Phantasms of the Living and the Dead : Part 2

The Unknown Guest
by Maurice Maeterlinck

(Page 3 of 9)

As for communications with the dead, I devoted a whole chapter to these in my own essay entitled Our Eternity and will not return to them now. It will be enough to recall and recapitulate my general impression, that probably the dead did not enter into any of these conversations. We are here concerned with purely mediumistic phenomena, more curious and mere subtle than those of table-rapping, but of the same character; and these manifestations, however astonishing they may be, do not pierce the terrestrial sphere wherein we are imprisoned.

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Setting aside the religious hypotheses, which we are not examining here, for they belong to a different order of ideas, we find, as an explanation of the Majority of these phenomena, or at least as a means of avoiding an absolute and depressing silence in regard to them, two hypotheses which reach the unknown by more or less divergent paths, to wit, the spiritualistic hypothesis and the mediumistic hypothesis. The spiritualists, or rather the neospiritualists or scientific spiritualists, who must not be confused with the somewhat over-credulous disciples of Allan Kardec, maintain that the dead do not die entirely, that their spiritual or animistic entity neither departs nor disperses into space after the dissolution of the body, but continues an active though invisible existence around us. The neospiritualistic theory, however, professes only very vague notions as to the life led by these discarnate spirits. Are they more intelligent than they were when they inhabited their flesh? Do they possess a wider understanding and mightier faculties than ours? Up to the present, we have not the unimpeachable facts that would permit us to say so. It would seem, on the contrary, if the discarnate spirits really continue to exist, that their life is circumscribed, frail, precarious, incoherent and, above all, not very long.

To this the objection is raised that it only appears so to our feeble eyes. The dead among whom we move without knowing it struggle to make themselves understood, to manifest themselves, but dash themselves against the inpenetrable wall of our senses, which, created solely to perceive matter, remain hopelessly ignorant of all the rest, though this is doubtless the essential part of the universe. That which will survive in us, imprisoned in our body, is absolutely inaccessible to that which survives in them. The utmost that they can do is occasionally to cause a few glimmers of their existence to penetrate the fissures of those singular organisms known as mediums. But these vagrant, fleeting, venturous, stifled, deformed glimmers can but give us a ludicrous idea of a life which has no longer anything in common with the life - purely animal for the most part- which we lead on this earth. It is possible; and there is something to be said for the theory.

It is at any rate remarkable that certain communications, certain manifestations have shaken the scepticism of the coldest and most dispassionate men of science, men utterly hostile to supernatural influences. In order to some extent to understand their uneasiness and their astonishment, we need only read - to quote but one instance among a thousand - a disquieting but unassailable article, entitled, Dans les regions inexplorees de la biologic humaine. Observations et experiences sur Eusapia Paladino, by Professor Bottazzi, Director of the Physiological Institute of the University of Naples. Seldom have experiments in the domain of mediums or spirits been conducted with more distrustful suspicion or with more implacable scientific strictness.

Nevertheless, scattered limbs, pale, diaphanous but capable hands, suddenly appeared in the little physiological laboratory of Naples University, with its doors heavily padlocked and sealed, as it were, mathematically excluding any possibility of fraud; these same hands worked apparatus specially intended to register their touches; lastly, the outline of something black, of a head, uprose between the curtains of the mediumistic cabinet, remained visible for several seconds and did not retire until itself apparently frightened by the exclamations of surprise drawn from a group of scientists who, after all, were prepared for anything; and Professor Bottazzi confesses that it was then that, to quote his own words - measured words, as beseems a votary of science, but expressive - he felt "a shiver all through his body."

It was one of those moments in which a doubt which one had thought for ever abolished grips the most unbelieving. For the first time, perhaps, he looked around him with uncertainty and wondered in what world he was. As for the faithful adherents of the unknown, who had long understood that we must resign ourselves to understanding nothing and he prepared for every sort of surprise there was here, all the same, even for them, a mystery of another character, a bewildering mystery, the only really strange mystery, more torturing than all the others together, because it verges upon ancestral fears and touches the most sensitive point of our destiny.

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The spiritualistic argument most worthy of attention is that supplied by the apparitions of the dead and by haunted houses. We will take no account of the phantasms that precede, accompany or follow hard upon death: they are explained by the transmission of a violent motion from one subconsciousness to another; and, even when they are not manifested until several days after death, it may still he contended that they are delayed telepathic communications. But what are we to say of the ghosts that spring up more than a year, nay, more than ten years after the disappearance of the corpse? They are very rare, I know, but after all there are some that are extremely difficult to deny, for the accounts of their actions are attested and corroborated by numerous and trustworthy witnesses.

It is true that here again, where it is in most cases a question of apparitions to relations or friends, we may be told that we are in the presence of telepathic incidents or of hallucinations of the memory. We thus deprive the spiritualists of a new and considerable province of their realm. Nevertheless, they retain certain private desmesnes into which our telepathic explanations do not penetrate so easily. There have in fact been ghosts that showed themselves to people who had never known or seen them in the flesh. They are more or less closely connected with the ghosts in haunted houses, to which we must revert for a moment.

As I said above, it is almost impossible honestly to deny the existence of these houses. Here again the telepathic interpretation enforces itself in the majority of cases. We may even allow it a strange but justifiable extension, for its limits are scarcely known. It has happened fairly often, for instance, that ghosts come to disturb a dwelling whose occupiers find, in response to their indications, bones hidden in the walls or under the floors. It is even possible, as in the case of William Moir, which was as strictly conducted and supervised as a judicial enquiry, that the skeleton is buried at some distance from the house and dates more than forty years back. When the remains are removed and decently interred, the apparitions cease.

About the Author

Count Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck (August 29, 1862 - May 6, 1949) was a Belgian poet, playwright, and essayist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911. The main themes in his work are death and the meaning of life.