While the Martian romance is purely a work of fantasy, in which the creative imagination was able to allow itself free play through having no investigation to fear, the Hindoo cycle, and that of Marie Antoinette, having a fixed terrestrial setting, represent a labor of construction which was subjected from the start to very complex conditions of environments and epochs. To keep within the bounds of probability, not to be guilty of too many anachronisms, to satisfy the multiple demands of both logic and æsthetics, formed a particularly dangerous undertaking, and one apparently altogether beyond the powers of a person without special instruction in such matters. The subconscious genius of Mlle. Smith has acquitted itself of the task in a remarkable manner, and has displayed in it a truly wonderful and delicate sense of historic possibilities and of local color.
The Hindoo romance, in particular, remains for those who have taken part in it a psychological enigma, not yet solved in a satisfactory manner, because it reveals and implies in regard to Hélène, a knowledge relative to the costumes and languages of the Orient, the actual source of which it has up to the present time not been possible to discover. All the witnesses of Mlle. Smith’s Hindoo somnambulisms who are of the same opinion on that subject (several refrain from having any) unite in seeing in it a curious phenomenon of cryptomnesia, of reappearances of memories profoundly buried beneath the normal waking state, together with an indeterminate amount of imaginative exaggeration upon the canvas of actual facts. But by this name of cryptomnesia, or resurrection of latent memories, two singularly different things are understood. For me it is only a question of memories of her present life; and I see nothing of the supernormal in that. For while I have not yet succeeded in finding the key to the enigma, I do not doubt its existence, and I will mention later certain indications which seem to me to support my idea that the Asiatic notions of Mlle. Smith have a wholly natural origin.
For the observer inclined towards spiritism, on the contrary, the sleeping memory which is awakened in somnambulism is nothing less than that of a previous existence of Mlle. Smith, and that piquant explanation, which was first given by Leopold, profits in their eyes from the impossibility which I find in proving that it is anything else.
Doubtless, if one was familiar with all the incidents of Hélène’s life from her earliest childhood, and if it were absolutely certain that her knowledge of India had not been furnished her from the outside, through the normal channel of the organs of sense, it would be necessary to seek elsewhere for the solution of the riddle, and to choose between the hypothesis of an atavic memory, hereditarily transmitted across fifteen generations, and actual telepathic communication with the brain of some Indian savant, or a spiritistic reincarnation. But we do not find ourselves in that position. There is nothing less known, in its details, than the daily life of Mlle. Smith in her childhood and youth. But, when all the feats of which the subconscious memory of our present life is capable are considered, it is not scientifically correct to have recourse to a pretended “anteriority,” of which the only guarantee is the authority of Leopold, in order to explain the somnambulistic apparitions of facts of which Mlle. Smith in her waking state has no remembrance, I admit, but the origin of which may well have been hidden in the unknown recesses of her past life (reading, conversation, etc.).
The plot of the Hindoo romance, which I have already briefly hinted at on divers occasions, is as follows:
Hélène Smith was, at the end of the fourteenth century of our era, the daughter of an Arab sheik, possibly named Pirux, whom she left in order to become, under the name of Simandini, the eleventh wife of Prince Sivrouka Nayaka, of whom I have the honor to be the actual reincarnation. (I pray the reader once for all to pardon me the immodest rôle which has been imposed upon me in this affair against my will.)
This Sivrouka, who reigned over Kanara, and built there, in 1401, the fortress of Tchandraguiri, does not seem to have been a very accommodating person; although not bad at heart, and quite attached to his favorite wife, he had a wild humor and very uncouth manners. More could not be expected of an Asiatic potentate of that epoch. Simandini, nevertheless, passionately loved him, and at his death she was burned alive on his grave, after the fashion of Malabar.
Around these two principal personages are grouped some secondary figures, among others a faithful domestic named Adèl, and a little monkey, Mitidja, which Simandini had brought to India with her from Arabia; then the fakir Kanga, who occupies a much more important place in the Martian romance, in which we have seen him reincarnated as Astané, than in the Hindoo cycle.
Some other individuals, all masculine—Mougia, Miousa, Kangia, Kana—appear in obscure rôles, concerning which nothing certain can be said.
The hypnoid states, in which this romance has manifested itself with Hélène, present the greatest variety and all degrees, from the perfect waking state (apparently), momentarily crossed by some visual or auditive hallucination, the memory of which is preserved intact and allows a detailed description, up to total somnambulism, with amnesia upon awakening, in which the most striking scenes of ecstasies or incarnations are unfolded. We shall see divers examples in the following pages.
Without recurring to the strange and little-known visions which already haunted the childhood and youth of Mlle. Smith (see pp. 20-25), I will retrace the principal stages of her Asiatic romance from the birth of her mediumship.
During the three first years there were but few manifestations of this sort, in the seances, at least, while as to the automatisms which developed at other times, especially at night, or in the hypnagogic state, we know nothing.
In November, 1892, two seances of the N. group are occupied with the apparition of a Chinese city—Pekin, according to the table—in which a disincarnate spirit, a parent of one of the group, is found performing a mission to a sick child.
In her seances of 1894, Hélène had on several occasions detached visions belonging to the Orient, as appeared from their content, or hints dictated by the table. She also saw Teheran; then the cemetery of the missions at Tokat (June 12th); a cavalier with a white woollen cloak and a turban bearing the name of Abderrhaman (September 2d); and, finally, an Oriental landscape, which depicted a ceremony of Buddhist aspect (October 16th). This latter vision, more especially, seemed to be a forerunner of the Hindoo romance, since the records of the seances of that period show an ensemble of characteristic traits which will be again met with in the later Hindoo scenes—e.g., an immense garden of exotic plants, colonnades, rows of palm-trees, with enormous stone lions at the head; rugs of magnificent design, a temple surrounded by trees, with a statue, apparently that of Buddha; a procession of twelve women in white, who kneel, holding lighted lamps; in the centre another woman, with very black hair, detaches herself from the procession, balances a lamp, and burns a powder which expands into a white stone (the continuation of the romance shows this woman to be Simandini, of whom this was the first appearance).
February 17, 1895.—At the end of a rather long seance, the table dictates Pirux sheik, and replies to our questions that it refers to an Arab sheik of the fifteenth century. At this moment Hélène awakes, saying that she had seen a man with a black mustache and curly hair, wearing a cloak and a turban, who seemed to be laughing at and mocking her. The spelling out of Pirux was not very clear, and Leopold, when interrogated later, neither affirmed categorically, nor did he deny, that this name was that of the sheik, father of Simandini.
March 3.—Seance with six persons present, all having their hands upon the table. After a brief waiting, Hélène is surprised at no longer being able to see my left middle finger, while she can see all my other fingers quite clearly. My bunch of keys, which I then place upon my middle finger, likewise disappears from her view. This very limited, systematic, visual anæsthesia authorizes the prediction, following numerous examples of former seances, that the phenomena about to appear will concern me. Presently begins a long vision, consisting of scenes which Hélène believes she has already partially seen before.
She describes a pagoda, which she draws with her left hand, with a few strokes of her pencil; then an avenue of palms and statues, a procession, and ceremonies before an altar, etc.
The principal rôles are played by a personage in sandals, a great yellow robe, a helmet of gold, ornamented with precious stones (first appearance of Sivrouka) and by the woman with black hair and white robe, already seen on the 12th of October (Simandini).
In the first part of the vision, Hélène, who follows that woman with ecstatic gaze, describing her to us, sees her coming towards me, but at that moment the invisibility of my finger was extended to my entire person, and Hélène neither sees nor hears me. While she was fully conscious of the other sitters, she was astonished at seeing this woman make “on the empty air” certain gestures of laying-on of hands and benediction, which were made upon my head. On several occasions I change my place, and seat myself in different parts of the room. Each time, after a few seconds, Hélène turns towards me, and, without perceiving me, sees the woman with black hair place herself behind my seat and repeat her gestures of benediction in space, at a height corresponding to that of my head.
As the vision continues, I do not play any further rôle, but it has to do with a ceremony during which the Hindoo woman with a diadem on her head burns incense in the midst of her twelve companions, etc.
During all this time the table, contrary to its custom, gave no explanation; but Hélène, having herself asked some questions, remarks that the imaginary woman replies to her by certain signs of her head and reveals to her many things that she had known in a former existence. At the moment of the disappearance of the vision, which had lasted more than an hour, Mlle. Smith hears the words (“Until presently”). The continuation, in fact, was not long delayed.
March 6.—Repetition and continuation of the preceding seance, with this degree of progress—viz., that the visual hallucination of the woman with the black hair was changed into a total cœnæsthetic hallucination—i.e., instead of a simple vision an incarnation was produced. After a very impressive scene of benediction, Hélène gave herself up to a succession of pantomimes in which she seemed to take part in a fearful spectacle and to struggle with enemies (scene of the funeral pile). She ended by seating herself on the divan when she recovered her normal state, after a series of psychical oscillations, various attitudes, etc. The last of her phases of mimicry was to tear off and throw away all the ornaments which an Asiatic princess could wear—rings on all her fingers, bracelets on her arms and wrists, a necklace, diadem, ear-rings, girdle, anklets. Once awake, she had no recollection of the scene of benediction, but recalled quite distinctly the dreams corresponding to the other pantomimes. She saw again the black-haired woman, the Oriental landscape of the preceding seance, etc. In the course of her description the passage of the simple vision into the scene of incarnation was reflected in a change of the form of her narrative; she spoke to us of the woman in the third person, then suddenly adopted the first person, and said “I” in recounting among other things that she—or the black-haired woman—saw a corpse on the funeral pile, upon which four men, against whom she struggled, endeavored to force her to mount. When I drew her attention to this change of style, she replied that, in fact, it seemed as though she herself was that woman.
Independently of the Hindoo romance, these two seances are interesting from a psychological point of view, because the change from a visual, objective hallucination into total cœnæsthetic and motor hallucination occurs in it, constituting a complete transformation of the personality. This generalization of partial automatism at the beginning, this subjugation and absorption of the ordinary personality by the subliminal personality, does not always produce amnesia with Hélène, that unique impression which she might describe on awakening as being herself and some one else at the same time. (Compare, p. 119.) It must be noted that in the particular case of the identification of the black-haired Hindoo woman with Mlle. Hélène Smith of Geneva, the problem of the causal connection is susceptible of two opposite solutions (and the same remark will be equally appropriate in the case of Marie Antoinette).
For the believing spiritist it is because Mlle. Smith is the reincarnation of Simandini—that is to say, because these two personages, in spite of the separation of their existences in time and space, are substantially and metaphysically identical—that she really again becomes Simandini, and feels herself to be a Hindoo princess in certain favorable somnambulistic states. For the empirical psychologist it is, on the contrary, because the visual memory of a Hindoo woman (her origin is of no importance) grows like a parasite and increases in surface and in depth like a drop of oil, until it invades the whole impressionable and suggestible personality of the medium—this is why Mlle. Smith feels herself becoming this woman, and concludes from it that she formerly actually was that person (see p. 28-30). But we must return from this digression to the Hindoo dream.
March 10.—After various waking visions relating to other subjects, Hélène enters into somnambulism. For twenty minutes she remains seated with her hands on the table, by means of raps struck upon which Leopold informs us that a scene of previous existence concerning me is being prepared; that I was formerly a Hindoo prince, and that Mlle. Smith, long before her existence as Marie Antoinette, had then been my wife, and had been burned on my tomb; that we should ultimately know the name of this Hindoo prince, as well as the time and place of these events, but not this evening, nor at the next seance. Then Hélène leaves the table, and in a silent pantomime of an hour’s duration, the meaning of which, already quite clear, is confirmed by Leopold, she plays, this time to the very close, the scene of the funeral pile as outlined in the preceding seance.
She goes slowly around the room, as if resisting and carried away in spite of herself, by turns supplicating and struggling fiercely with these fictitious men who are bearing her to her death.
All at once, standing on tiptoe, she seems to ascend the pile, hides, with affright, her face in her hands, recoils in terror, then advances anew as though pushed from behind. Finally she falls on her knees before a soft couch, in which she buries her face covered by her clasped hands. She sobs violently. By means of her little finger, visible between her cheek and the cushion of the couch, Leopold continues to reply very clearly by yes and no to my questions. It is the moment at which she again passes through her agony on the funeral pile: her cries cease little by little; her respiration becomes more and more panting, then suddenly stops and remains suspended during some seconds which seem interminable. It is the end! Her pulse is fortunately strong, though a little irregular. While I am feeling it, her breathing is re-established by means of a deep inspiration. After repeated sobs she becomes calm, and slowly rises and seats herself on a neighboring sofa. This scene of fatal dénouement lasted eight minutes. She finally awakens, remembering to have seen in a dream the dead body of a man stretched on a funeral pile, and a woman whom some men were forcing to ascend the pile against her will.
There was nothing Oriental in the succeeding seances, and the Hindoo dream did not appear again until four weeks later.
April 7.—Mlle. Smith went quickly into a mixed state, in which the Hindoo dream was mingled and substituted, but only so far as concerns me, for the feeling of present reality. She believes me absent, asks other sitters why I have gone away, then rises and begins to walk around me and look at me, very much surprised at seeing my place occupied by a stranger with black curly hair and of brown complexion, clothed in a robe with flowing sleeves of blue, and with gold ornaments. When I speak to her she turns around and seems to hear my voice from the opposite side, whither she goes to look for me; when I go towards her she shuns me; then, when I follow her, she returns to the place I had just left. After some time occupied in these manœuvres she ceases to be preoccupied with me and my substitute in the blue robe, and falls into a deeper state. She takes on the look of a seeress, and describes a kind of embattled château on a hill, where she perceives and recognizes the before-mentioned personage with the curly hair, but in another costume and surrounded by very ugly black men, and women “who are good looking.”
Interrogated as to the meaning of this vision, Leopold replies: “The city of Tchandraguiri in Kanaraau” (sic); then he adds, a moment later, “There is a letter too many in the last word,” and ends by giving the name Kanara, and adding the explanation “of the fifteenth century.” Upon awaking from this somnambulistic state, which lasted two hours, Hélène recalls having had a dream of a personage with curly hair, in a blue robe, richly ornamented with precious stones, with a cutlass of gold, bent backward, suspended from a hook. She recollects having held a long conversation with him in a strange language which she understood and spoke very well herself, although she no longer knows the meaning of it.
April 14.—Very soon passing into a deep sleep, Mlle. Smith leaves the table and gives herself up to a silent pantomime, at first smiling, then finishing in sadness and by a scene of tears.
The meaning of this is explained by Leopold as follows: Hélène is in India, in her palace of Tchandraguiri, in Kanara, in 1401, and she receives a declaration of love from the personage with the curly hair, who is the Prince Sivrouka Nayaka, to whom she has been married for about a year. The prince has flung himself upon his knees, but he inspires in her a certain fright, and she still regrets having left her native country in order to follow him. Leopold affirms that she will remember, on awaking, in French, all that the prince has said to her in Sanscrit, and that she will repeat to us a part of it, but not all, because it is too private. After awaking she seems in reality to recall clearly her entire dream, and tells us that she found herself on a hill, where they were building; that it was not exactly a city, nor even a village, since there were no streets; that it was rather an isolated place in the country, and that which was being built was not in the form of a house; it had holes rather than windows (a fortress and loop-holes).
She found herself in a fine palace, very beautiful as to its interior, but not its exterior. There was a great hall, decorated with greens, with a grand staircase at the end, flanked by statues of gold. She held a long conversation there, not in French, with the swarthy personage with the black curly hair and magnificent costume; he finally ascended the staircase, but she did not follow him.
She appeared to recall well the meaning of all that he said to her in their conversation in a foreign language, but seemed embarrassed by these memories, and would not consent to relate them to us.
May 26.—In the course of this seance, as Hélène, in a silent somnambulism, incarnates the Hindoo princess, I hand her a sheet of paper and a pencil in the hope of obtaining some text or drawing. After divers scribblings she traces the single word Simadini in letters which are not at all like her usual hand (see Fig. 34).
Then taking a fresh sheet, she seems to write on it with a happy smile, folds it carefully and thrusts it in her corsage, takes it out again, and rereads it with rapture, etc. Leopold informs us that Simadini is the name of the Hindoo princess, and that she is reading a love-letter from Sivrouka. On awaking she remembers having been “in such a beautiful palace,” and of having received there a very interesting letter, but the contents of which she refused to disclose to us, being evidently too confidential.
I intercalate here two remarks apropos of the name Simadini, which is one of the first known examples of a handwriting of Mlle. Smith other than her own normal hand.
First: When, four months later, Leopold began to communicate in writing (pp. 98-103), a certain analogy in the formation of the letters, and the identical way of holding the pencil, caused us to believe that it was he who had already traced the word in Fig. 34. But he has always denied it, and we have never been able to discover the author of it. Secondly: I said above, (p. 204), that there had been divergences in the orthography of this name. Here, in substance, is a fragment of a letter which Mlle. Smith wrote me in the winter following (February 18, 1896), depicting to me the vexatious impressions which she still had concerning it.
“ ... I am very sad, and I cannot tell why. I have a heavy heart, and for what reason I do not know myself. It came to such a pass to-day (you are going to laugh) that it seemed to me as though my left cheek had grown perceptibly thinner. I am sure that at this moment you would not recognize Simadini, so piteous and discouraged is her countenance! Think, that at the very moment in which I trace these words, I hear a voice speaking to me in my right ear: “Not Simadini, but Simandini!” What do you think that can be? It is very strange, is it not? Have we misunderstood that name? Or, perhaps, may it not be I who have misunderstood it?...”
Mlle. Smith here forgets that the name did not come to her on the first occasion by auditive hallucination, in which case it might be that she had misunderstood it, but by writing in somnambulism, which excludes any mistake of her ordinary consciousness. We must confine ourselves to registering as a fact, inexplicable hitherto, this correction of a graphic automatism by an auditive automatism at the end of several months. Between the two orthographies, I have adopted the second, which has undergone no further changes, and figures only in the Martian texts (10, 16).
June 16.—Fuller repetition of the scene of the letter of the Hindoo prince. Impossible to learn the contents of it. I suggest to her to remember and to relate them to us upon awakening, but Leopold replies: “She will not reveal it. Why have you not gained her confidence sufficiently, that she may tell you everything without fear?” and the suggestion had no effect.
June 30.—Somnambulism with silent pantomime, the meaning of which is given by Leopold: It is the scene of the betrothal of Simandini and Sivrouka at Tchandraguiri. There is first a phase of oppression, with sighs and gestures as of a struggle against various pretenders who wish to seize her; then laughter and ecstasy, provoked by the arrival of Sivrouka, who delivers her and drives off his rivals; finally, joy and admiration on accepting the flowers and jewels which he offers her.
I have reported, too much at length perhaps, though still greatly abridged, these first appearances of the Oriental romance, because they form a continuous series, in the reverse of the chronological order, conformably to a spiritistic theory which holds that in these memories of previous existences the mediumistic memory goes back and recovers the “images” of the more recent events before those which are more remote. During this first period of four months, the Hindoo cycle made irruption into eight seances (about one-twentieth of those at which I have been present since I have had knowledge of them), and has manifested itself somewhat like the panorama of a magic lantern, unfolding itself in successive tableaux.
This whole history can be summed up by a few principal tableaux: there was the scene of the death on the funeral pile, prepared in vision in the seance of the 6th of March and executed on the 10th; then the scene of the interior of the palace and the fortress in process of construction (7th and 14th of April); that of the love-letter (26th of May and 16th of June); finally, the betrothal (30th of June). There must be added to these the grand tableau at the beginning, first presented in vision the 3d of March, then realized three days later with the astonishing exclamation Atièyâ Ganapatinâmâ. The meaning of this scene has never been explained by Leopold, but seems to be quite clear. A species of prologue can be seen in it, or even apotheosis, inaugurating the entire romance; it is the Hindoo princess of four centuries ago recognizing her lord and master in flesh and blood, under the unexpected form of a university professor, whom she greets with an emphasis wholly Oriental in blessing him, very appropriately, in the name of the divinity of science and of wisdom—since Ganapati is an equivalent of Ganesâ, the god with the head of an elephant, patron of sages and savants.
It can be easily conceived that these two words of Oriental resonance, spoken aloud at a period at which the Martian was not yet born—and followed by all the conversations unfortunately unheard by us, which at the waking at the subsequent seances Hélène recalled having held in a strange language (in Sanscrit, according to Leopold) with the Hindoo prince of her dreams—would excite a lively curiosity and a desire to obtain longer audible fragments of this unknown idiom. It was only in September, 1895, that this satisfaction was afforded us, during a seance at which the Oriental romance, which had given no further sign of life since the month of June, made a new outbreak. Starting from that moment, it has never ceased during these four years to reappear irregularly, and, suffering some eclipses, accompanied on each occasion by words of a Sanscritoid aspect. But the plot of the romance has no longer the same clearness that it showed at the beginning. In place of tableaux linking themselves in a regular chronological order, they are often no more than confused reminiscences, memories, without precise bonds between them, which gush forth from the memory of Simandini. As the fragments of our youthful years surge up incoherent and pell-mell in our dreams, Mlle. Smith, too, finds herself easily assailed in her somnambulisms by visions connected with certain episodes, and not forming an entire continuation of supposed Asiatic pre-existence.
Some of these scenes concern her life as a young Arab girl. One sees her there, for example, playing joyously with her little monkey, Mitidja; or copying an Arab text (see Fig. 35, p. 312), which her father, the sheik, surrounded by his tribes, furnishes her; or embarking on a strange boat, escorted by black Hindoos, for her new country, etc. But much the larger number of her somnambulistic trances and her spontaneous visions have reference to her life in India and to the details of her daily existence. Her bath, which the faithful domestic Adèl prepares for her; her walks and reveries in the splendid gardens of the palace, all full of a luxurious vegetation and rare birds of brilliant colors; her scenes of tenderness and of affectionate effusions—always stamped, this is to be noted, with the most perfect propriety—towards the Prince Sivrouka, when he is kindly disposed; scenes of regret also and abundant tears for the memory of her far-off native land, when the capricious and brutal humor of the Oriental despot makes itself too severely felt; conversation with the fakir Kanga; devotions and religious ceremonies before some Buddhist image, etc., all this forms an ensemble extremely varied and full of local color. There is in the whole being of Simandini—in the expression of her countenance (Hélène almost always has her large eyes open in this somnambulism), in her movements, in the quality of her voice when she speaks or chants Hindoo—a languishing grace, an abandon, a melancholy sweetness, a something of languor and of charm, which corresponds wonderfully with the character of the Orient, as the spectators conceive it to be, who, like me, have never been there, etc. With all this a bearing always full of noblesse and dignity conforms to that which one would expect of a princess; there are no dances, for example, nothing of the bayadère.
Mlle. Smith is really very wonderful in her Hindoo somnambulisms. The way in which Simandini seats herself on the ground, her legs crossed, or half stretched out, nonchalantly leaning her arms or her head against a Sivrouka, who is sometimes real (when in her incomplete trance she takes me for her prince), sometimes imaginary; the religious and solemn gravity of her prostrations when, after having for a long time balanced the fictitious brazier, she crosses her extended hands on her breast, kneeling and bowing herself three times, her forehead striking the ground; the melancholy sweetness of her chants in a minor key, wailing and plaintive melodies, which unfold themselves in certain flute-like notes, prolonged in a slow decrescendo, and only dying away at the end of a single note held for fully fourteen seconds; the agile suppleness of her swaying and serpentine movements, when she amuses herself with her imaginary monkey, caresses it, embraces it, excites it, scolds it laughingly, and makes it repeat all its tricks—all this so varied mimicry and Oriental speech have such a stamp of originality, of ease, of naturalness, that one asks in amazement whence it comes to this little daughter of Lake Leman, without artistic education or special knowledge of the Orient—a perfection of play to which the best actress, without doubt, could only attain at the price of prolonged studies or a sojourn on the banks of the Ganges.
The problem, as I have already stated, is not yet solved, and I am obliged still to endeavor to discover whence Hélène Smith has derived her ideas in regard to India. It seems that the more simple method would be to take advantage of the hypnotic state of the seances to obtain a confession from Hélène’s subconscious memory, and persuade it to disclose the secret; but my efforts in that direction have not as yet succeeded. It is doubtless incompetency on my part, and I will end, perhaps—or some one better qualified than I—in finding the joint in the armor. The fact is that hitherto I have always run up against Leopold, who will not allow himself to be ejected or ridiculed, and who has never ceased to affirm that the Sanscrit, Simandini, and the rest are authentic. All the trails which I have thought I have discovered—and they are already numerous—have proved false. The reader must pardon me for not going into the details of my failures in this regard.
If it was only a question of the Hindoo pantomime the mystery would not be so great: some recitations at school, newspaper articles concerning the incineration of the widows of Malabar, engravings and descriptions relative to the civil and religious life of India, etc.—in short, the varied sources of information which, in a civilized country and at our epoch of cosmopolitanism, inevitably meet some time or other the eyes or ears of every one of us and form part of the equipment (conscious or unconscious) of every individual who is not altogether uncultured, would more than suffice to explain the scene of the funeral pile, the prostrations, and the varied attitudes. There are, indeed, some well-known examples showing how small a thing a cunning intelligence, furnished with a good memory and a fertile and plastic imagination, needs in order to reconstruct or fabricate out of nothing a complex edifice, having every appearance of authenticity, and capable of holding in check for a considerable length of time the perspicacity even of skilled minds. But that which conscious and reflecting labor has succeeded in accomplishing in the cases referred to, the subliminal faculties can execute to a much higher degree of perfection in the case of persons subject to automatic tendencies.
But two points remain, which complicate the case of the Hindoo romance and seem to defy—thus far, at least—all normal explanation, because they surpass the limits of a simple play of the imagination. These are the precise historical information given by Leopold, some of which can be, in a certain sense, verified; and the Hindoo language spoken by Simandini, which contains words more or less recognizable, the real meaning of which is adapted to the situation in which they have been spoken. But, even if Hélène’s imagination could have reconstructed the manners and customs and scenes of the Orient from the general information floating in some way in cosmopolitan atmosphere, still one cannot conceive whence she has derived her knowledge of the language and of certain obscure episodes in the history of India. These two points deserve to be examined separately.
When Kanara, Sivrouka, Simandini, etc., successively made their appearance, slowly spelled out by Leopold, with the date of 1401, my companions of the seance and I hastened to investigate Brouillet, who brought to mind the province of Malabar in connection with the first of these names, but left us in utter darkness as to the others. The geography of Vivien Saint-Martin revealed the existence of no fewer than three Tchandraguiris—a hill, a river, and a small town in the district of Arcot-Nord (Madras). The latter—or rather its citadel on the summit of the hill—answered quite well to the description given by Hélène in her visions of the 7th and 14th of April, but the construction of this fortress dates back only to 1510, and this locality is very far removed from the Kanara where Leopold locates this entire story (see pp. 286-288).
As to Sivrouka and his surroundings, neither biographical dictionaries nor encyclopædias were able to furnish me the least hint on this subject. Living historians or Orientalists to whom I addressed myself were of a discouraging unanimity in replying that they did not recognize even the names, the historic correctness of which they regarded as doubtful, and they did not at all remember having met with them in works of fiction.
“I have there,” said a learned professor of history, showing me a good-sized bookcase, “numerous works on the history of India; but they relate only to the north of the peninsula; and as to what transpired in the south during the period to which you refer, we know almost nothing. Your names are unknown to me and do not recall to my mind any personage, real or fictitious.”
“The very name of Sivrouka seems to me improbable as a Hindoo name” replied another, who was unable to give me any more information on the subject.
“I greatly regret,” wrote a third, on receipt of Hélène’s texts, “not to have succeeded in getting upon the trail of the recollections of your medium. I cannot think of any book which would be likely to furnish the information. Tchandraguiri and Mangalore (where several scenes of the Hindoo cycle are located) are correct, but Madras (id.) did not exist in 1401. Its name and foundation do not go further back than the seventeenth century. That region was then a dependency of the kingdom of Vijayanagara, and a naïk in the service of those princes resided successively at Tchandraguiri and at Mangalore. I can make nothing of Sivrouka; the king of Vijayanagara, in 1402, was Bukkha II., or Bukkha called Siribukkha, Tiribukkha. But the naïk who so often changed his residence was evidently not a ruling prince. Was it a romance? Certain details caused me to doubt it. A romancer so careful in regard to local coloring as to introduce into his narrative Indian words, would not have given the title of the prince under the Sanscrit form Nayaka, but would have used the vulgar form naïk; he would not have made the wife, in speaking to her husband, call him by his name Sivrouka (as Hélène constantly does in this somnambulism). I have no recollection of having read anything of this kind, and I know of no work of fiction from which the story might have been taken.”
It will be readily understood that I was annoyed at not being able to establish clearly my presumed Asiatic previous existence. However, while professional science was administering to me these cold douches, I continued, on my own account, to search the libraries at my disposal, and here one fine day I accidentally came across, in an old history of India, in six volumes, by a man named De Marlès, the following passages:
“Kanara and the neighboring provinces on the side towards Delhi may be regarded as the Georgia of Hindustan; it is there, it is said, that the most beautiful women are to be found; the natives, however, are very jealous in guarding them, and do not often allow them to be seen by strangers.”
“Tchandraguiri, which signifies Mountain of the Moon, is a vast fortress constructed, in 1401, by the rajah Sivrouka Nayaka. This prince, as also his successors, belonged to the sect of the Djaïns.”
At last! With what a beating heart did I fasten my eyes on that irrefutable historic evidence that my preceding incarnation, under the beautiful skies of India was not a myth! I felt new life in my veins. I reread twenty times those blessed lines, and took a copy of them to send to those pretended savants who were ignorant even of the name of Sivrouka, and allowed doubts to be cast upon his reality.
Alas! my triumph was of brief duration. It seems that the testimony of De Marlès is not of the highest order. This author is held in slight esteem in well-informed circles, as may be seen from the following passage in a letter of M. Barth, which merely expresses, in a vigorous and lively manner, an opinion which other specialists have confirmed:[22]
“It is through a letter of M. Flournoy that I learn that there has existed since 1828 in Paris, printed in Roman characters, a history of India by De Marlès containing a statement that the fortress of Candragiri was built in 1401, and that its founder was Sivrouka Nayaka. What new facts there are in books one no longer consults! And that of De Marlès is, indeed, one of those that are no longer consulted. I found it yesterday at the library of the Institute. It would have been impossible to have done worse, even in 1828. But sometimes we find pearls in a dung-hill, and perhaps this Sivrouka Nayaka is one of them. Unfortunately, the author gives no hint as to the sources of his information; and later, in his fourth volume, in which he narrates the history of the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, he does not say a word more either of Candragiri or of Sivrouka.”
Here was a terrible blow to my Hindoo existence, which poor M. de Marlès had so well established for me.
Nevertheless, the hope still lingers that his information, although not reproduced by later writers more highly esteemed, may perhaps still be correct. This is quite possible, since science has not yet spoken its last word in this department, hardly even its first, if men still more competent may be believed, beginning with M. Barth himself.
“Up to the present moment,” says he, “there is no trustworthy history of the south of the peninsula.... The Dravidian languages of India is a domain very unfamiliar to the majority of Indian scholars.... There is nothing to draw upon but some works and monographs on the aboriginal chronicles and legendary traditions; and it would be necessary to know the Dravidian languages on the one hand and Arabic on the other, to be able to examine or even consult them with profit. The only works which we are able to follow are those which undertake to make this history by epigraphic documents, but these, thus far, say nothing of Simandini, of Adèl, of Mitidja, or even of Sivrouka.”
This silence of epigraphy is certainly to be regretted; but who knows whether it will not some day enlighten us by proving De Marlès to be right—and also Leopold—by narrating to us the true story of the Hindoo princess, the Arabian monkey, and the slave Adèl! It costs nothing to hope! Already, thanks again to M. Barth, I have gained information concerning another Tchandraguiri than the one of the District of North Arcot mentioned by Vivien de Saint-Martin—i.e., a Tchandraguiri, situated in South Kanara, and in the citadel of which a hitherto unknown inscription has been discovered which must date back to the time of King Harihara II., of Vijayanagara, who reigned at the beginning of the fifteenth century.[23] Here is something approaching the somnambulistic revelations of Mlle. Smith. While awaiting their definite confirmation by new archæological discoveries, traces of Sivrouka may be sought for in the earlier works upon which De Marlès must have drawn. Unfortunately these works are not easy to find, and are inconvenient to consult. Professor Michel, of the University of Liège, has had the kindness to run through those of Buchanan[24] and of Rennell,[25] but without result.
If De Marlès did not invent Sivrouka out of whole cloth, which is hardly supposable, it was very probably in the translation of Ferishta by Dow,[26] that he found his facts. I have, unhappily, not yet been able myself to consult that very rare work, which is not to be found in Geneva, so far as I am aware, nor to obtain accurate information regarding its contents.
The uncertainty which hovers over the historical problem extends, naturally, to the psychological problem also. It is clear that if certain inscriptions, or even some old work, should come some day to tell us not only of Sivrouka, but of Simandini, of Adèl, and the other personages who figure in Hélène’s Hindoo romance, but of whom De Marlès does not whisper a word, we should no longer care about the latter author, and the question would then be as follows: Could Mlle. Smith have had cognizance of these early works, and if not, how do their contents reappear in her somnambulism? But in the actual condition of things, and all allowance made for possible surprises in the future, I do not hesitate to regard as the more probable and more rational supposition, that it was really the passage of De Marlès, quoted above, which furnished the subliminal memory of Hélène the precise date of 1401—and the three names of the fortress, the province, and the rajah.
Various other traits of the visions of Mlle. Smith betray likewise the same inspiration. The scene in which she sees them engaged in building, and her description of that which is being built, suggest clearly the idea of a fortress furnished by the text. The translation Mountain of the Moon contributed to causing her to locate the scene upon a hill. The beauty of the women of the country, on which De Marlès dwells, has its echo in the remark of Hélène that the women whom she sees are “good looking.” Finally, the princely character of Sivrouka, mentioned by De Marlès, is found throughout the length of the entire romance, and displays itself in the splendor of his costume, of the palace, of the gardens, etc.
It is possible that the names and the nationality of the other personages—Simandini, Adèl, the monkey, the sheik, etc.—may have been borrowed from some unknown work, which would be, for the Arabian portion of the narrative, the pendant to De Marlès for the Hindoo past.
This may be, but it is not necessary. It is permissible to regard, provisionally, the imaginations built up around Sivrouka, as an ingenious expedient, by means of which Hélène’s imagination finds a way of binding to that central figure, and also of blending in a single whole, her other Oriental memories not specifically Hindoo.
The hypothesis which I am about to assume, which connects directly with De Marlès the data of Hélène’s Asiatic dream, contained likewise in the work of that author, arouses, nevertheless, two objections. The first is drawn from the slight differences of orthography between the text of De Marlès and the words spoken by Leopold. This difficulty is only insurmountable by elevating the inerrancy of the subliminal memory to the plane of absolute infallibility, though the latter must be admitted to be ordinarily very much superior to that of the conscious memory. But the favorite comparison of the forgotten memories, reappearing in somnambulisms, to unchangeable, absolutely true photographic impressions, causes us readily to exaggerate the fidelity of the unconscious memory-images. The example of certain dreams—in which memories of childhood sometimes return with a startling clearness, but, nevertheless, altered or distorted in some details, conformably to later experiences or to recent events—suffices to show that automatisms of the memory are not always sheltered by influences of the imagination, nor absolutely free from error.
In this particular case there are two divergences between De Marlès and Leopold: the latter has substituted a k for the c in Nayaca, and has omitted the n in Tchandraguiri (compare pp. 286 and 288). Another mistake, which he immediately corrected, consisting in dictating first Kanaraau, was evidently a confusion such as frequently occurs in writing, occasioned by a too rapid passing from the word Kanara to the information following, and already about to come—“au fifteenth century.” The spelling Nayaka, instead of Nayaca, is attributable to the termination of the word Sivrouka, which precedes it. Identity of pronunciation has produced identity of orthography.
The second objection is of a negative character. It consists in the impossibility of showing where, when, or how Mlle. Smith obtained cognizance of the text of De Marlès.
I admit frankly that I know nothing about it, and I give full credit to Hélène for the indomitable and persevering energy with which she has never ceased to protest against my hypothesis, which has the faculty of exasperating her in the highest degree—and one readily understands that it would naturally do so. For it is in vain that she digs down to the very bottom of her memories; she does not discover the slightest trace of this work. And not only that, but how can one seriously suppose that she has ever had the slightest intimation of it, since she never studied the history of India, has neither read nor heard anything on the subject, the very name of De Marlès having been utterly unknown to her up to the day on which she learned that I suspected that author of being the source of the Hindoo romance? It must, indeed, be admitted that the idea of the passage in question having come before the eyes or ears of Mlle. Smith through any ordinary channel seems a trifle absurd. I only know in Geneva of two copies of the work of De Marlès, both covered with dust—the one belonging to the Société de Lecture, a private association of which none of the Smith family nor any friend of theirs was ever a member; the other in the Public Library, where, among the thousands of more interesting and more modern books, it is now very rarely consulted. It could only have happened, therefore, by a combination of absolutely exceptional and almost unimaginable circumstances that the work of De Marlès could have found its way into Hélène’s hands; and how could it have done so and she not have the slightest recollection of it?
I acknowledge the force of this argument, and that the wisest thing to do is to leave the matter in suspense. But if the question must be decided, though there is scarcely any choice, extravagance for extravagance, I still prefer the hypothesis which only invokes natural possibilities to that which appeals to occult causes.
Possibly the work of De Marlès may have been heard of by Mlle. Smith without her normal consciousness taking note of it. Either when among her friends or acquaintances, or with her parents, she might have heard some passages read in her young days, etc. The fact that she has no conscious recollection of it proves nothing against such a supposition to any one who is at all familiar with the play of our faculties.
It goes without saying that my method of reasoning is the inverse of that which generally prevails in spiritistic circles. Witness the celebrated Aksakoff, as a single example, who, discovering that a curious typtological message was found already in print in a book which could not readily have come to the knowledge of the medium, and recognizing the fact that the message came from that book, says: “But in what way could the brain of the medium have been made aware of the contents of the book? There is the mystery. I refuse to admit that it could have been through natural means. I believe it was by some occult process.”
Very well! this is plain language, and the frankness of the declaration charms me to such a degree that I cannot resist the temptation to appropriate it for myself in the case of Mlle. Smith and M. de Marlès, transposing only two words: “I refuse to admit that it could have been through occult means. I believe it was by some natural process.” Evidently, in doubtful cases (which are in an enormous majority), in which the natural and the occult explanations are in direct opposition, without the possibility of a material demonstration as to which is true in fact, a decision must be reached in accordance with personal taste and feeling. Between these two methodological points of view a reconciliation is scarcely possible. The reader may think what he will. But, right or wrong, I claim the first of these as my opinion, and regard the tendency of the supernatural and occult to substitute themselves, on account of the insufficiency of our knowledge, for the acquired rights of natural hypothesis, as an unjustifiable reversal of rôles.
To those who shall find my hypothesis decidedly too extravagant—or too simple—remains a choice between the multiple forms of occult hypothesis. Shall it be Leopold who, in his all-powerful state of disincarnation, has read in the closed volume of De Marlès? Or has there, indeed, been a telepathic transmission of this passage from the brain of some unknown terrestrial reader to that of Mlle. Smith? Shall it be with her a case of clairvoyance, of lucidity, of intuition in the astral body; or, again, of trickery on the part of some facetious spirit? And if, taking the reincarnationist theory seriously, it is admitted that Sivrouka, 1401, and Tchandraguiri, are indeed really reminiscences of the past life of Simandini, how explain that curious coincidence in their choice and their spelling with precisely the designations used by M. de Marlès?
Verily my brain reels in the midst of all these alternatives, and I hasten to pass to another subject.
Here is a problem for the partisans of the Oriental pre-existence of Mlle. Smith: How comes it that, recovering in her trances the use of the Hindoo which she formerly spoke at the court of Sivrouka, she has totally forgotten Arabian, which, however, had been her mother-tongue in that same previous existence, and which she was accustomed to use exclusively up to the time of her departure from her native land, in her eighteenth year?
If the emotions caused by her royal marriage had destroyed all memory of the past, one could understand how the idiom might have become obscured along with the rest in that loss of memory of her life as a young girl.
But such was not the case. She preserved very vivid memories of her father the sheik, of his tents gleaming in the sunlight, of the people, of the camels and landscapes of Arabia. In many seances and spontaneous visions she finds herself carried back to that first half of her Asiatic existence. But then she narrates in French that which is unfolded before her eyes, or gives herself up to a silent pantomime. She has never spoken or written anything at all resembling Arabian. Can it be supposed that already in her Hindoo life she had assimilated the language of her adopted country to the point of losing even the latent memories of her maternal language? That would be contrary to all known psychological analogies.
However, in saying that Hélène has never written or spoken Arabian I exaggerate. On one occasion she spoke four words of it. It is the exception which proves the rule. In fact, not only did she fail to accompany that single text with any pronunciation, but she executed it as a drawing, and apparently copied, without comprehending, a model which an imaginary person presented to her.
Here is a review of that incident:
October 27, 1895.—Shortly after the beginning of the seance Mlle. Smith has an Arabian vision: “Look at those tents! There are no stones here—it is all sand ... [she counts the tents one by one]. There are twenty of them. That one is beautiful. Don’t you find it so, M. Lemaître—that largest one? It is fastened by cords and small stakes ...“ etc. Then she describes the personages: The one who is smoking, seated in a corner, with his legs crossed; others all black (the table says they are negroes, and that the scene takes place in Arabia); then a man clothed in white, whom Hélène has the feeling of knowing without being able to recognize him; she places her finger upon her forehead, in the attitude of a person trying to remember, and the table (on which she has her left hand) informs us then that she lived in Arabia in her life as Simandini, and that she is trying to recollect those far-distant times. A quite long scene follows, in which her Arab reminiscences alternate and mingle with the consciousness of the real environment, though she neither sees nor hears us. At this point a state of mental confusion ensues, which seems to be very painful to her.
“ ... M. Lemaître! M. Flournoy! are you there? Answer me, then. Did I not come here this evening? If only I could ... however, I am not en voyage.... I really believe it is Sunday at last ... I understand nothing more about it. I think my brain is so tired that all my ideas are mixed up ... however, I am not dreaming.... It seems to me that I have also lived with them ... [the sitters at the table], and with them [the Arabs of her vision].... But I know them—all those men. Tell me, then, who you are! Did you arrive in Geneva lately? [They are, says the table, Arabs who lived five centuries ago, among them the father of Simandini.] Come nearer, then, come here. I want you to speak to me! M. Lemaître! Oh, that pretty little sketch! What is that sketch? [The table having said that it is a drawing which her father is presenting to her, and that she can copy it, a pencil and a sheet of paper are placed before her, the latter of which seems to be transformed into papyrus in her dream.] That green leaf is pretty. Of what plant is it the leaf? I think I have a pencil; I am going to try to make this sketch....”
After the usual struggle between the two methods of holding the pencil (see pp. 100-102), she yields to Leopold’s manner of holding it, saying, “So much the worse”; then traces, slowly and with great care, Fig. 35, from left to right, often raising her eyes to her imaginary model, as if copying a drawing. After which she goes profoundly asleep; then other somnambulisms come.
On awaking she recollects the state of confusion through which she had passed. “Wretched evening,” said she. “I was unhappy. I felt that I was living here, as I always have, and I saw some things as though I were a foreigner. I was with you, but I was living elsewhere,” etc.
This whole scene gives the distinct impression that the Arab phrase only existed in Hélène’s recollection as a visual memory, without meaning or any verbal images. It was for her an incomprehensible piece of writing, a simple drawing, like Chinese or Japanese characters would be for us. Evidently it was a text which had come before her eyes at some propitious moment, and, having been absorbed by the subliminal imagination—always on the watch for matters of Oriental aspect—had been incorporated in a scene of the Asiatic dream.