14. Transmutationsb

Many persons will believe that they are dreaming when they read such things as these, and may ask whether we are really awake ourselves; but we need only request men of science to reflect upon the phenomena of gestation and upon the influence of the imagination of women on the form of their offspring. A woman who had been present at the execution of a man who was broken on the wheel gave birth to a child with all its limbs shattered. Let anyone tell us how the impression produced upon the soul of the mother by a horrible spectacle could so have reacted on the child, and we will explain in turn why blows received in dreams can bruise and even wound grievously the body of him who receives them in imagination, above all when that body is suffering and subjected to nervous and magnetic influences. To such phenomena and to the occult laws which govern them must be referred the effects of bewitchment, of which we shall speak hereafter. Diabolical obsessions, and the majority of nervous diseases which affect the brain, are wounds inflicted on the nervous mechanism by perverted Astral Light, meaning that which is absorbed or projected in abnormal proportions. All extraordinary and extra-natural tensions of will predispose to obsessions and nervous diseases; enforced celibacy, asceticism, hatred, ambition, rejected love, are so many generative principles of infernal forms and influences. Paracelsus says that the menstruations of women beget phantoms in the air, and from this standpoint convents would be seminaries for nightmares, while the devils might be compared to those heads of the hydra of Lerna which were reproduced eternally and propagated in the very blood from their wounds. The phenomena of possession amongst the Ursulines of Loudun, so fatal to Urban Grandier, have been misconstrued. The nuns in reality were possessed by hysteria and fanatical imitation of the secret thoughts of their exorcists, these being transmitted to their nervous system by the Astral Light. They experienced an impression of all the hatreds which this unfortunate priest had conjured up against him, and such wholly interior communication seemed diabolical and miraculous to themselves. Hence in this tragical affair everyone acted sincerely, even to Laubardemont, who, in his blind execution of the prejudged verdicts of Cardinal Richelieu, believed that he was fulfilling the duties of a true judge, and as little suspected himself of being a follower of Pontius Pilate as he would have recognized in the sceptical and libertine cure of Saint-Pierre-du-March a disciple and martyr of Christ. The possession of the nuns of Louvier is scarcely more than a copy of those of Loudun: devils invent little and plagiarize one another. The process of Gaufridi and Magdalen de la Palud possesses stranger features, for in this case the victims were their own accusers. Gaufridi confessed that he was guilty of depriving a number of women of the power to defend themselves against his seductions by simply breathing in their nostrils. A young and beautiful girl, of noble family, who had been thus insufflated, described in the greatest detail scenes wherein lubricity seemed to vie with the monstrous and grotesque. Such are the ordinary hallucinations of false mysticism and infringed celibacy. Gaufridi and his mistress were obsessed by their mutual chimeras, and the brain of the one reflected the nightmares of the other. Was not the Marquis de Sade himself infectious for certain depleted and diseased natures? The scandalous trial of Father Girard is a fresh proof of the deliriums of mysticism and the singular nervous affections which it may entail. The trances of la Cadiere, her ecstasies, her stigmata, were all as real as the insensate and perhaps involuntary debauchery of her director.