REINCARNATIONIST EXTRAVAGANCES
We have said that the idea of reincarnation has contributed greatly to the mental disorder of our time, and we will now demonstrate this by citing examples of the extravagances it has occasioned. Given all the metaphysical considerations we have outlined, we think this will be a rather amusing diversion. To tell the truth, there is something fundamentally sad in the spectacle of all these follies, although occasionally it is difficult to keep from smiling. In this connection, what we most frequently observe in spiritist circles is a special kind of megalomania: almost all these people imagine that they are the reincarnation of some illustrious figure. Judging by the names attached to the 'communications', great men manifest themselves much more willingly than others; we must believe that they also reincarnate more often, even in multiples and simultaneously. In sum, all this differs from ordinary megalomania in one point only: instead of believing themselves grand personages of the present, the spiritists locate their sickly dreams in the past. We speak of spiritists because they are the more numerous, but it is the same with Theosophists, who are no less tainted (elsewhere we have seen Mr Leadbeater giving grave assurances that Col Olcott was the reincarnation of the kings Gushtasp and Ashoka). [1] There are also those among whom this same dream is transformed into a future hope, and this is perhaps why they find reincarnation so 'consoling'. In the teachings of the 'H B of L', some of which we reproduced in the
previous chapter, allusion is made to men who declare that 'those who have led a noble and worthy life befitting a king (even if this was in the body of a beggar) in their last earthly existence, will live again as nobles, kings, or other personages of high rank,' and it is appropriately added that such statements prove that their authors are inspired only by sentimentality, and are lacking in knowledge.
The anti-reincarnationist spiritists of the Anglo-Saxon countries do not hesitate to make fun of these wild imaginings. Dunglas Home wrote:
Those who share Allan Kardec's daydreams are recruited especially from the bourgeoisie. It is their consolation-these brave men who are nothing-to believe that they have been some great person before their birth and that they will again be someone important after their death. [2]
And elsewhere:
Apart from the revolting confusion to which this doctrine logically leads (in family and social relationships), there are material impossibilities to be taken into account, no matter how enthusiastic one may be. A lady may believe as much as she likes that she was the companion of an emperor or a king in a previous existence; but how to reconcile these things if we encounter, as often happens, a good half dozen ladies, equally convinced, each of whom claims to have been the very dear spouse of the same august personage? For my part, I have had the honor of meeting at least a dozen Marie Antoinettes, six or seven Mary Stuarts, a multitude of Saint Louises, and twenty or so Alexander the Greats and Caesars, but never a simple Tom, Dick, or Harry. [3]
On the other hand there are also proponents of reincarnation, especially among occultists, who believe they should protest against what they regard as 'exaggerations' that might compromise their cause. Thus Papus wrote:
In certain spiritist circles one meets certain poor wretches who coolly pretend that they are a reincarnation of Molière, or Racine, or Richelieu, not to speak of the ancient poets Orpheus and Homer. At the moment we cannot discuss whether these assertions have a solid basis or whether they stem from the realm of incipient mental illness. But let us recall that Pythagoras, reciting his previous incarnations, did not boast of having been a great man; [4] and we note that presenting a Richelieu who has lost all trace of genius and a Victor Hugo writing fourteen-meter verse after his death is a singular way of defending the unending progress of souls in the infinite [the theory of the spiritists]. Serious and educated spiritists, and there are more than one might believe, should take care that such things do not happen. [5]
And further on he says:
Exaggerating this doctrine, some spiritists give themselves out as reincarnations of all the great and famous men. A stolid worker is the reincarnation of Voltaire . . . but without Voltaire's wit. A retired captain is Napoleon come back from St Helena, though having since lost the knack of success. Finally, there is no group where Marie de Medici, Mme de Maintenon, or Mary Stuart have not returned in the bodies of good middle-class and often rich women, or where Turenne, Condé, Richelieu, Mazarin, Molière, Jean-Jacques Rousseau do not direct some little séance. This is the danger, this is the real cause of the stagnant state of spiritism for the last fifty years; there is no need to search for any other reason than this, added to the ignorance and sectarianism of the group leaders. [6]
In another and more recent work he returns to the same subject:
The human being who becomes aware of this mystery of reincarnation immediately imagines the person whom he must have been; he finds as if by chance that this personage was always a
man of earthly significance and of high position. In spiritist or Theosophist meetings one sees very few assassins, drunkards, grocers, or valets (professions on the whole quite honorable) reincarnated. It is always Napoleon, a great princess, Louis XIV, Frederick the Great, or some celebrated Pharaoh, who are reincarnated in the skin of some worthy men who come to fancy themselves as having been the great persons whom they imagine. For the said great personages this would already be a rather strong punishment, to have come back to earth in such conditions. . . . Pride is the great stumbling-block of many advocates of the doctrine of reincarnation; pride often plays a role as harmful as it is elevated. If one reserves the great personalities of history for one's own reincarnations, it must be recognized that the adepts of this doctrine keep the assassins, the great criminals, and often the much-maligned, for the reincarnations of their enemies. [7]
And here is what Papus has found to remedy the evil he has thus denounced:
One may have the intuition that one has lived in such and such a time, that one has been in such and such a setting; one may have a revelation through the world of the spirits that one was a great lady, a contemporary of the great philosopher Abelard who was so unappreciated by his crude contemporaries, but one cannot be so certain of this as one is of having lived on the earth. [8]
The great lady in question may not necessarily have been Heloise, therefore, and if one believes oneself to have been such and such a celebrity, it is simply because one may have lived in that person's entourage, perhaps as a domestic servant. Papus evidently thinks these considerations may rein in the ravings brought on by pride, but we doubt that the spiritists will be so easily persuaded that they must renounce their illusions. Unfortunately, too, there are other kinds of maunderings that are scarcely less pitiful. The quite relative
prudence and wisdom Papus displays does not prevent him from writing in the following vein himself:
Christ has an apartment [sic] encompassing thousands of spirits. Every time a spirit from Christ's apartment is reincarnated, he obeys the following law while on earth: (i) he is the oldest of his family; (ii) his father is always named Joseph; (iii) his mother is always named Mary, or a name which numerically corresponds to these names in other languages. Finally, there are planetary aspects in the birth of spirits coming from the apartment of Christ (and we do not say of Christ himself) though it would be needless to reveal them here. [9]
We know perfectly well who is alluded to here and we could recount the entire story of this so-called 'Master' who is said to be 'the oldest spirit of the planet', and the chief of the Twelve who passed through the Gate of the Sun two years after the middle of the century. Those who refuse to acknowledge this 'Master' risk a 'delay in evolution' in the form of a penalty of thirty-three supplementary incarnations, neither more nor less!
Nevertheless, in writing the lines which we have just cited, Papus was still convinced that he could contribute thereby to the moderation of certain excessive conceits, for he added: 'Unaware of all that, a crowd of visionaries claim that they are the reincarnation of Christ on this earth . . . and the list is endless.' This prediction was only too well vindicated; elsewhere we have told the story of Theosophical messiahs, and there are many others in similar circles. But the messianism of the 'neo-spiritualists' can be clad in the most bizarre and diverse forms, even apart from these 'reincarnations of Christ' of which one of the prototypes was the pastor Guillaume Monod. In this regard it does not seem that the theory of the 'spirits of the apartment of Christ' is much more extravagant than the others. We know too well the deplorable role it played in the occultist school of France, and continues to play in the various groups which today represent the remnants of French occultism. On the other hand, there is a clairvoyant spiritist, Mlle Marguerite Wolff (we can name
her, since the case has been made public), who recently received from her 'guide' the mission of announcing 'the forthcoming reincarnation of Christ in France.' She believes herself to be the reincarnation of Catherine de Medici (not to speak of several hundred other previous existences on earth and elsewhere, of which she would have regained more or less precise memories). She has published a list of more than two hundred 'celebrated reincarnations', in which she has revealed 'what the great men of today once were'; this too is a quite remarkable pathological case. [10] There are also spiritists who have messianic conceptions of quite a different kind: we recently read in a foreign spiritist journal (we were unable to find the exact reference) an article in which the author very correctly criticized those who in announcing the imminent 'second coming' of Christ present it as a reincarnation; but he did so only to declare subsequently that if he was unable to admit such a thesis, it was only because the return of Christ was already a fait accompli... by spiritism, that is. 'He has already come, since in certain centers his communications are being recorded.' Truly, one must have a robust faith to believe that Christ and his Apostles manifest themselves in spiritist séances and speak through mediums, especially when one has sampled the quality of the innumerable 'communications' attributed to them. [11] Elsewhere, in some American circles there were 'messages' in which Apollonius of Tyana, supported by various 'witnesses', declared that he himself was simultaneously 'the Jesus and Saint Paul of the Christian Scriptures,' and perhaps Saint John as well, and that he preached Gospels of which the originals had been
given him by the Buddhists; several of these 'messages' can be found at the end of Henri Lacroix's book. [12] Apart from spiritism, there was also an Anglo-American secret society which taught the identity of St Paul and Apollonius, claiming that the proof can be found 'in a small manuscript now kept in a monastery in the South of France.' There are many reasons for thinking the said source is purely imaginary, but the agreement of this story with the spiritist 'communications' just mentioned renders these 'communications' extremely suspect, for it suggests something more than the product of the 'subconscious of two or three deranged individuals. [13]
Papus provides other stories of almost the same merit as the 'spirits of the apartment of Christ'; we offer this example:
Just as there are comets which come to bring strength to a weary sun and which circulate between various solar systems, there are also cyclic envoys who come at certain periods to stir up a humanity made numb by pleasure or rendered weak by a too prolonged quietude. . . . Among these cyclic reincarnations, which always come from the same apartment of the invisible even if they are not of the same spirit, we will cite the reincarnation which has so much struck historians: Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon. Each time a spirit of this plane returns, he brusquely transforms all the laws of war. Regardless of which people may be at his disposal, he dynamizes them into an instrument of conquest against whom struggle is vain. . . . The next time he comes this spirit will find the means of preventing the death in combat of more than two thirds of his troops by the creation of a defensive system which will revolutionize the laws of warfare. [14]
The date of this next visit is not indicated, even approximately, which is too bad, although Papus should perhaps be praised for his prudence; for every time he involves himself in even slightly specific prophecies, by incredible bad luck events never fail to give him the lie. But here is another 'apartment' with which he acquaints us:
Again it is France [he was speaking of Napoleon] which had the great honor of several times incarnating a celestial envoy from the apartment of the Virgin of Light, linking feminine weakness with the strength of the incarnated angel. St Geneviève formed the nucleus of the French nation. Joan of Arc saved this nation at the moment when, logically, there was nothing more that could be done. [15]
And on the subject of Joan of Arc one must not let slip the opportunity for a brief anticlerical and democratic aside:
The Roman Church is herself hostile to every celestial envoy, and it took the strong voice of the people to overturn the sentence of the ecclesiastical judges, who, blinded by politics, had martyred the envoy of Heaven. [16]
If Papus had Joan of Arc coming from the 'apartment' of the Virgin of Light, there was at one time in France a fundamentally spiritist sect calling itself 'Essenian' (this name has been very successful in all the milieux of this kind) which regarded her as the 'feminine Messiah', the equal of Christ himself, and finally as the 'celestial Comforter' and 'spirit of Truth' announced by Jesus; [17] and it seems that some spiritists have gone so far as to consider her a reincarnation of Christ himself. [18]
But let us move on to another kind of extravagance which the idea of reincarnation has occasioned. We mean the relationships which spiritists and occultists believe exist between successive existences. For them, in fact, actions accomplished in the course of one life must have their consequences in following lives. This is a causality of a most particular kind. More precisely, it is the idea of moral sanction, but which instead of being applied to an extra-terrestrial 'future life', as in religious conceptions, is applied to terrestrial lives in virtue of the assertion, which is contestable to say the least, that actions accomplished on earth must have their effects exclusively on earth. The 'Master' to whom we have alluded taught expressly that it is in the world where one has incurred debts that one must pay them.' The Theosophists have given to this 'ethical causality' the name karma-which is completely inappropriate, as the meaning of this word in Sanskrit is nothing other than 'action'. In other schools, if the word is not current (although despite their hostility toward the Theosophists, French occultists use it freely), the idea is fundamentally the same, the variations concerning only secondary points. When it is a matter of precisely indicating the consequences of such and such specific action, the Theosophists are generally rather reserved; but the spiritists and occultists seem to compete with one another in providing the most minute and ridiculous details. For example, if some are to be believed, a person who behaves badly toward his father will be reborn lame in his right leg; or if toward his mother, the lameness will be in his left leg, and so on. There are others who blame accidents incurred in previous lives for infirmities of this kind. We knew an occultist who was lame and who firmly believed that this was because in his previous life he had broken his leg when jumping from a window to escape the Inquisition. There is no telling how far dangers of this kind of thing can go. Especially in occultist circles, one learns daily of someone who of old had committed such and such a crime for which he must expect to pay in this present life. Additionally, he must do nothing to escape the punishment which sooner or later will come to him, and which will be so much the more serious as the quittance has been the more delayed. Under the shadow of such a suggestion the unfortunate individual will truly rush to accept the so-called punishment and
even try to provoke it. If it is a question of an act that depends upon his will, the most absurd things will not give pause to one who has reached this degree of credulity and fanaticism. The 'Master' (still the same) had persuaded one of his disciples that, because of who knows what action committed in another incarnation, he must marry a woman whose left leg had been amputated. The disciple (who, moreover, was an engineer and therefore a man with a certain degree of intelligence and education) placed announcements in various journals in order to locate a woman meeting the requisite conditions and eventually found her. This is only one act among many similar ones, and we mention it only because it is so characteristic of the mentality of the people involved; but there are others which may yield more tragic results. We knew another occultist who, desiring nothing so much as an accidental death that would liberate him from a burdensome karma, had quite simply decided not to avoid automobiles that crossed his path; if he did not go so far as to throw himself under their wheels it was only because his death had to be accidental and not suicidal, which latter, instead of freeing him from his karma, would only have aggravated it. Do not suppose that we exaggerate in the least; these things are not inventions, and the very puerility of certain details only serves as a guarantee of authenticity. We could if needed give the names of various persons who underwent these adventures. One can only pity those who are victims of such suggestions, but what is one to think of those who are responsible for them? If they are guilty of dishonesty, surely they should be denounced as real evil-doers. If they are sincere, which is possible in many cases, they should be treated as dangerous fools.
When these things remain simple theories they are only grotesque; such is the well-known example (among spiritists) of the victim who sought vengeance against his murderer even into another existence. The formerly assassinated becomes the assassin in his turn; and the murderer becomes the victim avenging himself in yet another existence. Another example of the same kind is that of the coachman who crushes a pedestrian; as punishment-for the posthumous justice of the spiritists extends even to involuntary manslaughter-this coachman-become-pedestrian will in his next life be crushed by the pedestrian-become-coachman. But logically
the latter, whose act does not differ from that of the former, must subsequently undergo the same punishment-always because of his victim, so that these two unfortunate individuals will be obliged to run over one another alternately until the end of time, for there is obviously no reason for this to come to an end. One would like to know what Gabriel Delanne thinks of this reasoning. On this point, too, there are other 'neo-spiritualists' who concede nothing to the spiritists, and we have heard an occultist with mystical tendencies tell the following story as an example of the frightful consequences that may follow on acts generally considered indifferent: a schoolboy amuses himself by breaking a pen and then throwing it away. 'Through all transformations to which they are subject, the molecules of metal retain the memory of the boy's malicious act. Finally, after several centuries, these molecules pass into some machine and one day an accident occurs and a worker dies, crushed by the machine. Now it happens that this worker was precisely the schoolboy in question, reincarnated so that he might undergo the punishment of his previous act. It would certainly be difficult to imagine anything more outlandish than these fantastic stories which suffice to give an accurate notion of the mentality of those who invent them, and especially of those who believe them.
In these accounts it is, as we see, most often a question of punishments, which may seem rather astonishing on the part of men who boast of having a doctrine that is above all else 'consoling'; but this is doubtless what is most likely to capture the imagination. For as we have said, one hopes for future recompense; but as to knowing what in the present life is recompense for this or that good particular action accomplished in the past, this, it seems, has the drawback of provoking sentiments of pride. But this may be less fateful, after all, than terrorizing poor men with 'payment' of their imaginary 'debts'. Let us add that sometimes more inoffensive consequences are envisaged; thus Papus assures us that 'it is rare that a spiritual being reincarnated on earth is not led by apparently fortuitous circumstances to speak the language of the land of his last incarnation as well as his present language'; [19] and he adds that 'this is an
observation which it would be interesting to monitor,' but unfortunately forgets to give the means by which this might be done. Since we are citing Papus again, let us not neglect to add (for it is a curiosity worth noting) that he taught, though we believe he never dared write it down, that sometimes one might be reincarnated before dying. He recognized that this would be an exceptional case, but he at last offered the description of a grandfather and his grandson having one and the same spirit, which was incarnated progressively in the child (the theory of the occultists is that an incarnation is complete only after seven years) in the same proportion that the old man weakened. Moreover, the idea that one can be reincarnated in one's own descendants was particularly dear to him because from his point of view he saw therein a means of justifying the words by which 'Christ proclaimed that sin may be punished unto the seventh generation. [20] The conception of what may be called an 'hereditary responsibility' seems to have escaped him entirely, although it is a fact which is incontestable even physiologically. Once the human individual takes from his parents certain corporeal and psychic elements, he prolongs their life, at least partially, under this double relationship; and by this double connection he is truly something of his parents even while being himself, so that the consequences of their actions may in this way be extended even to him. These things may at least be expressed in this way, ridding them of any specifically moral character. Inversely, it can be said that the child, and even all descendants, are potentially included, from the beginning, in the individualities of the parents, always in the double corporeal and psychic relationship; that is to say, not in what concerns the properly spiritual and personal being, but in what concerns the human individual as such. And thus the descendants can be regarded as having in a way participated in the actions of the parents without the former actually existing in the parents' individuality. We have indicated, then, the two complementary aspects of the question and will not linger further over it, although this
perhaps will be enough for some readers to catch a glimpse of all that may be of interest in this connection regarding the doctrine of original sin.
Spiritists, precisely, protest against this idea of original sin, first because it shocks their special sense of justice, and also because it has consequences contrary to their 'progressive' theory of original sin. Allan Kardec did not want to see in original sin anything more than an expression of the fact that 'man has come to this earth bearing in himself the seed of his passions and the traces of his original inferiority, so that for him 'original sin stands for the still imperfect nature of man who is thus responsible only for his own faults and not for those of his fathers.' Such at least is the teaching he attributes to the 'spirit' of Saint Louis. [21] Léon Denis expresses himself in terms both more precise and more violent:
Original sin is the fundamental dogma on which the entire structure of Christian doctrine rests. The idea is fundamentally true, but false in form and denatured by the Church. It is true in the sense that man suffers from his intuition that he retains the faults committed in his previous lives and from the consequences that they entail for him. But this suffering is personal and merited. No one is responsible for the faults of another unless he has participated in them. Presented in its dogmatic aspect, original sin, which punishes all the posterity of Adam, that is to say humanity in its entirety, for the disobedience of the first couple, only to be saved subsequently by an even greater inequity-the immolation of a just man-is an outrage to reason and to morality in their essential principles, namely kindness and justice. . . . [Original sin] has done more to distance man from belief in God than all the attacks and all the criticisms of philosophy. [22]
One might ask the author if from his perspective the transmission of hereditary disease is not equally an outrage to reason and morality, which nevertheless does not prevent this transmission from
being both frequent and real; [23] or one might ask also whether justice understood in the human sense (and it is thus that he understands it, his conception of God being quite anthropomorphic and 'anthropopathetic') can consist in nothing but 'compensating an injustice by another injustice,' as the Chinese say. But fundamentally, declamations of this kind do not merit the least discussion. What is of more interest here is to call attention to a technique customary with spiritists, which consists in claiming that the dogmas of the Church, as also the various doctrines of antiquity, are a deformation of their own theories; only they forget that these latter are quite modern inventions, a failing they have in common with the Theosophists, who present their doctrine as the 'source of all religions'. Has not Léon Denis formally declared that 'at their origin all religions rest on spiritist facts and have no other origin but spiritism'? [24] In the present case, the opinion of spiritists is that original sin is a figure for faults committed in previous lives, a figure the true sense of which obviously can be understood only by those who, like them, believe in reincarnation. It is unfortunate for the soundness of their thesis that Allan Kardec happens to come along a little after Moses!
Occultist interpretations of original sin and the fall of man are at least more subtle, if not better founded. And there is one that we must point out because it is directly connected to the theory of reincarnation. This explanation is the personal creation of a French occultist, a stranger to Papus' school, who claims for himself alone the qualification of 'Christian occultist' (even though others claim to be Christian, unless they prefer to call themselves 'Christics'). One of his unique characteristics is that on every occasion he mocks the triple and septuple senses of the esoterists and the kabbalists and he wishes to abide by the literal interpretation of Scripturealthough this does not prevent him from accommodating this inter-
pretation to his personal ideas, as will be seen. In order to understand his theory it is necessary to know that this occultist favors the geocentric system, in the sense that he regards the earth as the center of the Universe-if not materially, at least by a certain privilege pertaining to its inhabitants. [25] For him the earth is the only world where there could be human beings because the conditions of life on other planets or in other systems are too different from those of the earth for man to adapt to them. From this it obviously results that by 'man' he understands exclusively a physical individual endowed with the five senses familiar to us plus their corresponding faculties, and with all the organs necessary to the various functions of human terrestrial life. Consequently, human beings can reincarnate only on this earth since there is no other place in the Universe where they could possibly live (it goes without saying that freedom from the spatial condition cannot be in question in all this). Moreover, humans always remain humans in their reincarnations; he even adds that a change of sex is impossible. At the beginning, man, 'leaving the hands of the Creator [in these remarks the most anthropomorphic expressions must be taken literally and not as the symbols which they really are], was placed on the earth to cultivate his garden,' that is to say to develop physical matter, presumed to have been more subtle than that today. [26] By 'man' must be understood the human collectivity in its entirety, the totality of the human race regarded as the sum of all individuals (note the confusion between species and collectivity, which is also quite common among modern philosophers), so that 'all men', without exception and in number unknown (but assuredly very great), were at first incarnated simultaneously on the earth. This is not the view of other occultist schools, which often speak of the 'differences in age of human spirits' (especially those that have had the privilege of knowing the 'the oldest spirit of the planet'), and even of the means of determining these age differences, principally by the examination of 'planetary
aspects' of the horoscope-but enough. In the conditions we have just described there could be no human birth, for there would be no man who was unincarnate; and it would be thus as long as man did not die, that is to say until the Fall in which all would personally participate (this is the essential point of the theory) and which is considered as 'representing a series of events which had to take place over a period of several centuries,' although quite prudently no mention is made of the nature of these events. After the Fall, physical matter became more gross, its properties were modified, and it was subject to corruption; mankind, imprisoned in this matter, began to die, to be 'disincarnated'. Then, likewise, they began to be born because 'disincarnate' man, remaining 'in space' (one sees how great is the influence of spiritism in all this), or in the 'invisible atmosphere' of the earth, tends to reincarnate, to assume again the physical life of the earth in new human bodies, that is to say to return to their normal condition. According to this conception, then, it is always the same human beings who must reincarnate periodically from the beginning to the end of terrestrial humanity (if it is conceded that terrestrial humanity has an end, for there are also schools which hold that the end to be attained is to regain corporeal or 'physical immortality' and that each individual who composes this 'physical immortality' will be reincarnated on earth until this aim has finally been achieved). Certainly, all this reasoning is quite simple and perfectly logical if the starting-point is admitted, and especially if it be admitted that is impossible for the human being to exist in modalities other than the terrestrial and corporeal, which in no way whatsoever is reconcilable with the most elementary notions of metaphysics. It nevertheless appears, at least according to its author, that this is the strongest argument that can be adduced in support of the hypothesis of reincarnation! [27]
We can draw to a halt here, for we cannot begin to exhaust the list of these oddities. But we have said enough to show how disquieting the spread of the reincarnationist idea is for the mental state of our
contemporaries. One must not be surprised that we have taken some of our examples from outside spiritism, because it is from spiritism that this idea has been borrowed by all the other schools that teach it. This strange folly redounds, at least indirectly, to spiritism. Finally, we excuse ourselves for not mentioning names in the preceding. We do not want to engage in polemics, and if one can cite without objection all that an author has published under his own signature or even under a pseudonym, the case is a little different when unwritten materials are in question. Nevertheless, if we feel obliged some day to provide greater detail, we will not hesitate to do so in the interests of the truth; and circumstances alone will determine our conduct in this regard.