Havre, June 1907, a psychic
was asked to obtain from invisible spirits an explanation of how these past incarnations were revealed. The
reply was: ‘When the mediumistic subject is not sufficiently freed from his body to read for himself the history
of his past, we proceed to show him by successive pictures the reproduction of his former lives. From on high
we communicate the instructions furnished to experimenters, asking them to make allowance for the
circumstances under which they are received. You must not forget that here, free from earth conventions, there
is for us neither time nor space; living outside of these limits we easily commit errors in anything connected
with them. We consider time and space small things, and prefer to talk of acts good and bad and their
consequences. If some dates and names are not found in our archives, you must not conclude that all is false.
Difficulties are great for us to give you the precise information you demand; but do not relax your search, for
this is the most beautiful of all studies. Light is spreading, but it will be a long time before the masses
comprehend toward what dawn they should look.’
There are numerous facts which can be added almost indefinitely in these researches. Prince Adam
Wisznieski, 7 Rue du Defarcalese, Paris, related to us the following: Prince Galetzin, the Marquis de B-, and
Count de R- were together at Hamburg in the summer of 1862. One evening during a stroll they found a poor
woman lying on a bench. Finding she was hungry and penniless, they took her to the hotel and fed her. After
she had satisfied a ravenous appetite, the Prince, who possessed magnetic powers, desired to experiment with
her. The woman, who spoke a poor ungrammatical German dialect, when in trance condition began to speak
correctly in French, and related how her present life was the result of crime committed in a former incarnation
in the eighteenth century. She lived in a château in Brittany on the border of the sea. Having a lover, she
desired to be rid of her husband, and pushed him over a precipice into the sea. She described the crime and
place minutely; and thanks to this description, Prince Galetzin and the Marquis de B- later went to Brittany
separately, and each made inquiries and investigation with identically the same results. After careful
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