Conversations

W ith Eternity
> S JiI■■KS9IHESMr-i
The Forgotten masterpiece
of victor Hugo

TRANSLATED WITH A COMMENTARY BY

JOHN CHAMBERS
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
MARTIN EBON
 Marine-Terrace, Saint-Hélier, Jersey, Sept. 29, 1854.
‘Death’ speaks to Victor Hugo through the tables:

“May your posthumous work be still a living thing, so that, at

certain intervals, it will be able to talk to posterity and tell it un­
known things which will have had time to ripen in the grave. What is
impossible today is necessary tomorrow. In your Last Will and Testa­
ment, space out your posthumous works, one every ten years, one
every five years. Can you not see the greatness of a tomb which, from
time to time, in periods of human crisis, when some shadow passes
over progress, when clouds blot out the ideal, suddenly opens its lips
of stone and speaks?
“Christ was resurrected only once; you can fill your grave with
resurrections; you can, if my advice seems good to you, have an ex­
traordinary death; you would say while dying: You will awaken me in
1920; you will awaken me in 1940; you will awaken me in 1960; you
will awaken me in 1980; you will awaken me in the year 2000.”
 Original transcriptpage, in the handwriting of Victor Hugo,
from a turning table seance held at Marine-Terrace, Jersey
island Named as presentare Victor Hugo, Mme. Adèle Hugo,
their daughter, Adèle, and Auguste Vacquerie. Date unknown,
probably autumn, 1853. Discovered only recently, this page is
not included in the edition ofthe transcripts in Volume IX of
The Complete Works ofVictor Hugo, ed Jean Massin, Le Club
Franjáis du Livre, Paris, 1967-1969. Reproduced with the kind
permission ofFrédéric Castaing Autographes et Documents
Historiques, 13 rue Chapón 75003, Paris, France.

Ofus four, who has the most

De nous quatre, qui est ce qui a
fluid?
le plus de fluide?
Adèle
Adèle mother or daughter? Daughter
la mère ou la filie? la filie
Aflerher? Auguste
AprèseUe? Auguste Afierhim? Victor
Après lui? Victor Who are you? You are a red
Qui es tu? Tu es un rouge I hold France in contempt
Je méprise la France Continue. Knock down walls.
Continue. A battre murs Your name? Deliverance.
Ton nom? La délivrance. 'Deliverance is an abstraction.
C’est une abstraction la What's your name?
déUvrance mais ton nom? Faith.
La foi. Give us other synonyms for
Donne-nous d’autres synonymes yourself.
de toi. - [Erasure in the form ofan X
- [Rature en forme dXsurmonté with a Christian cross on top.]
dune croix chrétienne] Homme, Man, for shame, you are a rare
fi tu es un sujet rare. subject.
Quentends-tu par sujet rare? What do you mean by rare
Dou es-tu sorti corromps subject?
Toujours ton nom? From whence did you emerge
La femme de la multitude. corrupt?
Were still askingfor your
name?
The woman ofthe multitude.

See Verso
CONVERSATIONS
WITH
ETERNITY
THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF
VICTOR HUGO

translated with a commentary by

JOHN CHAMBERS

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
MARTIN EBON

BOCA RATON

N I W
PARADIGM
De X )|<s
1998
 1

CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

N I- W
PARADIGM This book is dedicated to the memory of myfather-in-law
BOOKS
Morris “Mike” Tampoll
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The New Paradigm Books Web Site address is:
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CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY:

THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO
Copyright © 1998 by New Paradigm Books
Translation © 1998 by John Chambers
Cover design and illustrations by Knockout Design
Map Created by Peri Poloni

The publisher wishes to thank the Bibliothèque Nationale of París for permission
to reproduce artists renderings of seven channeled drawings communicated to
Victor Hugo and now in the possession of the Bibliothèque Nationale. It wishes
to thank Alfred A. Knopf, the publisher, for permission to reprint selected passages
from The Changing Light at Sandover\>y James Merrill, Copyright © 1980, 1982
by James Merrill; to thank Beyond Words, the publisher, for permission to reprint
selected passages from Songs oftheArcturians by Patricia Pereira, Copyright ©
1996 by Patricia L. Pereira; and to thank New Solutions, the publisher, for
permission to reprint selected passages from Bashar: Blueprintfor Change. A
Messagefrom Our Future by Darryl Anka, Bashar material Copyright © by Darryl
Anka, compilation, Bashar: Blueprintfor Change, Copyright © 1990 by Luana
Ewing.

All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof,

may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

First New Paradigm Books Quality Paperback Edition: November 1998

New Paradigm Books ISBN No. 1-8921138-01-8
Library of Congress Preassigned Catalog No. 98-065689

1098765432 1

i
 THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO
CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY
Chapter Twelve: THE LION OF ANDROCLES 122
CONTENTS
Chapter Thirteen: ROARINGS OF OCEAN AND COMET 133
Dramatis Personae in the Spirit World iv
Map: What the Turning Tables Told v Chapter Fourteen: VOYAGE TO THE PLANET MERCURY 144
What the Turning Tables Drew (I) 140
What the Turning Tables Drew (II) 150 Chapter Fifteen: CH ANNELING GAIA AND METAGAIA 157

Introduction: VICTOR THE GRANDIOSE Chapter Sixteen: “...YOU WILL AWAKEN ME

by Martin Ebon 1 IN THE YEAR 2000...” 168

Chapter One: LÉOPOLDINE BECKONS 18

Chapter Seventeen: PUNITARY PLANETS AND
WORLDS OF REWARD 184
Chapter Two: JOURNEYS TO THE AFTERWORLD 29
Chapter Eighteen: GALILEO ON THE UNEXPLAINABLE 194
Chapter Three: HANNIBAL STORMS
THE TURNING TABLES 38 Chapter Nineteen: JOSHUA ON QUANTUM HOLOGRAPHY 210

Chapter Four: GOD’S CONVICT 44 Chapter Twenty: FOUR RELIGIONS OF MANKIND:

MOHAMMED ON ISLAM; JESUS CHRIST ON
Chapter Five: ANDRE CHENIER LOSES HIS HEAD BUT DRUIDISM, CHRISTIANITY AND REVOLUTION 221
ENDS UP KEEPING IT 52
Chapter Twenty-One: “I LOVE THE SPIDER AND I LOVE
Chapter Six: METEMPSYCHOSIS SPEAKS 59 THE NETTLE”: VICTOR HUGO’S
FIFTH RELIGION OF MANKIND 235
Chapter Seven: THE COSTUME BOX 67
« Chapter Twenty-Two: MADMAN OR ARCHAIC MAN? 245
Chapter Eight: ENG. LIT. 1000: SHAKESPEARE HOLDS
FORTH AND BYRON AND SIR WALTER Postscript 252
SCOTT NOD DISTANTLY 76
The Authors 253
Chapter Nine: THE HAUNTING OF VICTOR HUGO 84
WORKS CONSULTED 254
Chapter Ten: DOES GOD EXIST? 102
INDEX 256
Chapter Eleven: THE SECRET WORLD OF ANIMALS 110

iii
 What the turning tables told
* THE
WORLDS OF
THE NON-LIVING DRAMATIS PERSONAE (HISTORICAL AND REWARD
ABSTRACT) OF THE CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY: The Names
of the Spirits who Spoke through the Turning Tables, in Alphabetical
THE
Order and with the Number of Appearances. PUNITARY
WORLDS
OV
Abel(l) Finger of Death, The (1) Napoleon I (The Great) (1)
Aeschylus (4) Flamel, Nicholas (1) Napoleon III (Louis
Aesop (1) Galileo (2) Bonaparte) (1)
Alexander (1) Glory (1) Novel, The (3)
Amelia (a fairy) (1) Grim Gatekeeper, The (1) Ocean, The (2)
Amuca (Babac) (1) Hannibal (1) Plato (1)
Anacreon (1) Happiness (1) Poetry (1)
Andre (Pinson’s Brother) (1) Haynau (1) Prayer(1)
Apuleus (1) Idea, The (6) Racine (1)
Archangel Love, The (1) India (1) Raphael (1)
Aristophanes (1) Inspiration (1) Reverie (1)
Aristotle (1) Iron Mask, The (1) Robespierre (1)
Ass of Balaam, The (1) Isaac Laquedem (1) Roothan (1)
Being Speaking Latin (1) Isaiah (1) Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (2)
Being, A (1) Jacob (1) Russia (1)
Bonnivard (1) Jesus Christ (6) Sappho (1)
Byron (1) Joan of Arc (1) Sesostris (1)
Cagliostro (1) Joshua (3) Shadow of the Sepulcher, The (9)
Cain (1) Judas (1) Shakespeare (11)
Cerpola the Shepherd (1) Lady in White, The (3) Sister Soul (Arne Soror) (1)
Cesarion (1) Lais (1) Socrates (2)
Charlet (1) Latude (1) Spirits, Assorted (7)
Chateaubriand (1) Leonidas (1) Table draws a series of pictures (2)
Chenier, Andre (7) Lion of Androcles, The (18) Tragedy (1) GUERNSEY
Cimarosa (1) Lion of Florence, The (1) Tyatafia (from Jupiter) (1)
Civilization (1) Lope de Vega (1) Tertius (1) ^ANNEL
Comedy (1) Louis-Philippe (1) Vestra (1) saintJ-hélier
Comet, A (1) Luther(2) Vestris (1)
SlANDS
Corday, Charlotte (1) Machiavelli (1) Voltaire (2) JERSEY
Criticism (2) Marat (1) Vulcan (1)
Damianiels (1) Marie-Blanche (1) Vux(l)
Dante (1) Metempsychosis (1) Walter Scott, Sir (1)
Death (7) Mohammed (1) White Wing, The(l)
Delorme, Marion (1) Molière (11) Wind of the Sea, The (1) !fiE Many worlds of
Diderot(1) Moses (1) Z(2)
Diogenes (1) Mother, Durrieu’s (1) Zoile (1)
VICTOR HUGO
As o ~
Drama, The (16) Mozart (3) Ornmunicated to the Exiled Poet Saint-Hélier to London
188 miles/300 km
the Channel island of Jersey
Saint-Hélier to Paris
Member, 1853, to October, 1855 200 miles/320 km
 THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO
CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY

Introduction
Acknowledgements
VICTOR THE GRANDIOSE

I would first of all like to express my profound gratitude to By Martin Ebon

Martin Ebon, dean of writers on the Paranormal (and many other
subjects as well) in the United States, without whose extremely
gracious and extraordinarily generous support this project could
never have been completed. It is an honor that Conversations with In the fall of 1950,1 was sitting in a half-empty office at the
Eternity: The Forgotten Masterpiece of Victor Hugo should begin “Voice of America,” surrounded by books, files and clippings on
with his Introduction. die subject of Indochina. I had just been appointed to direct the
My heartfelt thanks also to Guyon Neutze, Senior Lecturer, newly-established Vietnamese Unit of the United States’ short­
Educational Development Department, Wellington Polytechnic, wave and medium-wave broadcasts to Viet Nam, having previ­
New Zealand, one of the few philosophers willing and able to ously served as head of the information agency’s broadcasts to In­
grapple with the complex problems of channeling, and whose donesia. (Later, I would take over the Hindi and Urdu units,
comments and suggestions have been invaluable throughout. transmitting to India and Pakistan.) Now, I had to immerse my­
Thanks also to the ever-generous Marilyn Raphael, whose world­ self in the political-economic and religio-cultutal milieu of a new
class classes in channeling provided me with precious insight into target area: Viet Nam. Remember, this was years before the United
that most mysterious of processes. States became involved in the Viet Nam War; at that time, the
For their help and support, I would also like to thank: my armed struggle was for the future of Korea.
mother-in-law, Grace Tarnpoll; Patricia Pereira; Julia Jones; William All went smoothly, until I came to the religious orientations of
Blaine Hill; Joseph Rowe; Alan Annand; Laura Fenoglio; Barbara the Vietnamese people, and read that the third-largest religious
Norcross and Diana Neutze. Movement, after Roman Catholicism and Buddhism, was a de­
And thank you, also, to Judy, without whom, as always, not a nomination known as the Cao Dai. I read that this was, broadly
single word of this would ever have been written. speaking, an amalgam of Eastern and Western faiths—and that
one of its three major saints was the French poet-novelist-play-
Wright and politically volatile persona, Victor Hugo (1802-1885).
1 bad a fairly good idea of Hugo as a commanding literary figure
m Europe of the nineteenth century; but, aware of his controver­
sial life style, 1 had never thought of him as a saint of anything,

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 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY
THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

Initially, Caodaist spirit communications were undertaken by

anywhere, at any time. And what, exactly, was the Cao Dai?
table-turning. When participants complained that this was an
Bear with me for a minute! Caodaism considers itself, “The
extremely time-consuming technique, the entities suggested what
Third Alliance between God and Man.” Its actual founder was
appears to be a very sophisticated variation of traditional spiritistic
Ngo Minh Chieu, born in 1878, a civil servant for a short time in
automatic writing. The central device was a wicker basket shaped
Saigon, who, in 1902, underwent the spiritistic experience that
like a crow. Four ropes were attached to the basket, which was
literally “inspired” him to found this all-encompassing religion.
known as a corbeille à bee. Each rope was held by a different me­
Thus the movement s belief-system was rooted in the regions deep
dium, so that no single personality would, in any way, be the sole
spiritistic traditions; with followers numbering in excess of two
Instrument of communication. The basket was positioned in such
million today, it represents Gods third attempt to convey His Ul­
a way that the “beak” of its crow-shape made contact with flat,
timate Truths to humanity. In November, 1926, Chieu revealed
fine sand beneath; thus, the writings were visible in the sand.
the conclusions of his four years of mediumistic contacts with the
The Cao Dai spirit of Victor Hugo evolved from communica­
dead, many of them distinguished and prominent.
tions originating with an entity who initially called itself Nguyet
Chieu regarded the first attempt at conveying the divine mes­
Tam Chon Nhon, but later stated that it was, in fact, the spirit of
sage as coinciding with the emergence of Buddhism, Confucian­
the famous Victor Hugo. Adherents have meticulously recorded
ism and Taoism; the second contact was personified by Moses and
that the first, momentous encounter with this spirit took place on
Jesus; and the third attempt centered on the Middle Buddha. (Bud­
April 20, 1930, at 1:00 a.m., the earthly interviewer being one
dhism went through a variety of stages and regional adaptations).
Ho-Phap. A bit later, the entity said that one prominent Caodaist,
As an amalgam of Eastern and Western religious principles,
Tran quang Vinh, was, actually, a reincarnation of the French poet s
Caodaism embraces universal ethical standards, and has widely
third son, Francois-Victor Hugo (1828-1873). Tran later became
adopted vegetarianism. “Cao Dai” may be translated as “Tower of
head of the Cao Dai Army, and eventually Minister of Defense
the Highest,” a metaphor for God. The religions unique character­
(1948-1951) in the ill-fated government of Bao Dai. During a
istic lies in its combination of traditional, actually pre-historic, an­
cestor-worship, its rituals that closely resemble such spiritistic tech­ session of the Cao Dai s legislative body, Victor Hugo was ap­
pointed titular head of the movement s “Foreign Missions.”
niques as trance inediumship, and so-called automatic writing.
One of many messages received by the Caodaists from the al-
One Cao Dai link to Victor Hugo appears to be his own volu­
^ged spirit of Victor Hugo speaks eloquently of Beauty, Divine
minous spirit communications, detailed in this volume, while his
family was in exile on the Channel island of Jersey. In fact, the ^eace and Harmony, Science and Wisdom, as well as of the spirit s
wide-ranging messages from prominent personalities, collected by Perception that “within the infinite, countless universes exist,”
Caodaism, closely resemble the astonishing number of alleged his­ ^hose inhabitants “do not know the word War,” and in whom
toric spirit entities who manifested at the Jersey seances. The Hugo Ae spirit supersedes mortal frailties.” The entity also communi­
sittings, as far as we can tell, centered on the spiritistic rapping cated that, “Death is overcome through high consciousness; death
movements of a table leg, or actual table-turning. and life are but the same...”

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 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

awards, such as membership in the Académie Fran^aise. He was

Now, back to the flesh-and-blood Victor Hugo, whose extraor­
elected to parliament, where he made long, provocative, and at
dinary prominence evolved within a very specific psycho-cultural
times barely coherent speeches. But even if readers found it diffi­
and religio-political framework of nineteenth century France, and,
cult to comprehend the “deeper meaning” of one of his long, meta­
specifically, within the highly politicized literary society of Paris.
phor-ridden poems, they might still be pulled along by the soaring
To say that Victor Hugo, throughout his life, was a man of mul­
rhythm of his words. Listeners, in turn, could be carried away by
tiple contradictions, comes close to understatement.
the fire of his passion, by his rousing, lyrical oratorical fireworks.
Victor was the third son of a brash, self-centered father, ulti­
The fierce power behind it all was not only the fire of Hugos
mately General Joseph-Léopold-Sigisbert Hugo (1773-1828), who
genius, but also the unquenchable thirst to be admired, loved, and
served in the army of Napoleon Bonaparte, or Emperor Napoleon
1(1769-1821). General Hugo was intermittently stationed abroad, even worshipped.
The French Empire, under Napoleon the Great, the Corsican
including Italy and Spain, and his family accompanied him on
Joseph Bonaparte (1769-1821)—who had placed the royal crown
occasion. While Victor s father was, at least by reasons of career, a
°n his own head at the Cathedral of Notre Dame on December 2,
monarchist, his mother, Sophie, was, by private sentiment and
1804—spread all over Europe. One conquest demanded yet an-
conviction, republican and, therefore, anti-monarchist. Father and
°ther, and still another. And all this neo-monarchistic expansion­
mother managed to get along by a mixture of mutual disregard
urn happened, we must remember, after the bloody, history-mak-
and opportunistic tolerance.
lng> anti-monarchist French Revolution of 1789.
Victor Hugo himself remained a monarchistic republican and
Napoleons armies swept on. Most of Europe was overrun. As
a republicanistic monarchist, a liberal and a conservative, an elitist
t^e grand conquests continued, the apparently invincible Emperor
and a populist, for most of his contradictory life. It is difficult to
was hugely popular throughout France, and aroused admiration,
imagine, in retrospect, the impact of a literary colossus such as
sincere or opportunistic, within much of Europe. Yet, England
Victor Hugo during the century that his life spanned. No matter
an<J Russia eluded him. Eventually, grossly over-extended, Napo-
how eccentric or volatile his beliefs might have been, at any given
kon had to retreat from Moscow in 1812. With this, he seemed
time he was capable of expressing them in such prose or poetry
that he could ptovoke the roaring cheers of the Parisian masses as to retreat from history as well.
Victor Marie Hugo was born at Besannen, on February 16,
well as the jealousy-tainted approval of his peers and rivals.
1802. So, when Napoleon resigned, on April 11,1814, little Hugo
What was he, then? Well, what was he not?
Was twelve years old. Napoleon was exiled to the Island of Elba,
The term, “mad genius,” has pretty well gone out of fashion.
But it certainly applied to Victor Hugo. With due respect for ar*d a member of the royal Bourbon family, Louis XVIII, took
Over the reign of the disillusioned nation. But, with surprising
exact clinical terminology, one might well generalize that he fit­
ted, at one time or another, the categories of egomaniac, mytho- sPeed and daring, Napoleon made his stunning come-back. On
maniac, and, quite possibly, manic-depressive. His hunger for Starch 15, 1815, he arrived at Frances Mediterranean coast with
admiration could never be stilled. He was eager for honors and army of 1,000 men. They rapidly marched up to Paris; Napo-

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 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

leon re-conquered an unresisting France in three weeks. The masses, about a violent rebellion in Santo Domingo.
That, in later years, Victor Hugo achieved a wide popular read­
fickle and frightened, re-embraced the man whom they had re­
ership might well be attributed to elements of horror and the ma­
viled as a monster only months before.
cabre in much of his writings. Todays audiences of the musical
But this Grand Illusion was quickly followed by Total Disillu­
based on Les Misérables miss much of the stench, sadism and plain
sion: Napoleons effort to re-conquer Europe ended with his ulti­
cruelty contained in the original novel. And those who have seen
mate defeat on June 18 at the Battle of Waterloo. He abdicated a
the Disney cartoon version of Hugo’s melodrama, known in its
second time.. Napoleon was taken into exile once more and died
English version as The Hunchback ofNotre-Dame, are deprived of
on the Island of Saint Helena, on May 5, 1816; he was 52 years
Ac ultimate macabre scene, which shows the skeletons of the
old.
Hunchback and his much-pursued lady love in a final, mortal
The end of the Napoleonic Era also marked the end of the
profitable military career of General Hugo. Son Victor had ac­ embrace.
Victor’s mother died in June, 1821. He refused money from
companied his father, briefly, to Italy when he was five years old.
bis father. And, secretly engaged to his childhood sweetheart, Adèle
By the time he was eleven, the Hugo family had settled comfort­
Poucher, Victor Hugo spent a year sweating it out on the fringes
ably in occupied Spain, where Victor was fascinated by the exotic
poverty. His observations during this period would later pro­
scenery, and picked up some of the Spanish language. He had also
vide material for his hugely successful novel, Les Misérables, melo­
learned Latin.
dramatically embroidered with cruel incidents. The universally
The Hugo family, like much of the society that had allied itself
successful musical, based on this novel of the poor, maltreated and
with Napoleon, fell on relatively hard times. Little Hugo received
deprived, greatly softens Hugo’s ultimate macabre touch.
a rather scrappy education. Beginning in 1815, he lived at the
Hugo could not have written in his uninhibited style had the
Pension Cordier and attended lectures at Lóuis-le-Grand College.
traditional, so-called “classical” literary style continued to prevail.
His literary fascinations burgeoned. He had always admired the
Victor Hugo, who sometimes composed full-length poems virtu-
work of Voltaire (1694-1778), perhaps the leading figure of the
% in his sleep, refused to be confined to a literary straight jacket
eighteenth century “Enlightenment” movement. Now Victor read
be regarded as outdated and essentially meaningless. He thus be­
voraciously. Hè also did quite well in philosophy, geometry and
came the most prominent spokesman of a literary approach which,
physics.
much of the century, flourished under the benign label of Ro­
Soon, his volcanic literary talents began to erupt, and he wrote
a string of verses, odes, satires, acrostics, riddles, epics and madri­ manticism.”
But Romanticism, in that period’s literary sense, does not cor-
gals. Victor’s older brother, Joseph-Abel, edited a journal, Le
respond to our popular and contemporary meaning of the term.
Conservateur Littéraire. Victor contributed a horror novel, Bug-
Today, Romanticism is commonly identified with the purely erotic:
Jargal, to the short-lived periodical, but also a great deal of quite
Ae Romance Novel, Romantic Love, and the word “Romance” as
marginal writings. In his mid-teens, he had all the makings of a
hack writer. Bug-Jargal was a bloody, highly-charged terror yarn mdicating a love affair. Consequently, dictionary definitions of

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 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

“Romanticism” are forced to cite disparate interpretations. One of love poems for his fiancée, Adèle Foucher, but was clearly de­
that would apply to the Hugo period describes “Romanticism” as signed to attract the sentimental attention of Louis XVIII. In
a “literary and artistic movement, originating in Europe toward fact, Hugos elegy in memory of the Due de Berry is said to have
the end of the 18th century, that sought to assert the validity of brought tears to the eyes of the monarch. He gave young Victor a
subjective experience and to escape from the prevailing subordina­ pension from the privy purse. This was in 1822, and Hugo was
tion of content and feeling to classical forms” (The American Heri­ just twenty years old. The following year, the pension was doubled.
tage Dictionary ofthe English Language, New York: American Heri­ With money in his pocket, he heightened his courtship of Adèle,
tage Publishing Co., Inc., 1969). Of course, Romanticism in­ and the two were married on October 14, 1822. The great and
cluded, in its emphasis on “the validity of subjective experience,” lasting family tragedy was that Victors brother, Eugène Hugo,
the specifically erotic, possibly the most subjective of all human was passionately in love with Adèle; but Eugène had shown signs
experiences. of mental imbalance from time to time. If we can trust melodra­
Victor Hugo had entered the Parisian literary-political scene matic records, he went mad on the day of the wedding, and ulti­
at ramming-speed. He quickly perfected the game of sending grov­ mately had to be committed to an asylum where he died in 1837.
eling letters of thanks to his teachers and other betters, often by Professionally, Victor Hugo continued his output of prose and
writing odes in their praise. Graham Robb, in his comprehensive poetry. He wrote another popular horror novel, Han d’Islande.
biography, Victor Hugo, states that his “most successful ode was He had, of course, never been to Iceland, and this novelistic fan­
the poetic begging bowl held out to M. le Compre Francois de tasy featured Hugos first disfigured protagonist (in the vein of
Neufchateau, of TAcadémie Fran^aise. It earned Hugo a powerful Quasimodo), Han, a red-haired dwarf. Robb summarizes the plot
patron.” It also revealed his early understanding, and skillful ma­ with as much detachment as seems possible:
nipulation, ofthe powerful, the rich and the decision-makers, both “The novel opens promisingly, in the morgue at Trondheim.
in literary and political affairs. Among other deals, Hugo became Bodies have been torn to shreds as if by a long-haired beast. Mean­
Neufchateaus secret ghost-writer. His new mentor later arranged while, among the icy crags to the north lurks a weird, red-haired
a royal pension for the sixteen-year-old poet. All his life, Victor dwarf, the son of a witch and the last descendant of Ingulphus the
Hugos letters could deliver the most obsequious and flattering Exterminator. Abandoned in Iceland, the hideous infant, Han,
hyperbole, as well as the most vicious contempt, denunciation and Was taken in by a saintly bishop (a forerunner of Bishop Myriel in
accusation—all in his poetic or pseudo-poetic melodramatic ver­ Les Misérables). Immune to Christian charity, he torches the
nacular, frequently exceeding the boundaries of the rational, or bishops palace and sets sail by the light of the flames on a tree
even of his own true convictions. trunk, bound for Norway. There, he incinerates Trondheim ca­
Victors career-building-by-ingratiation accelerated as he en­ thedral, whose flying buttresses now resemble the rib-cage of a
tered his twenties. He targeted the French Court, and specifically Mammoths carcass. He slaughters regiments, hurls mountains
the person of Louis XVIII. His device was a volume of verses, down on villages, extinguishes beacons with a single breath, car-
Odes et Poésies Diverses, which contained the appropriate number nes a stone axe, and rides a polar bear called 'Friend? He also

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 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

provides a tenuous link with the rest of the novel by stealing the During the performance, rowdy applause followed particularly
casket which contains proof of the fathers innocence.” outrageous lines—as when the young hero tells pretty Doña Sol’s
Considering that not only Broadway, but Hollywood, have lecherous guardian, “Go, get yourself measured for a coffin, old
discovered Victor Hugo’s works, this horror fantasy might yet find man.” Satire became standard tragedy, as, in the final act, Hernani
a fresh market, either as a sex-and-violence motion picture (with and Doña Sol die in each other’s arms. According to Graham
earlier episodes on television), or as a musical melodrama. Robb Robb, the audience erupted into “simultaneous booing and cheer­
comments that the horror play and Victors letters to Adèle “spanned ing, fisticuffs and arrests.” It was, Robb adds, prophetic “enact­
two years of unrequited lust, and formed a ramshackle bridge over ment—even, in some minds, a direct cause—of what was to hap­
the abyss opened by his mothers death” on June 21, 1821. pen in the streets.”
In order to be able to marry Adèle, Victor applied to the King With success came prosperity. The Hugo family moved to
for yet another pension. He managed to get it, and so the two new quarters, a comfortable apartment on Rue Jean-Goujon, sur­
were married on October 12, 1822. His prominence increased, rounded by fresh air, trees and a lawn. Victor and Adèle Hugo
while he maintained a delicate balance between his neo-monar- had three children by then: Léopoldine, Charles and Francois-
chist conservatism and the emerging literary revolution. He re­ Victor, soon to be joined by a fourth, conveniently called Adèle II.
ceived the Legion of Honor, as well as a personal invitation to the Rut success took an emotional toll. Victor Hugo became more
coronation of Charles X at Rheims. and more autocratic, egocentric, and eccentric. His literary out­
The next decades re-enforced his position as France’s outstand­ put was, if anything, exceeded by his conveyor belt of sexual liai­
ing progressive literary figure. Novels, poems and plays flowed sons. He had become, in current terms, a stud, and women yielded
from his pen. Their content and form reflected a spirit of emo­ to or pursued him like groupies. Meanwhile, his wife, Adèle, had
tional liberation which, inevitably, put him once again at odds formed a tentative liaison with Hugo’s old friend, the respected
with monarchistic paternalism. The symbol of this literary-politi­ literary critic, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804-1869). Dra­
cal conflict was Hugo’s play, Hemani, which he wanted to be per­ matically, Sainte-Beuve used to sneak into the Hugo apartment
formed at that center of French theatrical arts, the Comédie when Victor was elsewhere, disguised as a nun. The affair ended
Franchise. On the surface, this was just another exotic, fanciful when Sainte-Beuve, rather abjectly, confessed his love for Adèle to
melodrama, set in Spain. It centers on the fate of a beautiful Hugo.
young girl, in love with a handsome persecuted hero, who seeks to Meanwhile, on the streets of Paris, history caught up with
rebuff the advances of several repulsive old men—one of whom is Hugos revolutionary play, Hemani, On July 25,1830, Charles X
a royal personality, a lustful sovereign called, of all things, Charles. dissolved parliament and abolished freedom of the press. A bloody
The opening night of the play became the scene of a war of gen­ three-day uprising followed (July 27-29), and Louis-Philippe was
erations, with teenagers in open revolt against social restrictions. crowned “King of the French.” Monarchy was back in full force,
On the afternoon of Thursday, February 25, 1830, a huge line h Was also a new disaster. But Hugo was undeterred in his creative
began to form outside the theater, clogging up the Rue Richelieu. energies: In April, 1831, he published Notre Dame de Paris, which,

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 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

as The Hunchback ofNotre Dame, achieved lasting world-wide fame. than Hugo. As if it were not enough to have exhausted himself in
But first, on the see-saw between public life and sex, back to a days writing—he was then working hard on what was to be­
sex! On February 2, 1833, Hugos latest play, Lucrezia Borgia, was come Les Misérables—Victor Hugo also kept an erotic diary, in
being cast. The part of Princess Negroni was given to a young, code! The indomitable Juliette came across it, decoded most of it,
beautiful actress, Juliette Drouet. She quickly became Hugos and even asked a friend to translate the occasional Spanish phrases.
Number One Mistress, and remained—always, discreetly, a few Lively trans-Channel gossip kept the London literary scene up-to-
houses removed—his very close friend for half a century. date on Hugo’s activities. One British writer, who, regrettably but
Some of Hugos finest love lyrics were addressed to Juliette. understandably, remains anonymous, observed, “It would appear
And, tragically, some of his most memorable verses of grief and that, alternately, M. Hugos pen and penis overflow.”
mourning were prompted by the drowning death of his daughter, Victor Hugo’s multifarious pursuits came to a temporary halt
Léopoldine, in early September, 1843. Hearing the news of this due to the revolution he had anticipated, feared and favored. On
tragedy, and in an oddly self-centered note to Adèle, his wife, Vic­ February 12, 1848, Paris awoke to the sight of barricades every­
tor wrote, “My God, what have I done to you?” where. Louis-Philippe fled to England and settled in Surrey as
If we glance forward, to the dramatic seances to which this Mr. Smith.’ Hugo himself achieved a quite uncomfortable image
book is devoted, we may view the death of Léopoldine as the cen­ as a Messiah of the Revolution. He was elected to the new Na­
tral emotional core in Victor Hugos dramatic dialogue with death, tional Assembly. But the Assembly wanted the rebels to halt the
and its implied assurance of eternal life. destruction of the city. This was the same “rabble who followed
Poetry moved into the background when, in 1845, Hugo was Jesus Christ,” as Hugo had put it earlier. Which side was he on?
elected a member of the House of Peers. His often contradictory He didn’t really know himself.
but always dramatic verbiage did not fit into the traditions of the Reprisals were fierce and chaotic. Government troops began
House. At Hugos home, an atmosphere of fearful strain devel­ to round up “suspects,” four of them hidden by Juliette, who man­
oped. The man himself, who wore the banner of a realistic athe­ aged to talk her way out of the chaos. Hugo suffered from psy­
ist, seemed to fear a vengeful, malevolent God. Both he and Adèle chosomatic symptoms, including intermittent loss of his voice.
turned to the erotic as an antidote to death, or to the fear of it. *Fhe Assembly ended martial law on November 4,1848, and placed
Adèle s friendships with the men in her crowd took on a flirtatious executive power in the hands of a single head of state. Six days
note. And Victor Hugo flung himself into a new infatuation, later, a president was elected whose name was Louis Napoleon
Léonie Biard. Later on, Léonie sent a batch of Victors exuberant Bonaparte, a nephew of the Great Napoleon. He was an odd bird,
love letters to Juliette, presumably in order to break her relation hesitant, reluctant, indecisive—the makings of a weak tyrant. Hugo
with Victor; but Juliette had put up with too much of that sort of described him later as “a man of weary gestures and a glazed ex­
thing to be manipulated by yet another temporary rival. pression,” who “walks with an absent-minded air amidst the hor­
Juliette, not lacking in either candor or humor, complained at rible things he does, like a sinister sleepwalker.”
one point that her cat, Fouyou, spent more time in bed with her Before the election that brought him to power, the new Napo­

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 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

leon visited Hugo in his apartment. Sitting on a packing crate in In any event, exile was just ahead. After successive efforts to
the poet s front room, the new ruler pledged that he would not come to terms with the increasingly tyrannical regime of Napo­
“copy” Napoleon, but seek to “imitate Washington.” It was all leon III, and under actual threat of arrest, Victor Hugo decided
quite humble, cozy, and falsely reassuring. Napoleon and the As­ that his family was no longer safe in Paris, or anywhere else in
sembly resorted to a frightened and frightening tyranny almost France. On December 14,1851, he escaped to Brussels, by train,
immediately. Victor Hugo found himself in the middle, orating in disguise. His family followed him, first to the Belgian capital,
fiercely, and profoundly challenged in his self-esteem. and eventually to the Channel island of Jersey, where they settled
It was then that the members of his household turned to the in a large house called Marine-Terrace.
occult, a rehearsal for the day-and-night seances during their later Two exceedingly influential opposition writings were the prod­
exile on the Channel island ofJersey. One visitor, Georges Guenot, uct of these years. The first, written in one month, was Napoleon-
reported on a variety of apparent psychic phenomena at the Hugo k-Petit, which, published in England under the title of Napoleon
apartment between the end ofJuly and mid-November, 1851. The the Small, became an underground weapon. Hugo had written a
phenomena included alleged contact with the spirit world, and it 600-page volume in record time, with his usual flowing, literary
is notable that, during this period, a variety of “progressive” move­ style which could be read like a novel. With all the skill of a
ments, ranging from Socialism to Feminism, tended to run paral­ twentieth century narcotics smuggler, the author had the book
lel with Spiritualism (Spiritisme, or Spiritism, in France). Con­ smugged into France, in mini-editions, printed on thin paper.
tact with a spirit world was said to underscore the essential equal­ Even plaster busts of Napoleon III himself were used to sneak the
ity of all worlds, a unity of creation. Adèle Hugo sought the help banned volume into French territory; additional copies were ear­
of a “somnambulist,” or “psychic,” to contact relatives in ned by balloon. The first printing of his super-pamphlet appeared
Normandy. Rather questionable phenomena, such as reading words ln Brussels two days after Hugo arrived on Jersey, where the family
through a closed envelope, were reported, and participants at­ spent the first three years of its ultimately 19 years in exile. The
tempted to or completely succeeded in pushing needles painlessly remaining years were spent on the island of Guernsey, at a resi­
through their hands. Robb, somewhat obscurely, writes that “even dence called Hauteville-House.
the ghosts of Hugos verse began to take on a more ectoplasmic Exile enabled Victor Hugo to jettison Léonie Biard, but he
consistency, long before the orgy of communication with the spirit refused Adèle’s subtle urgings to let go of Juliette as well; she, too,
world which ís usually associated with the years in exile.” This settled in exile, not far from the Hugo family. A book of Hugo s
could mean that one or the other in the group went into a Politico-ideological poems, Chàtiments (Punishments), may well
mediumistic trance, with the result that real or imaginary person­ have been the seed for the Cao Dai movement, described earlier,
ages from Victor Hugos poems manifested to the assembled group. ^hese poems—part political, part philosophical—carried the mes­
If this interpretation is correct, there existed an emotional and sage of a future faith that would not replace, but would supersede,
practical basis for the more extensive spiritualistic phenomena on rhe world s major religions.
the Island of Jersey later on. At this point, the Hugo clan was, in a contradictory fashion,

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 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

both at the center of a new revolutionary storm and in total isola­ lie succeeded the reign of Napoleon III.
tion. None of them were any good at English, least of all the
master of the house, who looked upon the French language as The final years ofVictor Hugo’s life were overshadowed by the
something like a divine gift. Jersey had a French exile community, decision of his wife, Adèle, to leave him and move to Brussels,
but Hugo did not take to it, and tended to look upon most of its where she died on August 27, 1868. Their daughter, Adèle, fell,
literally, “madly” in love with a British officer, Albert Pinson, and
members with elitist contempt. Who, then, could represent a vast
followed him to Canada. Emotionally disturbed, she hoped that
new audience for Hugos thoughts and ideas? Who might stand
he might marry her. Disappointed, she settled in the Caribbean,
well above the Paris literati or the Paris bourgeoisie or the Paris
political establishment? Well, of course, a higher dimension of ex­ eventually returning to Paris, where she was permanently hospi­
istence, the world of the spirits, the world of great minds, and of talized. Adèle II died in 1878. Juliette Drouet, who had spent
fifty years both at Hugo’s side and at a distance, died on May 11,
even greater superhuman concepts! It was at this very moment of
isolation and frustrated emotional energies, in September, 1853, *883.
that Hugos old friend, Delphine de Girardin, introduced the family Victor Hugo died on May 31, 1885. The mass of mourners,
to the latest “American” device for spirit contact, the turning table, Roving through the streets toward the Pantheon, where he was
capable of tapping out messages from the dead by knocking a lnterred, was estimated at two million, more than the actual popu-
ktion of Paris at the time. Although, in his lifetime, Hugo had
table leg on the floor.
heen an outspoken, and even flamboyant, spokesman of the Paris
The book for which this is the Introduction, Conversations
with Eternity, consisting of the most important of the transcripts Underclass, in poetry, prose, plays and speeches, he left only one
of these seances, is the first account in the English language of Percent of his fortune to the “poor.” On the other hand, and al­
Victor Hugo’s encounters with the spirits. This emotional experi­ ways conscious of grand symbolism, he had ordered that, at the
funeral, his body be carried in a simple, black “pauper’s coffin.”
ence lasted for over two years, and the record of its strange and
Qf course, the coffin was at the center of a vast state parade, com­
exalted nights and days is certainly a unique document, as well as
plete with uniformed marchers, funereal music, and appropriately
a glimpse into the subconscious of an egocentric, frustrated ge­
nius, seeking to crash through the barriers of human communica­ |audy floral decorations. Thus, in a final irony, Victor Hugo’s
tions, and exploding like a volcano of yearning, fear, madness and Uneral procession symbolized his life’s ultimate contradiction.
creativity. Arid—who knows?—it may even be that Hugo suc­ Hugo’s last will reflected his belief, or certainty, that there was
ceeded at moments in crashing through those barriers, and in com­ *e after death. He also had a brief, self-assured message for those
muning with worlds beyond our human realm; there is much to came after him: “I have tried to introduce moral and human
startle, and even to transfix, the attentive reader of this amazing Questions into what is known as politics....! have spoken out for
document. Long after the last rap of the last spirit had died away— e oppressed of all lands, and of all parties. I believe I have done
X* Il
after 18 years of exile on the Channel islands of Jersey and Guern­ ell. My conscience tells me I am right. And if the future proves
sey—Hugo was able to return, in triumph, to Paris, as the Repub- wrong, I am sorry for the future.”

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 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

The island, though, has scenes of great natural beauty, and

plenty of history, and these two factors, combined with the ubiq­
uitous, eternally-whispering sea, were often to bring peace to the
Chapter One turbulent heart of Victor Hugo. There were intricate grottos hol­
lowed out through the millennia by the sea. There was the occa­
sional castle, or its splendid ruin, harking back to the Middle Ages.
Scattered here and there were mysterious dolmens and menhirs—
LÉOPOLDINE BECKONS
huge, columnar, polished stones often laid out in the enigmatic
circular shape of a cromlech. These ancient monuments were
thought to have been erected by a Druidic people; they were asso­
ciated in the minds of the nineteenth-century islanders with bar­
On Aug. 5, 1853, Victor Hugo arrived on the island ofJersey baric rituals of blood-letting; and, mostly for these reasons, it was
with his wife, Adèle, his sons and daughter, and his mistress Juliette believed that ghosts were on the loose everywhere: Druidic priest-
Drouet disembarking discretely sometime afterward. Glancing
esses in white or black, men carrying their heads under their arms,
around, Hugo could scarcely have imagined that he had come to a blackbirds screeching as if possessed. None of this would be lost
place where he would spend hundreds of days and nights in the
°n the endlessly active imagination of Victor Hugo.
company of the departed souls of some of the most interesting
There was also on Jersey at this time a ragtag collection of
people who had ever lived.
Political exiles, some 300 in all, mostly from France, but also from
Jersey is a stark, bare island of 51 square miles, a British posses­
other parts of Europe, men of integrity and intelligence for the
sion lying in the English Channel only 25 miles from France, but
Itl°st part but now seething with bitter frustration. The majority
188 miles from London and 200 miles from Paris. Even today,
them, Hugo was to treat at best with a benign aloofness; some,
the almost wholly French-speaking population of the island doesn’t
whose liveliness of mind or compatible views caught the poet’s
exceed 100,000. The capital, Saint-Hélier—on whose outskirts
attention, he would single out as friends; a few, such as the hunch-
Victor Hugo would live in a house called Marine-Terrace—was,
acked, poverty-stricken Hennet de Kesler, he would treat with
in the poet’s day, an unprepossessing hole whose saving graces were
enormous generosity, providing the little French teacher with room
mainly a theatre and a library.
and board for the last two years of his life. All in all, the intelligent
The average temperature of Jersey island is 51 degrees Fahren­
attentiveness of these fellow exiles would help make the poet’s life
heit, and the weather is usually overcast. The greater part of the
a little easier.
time, wind, rain and sudden squalls vie with each other under a
Still, for a man of Victor Hugo’s huge talents and resdess en-
glowering sky as to which will bring the greatest despair to the
tbe island must have seemed at first like hell on earth. It’s
hearts of those whom fate has brought to this place against their
J that, in those first weeks, his mind, depressed, cut off from
will. On every beach, in every cove, white-capped waves, often
lts habitual pursuits—cruelly prompted by the surrounding sea—
whipped to a frenzy, scud across jagged upthrust rocks.

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 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

must have gone back to the appalling, unthinkable death by drown­ was an experienced sea-captain, the craft had capsized. Everyone
ing of his eldest daughter, Léopoldine, with her husband of ten on board had drowned.
months, Charles Vacquerie, on September 4, 1843. The first reports claimed that the bodies of Léopoldine and
Not only had Victor Hugo not been at home at the time, but Charles had been found clasped in each others arms in a final
he had been returning from a trip to Spain with his mistress, Juliette embrace. It later emerged that Léopoldine had drowned clinging
Drouet. The couple had stopped off at Bordeaux to visit the fa­ to the boat, while Charles’s body had been washed much farther
mous charnel-house of Saint-Michael’s Church with its 70 mum­ downstream.
mified bodies. The sight of all this death had made Victor Hugo Léopoldine was 19 years old and three months pregnant,
peculiarly gloomy; it had filled him with a presentiment of some fidine, as her father called her, had been his favorite child. A
oncoming disaster. Continuing on their way, the poet and his gunned and terribly grieving Hugo arrived back in Paris only in
mistress had arrived at the village of Soubise, and sat down to rest time for the funeral. Some months later, he would write:
for a few minutes in a local café, the Europe. They glanced desul­
torily at two newspapers that lay on the table, Juliette Drouet at Tve lost you, O precious daughter
the Charivari, and Victor Hugo at The Century. In the most shock­ Thou who fills, O my pride
ing moment of his life, Hugo read the headlines: My whole destiny with
The light ofyour coffin
The sinister report ofan appalling incident which will cast a pall
over a family held dear by the world ofFrench letters has this morning Nothing in his life would ever wound him again quite so deeply
afflicted the inhabitants ofour town... the unexpected death of his young, vibrant, beloved daughter.
U1lt would also hound him to the end of his days; despite his
M.P Vacquerie...took with him in his yacht...his nephew M. sturdy rationalism, in his worst moments he would wonder if God
Ch. Vacquerie and the young wife ofthe latter, who is, as everyone au punished him for his philandering ways.
knows, the daugher ofM. Victor Hugo... To what extent this horrendous, never-to-be-accepted, never-
to-be-forgotten tragedy weighed on Hugo’s mind during his first
In December, 1842, Léopoldine had married Charles Vacquerie, "^eks on Jersey island, we can never know. But something was
brother ofAuguste Vacquerie, the journalist who would share most ?°ut to happen which would precipitate him into the occult world
of Victor Hugos years in exile with him. On a bright, cold Sep­ . e Spiritists, and drive him to indulge whatever longing he
tember day only ten months later, Léopoldine and Charles, and ^ght have to converse with the souls of the dead. On September
Charles’s Uncle Pierre and his Cousin Arthus, had boarded a small ’ Aere arrived at the Port of Saint-Hélier his childhood friend,
yacht at Villequier on the Seine. They had set out on a day trip Pmne de Girardin, journalist, member of the tout-Paris—the
across the river which flowed with particular swiftness at that point. Q? Society of Paris—and wife of Hugo’s close friend Emile de
The vessel was slightly top-heavy with sail. Though Uncle Pierre Irardin, the publisher of La Presse and the man who had intro­

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 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

duced advertising into the newspapers of France. Delphine came tual country whose drawing-rooms were generally famed for the
lively conversations held therein, one saw, during several months,
bubbling over with news of the latest craze to seize the attention of
Frenchmen and Frenchwomen, who have so often been accused of
the upper crust of Paris: talking to the dead through the agency of
being light-headed, sitting for hours around a table, stem, mo­
tapping, turning tables.
This was a phenomenon that had mushroomed from almost tionless and dumb; their fingers stretched out, their eyes obsti­
nothing into a world-wide fad in only six years. In Hydesville, nately staring at the same spot, and their minds stubbornly en­
New York, in 1847, three Fox sisters had heard loud raps which grossed by the same idea, in a state of anxious expectation, some­
they were certain signaled messages from the dead. In the months times standing up when exhausted by useless trials, sometimes, if
there was a motion or a creaking, disturbed and put out of them-
and years that followed, they had communed with the spirit world
Selves while chasing a piece of furniture that moved away. During
by means of raps—often, but not always, created by tapping table
legs—in front of increasingly large audiences seeking, and some­ whole winter, there was no other social occupation or topic. It
times finding, assurances that there was a life beyond this one. Was a beautiful period, a period of first enthusiasm, of trust and
^rdor that would lead to success. How triumphant with modesty
The Fox sister seances, however controversial, had been the
those who had the ‘fluid’! What a shame it was to those who had
match that had lit the powder keg that exploded into the Spiritu­
alist movement in the United States. In 1910, Sir Arthur Conan lt not! What a power it became to spread the new religion! What a
Doyle estimated that there were 10,000 practicing mediums in nve existed between adepts! What wrath prevailed against unbe­
lievers!”’
America in 1850 (the country’s total population was 23 million at
the time). The craze had leapt across the Atlantic, where it was One indication of the success of Spiritism was that the Roman
atholic clergy inveighed against it from the pulpit. The Bishop
appropriated by one Hippolyte-Léon Dénizart-Rival—later to be
^FViviers, later to be Archbishop of Paris, forbade practicing Catho-
anointed (by his own rapping spirits!) Alan Kardec—into a bur­
geoning movement called Spiritism. Spiritualism had affirmed cs on pain of hell from consorting with the tables; no one paid
the existence of the spirits of the dead, and of their readiness to attention. At the same time, the government of Napoleon III,
communicate with the living; Spiritism would do the same, with aPpy to see this new fad diverting attention from its own mis-
the addition ofjust one or two provocative concepts, in particular eeds, encouraged interest in what the great cartoonist Daumier
ater scornfully called “fluidomania” (a kind of astral “fluid,” flow-
metempsychosis, a type of reincarnation which incorporated liv­
through the body of the medium, was thought to be the ani­
ing lives as animals.
mating power behind the tables). For whatever reasons, talking
The new religio-occult movement took the upper crust of
^h the turning tables became the pastime of preference for the
French society by storm. Eighteen fifty-three, the year Hugo moved
to Jersey, was the annus mirabilis of Spiritism. Grasset, in The e and the not-so-idle rich of Paris, and indeed of much of Eu­
rope.
Marvels Beyond Science, quotes Bersot’s account of “these heroic
ages of turning tables:” la *nterest in Spiritism had preceded the Hugos to Jersey is-
arid. Among the exiles were those who had been infected by the
“’It was a passion and everything was forgotten. In an intellec­

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 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

mania, and who had acquired beliefs in past lives and other reali­ tapping; other times, the table would levitate entirely, even rising
ties. The Saint-Simonian Pierre Leroux believed that the human up to the ceiling; it often shook, and even shook violently some­
race could not fail to go on forever since its members were end­ times; occasionally, it slid right across the floor while turning around
lessly reincarnated in lifetime after lifetime. His disciple, the exile on itself.
Philippe Faure, was convinced he had been present in a previous Hugo was sternly skeptical, while his wife, Adèle, known for
lifetime at the crucifixion of Christ. And Jules Allix, scion of an her good sense, smiled benignly. The Hugos pointed to a small
old, established Jersey family, believed that if particular groups of table in the corner of the drawing room; they had to confess to
crawling snails were observed closely, their motions could be seen Delphine that they had spent an hour or so trying to make that
to be spelling out messages from the dead (those with eyes to see table move themselves—though they hadn t really known how to
should have read trouble in this unusually weird conviction; it was go about it!
Jules Allix who, in the throes of a nervous breakdown, would wave Jean de Mutigny recreates the scene in his informative Victor
Hugo and Spiritism'. “Not even waiting for dessert, Delphine de
a revolver in front of the Hugos’ seance participants in the au­
Girardin asked to see the table.. .It was a little, square four-legged
tumn of 1855 and help bring the gatherings to an end.).
All this would be brought to Hugo’s attention—he had long table. Delphine burst out laughing: ‘It’s not surprising that the
been interested in the occult, but had not taken much interest in spirits haven’t manifested! You need a little round table. Other­
the tables—when, on the day of Delphine de Girardin’s arrival, wise, the phenomena can’t possibly appear.’ Unfortunately, there
after the obligatory exchanges and usual gossip, Delphine brought Was no piece of furniture of this sort at Marine-Terrace, this loca­
tion not having been furnished by those specializing in the occult.
the conversation around to the burning question of the day. “Do
S° this situation wouldn’t endure indefinitely, Delphine who,
you do the tables?” she asked them.
They confessed to only a slight interest in the subject. They °nce she got an idea into her head, wouldn’t let it go—went into
Saint-Hélier that same afternoon and did the rounds of the furni­
wondered, exactly how was it done in Paris? Delphine quickly
filled them in. The medium or mediums-—those with the psychic ture stores...”
gift—placed their hands lightly on the top of the table. When the Delphine quickly found a small, round pedestal table, the single
leg of which ended in three golden claws. She brought it back to
piece of furniture was ready, it raised one leg, or even two, and
Marine-Terrace under her arm, and placed it on top of the larger
tapped out the message on the floor. Sometimes the table, though
it moved, dià not tap; the rappings seemed to come from no­ table. That same evening, profiting from Delphine s extensive ex­
where. The procedure took a long time, since the table leg, along perience, the Hugo family tried to make the tables turn. Delphine
^tl Mme. Hugo “held the table;” they acted as mediums. The
with communicating ‘Yes’ with one tap and ‘No’ with two, was
obliged to tap out the number of taps corresponding to the place group spent considerable time shifting the position of the large
of the letter in the alphabet; one tap, for example, meant ‘A,’ while square table and the small round pedestal table around in relation
26 meant ‘Z.’ The phenomenon was unpredictable; sometimes, one another. But, despite their efforts, particularly those of
eiphine, nothing happened. They tried again the next day, with
the table leg remained poised in the air for whole minutes without

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 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

the same lack of success. Sometimes Auguste Vacquerie, some­ “Who are you?” asked Victor Hugo.
times General Adolphe Le Fió and his wife, sometimes Sandor The reply came: Dead girl.
Téléki joined in. For four more days, the group periodically la­ “Your name?” asked Hugo.
bored away at the tables under the enthusiastic direction of The table tapped out:
Delphine. L.E.O.P.O.L.D.I.N.E.
During this time, Victor Hugo took almost no interest. He The group felt as if some large supernatural anguish were weigh-
did not sit at the table, nor even near the table; sometimes he sat lng upon them. Victor Hugo went pale with emotion. Adèle
in the far corner of the drawing room doing something else. Hugo collapsed in sobs. Charles Hugo maintained his self-con-
Suddenly, on Sunday, Sept. 11, 1853, an event took place tr°l enough to ask his sister:
which had all the force of a grenade being thrown into the center Where are you? Are you happy? Do you still love us?’
of the group, though the effect was entirely positive, especially for The reply came: Of God.
Victor Hugo. Sweet soul, are you happy?” asked Victor Hugo.
That afternoon the poet had joined the seance for the first Yes.
time. Vacquerie and Mme. de Girardin sat at the table; the re­ Where are you?”
mainder of the group included Mme. Hugo, sons Charles and Light.
Victor-Francois, General Le Flo, and Pierre de Treveneuc. What do we have to do to go to you?”
For the first time, the table had begun falteringly to tap out To love.
words. The group had succeeded in calling up the spirits! For the Yhe table was tapping out words without hesitation, as if the
first while, the messages were brief, scattered, fragmentary—al­ Presence felt it were being understood.
most incoherent. The participants acted like children at play, ask­ You were sent by whom?” asked Delphine.
ing the table to guess what they thinking. The Good Lord.
The defining moment came: Auguste Vacquerie asked the table, Is there something you want to tell us?”
“Guess what word Im thinking.” Yes.
The table tapped out: What?”
Suffering. Suffer for the other world.
This wasA’t his word, said Vacquerie; he had been thinking of * y°u see the suffering of those who love you?” asked Vic-
love. But, over the next few minutes, they observed that the mo­
tion of the table had stiffened a little, become almost abrupt and Yes.
willful, as if it were about to give some order. Will they suffer for some time to come?” asked Delphine.
“Are you still the same spirit who was there?” asked Delphine Yes.
de Girardin, sensing the change. Will they return to France soon?”
The table tapped twice: No. ^he table did not respond.

26 27
 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

“Are you happy when I mix your name with my prayers?” asked
Victor Hugo.
Yes.
“Are you always near those who love you? Do you watch over Chapter Two
them?”
Yes.
“Does it depend on them whether you return?” TWO VOYAGES TO THE AFTERWORLD
No.
“But will you return?”
Yes.
“Soon?” The words tapped out apparently by the spirit of
Yes. ''ad spoken to Victor Hugo’s heart, and drawn him into Aeina^^
And then the spirit was gone. cal circle of the seances. But this encounter a m. he did not
Victor Hugo was hooked. He would be intimately involved nature of a profound psychodrama experiena: m
with the turning tables for the next two years and more. believe that he had necessarily spoken to P eaj
or that he was necessarily speaking to t e spirits seemed
first, he thought he must be talking to his son, >
to have a gift for mediumship. On September 2Hug^old
Charles: “It’squite simply makesthe
by the magnetism [the psychic fluid thoughts ”
*X u «» you X Ä.

But, a week or two later, we find g necessar-

lly the ones they said they were. Itsp . he told a

who assumes these names in order to catch our in
friend at the end of September. ¡n
During the first autumn, and wel
Way he could to find out if these were really spmts from the
afterworld. He asked them to provide him wit h
tion-how to cure madness or rabies, how to steeibaboon Jow
to find gold in Australia. He sent the answers to the FnmdAcad
«ny of Sciences for verification; we have no record of what their

28 29
 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

answers were. attendance were the entire Hugo family; Delphine de G*

(who would leave to return to Paris in a few days), an
In January, 1854, he asked the spirits, in effect: ‘Why is it that
you, who, if you are who you say you are, have access to all the F1Ó with Mme. LeFtó. At first. Charles Hugo and TélékKM at
the table; partway through, General Le Flò too ova rom
resources of the universe, cannot come up with a way of demon­
strating to us that you really exist?’ They replied that to doubt was After a few brief, preliminary exchanges, Victor Hugo
the table who was speaking.
an unalterable part of the human condition (their response was
considerably more complicated than that, and became a topic of The Shadow.
discussion that ran from beginning to end of the turning table “The shadow of someone who lived?
experience). Hugos ultimate position seems to have been that the No.
spirits did exist—even though they might all be facets of one single, “It it necessary for you to live?
overriding entity, possibly, he thought, the Shadow of the Sepul­ No.
cher. He never ceased to be fascinated by the rich, occult content “Are you an angel?”
of the communications, even suggesting, in September, 1854, that Yes.
the transcripts of the seances might well become one of the “Bibles “The angel of death?”
of the future.” Yes.
“Why have you come? Call you tell us?
To chat with life.
Throughout October, the participants met almost daily;
throughout the entire experience, they rarely met less than once a “What do you wish to tell us?
week. Sometimes, bizarre and flighty communications came Believe.
“In what?”
through. But, as the weeks went by, the communications became
In the unknown. ..
more and more meaty, original and revelatory—even sensationally
“Is the world you belong to a continuation of this Ute.
so. There seemed to be two types of spirits: Those who seemed
Death is the balloon that takes the soul to heaven.
never to have taken life in this world, and the shades of historical
figures of major importance. The most powerful of the former, “And what is it that you have to say to life?
Spirits, come, here there be seers.
the Shadow of the Sepulcher, introduced himself at the seance
immediately fallowing the one at which Léopoldine had appeared. Are we the spirits you’re addressing?
No.
Though he didn’t reveal his full name at the time—and certainly
“You mean we’re the seers?”
not the giant role he was to play—this entity’s appearance brought
Yes.
to the seances the first hints of the vast and benign uncanniness
which would often characterize them. Can you see us?”
No. , „
The initial encounter with the Shadow of the Sepulcher took
“Have the spirits you’ve just summoned lived life as we live it.
place on Tuesday, September 13,1853, beginning at 9:30 p.m. In

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 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

The table said nothing. life?”

“Are you able to reply?” Yes.
No. The table shook. “If we behave badly, will we have a more painful one?”
“Is there any way I can calm you down?” Yes.
No. “Are the souls of the dead with you?”
“Are you a happy spirit?” Under me.
Happiness is only a human phenomenon, since it cannot aYou say that you are everything and everywhere. Are you
exist without unhappiness. God?”
“Do you speak this way because you’re in the void?” Over me.
Yes. “Are you nearer to souls than to God?”
“Talk about yourself.” For me there is neither near nor far.
Infinity is an emptiness packed full. Tell me, are worlds other than earth inhabited?”
“Do you mean by that that what we call the void is filled with Yes.
the world of spirits? By beings like us in body and soul?”
My goodness! Some, yes; others, no.
“So, Shadow, you’re capable of a good belly laugh?” After death, do the souls of those who have done good deeds
No. Ind themselves in regions of light, or do they end up inhabiting
“Talk to us.” °ther worlds?”
Use your body to search out your soul. Light.
“Are you the only spirit here?” And then the table was still. The Shadow of the Sepulcher had
I am everything and I am everywhere. 8°ne. He would return many times.
“Do you want me to continue questioning you?”
Yes. You hold the key to a door that has been closed. The responses of the Shadow of the Sepulcher had been mys-
“Are you aware of the vision I had yesterday?” teHous and bewildering. Perhaps, the seance-goers speculated, a
I know not yesterdays. Being who apparently had never lived away from the plane of the
“Can we|>e certain of seeing you after we die?” ^erworld couldn’t be expected to present an intelligible picture
You’re only wearing glasses. °f that realm to living human beings. They could only hope that
[Ed.: The Shadow ofthe Sepulcher may be suggesting that 'see­ a dead and articulate human would come along and fill them in.
ing' on earth is a matter of "wearing glasses. ” When we die, we will Their wishes were granted in the form of the shade of the
no longer wear these glasses, so that "seeing" will becomes an irrelevant eighteenth century Swiss social reformer Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
concept.] Li the first of two formidable table-turning sessions whose exact
If we behave well in this lifetime, can we hope for a better dates are unknown, but which took place between September 19

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 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

and December 6, 1853—this agreeable spirit engaged them in a pridefulness was dominated by a love for humanity. You made
highly technical discussion of French politics in the eighteenth mistakes, but you confessed them, and, by the tone of your con­
century. In the second, the shade relaxed a bit, holding forth on fession [Rousseaus autobiography, The Confessions], we feel that
subjects of interest to all humans: Not only did he describe his your repentance was a genuine one.” Durrieu then asked Rousseau,
personal experience of heaven in eloquent detail, but he expressed straightforwardly, “What is heaven like?”
his views about getting there by committing suicide. Day and night are synonymous. Heaven and God are the
In real life, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) had believed same word. Night and Earth are synonymous; man and doubt
that man was born good and that only social institutions made afe the same word. Genius is dawn, grave and twilight; the res-
him bad, or evil—institutions which, wittingly or unwittingly, Uffection is light. Alive, I desired God; resurrected, I behold
were designed to bring him under control and even to enslave Him. God is the love star radiating out into infinity and visible
him. Rousseau had written Emile (1762), a book which urged t° the eyes of the soul. The eyes of the body are condemned to
that children be educated in a natural setting wholly in accor­ See °nly the physical stars. The eye of the soul alone can con-
dance with the entirely good instincts with which they had been tefliplate the suns of intelligence. God is the planet ofthe tomb s
born even, preferably, on a one-to-one basis in a forest with one ÖIght; I have been its Herschel [the eighteenth century English
teacher! This was a very original, very radical approach to educa­ ^ronomer].
tion, the book created a sensation, winning Rousseau many friends Durrieu asked: “Can you make comprehensible, to us whose
(and enemies) and launching a number of fads among the aristoc­ eyes can only see the physical stars, that vision of God which you
racy, including daily walks in the forest and, for mothers who up n°w can see through the eyes of the soul?”
till then had disdained the task, the breast-feeding of their babies. Yes.
This latter change in behavior in particular had a far-reaching “Tell us.”
effect on all social classes of Europe. Rousseau wrote an equally I see in the infinite depths before me a dazzling abyss which
radical and equally influential book on political science, The So­ seems to draw me toward it ceaselessly. I am carried away by the
cial Contract (1762). Resistible attraction of that radiance. I am always in flight, and
The Swiss philosopher was thus a most interesting and sympa­ ^Ver do I arrive to where I may alight. I am plunged in infinity
thetic figure (notwithstanding that in life he had been extremely °f an eternity. I am dizzy with God.
moody and difficult, even succumbing to flat-out paranoia in his Are you totally happy?”
final years); the participants at the seance were delighted to be able happiness is like a perfume. I am forever inhaling it, and
to talk to him—they seem to have had no difficulty believing it ls forever eluding me. It is a ceaselessly-renewed intoxication,
washim!—and they showed their delight. Early on in the second Rver-satisfied intoxication. I have the fullness of happiness
session, Xavier Durrieu addressed him as follows: “You suffered the desire for happiness.
greatly and you loved greatly, and that’s why we’re deeply sympa­ •. Among human feelings, is there one that can give us a remote
thetic to you. You’ve been reproached for being prideful, but that ea of this happiness?”

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 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

Yes.
very least, provocative enough to make the Jersey island exiles want
“Which one?”
to come back for more. Looming on the horizon were figures at
Love. least as substantial as Rousseau, and more substantial, and whose
Charles Hugo objected, “But your happiness is insatiable in
comings and goings—the participants would realize long after­
itself, and human love always leads to satiety.”
ward—were soon to begin to fit into a larger pattern, one hospi­
Imagine my happiness as a bath in an ocean of beams of
table to the revelation of many truths.
light. Human love has something ofthese light beams, but there
Among those figures was the mighty one of Hannibal of
must also be lightning bolts therein.
Carthage.
Leguévàl asked: “What do you think about suicide now, after
what you ve written?” [Ed.: In his writings, Rousseau approves of
suicide under some circumstances.]
Suicide is the act of a traveler who has eternity to travel in
and who is aftaid of being late. To commit suicide is to advance
the hour-hand of the watch of your life.
“Do we have the right to commit suicide?”
No.
“Is it the act of a madman?” Charles Hugo inquired.
No.
Charles opined that he thought it was; Durrieu continued,
“Why do men fear death? Seeing as life where you are is so happy,
why does nature want men to fear death?”
God wants man to live, and therefore hides the nature of
death from him.
Durrieu asked: “Now that man is in possession of this revela­
tion, isn’t it to be feared that he will no longer fear death, and that
he will be tempted to commit suicide?”
If he commits suicide, he discovers what his own Paradise is.
[Ed.: Andperhaps he discovers that it is not Paradise.]
Durrieu commented: “But at least, if he lives the whole time
he has to live, he will no longer be afraid of death?”
No.
And that was the end of the seance, which had been, at the

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 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

what is now Tunisia, in North Africa. At the age of 25, Hannibal,

already a general, had launched an attack on Rome by way of
Chapter Three Spain and France, which were Roman colonies. He did not go
directly to Italy, but instead crossed the Mediterranean and ad­
vanced northward toward the Alps over these Roman territories.
HANNIBAL STORMS The youthful Carthaginian general won skirmish after skirmish,
Ingeniously outmaneuvering the Roman soldiers.
THE TURNING TABLES
Hannibal’s army consisted not only of 40,000 soldiers but of
numerous elephants. In one of the most daring military exploits
In all of history, he led this extraordinary band up over the Alps
and across and down into Italy. No one knows what route he
With Steven Spielberg’s brilliant 1998 movie Saving Private
took. But we do know that he lost half his soldiers and a good
Ryan, and its merciless depiction of the D-Day landing at Omaha
portion of his elephants during this unheard-of, freezing, food-shy
Beach, few can still doubt that war is hell.
crossing of the formidable mountain range.
For millennia, though, men not only believed that war was
However decimated his forces, Hannibal arrived in one piece
necessary, but that it was glorious and heroic—an essential part of
°n the plains of Italy. For 15 years he waged war against the
a young man’s education.
Romans on their own soil. Winning subjugated peoples within
This belief was delivered a mortal blow by the blood-baths of Italy, and even Romans, over to his side, he won battle after battle
the Napoleonic era. But it lingered on through the nineteenth
^vith stratagems of amazing originality. He almost conquered
century, not the least in the form of an abiding interest in the Rome; eventually, though, he was narrowly defeated and driven
exploits of great military leaders. The band of political exiles gath­ back to Carthage.
ered around Hugo on Jersey island shared these interests, with the
According to the Jersey island transcripts, this man who was
most interested of all being Hugo. After all, the poet’s own father,
Prepared to storm his way through anything—one of his favorite
“Brutus” Hugo, had been a successful general under Napoleon.
m*xims was, “I will find a way, or make one”— stormed his way
And Victor Hugo himself was often called the “Napoleon of Let-
°Ver 2,000 years later through the tapping table into Victor Hugos
terS’”. J . drawing room at Marine-Terrace.
Given this climate of interest, it’s perhaps not surprising that,
Some of the discussion that ensued isn’t of compelling interest
on the evening of December 8, 1853, one of the greatest military
*o rhose of us who are not history buffs. Hugo told Hannibal that
leaders of all time, Hannibal of Carthage, came tapping through
apoleon had considered him to be the greatest military leader in
the turning table.
Equity because Hannibal had sacrificed half his army just to
In 218-201 B.C., Hannibal came close to bringing the mighty
^rive on the battlefield, and had stayed there, far from home, for
Roman Empire to its knees. Carthage was a great city-state lo­
cated across the Mediterranean Sea from Italy, on the coast of Years. Hugo wondered what Hannibal thought of Napoleon?

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 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

The Carthaginian shade replied—in Latin, of which Victor Agers,” avid as they are for information about vanished civiliza­
Hugo and the seance participants had an excellent knowledge— tions and ancient, inscrutable monuments: Would Hannibal de­
that Napoleon had been the greatest of military leaders in victory, scribe the vanished city of Carthage for them?
but the worst in defeat. Carthage became a “vanished” city in 146 B.C., when the
What did this mean? wondered Victor Hugo. Hadn’t Napo­ Romans, after defeating the Carthaginians once and for all, razed
leon, in the course of his long retreat through Russia—where it the celebrated city to the ground, ploughed over the ruins, and
had been the winter, and not the Russians, that had defeated him— sowed salt in the furrows. Carthage was soon rebuilt as a Roman
kept his composure admirably, and, once back in France, man­ colony, and fragmentary descriptions of the original city have come
aged to put together a whole new army? down to us from antiquity—but historians are by no means cer­
Dixi ducem, non virum. Vidus a hyeme, dux magnus non tain just what this throbbing empire/metropolis of Carthage actu­
jugit, moritur. Mors suprema vidoria, replied the tapping table. ally looked like.
[I said the worst of leaders in defeat, not the worst of men. De­ Could it possibly have resembled the magnificent and magical
feated by winter, the greatest of leaders does not flee; he dies. Clty that Hannibal now described?
Death is the supreme victor.] Asked to repeat this in French, It was a giant city. It had 60 leagues of towers and 6,000
Hannibal explained: A defeated Napoleon is a selfish Napoleon. temples, 3,000 of which were made of marble, 2,000 of por­
Conqueror, he thinks of France; conquered, he thinks of phyry 600 of alabaster, 300 of jasper, 50 of stucco, 45 of ivory,
himself... .A defeated Napoleon is a fleeing genius who takes ref­ fi>ur of silver ^nd one of gold. The streets were 300 feet wide,
uge under a crown instead of abdicating under a halo. That and were paved with marble and covered in silver tile. Along the
abdication is death. entire length of the houses, perfumed lamps burned, and white
Hannibal meant that the honorable thing for Napoleon to have elephants swaying beneath towers brushed against the singers
done, as a military leader, would be to stay and fight the Russians and dancers in the streets. The air was so scented and melodi­
in winter, even if that meant death. The participants at the seance ous that flowers and birds never died there. Carthage had 30,000
weren’t so sure they agreed with him. Hugo asked the general if he Essels, 600 fortresses, 100,000 horses, 12,000 elephants,
recalled the names of the Roman legions he had defeated at Cannes, ^0,000 talents a year and Hannibal.
in France, near the beginning of his campaign. Faith, Vengeance, The air was so scented and so melodious that flowers and
Native Land! Hannibal tapped out the names in Latin. Did he ^u-ds never died there’? This sentence, with its fantastical details,
remember the names of the Carthaginian legions that had fought didnt put off Victor Hugo, perhaps because it was beautiful, and
in that engagement? Hannibal spelled those out, too. Perhaps because (as we will see in later chapters) Hugo regarded all
There was an exchange between Charles Hugo and the plants and animals as creatures with souls. Now he asked Hannibal:
discarnate general about Napoleon III, Hannibal communicating ^ould you like to tell us the names of the four silver tempes and
his contempt for the French dictator. Then Victor Hugo asked a lhe golden temple?”
question which would have seized the attention of todays “New Yes.

40 41
 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

“First, tell us the Carthaginian names, then translate them one hardly like a poet, but more like an engineer—or like a general
by one into Latin. First, the names of the silver temples.” enumerating the types and dispositions of his troops.
Hannibal performed this task with apparent ease: First temple, The seance goers would soon surmise that the coming of
in Carthaginian, Bocamar, in Latin Sol [sun]. - Second temple, Hannibal—or whatever strange concatenation of the warrior en­
Derimos, in Latin Luna [moon]. - Third, Jarimus, in Latin Dies ergies of our species that he represented—had not been entirely
[days]. - Fourth, Mossomba, in Latin Nox [night]. accidental. By bringing to the forefront the fierce, bloody and
“Now, tell us the name of the golden temple.” endlessly warring nature of mankind, it helped set the stage for the
In Carthaginian: Ulisaga; in Latin, Lux [light]. disturbing message that an entity called Balaams Ass would de­
Hugo’s next question is another tidbit for modern-day Adantis liver to the seance habitues only a little later that same month.
buffs who believe that the Basque country was setded by survivors
of Adantis, and that the Basque language is related to Atlantean’:
“We find lines in Punic [the Carthaginian language] in [the
Roman] Plautus. The scholar Abbe Elicagaray claimed that these
lines had close ties to Basque. Are the Punic and Basque languages
basically the same?”
Yes.
“So it’s certain that Basque derives from Carthaginian?”
Yes.
And on that note—which may suggest to some that the
Carthaginians were descended from the survivors of Atlantis,
though according to recorded history Carthage was ounded by
the Phoenicians!—Hannibal took his leave.
Was Victor Hugo really talking to the shade of the great
Carthaginian general? Though some knowledge of “Carthaginian,”
or Punic has come down to us, Hugo and the group could hardly
have had muéh knowledge of that language. Nor did these seance
attendees, learned as they were, necessarily know the names of the
Roman and Carthaginian legions that fought at Cannes.
And what about the peculiar fashion (apart from the exotic
details) in which Hannibal described Carthage? With his dry and
meticulous enumeration of the numbers of towers, temples, el­
ephants, and so forth, and what they were made of, he sounded

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 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY
THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

t0 expiate a wrong committed in a previous existence.

Our entire physical universe was a prison. As Hugo was to
express it in the coming year in his poem, What the Shadows Mouth
Chapter Four Says, every human being was God’s convict.
Why had a spirit with the name of ‘Balaam’s Ass’ been en-
1:1 usted with the task of delivering this news to the seance enthusi­
GOD’S CONVICT asts at Marine-Terrace on the night of December 27th, 1853?
In Verses 22-31, the Book of Numbers of the Bible tells the
story of how Balaam, the holy man of the Moabites—who was
able to speak directly to God—was asked by Balak, the King of
On Tuesday night, December 27, 1853, the messages of the ^I°ab, to intercede with God and ask Him to give Balak the
spirits took on a somber, sorrowful note. One Balaam’s Ass, ap­ strength to drive away the Israelites who had encamped on the
peared, and began methodically to lay out a whole new, strange orders of Moab. When Balaam asked this of the Lord, He de-
way of looking at the universe. One of the two principal pillars in lned to give his help to Balak, explaining that the Israelites were
this cosmological edifice was the Spiritist belief in metempsychosis: a blessed people. Balak persuaded Balaam to ask again; God re­
that we reincarnate through lifetime after lifetime, in the earlier seci again, but this time said that Balaam could go to the capital
stages as animals, along a Great Chain of Being which can take us Moab and speak with Balak, if he asked God’s permission.
up to angelhood. The metempsychosis of the Jersey island spirits Balaam set out for the capital on the back of his ass. At this,
differed from that of the Kardecists in two important respects, became angry with Balaam, since he had not asked for His
however: Whereas the Spiritists believed that we progressed more flPecific permission. Three times, an Angel of the Lord with a
oi less steadily up the Great Chain—if delayed a bit at certain ^ing sword showed itself to Balaam’s ass; twice the ass dutifully
points by bad behaviour—the spirits who spoke to Hugo and Com­ *y°Ved off the road; the third time, having no more room, it lay
pany cautioned that we could backslide badly between lives, even ^Wn.
tumbling back down into a ‘lower’ species. And those ‘lower spe­ Angered, Balaam proceeded to beat the ass. God enabled the
cies’ were far more extensive than for the Kardecists: They included eature to speak, allowing it to demand of Balaam why he had
reincarnations as plants and as stones. ck it three times? The ass added that, though Balaam had rid-
The other principal pillar of this startling cosmology was the Jt all the days of his life, it had never struck him. Now the
awful tiuth that Balaam’s Ass would unveil to the guests this
ho L°rcI appeared to Balaam, explaining that God had
evening: Not only did every particle of matter in our physical uni­ k §lven him His specific permission to go to the capital of Moab,
verse contain living, conscious spirit; not only did every stone, Qh ^at n°W cou^’ ibough he must reply no firmly to Balak.
plant, animal and human being on our earth have a living, con­ a§rined and humbled, Balaam continued on his way.
scious soul; but every one of those souls had come to earth solely Such personifications of beasts who had helped man—other

44
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 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

examples are the Lion of Anchóeles and the Dove of Noahs Ark— through a tree, alighting on every branch. Man flies through
were to come regularly through the turning tables. They seem to mfinity alighting on every world. You inhabit a world of suffer-
have been important in the pantheon of the spirits because they and punishment. We inhabit a star of light and reward,
hian, being born into life on this earth, comes here to expiate a
were imprisoned souls who had reached up from a lower echelon
of the Great Chain of Being to successfully help souls imprisoned guilty past, and the animal comes here to expiate a monstrous
on a higher; in so doing, they exemplified, it seemed, the kind of Past. Man does not know what his error was, nor the animal
transcendent, loving action that was the most conducive to help­ his crime was. If they did know, they would be happy.
Punishment would no longer be anything more than suffering
ing a soul along the path toward deliverance from imprisonment
that said to itself I committed such and such an injustice. I’m
in our physical universe. But such revelations—as well as others
having to do with the special nature of animals—were still in the Certain what it was; I’m in no doubt about that.
future for the seance-goers at Marine-Terrace. On this December Now, it is in the having doubts that the punishment lies. For
night two days after Christmas, Balaams Ass, who could see things to know his error would be for him to know his judge,
from the animal’s point of view, and who had in real life inter­ ^uld be for him to know God. And the certainty of Gods
ceded between species, took the first, dramatic step of explaining existence makes for Paradise on earth....In order to punish, di-
to them that our physical universe was nothing but a cosmic peni­ e justice puts on a mask Punishment consists in seeing only
tentiary. Ole mask of the judge. The reward is seeing the face of God.
We have no record of who was present that night, or when the Come down a step in the ladder for us: Do plants have souls?”
seance began. When the table began to move, Auguste Vacquerie Ves.
asked: “Who’s there?” Then, do plants suffer greatly? For, if the essence of punish-
The reply came: Balaams Ass. ^ent lies in not being able to see God, the plant is blinder than
For the first little while, Vacquerie was the sole questioner: e animal. Are you asserting that man in effect is in a minimum
“Well, if you’re a spirit in the afterworld, you who have been a purity prison, the animal in a maximum security prison, and the
beast in this one, you are better equipped than anyone to answer a in solitary confinement, for all their lives?”
question we’ve often asked: Do animals have souls?” « Bid. : The terms used by Balaam's Ass roughly translate as “prison,”
Yes. * ^^ysn and “dungeon. ”Modem terms have been substituted.}
“Talk to us about that.” If the plant suffers, then it has deserved to suffer. Unde-
Mankind is the minimum security prison of the soul, the u suffering, be it in a single atom, would be sufficient to
animal its maximum security prison. **6 the heavens collapse. Trees would fell, terror-stricken
“So, life is truly a punishment?” «ds would sink into the abyss, and infinity would cease to
Yes. *ate always outward, if the rose were oppressed or the daisy
“Explain how.” h k Subring necessarily entails a weakening. The plant
The created being passes through creation as a bird passes e grimmest of the soul’s prisons. The lily is sheer hell.

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“So you are asserting that animals suffer more than men, and about his true nature. You also seem to be saying that the pain
plants suffer more than animals?” resulting from complete ignorance, or from being in doubt, would
Yes. cease the moment we found out who we really were. And then
“How is that possible? Aren t pangs of conscience the worst of you go ahead and tell us who we really are! If what you’re telling us
all? Don t you suffer all the more when you live according to the ls true, then, if we accept what you’re saying, our punishment will
dictates of your soul? Do you really expect us to believe that a Cease. And it follows from that that our lives will cease, since the
blade of grass feels less happiness than a dog? Or that a creature Oldy reason we have been born at all is to be punished. The very
that can’t think suffers more than one that does? I grant you that world itself would cease to be, if our punishments vanished by
there might be some truth in this if [the souls within] plants and Vlrtue of our having had our true natures revealed to us! You tell us
that we are sentenced to doubt, and then you reveal that truth to
animals were aware of their former greatness. But even man him­
us!”
self has only retained a twilight gleam of his true nature. For the
brute animal, that gleam is merely a shadow; for the vegetal being, I said, to be in doubt about one’s true nature is the punish-
it’s pitch-black night. How can something be a punishment if t^cnt. I affirm the truth of this proposition, whereas you are
doing no more now than doubting your doubt. Therefore, your
you can’t even feel it? Are you trying to tell us that a horse that is
perfectly happy with a single bale of hay is more harshly punished Punishment continues.
than man with his unquenchable thirst for the ideal?” Victor Hugo entered into the discussion: “In regard to these
truths you are affirming, for some time now I, Victor Hugo, who
The horse is more harshly punished because it is more deeply
plunged in matter. The plant is even more harshly punished speaking to you, have believed in exactly what you say. If one
because it is rooted in the soil. The ladder of punishment has 3s to doubt these things in order to be punished, then, tell me:
three rungs: the body of the human, the hide of the beast and by has an exception has been made for me?”
the root of the plant. The soul imprisoned within the plant has If you’re so sure ofyourself, then tell me what punishment is
^ted out to the soul of an ox?
two rungs to climb, the soul within the animal has only one, to
attain to the level of man. The soul’s punishment begins in the You didn’t understand my question. I’m telling you that I’ve
animal and vegetal worlds with material suffering and is com­ « lrtipsed some of the truths you’ve just revealed to us, that those
toUching upon the human soul and its punishment in our world
pleted in th^ world of man with moral suffering; and by that
time it has become almost a deliverance, since to suffer in the at the level of a certitude for me, and have been for some time.
mind only is to be halfway to freedom already. In man, the soul n this point I’m not in a state of doubt, and yet I’m punished. I
breathes; in the plant, it suffocates. The eyes of man are sky­ you, then: What special category am I in?”
lights which open out upon a higher life; the prisoner-soul in the The proof that you doubt is that you have merely glimpsed.
human brain peers out at heaven through these skylights. f°r myself, I affirm these truths. You believe what your
“You say that, for the vegetal world, punishment lies in its y °Ughts tell you, and you doubt what our revelations tell you.
complete ignorance of its true nature, and for man, in his doubts °br thought is merely human; ours is divine. The thoughts of

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even the greatest mind always wear a blindfold over one eye. ing members of society.
That blindfold is life. You are a living, and therefore fallible» But Auguste Vacquerie’s mind was still on the bewildering rev­
genius. I will spell out to the dead Victor Hugo the errors of the elations that had preceded this description. He burst out:
living Victor Hugo. Truth awaits you at the door of the tomb. “Is mankind to be forever in a minimum security prison, the
You take God for a child’s book that can be read in a flash! animal to be forever in a maximum security prison, the plant to be
God is infinite, and what is infinite cannot be known. Death forever in solitary confinement? Is the world always so condemned?
will astonish you. Death is always astonishing. When he emerged k the earth really, from the root of the oak to the brow of the
from the tomb, Moses exclaimed: ‘How splendid it all is!’ Socrates genius, nothing but a vile morass where the dirty linen of the
ran about everywhere in heaven and cried out: ‘How ravishing it
higher worlds is washed throughout eternity? Everything that
all is!’ Jesus fell to his knees. Mohammed covered his face with thinks, everything that walks, everything that vegetates—every­
his hands and did not dare look thing is punished? What? Woman, virgin, baby being bom—they’re
Mme. Victor Hugo joined in: “For a long time now, my hus­ guilty? The adoring dog, the hovering bird, the rose giving off
band has been reflecting on and talking about the destiny of man lts glorious scent—these are all criminals? Is there not a single
hlade of grass that’s innocent?”
in the way you have just described it to us—except for the animals
and plants, in the souls of which he does not believe. He had You all come here guilty.
thought these things out long before you revealed them to us to­ Repeat that for me: Everything on earth is expiating a fault
night.” c°mmitted elsewhere.”
He has expressed only a one-millionth part of the truth con­ Yes.
cerning your humanity. As proof, I give you, from a million Balaam’s Ass made some final comments to the effect that the
examples, this one: He doesn’t know that your globe contains s°ul damned to Hell in the center of the earth hears forever words
another globe inside it, like a pit, or a stone, in a fruit. Volca­ ^d sounds connected with the crime he has commited. The ses-
noes are the mouths this inner world breathes through. That s,°n ended. The spirits had introduced a major theme into the
world is your Hell. Punished souls inhabit it, not in the midst of latice. It would be energetically pursued for the next two years—
flame, but in the midst of shadow. tyjth Auguste Vacquerie tenaciously fighting the spirits every inch
of die way.
Balaam’s ^Ass now described in detail how the damned soul
sank down through the ground from its tomb until it reached this
interior globe which was Hell, and how, if the soul was pardoned,
it was ejected up out of this inner Hell by the eruption of a vol­
cano. He explained how the soul, if not forgiven, could rise up
through the earth and be imprisoned in a plant or animal. He
described how the souls in this interior Hell were partly punished
by continually hearing their misdeeds eloquently described by liv­

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CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY

This respect for royalty would cost him his head. In 1793,
Robespierre came to power. The dreadful period in French his­
tory known as the Terror began. Already, on Jan. 21, Louis XVI
Chapter Five had been guillotined. Now, hundreds of prominent people not
completely anti-Royalist were rounded up and executed. Bloody
repression was enforced throughout the country. Though he had
ANDRÉ CHÉNIER LOSES HIS HEAD BUT tried to keep out of the public eye, André Chénier was arrested
ENDS UP KEEPING IT and thrown in the prison of Saint-Lazare on March 7, 1794.
Desperately, André continued to write his poetry. Before, he
ad written gentle love poems in the classical manner of ancient
Greece and Rome. Now, his verses, written on small strips of
Were the comings and goings of the various spirits really as Paper and smuggled out of prison in his laundry baskets, took on
arbitrary as all that? A week or so before Balaam’s Ass appeared a hitter, contemporary note.
with his grim revelations about our prison universe, the shade of July 25, 1794, dawned clear and cool. André Chénier was
the French poet Andre Chénier had dropped by. Mostly, he had . en from his cell in Saint-Lazare and marched through the wind-
discussed the politics of the French revolution. streets of Paris to the guillotine. He mounted the scaffold and
Then—the day after Balaam’s Asss visit—André Chénier came ^as forced to kneel. His head was buckled into an iron collar. He
again, this time to tell his own story. It was one that would bear p°°ked down in horror. A slop basket swayed a foot beneath his
out Balaams Ass’s assertion that man was indeed God’s convict. ace- It was half-filled with blood, some of it fresh, some of it in
Many writers suffer from writer’s block. That is nothing com­ 5°a§ulated globs. André was staring into the blood of those who
pared to the troubles of André Chénier. This French poet had his a been guillotined before him, some that very morning.
head chopped off before he could complete his final poem. had little time to experience his own revulsion. Suddenly,
Chénier was born in Constantinople in 1762, the son of a e crowd was silent. There was an odd creaking sound above his
French businessman/diplomat and a Turkish mother. The poet’s a * He had the sensation that his head was being hurled down-
father brought the family to Paris when André was three. His > toward the bloody slops in the basket.
mixed blood® proved a potent brew. The young Chénier was a J^^P^ he was far above his body, which was slumping, head-
brilliant student, a fine poet (who kept very quiet about his po­ ’ °nto the floor of the platform . He was being enveloped in a
etry), an ambassadorial secretary and a journalist—and an inde­ ^aPhanous sheath. What was being enveloped in the diaphanous
fatigable sexual adventurer who sowed his wild oats all across Eu­ sJ*hwas his soul. He looked up at the glittering, azure sky. The
rope. ad become a mirror, and in that mirror he saw himself. He
André was 27 when the French Revolution swept through h ^ears again. His face was fresh and sunny, full of hope.
France. He was a moderate liberal, happy that the power of the e gazed, he felt as if he were being kissed slowly, adoringly,
nobles had been broken, but inclined to favor the royal family.

53
52
 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

from head to foot, with a kiss in which he felt not only the pres­ At the start, Socrates occupied the tripod table for a few min-
ence of his mother but that of every woman he had ever loved. utes- Then, suddenly, an abnormally strong shaking of the table
The face in the mirror in the sky was connected to a body. alerted the assembled host that something unexpected was about
Where the guillotine had sliced through Andre Chenier’s neck, t0 happen.
there was now only a pulsing, luminous line... Who’s there?’ inquired Charles Hugo. The reply was: André
Chénier.’
How do we know what happened to Andre Chénier after he We know that numerous works of this poet remained incom­
was guillotined? plete, Grillet goes on, using the present tense for emphasis,
It would seem—and Victor Hugo believed it—that the spirit durrieu, one of the exiles who is at the seance, finds that this is
of the beheaded poet came tapping through the turning tables on excellent opportunity, since we have Chénier in our hands, for
Jersey island. asking him to complete several interrupted poems. And so it is
Beginning on Dec. 9, 1853, Andre Chenier not only told the ^at, solicited to complete the fragment of Idyll XII that begins,
participants at the seance about his afterlife experiences. He also Orne running, young Chromis, I love you and I am beautifid..., he
tapped out the remainder of the poem he had been working on replies with a declamation in fact greatly resembling his style:
just before he was taken out to be guillotined.
This posthumous performance of Andre Chenier has con­ ùlcere is swifi-footed, but Chromis is agile,
founded skeptics of the Paranormal. Not only was this poetry, Woods in which Amaryllis is the bird in Virgil...
tapped out by the “spirit” of Andre Chenier, of the highest literary
merit, but it was in exactly the same style as the work of the living stanzas follow. Other participants, their appetites whet-
Chenier. ’ also express their wishes. All the questions fuse into one. At
These skeptics can hardly argue that this poetry allegedly from request of Guérin, Chénier is made to complete his final poem
the afterworld was the unconscious work of Victor Hugo. Hugo lch was interrupted by the executioner. He is also made to
wasn’t even at the seance that night. auce new sections joining together a number of the poems he
Here’s how Claudius Grillet, in his Victor Hugo, Spiritist, tells °te while he was alive.”
the story. Crillet concludes: “Without losing his head, the glorious
‘ Friday evening, Dec. 9, 1853, we [Grillet writes as though he capitee lent himself with perfect good grace to these various
were present, though he was not] saw what amounted to a renewal Quests?
on Jersey of the experience of [the early 14th century Pope] Julius
II (an enthusiastic user of the turning tables, by all accounts), who tw 1 $ nOt easy f°r us c‘t*zens t^ie sound-byte world of late
persuaded the spirit of Homer to pick up the lyre again and add a entieth century America to take an interest in the poetry of late
verse to the Iliad. The seance took place at Leguéval’s house, and a d* teenth century France—even when it’s ostensibly dictated by
not at Marine-Terrace. Victor Hugo was not in attendance. Scarnate entity doing a perfect imitation of a late, great poet’s

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CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY the forgotten MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

style.
I recognize myself, and yet I no longer have my senses about
It’s easier for us to read—because it is morbidly fascinating—
I’m alive, and yet I no longer carry the weight of my life. It
an account, allegedly by a dead man, of his own beheading and
Pulsates through the light in my transparent veins. I drink infin-
what came after. through all my pores. An invisible mouth covers me with a
Here, as tapped through the table by, ostensibly, the obliging l°ng hiss in which I sense my mother, in which I recognize my
spirit of Andre Chenier himself, is the full story of his decapita­
^stress, and which gives forth one after the other the perfume
tion and its aftermath. all my lovers.
A luminous line separates my head from my body. It is an
The man climbs up on the scaffold. The executioner at­ ahve and feeling wound, which is receiving the kiss of God. Death
taches him to the platform. The half-moon closes around his
aPpears to me simultaneously on the earth and in the sky, while
neck The souls of those who have been guillotined take flight body, transfigured by the tomb, plunges deep into the beati-
in this iron collar. Then the man has a terrible moment. He tudes of eternity, I see, at an immense distance below me, my
opens his eyes and sees below him a basket full of reddish mud. ^ther body which the executioner is throwing to the worms, my
It lies in the gutter at the bottom of the scaffold; and his head
ad rolling in the gutter, my wound gushing blood, my guillo-
tells him: T’m going to be there.’ ‘No,’ replies his soul.
1116 blade being washed, my scalp hanging at the end of a stick,
The scene has just changed. Instead of mud, he sees an ocean;
my name being execrated by the crowd.
instead of blood he sees light. He has entered the sky by way of ^hen I hear a voice crying, “Glory to Chenier!” and I see a
that gutter. O, terror! O, joy! O, awakening! O, tremendous
0 descending from the heights of the sky down to my fore-
kiss! O, falling to one’s knees! O, soaring! The soul takes flight, ^ead. The basket into which my head had rolled has ended up
yet remains on its knees. It remains a child, yet becomes a bird.
^^c°ming an annunciation of God. The guillotine has ended up
But O, surprise! It feels itself being slowly enveloped in a
^mg forth ¡n beams of light. The executioner has discovered
diaphanous sheath. The sky changes into a mirror. The soul
s own wholeness in God. The sower of death has harvested
sees itself. It is beautiful. It is 20 years old. The body no longer Mortality.
hides the soul; it reflects it. The soul is no longer enclosed in
I am reborn in a huge cradle. I emerge alive from the shad-
matter. Beauty is no longer a matter of flesh. The soul has
. s> as pink as a lily in springtime. Every soul is a flower grow-
released from this corpse being dragged to the charnel-house all
°ut of the dirt of its tomb. Heaven is a bouquet. The scent
that was precious in it: its smile, its glance, its sunniness, love’s
^Cemeteries is the softest scent. God will always inhale the
first kiss still lingering on the lips of the severed head, a forgot­
of a rose that grows out of death. Prayer plucks the rose for
ten sigh, a song of an autumn evening, the perfume of an April’s
Prayer is the bouquet-maker of Heaven.
early morning, the tiny little fast-subsiding outburst of a dove,
1 of a sudden, I hear voices in the infinite, one saying, “O,
the words: ‘I love you;’ and it has carried all that away into the
Poet, my name is Neere. I am sad; my crown is incomplete.
sky

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Your verses abandoned me. I died while being born. O, my

poet, make me live again. Look once more upon my Idyll. Let
me rejoin Chromis.” The other says, “O, my lover, I am Camille; Chapter Six
you made me love you, you made me sing. Give your love back
to me, and take up my song once more. 0 my love, enable me to
find Chénier again.” The other says, with a grim and plaintive
note of mockery: “O, revenger, I am Louis Sixteenth. You hold
Metempsychosis speaks
in your hand angers whip. You’re on a first-name basis with
thunder. Seize the lightning lines ofpoetry and avenge me. Make
the scaffold wilt—
The universe as prison and all life as punishment: That was
°ne °f the two principal tenets of the strange and disturbing cos­
We will not linger longer with Andre Chénier, for now his mology presented by the spirit world in the person of Balaam’s Ass
channeled utterances begin to be those which will interest only
t0 the seance-goers at Marine-Terrace.
close students of French literature and history. André apparently
The other tenet, inextricably intertwined with the first, con-
meets in the afterworld those figures he created in his poetry but
S1sted of the Spiritist doctrine of reincarnation—or,
was not able to develop thoroughly because he was executed, but I^empsychosis, which included reincarnational lives in the bod-
which he will now complete by making use of the turning table.
les of animals. According to Alan Kardec’s spirits, metempsychosis
And he meets the King of France, whom he defended, and is about
a slow and steady process, a progressive movement up the
to meet Robespierre, also in the afterworld, who executed Chénier,
reat Chain of Being to the areas of Angelhood.
and whom Chénier will forgive...
To hear the spirits of Marine-Terrace tell it, the process was a
It’s all quite improbable. And quite amazing. Perhaps it is
mie lot more bumpy. It wasn’t just that you also reincarnated in
time to begin to look a little more critically at all these channeled
Ories and plants; it was that you could backslid horribly while on
revelations. Were these spirits really who they said they were? y°u Way up the Great Chain of Being. If the deed you committed
What were they, anyway? Was horrible enough, you could even tumble back downfrom the
Before anything else, though, we must meet and talk with
^rld of humans all the way to the world of stones—in a single
Metempsychosis. ^carnation.
Cleopatra—was she really that evil?— had become a worm!
. Here’s how Claudius Grillet sums up what he calls the Hugolian
,ef system of “metempsychosis applied to a doctrine of univer-
a ademption:”
ò°uls survive bodies, but take on a new material form. It’s a

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sort of generalized purgatory. Souls survive bodies, but reintegrate sey island, and wrote quite different comments in his journals,
matter around themselves anew. They plunge into inferior forms than he made to his professional colleagues about the extent to
of being (animal, mineral), or they mount up toward the more which he adopted the spirits’ words. Hugo was always a master of
perfect form of man or of angel, according to whether their present public relations, and he well knew how ridiculous a public profes­
existence has merited reward or punishment. sion of faith in the tables would made him look, and how much it
“Everything that is, is also conscious and alive to varying de­ Would open him to attacks from his enemies.
grees. But it’s likely that this ultimately highly secretive man bor-
“Beyond the impassive, unmoving and speechless appearance rowed more than a single image from the turning tables (of course,
of things, the Spiritist eye saw a nature that was all aquiver with the skeptics argue that the turning tables borrowed all of their
life, that bled, and that suffered for being contained in the blind Outages from him, and from his friends; but that is not the direc-
horror of matter or in the punished flesh of animals—that puri­ don of the argument of this book). Since fully three-thirds of the
fied itself and that sang on the heights of the spirit. transcripts have been lost from sight, it’s difficult to find out what
“In this system, there is no eternal punishment. But there are the truth is. Let’s glance briefly at the metempsychosical, plant­
penalties. ed stone-inhabited- universe images in some of the rest of his
“In awaiting their re-entry into grace, all criminals suffer, in P°etry. Many of them likely did come from the turning tables;
their prison of matter, a punishment proportionate to their crime. and a quick look at them will help us greatly in filling in the pic­
From the pebble in the road to the stars in the sky, the entire ture of this strange and rather merciless form of reincarnation.
universe is alive. Psychoanalyst Charles Baudouin summed up metempsychosis
“But universal burial in matter is the sentence imposed on those seen in Victor Hugo’s later poetry in his 1943 work, Psychanalyse
who are guilty—and also the means by which they expiate their Victor Hugo (Baudouin regards this imagery as issuing not from
sins.” ^e afterworld but from Hugo’s earliest, ambivalence-and-fear-cre-
at’ng, relationships with his mother, his father and his brothers).
Cleopatra had become a worm! Baudouin sees five basic premises as underlying the Hugolian
Hugo used this image in What the Shadow’s Mouth Says, the Metempsychosical universe. In setting them forth, he illustrates
more-than-600-line-long poem he wrote, late in 1854, at the urg­ each one with examples from Hugo’s poetry:
ing of the spirits, basing it almost entirely on the communications
from the turning tables. Hugo is on record as saying that this one l) The universe is peopled with souls that move upward from ech-
line, and the overall concept of a progression up a Great Chain of elon to echelon, as a function of their moral worth, and continu-
Being with includes lives as rocks and plants, are the only ideas he 0UslY This is a creation
ever borrowed from the turning tables and incorporated into his
poetry; everything else, he said, came from him. Which goes from rock to tree and tree to beasi
Hugo spoke very differently to his fellow seance-goers on Jer­ ^ndfrom the tree to you mounts imperceptibly,

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But, farfrom stopping at mankind,

Enters the invisible and the unfathomable, All who misbehave
Filling the blue sky endless Cause to be born, in dying, the monster oftheir ife
With beings neighbor to man, and others far away... Which [in the next lifetime] seizes hold ofthem.
This is the sublime ascension ofthe starry ladder.
The monster-animal and the monster-stone are described in
Hugo with some partiality. For the animal:
On the other hand, the beings, in function of how much merit
they have earned, transfer in death and reincarnation from one
echelon to another, mounting or descending and taking on, ac­ Pity the bird ofcrime and beast ofprey.
cording to a law of moral equilibrium, the form that corresponds That which Domitian
to their degree of merit. [one ofthe most tyrannical ofthe Roman emperors],
Caesar did with joy,
Everything lives. Creation hatches forth metempsychosis. The tiger carries on with untold horror.

2) This continuous ladder of beings goes right up to the archan­ The ultimate jail is in the interior of stones.
gels, and in the upper reaches vanishes in God, while at the other
end the ladder plunges straight down into absolute evil, the image The stone is a cave wherein a criminal muses.
of which is almost a negative of God:
The nameless cry of pain of the condemned soul is “walled up
A dreadful black sun from which radiates the night! ln the stone.”

3) God made the universe; the universe made itself. It is on account 0/ What eyes fixed wide open
of original sin that the soul has fallen down through the various tn the depths ofthe pebbles, secret dungeons ofsouls!
stages of matter. From now on, the world on which it lives is the
punishment-world. This vision of the stone-dark cell haunted Hugo.

In the monster, it expiates; in man, it repairs... t^Ian, captive spirit, listens to them (the magi)
Yes, your untamed universe is God's convict. ^Vhtle in his brain, doubt,
A beast blind to gleams from heaven,
4) For man, the reward is to ascend, in dying, to the level of pure So as to transport there the indignant soul
spirit; while the punishment is to fall to the level of animal, of Suspends its spiders web
plant, and of stone. t^own from the skull,

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 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

Down from the dark cell’s ceiling. comments from the evening’s seance participants have been pre­
served:
5) The images of punishment which Hugo presents in his later
poetry are especially those of the punishment of kings, emperors, I am the eternal idea. I am the real.
men in “purple” (the higher-ups of the Roman Catholic Church)
and tyrants from every century. He imagines the more tyrannical Only I complete myself by the I.
Caesars of ancient Rome as reincarnating as “birds of crime and
beasts of prey,” and, even worse: I take man and I wrest him into thingness.

Tiberius in a rock, Sejanus in a serpent. I am the slope of the soul between infinity and the finite.

In Night Weepings, Hugo even has the souls of the very worst I am the shortest path from pebble to God. [Ed.: The soul
tyrants of all—Nero, Caligula, Louis XI and the like—reincarnat­ ^ustpass through every echelon ofbeing in the shortest time possible.]
ing in huge tomb-stones above rotting, half-opened graves!
In Hugo’s later poetry, the revenge of metempsychosis is great I am immensity’s arm bearing the grain of sand and mixing it
indeed! ^ith the seed of fire.

What would Metempsychosis itself have made of all this? I am the corridor leading you to secret doors.
To jump ahead of our narrative by a year, on Dec 17, 1854,
the personification of metempsychosis—an entity calling itself I am the staircase of Babel climbed by Jacob and leading to
’Ee unknown ceiling.
‘Metempsychosis’—paid a visit to the turning tables.
This visit wasn’t long; just long enough for that entity to dic­
tate fourteen mainly short sentences, each one of them summing I have a countenance fashioned out of the creation; my eyes
up the nature of metempsychosis. stars, my ears are wind, my mouth is the abyss, my skin is the
shy, my hair the forest’s branches.
These fourteen sentences stand as a monument to the utterly
mysterious occasional brilliance of material allegedly channeled
from the spirit world. I am the mysterious portrait hanging on the wall of the ter
tÌble house- ,
Each one encapsulates the entire essence of metempsychosis.
A few are quite plain; others express the nature of metempsychosis [Ed.: This single sentence could be an entire short story by Kafka
^but without the other-dimensional realities). The sentence evokes a
with an astonishing pithiness combined with metaphorical rich­
ness. pictUre ofa human being in a single incarnation living tn a house
Here they are, with commentary when deemed necessary. No is rent by every sort of catastrophe, in which the one stable

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element is the portrait ofan unknown personage hanging on the wall

(in this context, house ofholy terror might be a better translation for
maison terrible). Now and then, in the course of living his or her
lifetime in this house, the human being, in the midst ofevery sort of Chapter Seven
difficulty, happens, in passing by the portrait, to glance up at it. It is
always unchanged, this portrait of—he or she doesn’t know whom, in
this house constantly rent by the thunder and lightning of terrible the costume box
events.
This unchanging portrait is the portrait ofthe unchanging, eter­
nal selfofthe human being; the Oversoul, so to speak, which contains
within and as itselfthe ‘ soul’ ofeach individual lifetime, in dynamic Is our entire physical universe really nothing but a
interrelatedness, and in such a way that the Oversoul, as an entity, Did all of us take life on penitentiary earth sole y P
remains essentially unchanged throughout each lifetime. The portrait mistake made in a previous lifetime?
is always mysteriously presentfor the occupant ofthe terrible house—
How seriously should we take a talking ta e, anyvv' y
though he or she scarcely ever has the time to even look at it. The TWchidquestion isonewe ha«^'Jóonundiuo of
occupant cannot know the identity ofthe personage until, in death—
between lives—he or she knows that it is their own self-portrait. ]

I am the formidable atom seed of man. heyond Í ¡S

tables at Marine-Terrace, they must, by e in
I am the root of the flower, the foundation of the rock, the outside of conventional space and time They .must haje been,
"'hen they came to Hugo’s house, not only mv.s.ble but also com
Purely nled, so to speak, in terms of any of the physical or men
I am that which enchains and that which unchains. tal accoutrements of time and space as we ow t em.
To communicate their ideas at all, the spirits would have h£
I am the archangel-jailer, and I shine forth in the immensity * make use of the words and concepts and imagesandmor«
like a sun in the shape of an iron collar. *at they found in the minds of the human parucipants
"Xunately, this difficult idea has been brilli^for

^ynn.i.f.hc.n.cais.ini.i.Wn«^^
lived, the Pulitzer Pnze-wmning Amen« P *
1 be undisputed masterpiece of Merrill—who a

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 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

68—was the 500-page poem The Changing Light at Sandover (pub­ But,” added the poet carefully, “the powers they represent are
lished in 1982, but issued in three separate volumes before that), real as, say, gravity is ‘real’—but they [these powers] would be
which was written largely under the guidance of, ostensibly, a host ^visible, inconceivable, if they’d never passed through our heads
of spirits speaking through a Ouija board. and clothed themselves out of the costume box they found there.
Over the almost 40 years that he channeled entities,’ James ^ow they appear depends on us, on the imaginer, and would have
Merrill was never able to make up his mind whether the spirits t0 Vary wildly from culture to culture, or even temperament to
existed as such or not. This brilliant, urbane and learned man, ternperament....A process that Einstein would entertain as a for-
who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the first book of Sandover rriula might be described by an African witch doctor as a croco­
and received two National Book awards, one for the second book dile.”
of Sandover, knew that most of what came through the Ouija As late as 1994, a year before his death, Merrill suggested to
board had not been in his head beforehand. He knew himself well Critic Helen Vendler that many of the entities in occult, channeled
enough to know that these strange, esoteric concepts-involving ^°rks were personifications. “There are forces in the world that it
reincarnation Akhnaton, Atlantis, an upcoming new species of ls convenient for us to personify,” he explained, using the gods
mankind, and much else-had not been buried in his unconscious goddesses in Homer’s Iliad as an example; in the modern era,
before they were swiftly spelled out by the marker. In The Chang­
new angels ought to be things like electricity and gravity;
ing Light at Sandover,^ had had the courage to put in block
ey too would lend themselves to personification.”
letters what came unbidden and unexpected from his guides, which
was close to half of that immensely lengthy poem I , With Merrill’s description of the channeling process in mind,
arriad ’ ^7“ °bl¡ged “ — an ets return to that extraordinary vision of a prison/convict uni-
att tude of perfect amb.valence” toward his spirit guides, this did ^rse which was communicated to Victor Hugo and Company by
not stop him from giving serious thought to the phenomenon. In e Jersey island spirits. Let’s ask ourselves: Assuming that they
® interview in Biró Ttawai, Summer, 1982, the dis- a<J any objective reality at all, would these other-worldly ener-
sXhad " T ÍSC1°Sed that hc beliwd b°* that the |^es’ when they passed through the heads of the seance-goers at
spirits had a measure of objective reality, and that they were de-
arme-Terrace and sought to cloth their thoughts and concepts
pendent for the expression of their truths ™ j -j
Ut of the costume boxes they found there, really have foundonly
created by the mind of man. °sturnes consisting mostly of prison uniforms, balls and chains?
Merrill set forth his belief that, in whatever realms of cosmic
forces or elemental processes are in existence, human lanZ answer is an emphatic: Yes.
th ^*CtOr f^ug° and Bis family, and the people who surrounded
fr Ori Jersey island, were quite literally prisoners. As we learned
pOiTl Martin Ebon’s Introduction, Hugo had been driven from
■b. ¡Anadón ‘
^ance in 1852, in the aftermath of the coup d’etat of Emperor
figures are our creation, or mankind’s.
aPoleon III. The other members of Hugo’s circle on the island

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THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

were also either political exiles from France, or, like Sandor Téléki,
The political exiles on Jersey island lived and breathed the no­
of Hungary, proscr.pts from the failed revolutions of other coun-
tlTlCSe tion of the universe as a prison. These were the concepts and
•mages—typical of their age—that the spirits, seeking human words
All of them were prisoners chained to the rocky, barren surface
and concepts and images and memories with which to clothe their
ofJersey .sland, wh.ch was separated by 25 miles of cold and w nd
°wn words and concepts—and themselves—would have found
swept waters from the coast of France. °
,nside the costume boxes in their heads.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the best minds of the time were
awakemng to a hornfied awareness of the extent to which wZn
If, from the vantage point of the late twentieth century, we
society had been a pumshment/prison culture Th
and women of the day were passionately Znn strip away some of the prison garb from this grim mid-nineteenth
tal punishment. As early as 1829 H ^P^^gagainstcapi- century vision of reality—for, in our time, things seem to be a
fiercely polemical » hld "»»" ltt;le better—what vision are we left with?
«, »land Ke bad „■ a Sí""“ «"d ™ )»- We are left with one of a physical universe that is entirely per-
that English statesman to action), describing i°" -°T^3- m°Ved ^cated with soul, and that is made up of a series of levels of real-
ticularly brutal hanging on the neighb • 6 ,V1Vld detai1 a Par" ’W the densest of which is composed of rock. The levels com­
In Riuria, LeoT.I.SXZ °f G"'"«r
posed of plant and animal matter are progressively less dense, and
be had wimeaaed in Paria In bia ÍS" c execution at of man the least dense of all—at least in terms of our material
...e on of paJ” ¡" » "fi' Planet. For the very coming of the spirits suggests that, elsewhere—
airiong the stars and planets? in other dimensions?—there are other,
c°mpletely ethereal species of being, whose modes of existence we
There were few French nationals who diJ ^ght do well to try to emulate.
had not been told by their fathers, of th kl j remember> or This vision of the universe which we are left with, stripped of
Revolution, in particular the Terror of 17<n °f the Frencb e grim fetters of mid-nineteenth century Europe, is one where
distinguished citizens were summaril When hund«ds of reincarnation is a reality, and one where we are admonished to
father, Joseph-Léopold-SigisbertZtSí^- Hu^
S*r,ve-—not only in terms of lifetime to lifetime, but in this par-
we learned in the Introduction, a ge/ I 828)’ had been> as t,cular lifetime as well—to improve ourselves by working toward a
Every educated Frenchman or wo SendnS under Napoleon, tT1°re spiritual kind of existence.
and brutality that the French Revel..,- 30 of the tyranny b ^emarkably, this is exactly the sort of universe presented to us
They knew also that, during the Mi had overtbrown. T the channeled entities of today.
population of France-and of other F. 95 Percent °f the It ¡s, with numerous variations in fine detail, the universe of
were, effectively, prisoners, their land T™ COUntries as well— j e spirit guides ofJames Merrill in The Changing Light at Sandover.
lives owned by a feudal lord ’ eve,T moment of their n that poem, we are told that the universe consists of ten levels of
reality, only the first of which, our earth, is physical. All of the

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rest come after death; only the most elite of the souls can finally from the planet Essassani (“Place of Living Light ), which revolves
attain to the highest rung, from which most of their soul matter is around the star Sha 500 light-years from earth, in the direction of
usually distributed back among living geniuses on earth. the constellation Orion. Essassani is a fourth-density world evolv­
Reincarnation is also a fact of life—or of‘lives’—in Sandover, ing into a fifth-density one. Bashar explains that he has come to
and it’s striking to note that Merrill’s guides tell him that human earth as an emissary from his world to help us evolve from our
souls reincarnate from time to time in the plant and mineral worlds third-density experience into a fourth-density one--an evolution
(though not exactly in the animal). This kind of reincarnation which he says it is essential that we accomplish. Bashar makes
isn’t the result of having commited a heinous crime in a human fourth density existence sound attractive, and certainly more re­
lifetime; rather, it seems to be a knowledge-acquiring adventure fined than the kind of living we are involved in here: You will be
taken on by hardier and more gifted souls. Merrill’s guides even living in the moment and truly understanding that every single
tell him the soul ofW.H. Auden has lately reincarnated as a min­
foment of time is literally a new moment....You will begin to
eral deposit! They also inform him that there is a sense in which
truly see through the illusion of physical reality as your own pro­
plant souls reincarnate in humans, since plants possess a quality jection. You will be able to come and go, in and out of your body
called shooting which is sometimes inseminated into a human soul
at will.”
before birth; Luther Burbank is an example of a human born with
a vigorous supply of shooting.
We could go on at some length about the many volumes of
channeled’ literature which have appeared over the past 20-30
In a later chapter, we’ll take up in more detail the theme of
Years, and which paint a picture of our universe consistent with
reincarnation as it appears in modern-day channeled literature. the universe of Hugo’s spirits when more or less stripped of its
But, a universe of ascending levels of refinement, only the earliest hall-and-chain elements. This is not to say that these books, where
of which consist of matter, through which the human soul moves
they are actually channeled from other-dimensional beings, ex­
progressively, is a staple of such literature today. According to the
press a ‘true’ picture of the cosmos. This is merely to say that they
spirit guides who dictate Songs oftheArcturians to Patricia Pereira,
cypress a picture of the cosmos which is cobbled together from the
our universe is comprised of 13 “densities” or “dimensions” (the
w°rds and concepts and images and memories in the costume boxes
terms seem interchangeable). Earth is only a third-density world, It) our heads—the heads of late twentieth century human beings,
with our afterlife being a fourth. Pereira’s guides, allegedly from
fhat vision is no more nor less true for us than was the vision of
the Blue Crystal Planet revolving around the star Arcturus—itself
the Jersey island spirits for Victor Hugo and his fellow exiles; it is
a fifth- and sixth-dimensional system (and therefore a completely
siitiply one that makes more sense to us, since it is, necessarily,
ethereal one) tell her that in mankinds universe “for every physical
planet there are at least four or five light-substance planets.” Partly created by us.
In Darryl Anka’s Bashar: Blueprintfor Change. A Messagefrom Perhaps it would not hurt for us to remain open-minded to
our Future, the extraterrestrial Bashar channeled by Anka comes notion that, behind both mid-nineteenth century and late twen­
tieth century versions of reality, there just may move objectively-

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the forgotten MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO
real energies seeking to make their presence known; or, perhaps
the canopic jars topped with bizarre animals heads which stood at
somehow just simply being picked up at propitious times by people
the four corners of the crypts in Egyptian tombs—of which John
of certain talents. But so essentially different are these spirits/
energ.es/presences from urne- and space-bound humankind that w°uld also have known—along with much else, could have pro­
vided him with a great deal of the imagery he needed to dress up
our apprehension of them is thoroughly garbled by our own pre-
“"“¡’Ti s there any way of arriving at a sLgle objective and make manifest his essentially inexpressible experience.
ruth behind all of these subjectivities masquerading as the truth' The Book ofRevelations of John, then, contain truth—but it is
In our day and age, many would say there is nnr. 6 l , a transcendent truth necessarily dressed up in the time-and-space
Bur, for ,b.,t »bo ..i« b.„ bopo, ooo acc°utrements of John’s time, and therefore enormously distorted
~ í ibXta .t ln its expression.
As we will see in the final chapter of this book, Victor Hugo
applied to the whole history of channeled lit ' 7 t0 eheved that he was the reincarnation of John of Patmos (along
the beginnings of mankind^but, ¡XÍ' “
ty’th a number of other religious prophets); perhaps the poet had
nity, we can at least try to keep Xro e T? s°nie intuition of the similarities in their essential nature of the
which seem particularly capable of sLding^doXX61115 delations of John and the revelations of his turning tables. On
only a fig leaf or two from the mid-nineteenth Weanng f^at note, let us turn to Victor Hugo and those revelations—for
boxes that the spirits have had to dip into. H C0Stume t ey have only just begun!

Lets look at a final example, in a diffpro «

use of the costume box. In “Deep Inside °f makin&
Doomsday! How the World Will End~~and \Y/L T*05 Cave” (in
Ebon), James R. Wolfe provides us with f by Martin
why one of humankinds greatest reli™ 3 • asclnatlng account of
tic Revelations of St. John—may have^n' k° fS~the APocalyp-
suggests that, given the essentially indescrih ki " d'd' Wolfe
perience which John was trying to des °e> transcendent ex­
forced to unccnsciously search throuehTlI W°U^ bave been
in order to find even minimal tinu " hls own experiences
describe his titanic four-day exoer!™ ,terms with which to
He would have had to tansack his'own X °f the Lor¿
heves that John’s memory of the eru me boxes! Wolfe be-
cano near Thera, which he could h, Pt'°n °f underwater vol-
ve seen from Patmos; and of

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 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY
THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

day Shakespeare did not meet another great representative of hu-

Htan thought.”
Chapter Eight
No.
However, on April 23, 1616, Cervantes [,the author of Don
Quixote,] died—the same day, almost the same hour, as yourself,
ENG. LIT. 1000: SHAKESPEARE HOLDS ^idnt you meet him? Would you care to answer that?”
FORTH AND BYRON AND SIR ^ALTER
No.
SCOTT NOD DISTANTLY Hugo explored this: “Do you mean, you wouldn’t care to an-
Sxver> or that you didn’t meet Cervantes?”
Cervantes did not die at the same time as I.
Not long after Ac arrival of the Hugo family on Jersey ¡sland But he died the same day. You must have met him in the
Fran^s-V.ctorh^begun to translate Ae complete worWWl’ place you both went to. Two geniuses like yourselves must have
ham Shakespeare. Eventually, he would produce an 7 j j ad things to say to each other. What did you say?”
tad. of d! 4. ¿“ “j
When you die, you straightaway take on the age of all those
write Ae introduction to his son’s work an,! i H 8? WOuU
have died—that is, of eternity. In heaven, there is neither a
expand his introduction into an entire book "Tk °l 6 afterward
nor a last to arrive. Everyone has a single second of life, and
- h „!1; J “fe ^at second lasts a hundred thousand years. Asking a dead per-
already high in the Hugo household when this was How long have you been in heaven?’ is like asking a sun-
glish dramatists and poets, if not Ae greatest in th^U eam, ‘How long have you been a part of the sun?’ A soul is a
1564 and Aed in 1616, first came tapping ^1°?’bom ¡n
®<ster who has no older sister. Infinity is not the elder sibling of
table, on January 13,1854. PP Arough Ae turning
nor eternity that of genius. All great minds are twinned
Victor Hugo and Auguste Vacquerie wer. together... .Ideas have brothers—but never little brothers. Ifyou
seance, wiA Mme. Hugo and Charles “knu- at first gestión the sunbeam about its age, it will reply, ‘Ask the light-
Ae identity of the illustrious shade had k tabIe- Once ^lng bolt.’... We [artists] write the drama; God produces it. Be-
Hugo put the first question: een establ*shed, Victor
°ld heaven: It is the final act of the drama. The tomb that
“As you kaow. for us you are one of the four ? ^Wns open to receive our souls is the curtain that goes up on
creators of all mankind. Would you like n “ five 8reatest final act. Applaud, Cervantes! Applaud, Molière! Applaud,
in Ae tomb and what encounter took . °td us what happened despeare! Enter God.
1 kissed Corneille, just Aen being k April 23> 1616?”
Hugo had another question:
was a French dramatist who lived ,77 ^d-: ?iem Corneille
When you were on earth, you created— you created in imi-
v™. B, „„„.d sbd.ZL'6?';,'«*! tation of God. Now that you’ve left earth and are living the true
1616. Gather together your Aouvhr, ’ . <“dnt 1606> hut
g S’"nd consider whether that living in the light, what is your genius doing with itself? You,

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THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

Shakespeare, lived, and you created; and for you these two ideas Cervantes, Molière, Shakespeare, and others whom I can but
cannot be separated: For Shakespeare, to live was to create So are dimly glimpse in the depths of infinity without quite seeing who
you continuing to create? Are you continuing your work’ If you’re they are. We sit pensively before the Light of Eternity. Jesus is
getting on with your creative work-if it still comes welling out of
On His knees. The Light illuminates us; it bedazzles us. Life
you—then this must also be true of all the other geniuses in heaven.
ravishes us and flows over us; and ifyou saw all the prophets and
So that, running parallel with the primary creation of God there ^1 the magi and all the poets and all the geniuses who are seated
must also be what we could call secondary creation-that is, God’s
ln a circle before God, you would not ask me if I created.
creation through the agency of great minds.
No; I look. No; I listen. No; I am no more than an attentive
“This opens up vast new horizons! If you’re [continuing your
atom before the face of immensity. I am a great man abdicating
work], are you domg so with reference to the world of men that before infinity. I fall from archangelhood. I get down from my
you lived in or with reference to the world of souls in which your
Pedestal as inconspicuously as possible, and I throw away my
being now dwells? Has your work undergone the same transfor­ balo. I am a dream the awakening from which is death. That
mation as yourself? Do you now write-if the word write is appli­
^bich, for me, in life was art, has been, for me, transfigured in
cable—i n a language that is new to us, that men would not under­ death into love. My creations have left their wings behind in the
stand, in a language appropriate only to heaven? What are you
toinb. As I have become what I now am, so has my art been
writing: dramas What passtons are you describing? What worLs’
tesurrected in the forms of love. Art walks to heavens door, but
What ideas? If these dramas were translated for us, would they be
Oldy love may enter. Happiness is an eternal Mecca toward which
accessible to our human intellect at all? In a word- What is the
art makes its way as a pilgrim, but for which love is the angel.
connection between the work you are n™ A ■ ■ ' ,
the work you did on earth?” ™ d°‘ng and
Shakespeare would quickly become a regular at the table. He
Human life has human creators. Celestial lit k . j- •
w°uld be the only English-language regular! But, six months later,
earth, great minds create in order to ooinr ° other greats of English literature would come dropping by.
heaven, everything is moral, everything is goocT'’ 55 “ hey would have virtually nothing to say; just a word or two each.
Ut their impact on the seance attendees—particularly one young
just, everything is beautifol. I could only create ’ “
if heaven wen incomplete; but, as it is I dwell • SOmetlunS here nglishman—would be enormous.
I now have my being in perfection. I d, *“ ’ “asterP,ece’ That young Englishman was Albert Pinson, a British naval
condemned to admire. I am lost in a crow/7™ adm,red’ am b’eutenant.
was the creator of the spectacle spectators, I who A few years later, Lieutenant Pinson would play a strange and
God has fashioned for himself an I Panful role in the history of the Hugo family. While he and the
demigods: Orpheus, Tyrteus, HornedC°mp°Sed °f ^ily were together on Jersey island, Victor Hugo’s other daugh-
Euripides, Moses, Ezekiel, Isaiah Bn • i’ a esc^us’ Sophocles, ter’ Adèle, would fall in love with the youthful officer, and become
’ el,AesoP’Dante, Rabelais, c°Bvinced that he had fallen in love with her. Tragically, in 1863,

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 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY the forgotten MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

she would follow him, first, to Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, then “You aren’t my brother,” said Charles Hugo. “Are you Mr.
to Barbados. During this period she would live alone, almost never Pinson’s?”
seeing Pinson—and then only from a distance—while he consis- Yes, Andre.
tendy ignored her. It would eventually become apparent that her This created a sensation. Lieutenant Pinson confessed that he
feeling that he loved her was a delusion, a symptom of schizophre­ did indeed have a brother. No one around the table had known
nia. In 1872, Adèle would return to Paris, eventually to be con­ Ais. Pinson explained that this brother had disappeared some
fined to a mental asylum, where she died in 1915. twelve years before, and that his family had no idea what had
On Wednesday, June 7, 1854, none of this was apparent. become of him.
Pinson and Adèle were merely engaged in a mild flirtation. Pinson now proceeded to ask a question in English. The table
Pinson had come to the seance partly to show the others the tesponded in English. Pinson asked a second question in English.
foolishness of these table-turning experiments. He had an idea A second reply came in English.
about how he could do this. He would only ask the spirits ques­ It’s not clear from the records whether the other members of
tions in English, and insist that they only answer him in English. Ae group had any idea what was being said, or if Pinson reported
This shouldn’t be a problem for them, if they were who they said *t to them.
they were, and had the world of the supernatural at their finger­ We do know that the English Lieutenant was visibly shaken by
tips. But Pinson was sure they weren’t who they said they were, wbat had occurred. He stood up, deeply moved.
and that they wouldn’t be able to respond—since nobody in Vic­ He told the group that personal, family matters had been in­
tor Hugo’s seance-loving group knew much English at all (Francois- volved in the questioning. He asked them that, for this reason,
Victor, who was hard at work translating Shakespeare, spoke the Aey not put on record anything that had been said.
language poorly, and rarely attended the seances). However remarkable all this was, what was to happen in five
We don’t know if Pinson thought that any of the seance-ma­
would be much more remarkable.
vens at Marine-Terrace were consciously perpetrating a fraud. But
On Monday, June 12, 1854, at 10:15 a.m., the same group
he was certain that, at the very least, they were unconsciously and
around the table again. Charles Hugo and Lieutenant Pinson
innocently transmitting the information to the table themselves.
the table.
Present at die seance that night was a large and varied crew:
After a minute or two, the piece of furniture began to move.,
Pinson, Mlle." Adèle Hugo, Victor Hugo, Guérin, Téléki, Charles
After a brief exchange ofcommonplaces, Pinson asked. Who s
Hugo, Vacquerie, and Kesler. Aere?”
Pinson held the table with Charles Hugo and asked if he could
^be table answered:
put questions to the spirits in English. The group had no objec­
tions—nor, apparently, did the table. It began to move. Charles
Is Montague Helt alive or dead?” Pinson asked in English,
asked who was there.
^be table tapped out, in English, Alive.
The table responded, in Latin: Frater Tuus [Your brother].
Ouérin put a question to Byron: Can you formu ate a com

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 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

píete thought in several lines of verse? Were asking you for just a Had it really been the shade ofSir Walter Scott that had tapped
small number of verses, since Charles doesn’t know English at all °ut these final two lines of poetry, and about Lord Byron? Why
and gets exhausted trying to follow the letters ” did the participants “know not what they spoke” when they asked
Yes. Byron himself to tap out a line ot two.
“Speak.” As a lesson in English Literature, this was surely one of the
The table tapped out in English: You know not what you ask. stfangest in the history of the English language. How did it affect
Pinson translated for the group; then he said in English: the incredulity of Lieutenant Pinson? It must surely have left him
“Can’t you speak some lines [of your poetry]?” thinking. He was, after all, the only one at the seance who had
No. any knowledge of English.
“You mean you don’t want to?” And he did not believe for a moment—or had not believed for
Yes. a moment—that there was the slightest chance that the turning
“Why don’t you want to say anything?” table could ever give access the land of the dead.
The table shook and turned around on itself.
“Who’s there?” asked Pinson.
There was no reply. The table shook violently; then, at the
end of several minutes, it tapped out: Silence.
“’Silence? Does he mean we should stop?”
Scott.
“Are you Sir Walter Scott?”
Yes.
“Do you wish to speak?”
The table tapped out two lines of English verse:

Vex not the bard; his lyre is broken,

His last song sung, his last work spoken.

Pinson translated for the groun TI„-„

No doubt the young lieutenant was dumbf^T jCP Z lmPressed'
plan to unmask the impostors of Marinc-T0'"1^' Certainly his
The session ended. Ofthemanvh J errace was a shambles,
eluded the turning table sessions at Victor h”5 í°, f°lloW that C°”'
have been among the hardest ugos ^orne’ would

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THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

certainly the growing quality of the messages, contributed to cre-

atmg at Marine-Terrace an atmosphere favorable to the invasion
°f the most obscure forces, which had always been besieging that
Chapter Nine s^d house.” Hugo’s unpublished The Exile’s Journal, for April 27,
J 854, describes the unpleasant atmosphere that often seemed to
ay upon the poet’s room. He writes that, “at night my room fills
THE HAUNTING OF VICTOR HUGO UP with strange noises, there are knocks on my wall, papers stir,
^explicable noises make themselves heard.” He noted that some-
tlrnes when he awoke at night, he wondered fearfully whether he
^as about to see some strange being strolling through his room.
There were grisly ghosts on Jersey island: In particular, there Since they talk to us, they might show themselves to us,” he re-
were three murderesses and a headless man. Nothing was known ccted. “They are able to arouse our hearing; perhaps they will be
about the headless man; but the White Lady was said to have able to arouse our sight. A black being would cause me a certain
murdered her infant child several millennia before, and to have ^ount of fear. A white being would perhaps frighten me a little
been condemned to walk the barren fields of Jersey island ever
II( ZI I t >e Spirit °f a nearbX menhir, also His fears were not unfounded. The wandering, disenfranchised
ca'led the Wh.te Lady; m the Jersey language, the term La Bh°st of the White Lady actually did invade the turning tables.
Bhanche Damme can refer to either a ghost or to a menhir
She seems to have set the stage for her appearance very care-
Local legend had it that the Black Lady, also condemned to
u beginning with the night of February 21, 1854. Wehavean
roam the tsland endlessly was an ancient druidess who had sacri­ account in Victor Hugo’s own hand, as preserved in the Jersey
ficed her own father on the bloodied altar stone of a dolmen. And Is and transcripts:

¿ (Note) On February 21, Charles and Francois-Victor, arriving

o;- - ack at the house at 11:30 p.m., saw the windows of the drawing
lit up. They wanted to come in by the drawing room, but the
mg tables opened doors to other dimensions- he 8°J jVZ
might bring forth something more palpable'^aiT" Or was locked. Everybody had gone to bed. Charles, unable to
thing quasi-physical, far more terrify^S°me' explain all the light, had searched for the key. He came to ask his
^ther for it; she didn’t know where it was; to ask Vacquerie for it,
tratling and slouching across his bedroom floor
h°> surly at being awakened abruptly, asked to be left alone, etc.
and a lead/ng French auÍorityonthebaÍ" W°rk*°fVictor HuZ0’
^he next morning, when we unlocked the drawing room, the maid
didn’tfind the candlesticks. So it couldn’t have been one ofour own
■he~
aridles that had illuminated the room. Nor had we lit the fire the

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THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

night before. What could the light have been? We chatted about it at
Guérins account of hearing strange shrieks on that same night
breakfast this morning. We decided to consult the tables.
>s preserved in the transcripts. He wrote: I wrote, yesterday, March
24, 1854, arriving home at midnight, the following note: I heard,
The seance was held at 1:30 that afternoon. Charles and Mme.
while passing by the Dick [Ed.: "Dicq"-a French version of the
Hugo sat at the table, with Victor Hugo transcribing. English word ‘"dyke"—is here mispelled by Guérin. This was a
The table did not offer much in the way of clarification. When
road leading in from the sea andfollowing the line ofan ancient
asked by Victor Hugo if the spirits knew what it was that his sons dyke], the strange and piercing cry that I had already ear at t at
had witnessed the night before, an anonymous entity rapped out,
same place. , ,. , , ,
Yes. When Hugo asked if the phenomenon had been natural or
I had already heard, a month before, the cry about which I speak
supernatural, the entity answered only:
*n the note ofthe 24th.
Night beauty.
Marine-Terrace, March 25, 1854
Then the table was still. Was that all? asked Hugo. To which
the table responded, Yes. Fran?ois-Victor took Charles’s place at Théophile Guerin
the piece of furniture. It responded with what seemed to be a
On March 23, reporting a conversation with a friend who told
string of nonsensical words: (Faith), goddess, doubt priest man him about, “a passerby having been pursued by a woman in
altar temple night.
who was none other than a ghost,” near Marine-Terrace, Hugo
Some months later, they would find out that the words had
reputedly said, “Since were doing the tables, it wouldnt upset me
not been so crazy But, for this afternoon, the seance was ended.
to end up not only chatting with the spirits but seeing t
Three weeks later, another hair-raising incident brought the
^uérin declared that he would rather fight on the barrica es ra* e
seance-goers running to the turning table, to make inquiries about rhan go through such an experience, to which Hugo retorte . m
the ghost called the White Lady. A Saint-Hélier baker’s boy-one
n°t like you. I would experience an infinite sweetness in seeing a
source suggests it was the barber-had been walking toward St.
shade, in seeing once more those beings whom I have loved an
Lukes Church, which faced Marine-Terrace, when he had seen a
who are dead.”
white, motionless figure standing at the end of the street. The
figure seemed to be in flames. It seemed important to speak to the table aSalI\
Philip S™„, .dk the in ViMr H The next day Thursday, March 23,1854, at 9:00 p m., Victor
Hugo, son Charles, and wife Adèle, along with Auguste Vacquerie,
Terrified. nur k„<,w,„g .heil» „ go J
inducted a seance.
i 7 J 6"P ” "d P« hid. hi. «y«
Is there someone there?”
IL” *h'n H"s° Ji ■!>» ky "«>
The table tapped twice.
“No? Who’s replying no?”
rween rhe kn.hHed „unke which lin™"™"™ ““ The table tapped twice. # .r
“But isn’t there someone, since someone is replying no. Can

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the forgotten MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

you say who you are?”

From this point on, the sequence of events is not clear. The
No.
seance seems to have ended early, with Francois-Victor leaving the
“Is something bothering you?”
ouse to spend the rest of the evening in town. No one seemed to
Yes.
e actively planning to go out on the street at 3:00 a.m.
“What?”
But something strange did happen in the middle of the night—
Domus vestra. Si vis mecum loqui, veni in viam. [Latin for:
as a matter of fact, at 3:00 a.m. Here is the story, told in Victor
Your house. If you want to talk to me, come out in the road ]
ugos words, and preserved in the transcripts:
Auguste Vacquerie asked: “Are you the White Lady whom the
the barber saw near the house?”
I went up to bed at 11:30p.m. I was worried and a little sad;
Yes.
esides, I was preoccupied, and a biton edge on account ofsomething
“If we went into the street, would we see you?”
Yes. Was working on at the time (Satan: The Suns Go Out).
I slept badly. Toward 1:00a.m., I heard Francois- Victor come in.
“Tonight?”
Yes. wrles went down to open the front door for him. Victor, Charles
and niy wife chatted in the kitchen for a moment [where we had
“At what time?”
continued to make the table talk (Moliere)]. Immediately afterward,
Three o’clock
^Would we be able to see you if there were several of us?” ey went to their rooms, and I heard my two sons, who sleep in the
w° rooms adjoining mine, come upstairs.
Everything was silent. The house fell asleep. I halfdozed off. In
“Must we be alone?”
Yes. . e midst ofmy drowsiness, I had a very sharp perception ofsurround-
Mme. Victor Hugo inquired: “Do you love us? Are you sym- objects, which meant I wasn’t entirely asleep.
I had been in this state for a fairly long time when the ringing of
pathetic to our concerns? m
a^ll abruptly aroused me into full awakeness. In the profound calm
Yes.
Auguste Vacquerie asked, “So you don’t » Mhe night, the doorbell was ringing in the clearest and most distinct
here in the house?” ant t0 sPea^ t0 us I raised myself up on my pillow. I listened. The world had
No. en S^nt agaln, and nothing was moving in the house. 1 thought:
obody in the house is outside. It wasn’t somebody from the house
Having more or less set un i 0 r#ng. Might it, by any chance, be 3:00 a. m. ?
a.m„ the three participants hastened to^ha rendez*vous for 3:00 ¡ wrestled with this idea for a moment. Because ofthe cold, I was
summoned Molière to the table and la kT Sub,ect' They ^rse to getting up. However, I said to myself: It’s odd that the bell
cussion of the dead dramatists comm UnC. Into a vigorous dis- ^e ringwg, and it would be strange indeed if it were now 3
The Learned Ladies . ln ver* »n his comedy, t 1 ^rew myselfout ofbed—and 1 ought to say, seeing as I’m
e llng everything, that I moved cautiously, as if someone else were

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the FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

present. Greek lyric poet of great distinction who lived from 570 to 478
The shutters ofmy window weren’t closed, the night wasn’t par- B.C. Victor Hugo put the question to him:
ticularly dark, and it wasn’t at all dark in my room. I took the box of “A mysterious event took place here yesterday on the subject
matches that was on my table and struck several matches in a row of which we’d like some clarity. This relates to an apparition that
against the wall; thefourth lit, and I lit my candle from it. I looked is known in the countryside under the name of the White Lady.
at my watch hanging from the chair back near the head ofthe bed. Will you let us talk about this event?”
The hands said 3.05 a. m. It had been about five minutes since the
No.
ringing ofthe bell had awakened me.
“Would you be able to enlighten us about it?
Iput out my candle. Ipeered outside to see ifI couldsee anything.
No.
The sea was calm, the nightpale, the terrace deserted. I went back to
“After we’ve listened to you, would we be able to persuade you
bed. As I was getting into bed, I saw on the wall between the two
run an errand for us with regard to the being about whom I ve
windows the phosphorescence ofthe matches tracing a luminous trail; just spoken?”
I[word/s missing here], ’What ifthat were about to take the form of
But the table would tap no more.
a ghost!’ The trails vanished.
The next morning I told the story at breakfast. No one except me
Victor Hugo was as visibly shaken by his failure to wrest any
had heard the doorbell ringing. They badali been deeply asleep at the
information from the spirits about the White Lady as he was by
time. We resolved to ask the table this evening about this I said that the inexplicable phenomenon of her apparent coming, oon
ifthe table invited us there [out in the street in the middle of the
the inconclusive meeting with Anacreon, however we o
night] again, I wouldgo. Auguste said, Td be very scared, butl’dgo, know the exact date, nor do we have the transcripts ° t e
too on the sole condition thatpeople kept me company in the house
ance—the White Lady appeared at the turning tab e, rew aqmc
right up until it was time [to go], ’ You had to go alone
Portrait of herself using a smaller table one leg o w ic en e
Glued to the piece ofpaper upon which these notes were written
a pencil, and then, after dropping a hint oi two a out
was an envele containingfour matches. Victor Hugo had written
and her punishment, took her leave of the seance..
on the envelope:
This time, she had set no rendez-vous for 3:00 in the morning.
But, one more time-though his fears were beginning to
lessen—it seemed to Victor Hugo that he passed close to the pres­

On the second n.ght-March 24, 1854—a seance was held, ence of the White Lady, while walking along the shore ate one
beg.nn.ng at 9:00 p.m. Those ptesent wete Mme. Hugo, Mlle. n’ght; and that she implored him to write a few ines o poetry to
her memory. Whether this was a waking revery or not, we tin
Ad le Hugo, Victor Hugo and Auguste Vacquetie. Seated at the
'he White Lady making her way with surprising composure
table were Charles Hugo and Théophile Guérin
through the turning table at Marine-Terrace on Monday, June 9,
The spirit in attendance turned out to be one Anacreon, a
1854. The hunchbacked French teacher Kesler was there. e

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in whom the spirits had been trying to inculcate faith in their

0 clock, under the tree in front of his window?
existence for many weeks now was fascinated by the presence of
“I accept most willingly, and I thank you,” pronounced Kesler.
this seemingly benign female ghost. The atmosphere at this se­
It was time for everyone to become more serious: Will you
ance swiftly became one, not of ghost-inspired terror, but of philo­
tell us what the Rock of the Fairies is, the one where the local
sophical inquiry, as the participants sought to interrogate the White
people claim to see apparitions?” asked Hugo.
Lady, and she sought to answer their well-meaning questions.
It is my rock
The White Lady seemed to bring out the gallant in the usually
“Can we see you every night at Rocquebert?’
very shy Kesler. “ The White Lady!” he had exclaimed when she
Yes.
first arrived. “I would very much like to see her. If she’ll give me
“Do you live in your rock alone?”
a rendez-vous, I’ll go!” The Lady did not reply.
No.
Victor Hugo had written some verses—he thought she had
“Can you tell us who lives in it with you?”
requested them—for the White Lady. He’d thought better of read­
My remorse. He is a black dwarf who beats me every time I
ing them, however; perhaps, he told her, he should have read them
c°me in.
aloud before the seance had really begun. To which the White
Mme. Hugo asked: “What can we do to lessen your suffer­
Lady answered:
ing?”
I will return.
Pray.
“When?” asked Hugo.
I don’t know when I’M be able to come. There are times “Can you tell us what crime you have committed? asked Vic­
tor Hugo.
when my stone closes in upon itself. [Ed.: The White Lady is
apparently referring to the dolmen ofwhich she is supposed to be the I was the first mother on this island to kill her baby.
familiar spirit. J “Has your punishment been going on for long? How long does
*t have to go on?”
Victor Hugo asked: “Since you’re free this evening, would you
be able to keep a rendez-vous with our friend Kesler who wants to Until the sea has invaded my rock
see you? ‘You haven’t old us how long you’ve been subjected to such a
harsh punishment.”
Does he want to have white hair?
“ I have some! Yes, I’d like some more!” exclaimed Kesler. Three thousand years.
I will be on the beach tonight at two o’clock “Three thousand years of suffering for the crime of a moment!
•Justice meted out by humans is less harsh! exclaimed Auguste
“On the Azette beach?”
Jacquerie.
Yes.
-Two rfdook i, la«," Ke,l„ That is not true. The harshness of a sentence lies not in how
J°ng it lasts, but in whether it is for life. Human law that metes
grarefiil.. you ,f y„. w,„|d
midnight. ®,llld he °ut forced labor for life is a thousand times more harsh than
divine law that metes out three thousand years of expiation fol-

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THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

lowed by an eternity of forgiveness.

Vacquerie declared: “I know it myself, because I personally
Hugo replied, rather incongruously, “You’ve said you had af­ believe in a future life. But for those who believe only in this
fectionate feelings for me. You’ve said: basia mille. [Italian for a
world, it’s a condemnation for life, since for them there’s nothing
thousand kisses’] Why do you love me?”
after life.”
Because you love your children and your children love you.
Even they are certain of being liberated.
Kesler joined in: “For myself, I love you because I am follow­
“By nothingness. Those whom men condemn for life are also
ing my instincts and allowing you to lure me toward you who are
certain to be delivered by death. There’s no difference.
so unhappy. You are indeed suffering. Tell me, will I have white
Yes, there is. Man metes out a life sentence, which means
hair before tomorrow night is over?”
that human punishment would go on eternally if death did not
If you have gotten through the entire day without commit­
Intervene. The law decrees punishment and does not decree the
ting any errors, then you will be quite fearless.
end ofpunishment. Whereas even for those ofwhom you speak,
Auguste Vacquerie was still hankering after more serious stuff:
the sense of being under sentence is not there without the cer­
“You are correct in saying that the harshness of a sentence lies not
in its duration, but in whether it is for life,” he declared. “But tainty of deliverance.
surely this is only on condition that the person being punished Kesler had not stopped thinking about his upcoming rendez­
knows that his sentence will come to an end. Do the imprisoned vous with the White Lady. “Tell me, dear soul,” he interrupted.
'You know what I’m thinking of at the moment. Do you want
souls of beings such as animals, plants, and pebbles know that
their suffering will come to an end? Do they know when?” 111e to do it?”
They know that they are not condemned for life. [Ed.: The Yes.
White Lady seems to be implying: for the entire lifetime ofthe soul— “But it’s quite difficult. How will 1 do it?
that the soul knows that at some point on the Great Chain ofBeing it If you cant do it, don’t. The White Lady seemed to be be-
will be deliveredfrom imprisonment.] But they do not know when coming impatient. . c
their sentence will finish. The thought of certain deliverance is “1 wanted to tell you that if it were to mean a softening ofyour
fate, I would certainly go and see you on your roc . ou yo
equivalent to the thought of deliverance in the near future. The
hke me to come to your rock?”
certainty is the reality.
Vacquerie pursued this. “We other men, who are also pun­ The owner of the field where my rock is would you
ished beings, we entertain the hope, but we do not have the cer­ buckshot if you did. ... . ,
tainty, that our sentence will end. The only thing we’re sure of is “Will the time come when you will find your child in t e
life; if, in dying, we are annihilated, we will then have been con­ °ther world?” Mme. Hugo asked.
demned for life. There is no certainty of resurrection; life is a life I’m certainly counting on it.
sentence.”
You know very well that you are not condemned for life. The seance ended. When the White Lady returned, almost
n’ne months later, on Thursday, March 1, 1855, at 10.00 p.m.,

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THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

she was significantly more eloquent and philosophical ( Kesler had

ness.
failed to keep the rendez-vous, to nobody’s surprise, and probably
not his own). Those in attendance included the Allixes, young “It seems to me that since the winter you no longer come to
the beach, and that instead you come down to the plain. Do you
Adèle, and Victor Hugo. “Holding” the table were Mme. Victor
have a motive for this?” .
Hugo and Charles Hugo.
After a few initial exchanges, the White Lady suddenly launched I am everywhere, but I am seen only at certain hours in the
into a poetical description of her fate: north and only at certain hours in the south, I get up, an go t
sleep; souls have their laws like stars; they fiinction like planets;
The mountain is my tomb; I am its soul; I am a being God
there are fixed souls; there are wandering souls; there are the
speaks ofunder his breath; I ascend and I descend; I desire heaven
and the earth desires me; stars pull me by the hair and coffin souls of nebulae; there are Pleiades of souls; there is the satellite
nails hold me by the feet. The darkness cries out to me: On your soul and the sun soul; there is the asteroid soul and the world
knees! And the sun cries out to me: Stand up! I am a martyr to soul. The heavens have two aspects: suns and souls, night and
death, radiance and resurrection. The sepulcher is a sunrise that
the dusk: I fear the setting sun; I fear the night; the shadow is my
God hides away, the day is a sunrise that God puts on disp *y.
assassin; I am she who is inconsolable standing in the obscure
darkness; I weep and the stars put out my tears; I weep behind One-half the night is given wings by eternity, the o er is
the mask ofthe day; I weep in the depths ofGod’s chasm; I weep given wings by immensity. .. .
inside that immense sinister keg that the Danaides of infinity “If 1 were on the plain or on the beach right now, would 1 be
pierced fidi of holes [Ed.: The Danaides were the daughters of able to see you?”
Danaus, wheat thetrfather's command murdered their bridegrooms Don’t put such questions to me.
on their wedding night, and were condemned in Hades topour water Mme. Hugo asked: “Where have you learned to use such me
eternally into a bottomless vessel.] Phrases? And why? Seeing as all you inspire is frig t.
Victor Hugo asked: “Are you the same person who came to me The worst pain of all is the pain that elicits horror from e
on the beach m front of my house one night and asked me for ^looker. To weep and to frighten: there’s a punishment, be-
lines or verse? cause, ordinarily, sorrow attracts love and tears bring sm es.
I am always she: I am she who is inconsolable and who stands My tears are storms, and I am a hurricane driven to desperation
on the horizon. I am the night watcher of the numberless tomb because I am unable to caress anyone.

emptying its eyes into empty skulls, I am she who brings bad “You asked me to pray for you,” said Victor Hugo. Do you
dreams; I am one of the bristling hai™ k T « know that I do that every night? Do you receive t ese praye s
•i j cup T ° nairs °*
terrible one of all, because I am the wk;* l •horror; I
. .am the most directly, and do they lighten your burden? f . k
«T rj
1 hose k IT saw von nn
days, when e^ • the right
rk«lte hair and ° hair.
« I am not the only one who suffers. Pray for aU. If you wish
by th„ y„„ appeared, „ ‘o lighten my burden, forget all about me. To pray for one
for lovely halfc, Person alone is to cause them distress. The o y goo prayers
those which you sow to the winds at every tomb you pass.

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the FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO
“In fact, it’s my rule to pray for everyone, and that’s what I do.
You ought to know that. But is there any disadvantage to my account of its habit of standing on the tips of mountaintops, has
lost the use of one of its feet. It’s the fastest bird there is.
mixing your name and several others together ina universal prayer?”
There is a disadvantage for my name only. I am unknown to It must have been hard to know what to reply to t is.
Hugo didn’t seem to have; he changed the subject: I ye seen you
you. I am not one of your dead. I am a symbol rather than a
being; I am the ghost of an entire crowd; I am the ghost of a on the mountain or on the dolmen of the White La y, ut you
crime rather than a criminal. I do not partake of an entity; my told us you lived at le Roquebert. Which one of those two places
do you really live at?” .
name is Infanticide; I am the mother of every murdered infant; I
am the numberless and the invisible; I am the formidable fu­ I have several dwelling places; I am part of a popular legend;
neral shroud fashioned in the grave from every bloodied swad- thus have I left traces of myself in the human imagination,
dling cloth of every cradle. for the rest: one final word. One night you wanted to go right
“What are we to make of the apparition which at the moment UP to a light that was shining on the sandbar,
has the attention of the entire island and makes some people quake ^hite Lady, and you found a fishermans lantern. e . yo
in their shoes and others chuckle with merriment?” Wanted to go right up to the light that was shining on e
In explanation of this, Victor Hugo had inserted the following You would have found a smugglers signal. Heres e exp
note in the transcript: For two weeks, the inhabitants ofBagot, George tion, in one line: There are two souls in the two can es at cas
Town and Ruelle Pavee have been up all night trying to see or catch a dieir light upon you.
mystenous bemg, dressed in a blackfuneral shroud, who appeared on The table stopped dead.
the snow to several good women ofthe area. Hugo asked anxiously: “Are you still there?
Nothing. The table shook: No.
Victor Hugo continued: “What are we to make of the foot­ “Who’s there?”
prints found m Devonshire two weeks ago that the entire English Pure yes m pure. .. . i
“You who are there, do you have anything to te us.
published the pattern. These are foot marks in the shape of horse­ ViccHuso. "O you explain youcselffurfi«! “”
shoes, spaced eight inches apart, in a straight line stretching for a rMy. "Do you want us co put some questions to you. e
hundred mdes and cutting across an arm of the sea, imprinted on did some considerable shaking, but did not rep y. inc
the walls and roofs of houses as well as on the ground, and not exhausted, they ended the session for the nig t.
matching dte stride of any being known to man. This is indisput- a-m. . ,
ably a reality, and an obvious mvsterv i . . That night, Victor Hugo left the following note in the tran-
1being 1
• •is that JI e "v^tery.
made these footprints?” Do you know what the scripts:
The being you’re talking about is a bird tk . V
foot with the help of its wines- a r 1 i °" / believe it’s necessary to explain the more mysterious questions
P wings, a colossal polar bird that, on
asked by myselfand which elicited the replies I’ve just recor e

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THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO
Since the beginning ofthe winter, I had no longer been seeing the
observed by my sons one night; with the doorbell ringing in the night,
light on the beach at night. About three months ago, across the way
from Marine Terrace (it was midnight; I was just coming home), I with [ lacuna ] drawings traced by the pencil moving ofits own ac­
noticed a vibrant, flickering gleaming on the hill which atfirst I took cord; andfinally with explanations provided by the tables on various
for theflames ofthe brick works. My interest was aroused. I began to occasions, notably on the night ofAugust 28 last. All this being sai ,
observe the horizon every night at those same times when Td come I decided to take the preliminary precaution of not telling anyone
home. Whenever I settled down to observe, there was never anything about my intention ofquestioning the table on this subject.
to see. So I stopped thinking about it. As soon as I stopped thinking You see that the White Lady responded.
about it, the glow reappeared.
It looked like a vibrant, reddish candle flame. It was trembling Victor Hugo’s encounter with the White Lady had co™6
visibly. It now appeared in the plain to the northeast ofmy house— circle. In this final seance, it had moved from the sublime—
which is quite solitary and an area where nobody lives~and on afew 'veep in the immense sinister keg that the Danaides of in ty
nights remained there, not moving fora quarter-of-an-hour and even pierced fall of holes—to the ridiculous—a colossal polar bird
half-an-hour. that on account of its habit of standing on the tips
These apparitions took place especially at the times when I got mountaintops has lost the use of one of its feet.
back to my house, not only toward midnight, but even between seven Perhaps the most enlightening moment came when t e
and eight o’clock in the evening. It's at that latter time that, arriving Lady said: I am a symbol rather than a being...I do not P211
home for dinner one evening in the first days ofFebruary, I saw— °f an entity; my name is Infanticide. We begin to suspect t a
when I'd automatically taken a look at the horizon on the ’summit of perhaps parts or fragments of human consciousness t .
the hill where the dolmen ofthe White Lady is-a long straightflame tive unconscious of mankind?—are being channeled to t e ne
which flared up abruptly, then subsided, then flared up again, then Marine-Terrace, energies arising from deep wit in t e sou
subsided again. It went through that strange, almost bounding mo- man and crystallizing around certain emotionally-c arge topics
non for a third time. Then it disappeared. (this may have been what was happening when Hanni
/« Spain I saw once on the.Jaizquibel hills some smugglers’ signals Warrior-consciousness of humankind? came throug t e ta
produced by handfuls ofstraw thrown in a brazier. They had the m the first winter of the seances). ...
effectfroi^p a distance. So atfirst I wondendif^^p^^^ng This explanation will not assume much importance for us ti
here was a smuggler ssignal Atfi™, I was satisfied with this explana- We come to the roarings of ocean and comet, an egin to
tion. Since then, I ve seen that flame a™;» ^ / • , on the large-scale global and extra-global energies which seem to
,hour; and
„jit.has
l seemed, tomeJthat a¿ain several
, neither times, at the same
the flame near the brick be moving through the turning tables.
oven nor theflame on the plain can be signals. I reached this conclu­ First, though, there is additional instruction to be had from
sion by comparing these various sightings with observations I’d made the spirits themselves. First among their topics is o
the summer before on the beach; with th, „Ì ■ / ,
&0W m the drawing room

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THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

What he wanted to know was whether Hugo’s having access to the

spirit world through the tables meant that he belonged to the noble
lineage of movers and shakers of humankind who also, apparently,
Chapter Ten
had had individual access to the divine. Victor Hugo framed his
question in this way:
It s a joy for us to talk to you. You are one of the great formu-
DOES GOD EXIST? lators of the laws of self-examination. You must be one of the
sPlnts most disposed to opening the doors of mystery for us.
A host of persons who have greatly influenced the destiny of
the human race through their thinking are presented to us as hav-
lng had mysterious beings at their ear, speaking words from un-
known worlds. Socrates had a ‘familiar spirit,’ Joan of Arc an
and therefore had all the resources of the im'
^gel, Mohammed a pigeon, and the four Evangelists are sup­
posed to have written the Gospels under the inspiration of four
supernatural beings, a lion, an eagle, a bull and an angel. You

J™ t' .0 . ,hy . ofe„ Ym -X-“ —

?h ™if Yourself often speak in your writings of devils who get mixed up in
Your work. You’ve even intimated that you often disputed with
them, since these demons seem to have been beings who impor-
tuned you rather than visiting friends. Can you tell us if the vari­
To these questions the spirits, thrn.mk l
had two sorts of answers in particular & m°ntlls and years> es manifestations of the mysterious that I’ve just enumerated
have any relation to the phenomenon that’s taking place right now?”
The first sort was communicated m \r
than Martin Luther, at the seance „fr ■ 1CtOr HuS° no less To which Martin Luther replied:
at 9:00 p.m. Present were Victor Hui "W a’ ’854, beginninS
with Mme. Hugo and Charles Hu™ “k T A,Uguste Vacquerie, The Word of God chooses certain spirits. The sound of His
Martin Luther (1483-1546) ¡S08p 0 dlnS the table, v°ice is thunder, ocean, wind. Man is the terrified passenger in
estantism; one of its major branchi T kthe fatber of Prot' world; life is an Ark that has lost its way. And so, to quiet
him. He was the German theologian’ Utberanism> is named for God softens his voice. He silences the thunder-clap, the
of the Roman Catholic Church in th™ °| ped break the Power Sea and the storm.
Renaissance, insisting that Christ t^le ^uroPean And while mariner-humanity inside the Ark is driven to de­
sole mediator between God and man ^urc^» was spair, God extends hope to him by using animals: The dove saves
Hugo did not question Martin T k oah, the donkey saves Balaam, the lion saves Androcles, the
tIn Luther directly about God. P’geon inspires Mohammed, and the four Evangelists listen to

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THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO
their four beasts. The language of the divine takes on yet an­
other form. Man is placed between beast and angel. He has one Martin Luther.”
ear to the ground and one ear to the sky. When the beast be­ The table’s reply was bewildering.
comes silent, the angel speaks, but it is always the angel. The What table are you talking about?
beast is the angel in disguise, the apparition is the angel revealed. A startled Victor Hugo answered: “About the one thats here,
I heard the angel. Socrates spoke to him, Joan of Arc obeyed that Charles is holding.”
him, and Jesus rejoined him. I don’t see any table. nf
Now, how is it that I, hearing the divine word, could have “Then you have something to learn from us, we c eatm« f
been allowed to doubt it? How is it that Socrates, faced with earth and shadow. Know this: that we communicate w y
drinking the hemlock, could have been allowed to doubt it? How means of a three-legged table. Tell us how you or yo
is it that Joan ofArc, about to be burned at the stake, could have to us? Should I assume that you are not aware of o
been allowed to doubt it? How could Jesus have been allowed to come to you? Do you perceive us in some manner.
doubt on Calvary? afe for you.”
Because doubt is the instrument which forges the human Spirits.
spirit. If the day were to come when the human spirit no longer “But in what shape do we appear to you
doubted, the human soul would fly off and leave the plough Tb, .piA, of d» de.d ~ 'f
behind, for it would have acquired wings. The earth would lie tmheads die spino ot ie de« *
fellow. Now, God is the sower and man the harvester. The r°ses across space and hear the song
celestial seed demands that the human nU.,4. l • human spirit is the great perfume an e g£
, furrow
the _ ._
orrilire. uuman ploughshare remain in earth. You come to us scented and melodious. [Ed.
Man, do not complain about the feet thatyou doubt. Doubt contain a pun in that we are is an
is the specter that holds the flaming sword of genius above the Change o^harZLs; ^idea is the keyboard, and the musi-
gateway of the beautifid. Shakespeare doubted, and he created
Hamlet; Cervantes doubted, and he created Don Quixote;
Mohere doubted andI he created Don Juan. Dante doubts, and “From what you say, it would seem4e
he creates Hell. Aeschylus doubts, and he creates Prometheus. v>ew the human spirit is quite unperson . D
Every creator doubts, and the result k .l , A humans are who are here? Do you kno
r me: From
for c my doubt, esuitls
i L IT created that they create gods. As
a religion.
you come to us instead of coming to
lining cause for coming here? ,
But Hugo was stiU anxious to know if hie r.kl . • The table shook; Martin Luther seeme himself as
—; i■ “ " * ÄS
Sh inOthel'eXChange °r W°’ thei ^^reluctantly, it seemed-that
begun in the Middle East and had enduri -li- Shakespeare) told to Hugo-a little reluctant y>
naa ended with this very spirit, the spirits came to the exiles at Marine- errace

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THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO
You are chosen.
“Is that all?” asked Hugo. The powerful entity who went by the name of Idea answered
Yes. ln this way:
And then—after just a few more words—the spirits departed
and the table was still. You ve just knocked at the back gate of the dark castle. You
ant to escape, and you tell me, ‘Open up!’ Which shows that
The second sort of explanation for why God does not reveal y°u don t know who we are. Prisoners, we are your jailers. All
Himself and His mysteries to us has to do with the inadequacy of ^Ur explanations are dungeon keys. We are the invisible turn-
the contents of the costume boxes filled with images and concepts of the stars. When we unlock a sun, we unlock shadow.
in our heads. Whatever He may want to say, even He is limited by G J60 We UnJ°ck we unlock one cell. When we unlock
the unGodlike, completely time- and space-engendered ideas and ^al fi Fe^eaSe °ne Person solitary confinement. We are
metaphors which bind down the consciousness and the awareness . eful Iigfits enlightening with darkness. We assert without be-
of humankind. a e to prove, and we cast doubt even as we pour forth truth.
The inability of God and of the spirits—to do more than Loe> y°urse^ves> are condemned. Under the sky of earth,
broaden our understanding just a little, since they are limited to |Te Is a galley slave, idealism is a galley slave, repentance is a
expressing themselves through us and with us and by us, is appar­ slave, hope is a galley slave. Truth is a shadowy lantern
ently the substance of what ‘Idea’ tells Auguste Vacquerie in the r a^guig in the vault of the human skull. The savage dungeon
following passage (it is a subject upon which ‘Galileo’ and the y^S °Ut <^ie ^ear^ firmament. The wind blows all around
Shadow of the Sepulcher will elaborate at tremendous and bril- With an eternal groaning. Even death cannot remove your
liant length in Chapter Twenty-One.) nhood. [Ed.: In death—or on the reincarnational road—¿/z?
The seance at which Idea held forth took place Monday, July e t0 reta*n sarne thoughts and concepts that we had on
3, 1854 beginning at 1:00 p.m. Auguste Vacquerie was present, J To die in that Bastille is to be imprisoned still. The
as were Mme. Hugo and Charles Hugo, who sat at the table. Ve<*igger doesn’t hollow out a breach there, but only battle-
Vacquerie had begun by taking up with Idea the problem of . nts- Nothingness is the ghost of this castle. Doubt haunts it.
human suffering. If, the ever-earnest young Vacquerie wondered, s ^ery rises up from all four corners of the room. The black
we suffer on th.s earth because we must expiate a sin we commit­ sPir* el ignorance k always there, always ready to balk the
ted in a previous existence, why did God, who created us, set things
to enclose it in infinity, to consign it to immensity, to
up in this way in the first place? Why did He, who could do any­ * *nt° t^le back °fGod’s lowest ditch, and to garrot it with
th) ng He wanted, introduce suffering at all? beams.

scended to answer this question. “ J“** -*

S very great service to mankind if it conde­
y0 J^querie responded: “Enlighten us. What do you mean when
jail y°Ur exPIanat¡ons are dungeon keys and that you are the
ers- Are you not, rather, the liberators? Because the light you

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the forgotten MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

bnng us, although mixed with shadow, nevertheless represents more

Vacquerie summed up grimly: “The upshot of all this is that it
hghtfor us, and light and liberty are exactly the same thing.”
^n t possible for you to give us a decisive and irrefutable explana­
We want to liberate you; we cannot. At the end of all our
tion for this terrible problem: ‘Why an infinity of goodness and
explanations, even dte most profound, there is a wall. Infinity,
for us, as for you, is an impasse. All we can do is give you a power creating so many hells?’”
I don’t know what Archangel Love will say to you.
S Í rU0“ 3 IÌtde m°re 1Ìght and * ™ en­
large the skylight, but we can’t tear down the wall. A window But, you—you can’t give us an explanation?”
No.
presupposes a pnsn. We are your windows. We are at one and
Auguste Vacquerie, despairing of finding enlightenment re­
wui k lXe D r andKbar' We Cast sEadows because we
garding the perennial questions of mankind, went on to quiz Idea
pour in light. Dont forget that it is the sun alone which pro-
about the secret world of animals. That amazing topic—upon
duces shadows; that is, reflections c i P «
Reflections ofwhom? Of God He^Zd ff" Í which the spirits were to elaborate ideas which were more than
the punitaty worlds and the worlds of Í Í TT 100 years ahead of their time—we will address in the next chapter.
worlds, God sees himself in black in th r7 '
sees himselfwith crystal clarity Onl Je r<Tarded worlds> God
ity. IEd.:J ^P^es mirror invisibfl-
woMs ofreward” and ^it^ywor^ WÍÜ
Vacquerie replied: “Now I undem J maJor concepts.]
geon in a prison. You don’t open the^Jon ’ b^
dungeon.” H Prison, but you open the
We’ve brought you some light, but th« t •
more shadow. We’ve brought you out iÍ
haven’t brought you out of the prison Y 6 CataCOmbs’ but
the Bastille; we’ve put you on the roof’ Bf“ °f
see the sky; now, you can see it But all T“ C0UU"‘
ditch for battlement, solitary confinem T d°ne “ exchange
be quite clear to you that we remain™“ Í
your liberators. We remove your 1.L7 ’ ff “l eV“ WMe
you a nail file. We make you less uni. Cuff ’but don’t g™6
you more free. We make you mn 3pPy but we don t make
way of the prison staircase. The skT but
been opened by a prison-house key^ y°U’ but *t S

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They had powers, and these enabled them to thrust forward, even
become the Jesus Christs of their hierarchies and sub-hierarchies
°f the beasts, even reach far beyond their places on the Great Chain
Chapter Eleven °f Being—which was essential, the spirits would make increas­
ingly clear, if all of soul-filled creation on earth were to do the
things that it now had to do.
THE SECRET WORLD OF ANIMALS It would take the spirits a while to explain all this. The first
thing to explain was this ability of beasts to glimpse their Creator.

This compensatory faculty of animals to be able to glimpse

As seance followed seance, the spirits had more and more to v^ster dimensions of reality, Victor Hugo himself had glimpsed, as
say about the unknown world of animals (from here on in, we will he revealed to the entity calling itself ‘Drama,’ during an after­
use the word animal Interchangeably with'beast,* this latter term
noon seance on April 24, 1854:
including birds, fish, and so on). It was true, of course, that ani­
You’ve reminded me of something 1 wanted to ask you about.
mals were the reincarnation of criminals who had taken life on I ve often wondered if animals saw things that we don t see, and if
our earth to expiate a crime committed in a previous existence this weren’t one of their compensations for being animals. That
(the same was true for plants and stones). It was also true that *dea came back to me tonight when I heard the dogs barking on
animals, since they didn’t understand that they were being pun­ the empty terrace at a time when nobody was passing. I wondered
ished, suffered more than humans. Tit were so that man thinks, but he doesn’t see; and animals dont
But, as the spirits began to explain, animals had compensa­ think, but they see; if that were how the incompleteness of animal
tions. They could glimpse eternity—catch sight of ghosts, angels, tt^ture was somehow balanced in God s eyes. Dogs can see ghosts
and even God. Balaam’s Ass had been able to see the Angel of the
souls going by, and they bark. While thats happening, were
Lord with the flaming sword; that had given him his power to
M the dark; we wonder: Why are they barking? They see what is
influence Balaam. The Dove of the Ark had been guided by God
Mysterious, but they can’t understand it; perhaps we would be
to the landing place for Noah’s gigantic boat. a^le to understand it, but we don’t see it. I’ve written this quickly,
Moreover, animals (and plants and stones) knew what crime ^Mt that should be enough to give you the gist of my thoughts,
they had commuted; such knowledge was not granted to man. ^hat is your thinking on this? Would you care to enlighten me?”
(Did that mean that since animals were also aware that they were
There are mysterious compensations for mysterious ills. Ani-
suffering, they could put two and two together and conclude that
Mals are prisons of the soul. But these cells are pierced with
they were being punished? No, since this would have required the
Endows which open out onto infinity, even though they are low
beasts to have the faculty of reason, which they did not have.)
M*d narrow and heavily barred. Shadows are cast by the bars
What all this meant was that animals were not just animals.
aild fight seeps down through the air-vent. The animal sees

no
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 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY
the forgotten MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

man and glimpses the angels. The beast’s glance spans a wide
spirit s revelations about the compensations of animals, mentioned:
Zd S ,tSrey,e ash.eS «““Passing the material at one end
I placed in a rose’s mouth this line addressed to a caterpillar:
watchin th T T °f the dog Tou’re whipping is Cowe to my place. My buds are where souls hide. Did I write this
Zi8h Íe c 8 n cTf- The barking ofdü«s » * “r-
lne blindly? Or did I, like the dog in the night, glimpse some­
• fh^ TAe DeafJMute “Stands; the roaring of beasts
thing?”
is the wading of the new-born infant the Silent Grandfeher hears.
Yes, you glimpsed something; but the rosebush is not the
1 he words men speak contain only half thp Mr . ■ c
only place where souls hide. Why do you poets always talk with
the animals contains the other half. The earth is; fifi. d "" Th“ “
for every mouth there are two ears; the fi^^onXZ °Ve about roses and butterflies, and never with love about thistles,
Poisonous mushrooms, toads, slugs, caterpillars, flies, mites,
gives, the second is the one that punishes Animi fl J
stones have their existence in-between on^h ’ k°T ^orms, vermin and infusoria? Certainly, these are ill-favored crea-
who does not see his soul, and on the oier, God^o“Ì”nu’ tUres; but...and then there are the pebbles and the seashells! Why
d°ot you talk about bed-bugs with love? about fleas?,.. Why
nance they glimpse; and th;« ;n * l wnose counte

* ^pPm.fd,?:xd*dX"'
waves, the dark-an immense noise rises
muzzles, of beaks, of fins, from maximum sP-
.
’ W°°ds’
°f
r °nt you pity the sufferings of vile, horrible beings? Why don’t
^°u take pity on the tortures of the infinitely tiny creatures con-
emned to live in the excrement of the infinitely large?
minimum security prisons, from eyelids “Untyprl“ns> from Drama went on to enumerate the sufferings of inanimate ob-
nity but that are never wiped. GoTsavs- Í thr°Ugh lects iron suffers, bronze suffers, the iron collar suffers—and
learns patience; and the bird s sleen k 1 earyou; 311(1 llon even of inanimate objects created by humans for offensive and
pensive purposes—the cannon suffers, the guillotine knife suf-
word in the human language which th . °rg‘Veness ,s on,y ers; you pity Joan of Arc, pity the stake as well. Then the spirit
other words would fall fef fhe Can sPel‘ the burned abruptly to the theme of feeling love for all beasts. This
tion of drowning; forgiveness is No’ah’s Ark" W0Uld ”° "°' ^as to make its final point that, in speaking as it had, Drama was
But human beings have certain n°t merely mouthing sentimental rhetoric about animals:
Some we regaid as evil, others as good ab°Ut beaStS' What I say is very precise, and I wish to emphasize that I am
sally at Hugo, exhorting him, as a poet ' t T™ kunched 3 final talking about the vague feelings that poets have had about
sion for the beasts which we think of às “ 4 »? C°mpaS' Riversai life....I ’m talking about the actual, vital life of beasts,
beasts which we regard as “bad”__ * f ^00d’ but also for the flowers, of stones, just as I would talk about your lives. I want
all of God’s creatures and creation inchT baVe for stress the importance of this attitude, I approve of this atti-
which we humans make into mól • i eVen those of ic tU(1e, and I command poets to write lines of this sort, just as I
actions. s with which to perform evil ^ould command my valets to do something... I want you to
Drama made these statements after H. ■^habilitate the toad’s unhappiness and the thistles despair. I
ugo> responding to the |,e most happy if in this house you spoke of tigers with

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the FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

£■’' ”d ». I wodd be dcMtcd if

What can we do for you?” pleaded Mme. Hugo.
Pray.
We will pray for you,” offered Victor Hugo. “Do you have
And, on this note, the session ended.
anyhing to add to that?”
The table shook convulsively. Mme. Hugo asked Archangel
Two months later, the abilitv nf J «. Eove to intercede.
natural became frighteningly apparent S
1. happened during fc'X,“ e :6°"!- The table tapped out swiftly: They’re barking.
Victor Hugo’s notes record that at that very moment they sud­
and .„.d™ succeeding in. denly heard the dogs barking loudly all around the outside of the
SÍ r'”8^“n'a23’besnlpeXte
°use. “Is this house surrounded by ghosts and spirits?” asked
What they got mstead was a violent a «... • i S
gry, shaking of the table. sustained, even an an- Guérin.
Yes.
Victor Hugo, Vacquerie, Guerin, Kesler and j j
Julie, made up the attendance at the sJn Asked Victor Hugo: “Are the other houses haunted in the same
Charles were holding the table. As the piece of f^’ by invisible beings?”
and trembled violently, Charles called out Vlbrated No.
Call repentance to yourself,” begged Mme. Hugo. “Calm
“Calm yourself! Speak. Who are you?”
Ourself.”
The table shook even more violenrlv Tk l
of furniture tapped out: en t^e tremNing piece The Grim Gatekeeper tapped out violently: Shut up, dogs!
The Grim Gatekeeper. To everybody’s astonishment, the barking of the dogs outside
subsided rapidly.
“Explain to us what the Grim GatPl^ • » .
tor Hugo. “Are you Death’’” ePer is, demanded Vic- Do you hear us, we who are here?” asked Mme. Hugo. “Don’t
isten to the dogs, and pray.”
No.
“Tell us who the Grim Gatekeeper is.” The barking of the dogs faded away completely.
The dogs aren’t barking anymore,” declared Victor Hugo. “Are
1 he ghost who opens the shadow Tk
keys to suffering. ’ dbe one wh° holds the y°u able to talk to us now? Who are you? Were you once a soul
They couldn’t think ofwho this uni.™. • • ^closed in a human being like ourselves? Have you lived before?
^Vhat crime did you commit to make you so unhappy? Speak!”
table was shaking so violently that ir » PPX SP‘nt cou,d be' Tbe
its side. Only with great difficulty could"?"^ faUinSoveron The table was once again moving violently, convulsively. It
tapping so quickly that they could h JI R WaS taPped out:
you have something to tell us’” acG-J w C°Unt tbe taps’ “Do Oh! The horror!
I suffer. ' kedHug°- “Speak!” “What does this mean?” asked Victor Hugo. “Explain this to
Us.”

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 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

The Danube, the Thames, the Seine, the Neva, four sources at the same time.
of blood which run from the four wounds of Jesus Christ. [Ed. The table was silent.
This seems to be a reference to the European dictators wars and crimes The Grim Gatekeeper had vanished. The dogs would not be
which were so oppressing the spirits ofthe exiles on Jersey island. It is heard from again that evening. Instead, not the White Lady, but
linked up here with the sufferings ofJesus on the Cross, with which the the Gray Lady, would come tapping through the table. She would
exiles tended to identijy. ] reveal to them that she was the ghost of a Druidic priestess who
Hugo replied: We feel the same horror as you do about what’s had sacrificed her father on the altar of the Druids 3,000 years
happening. Your thoughts are our thoughts. Do you know this?” before.
Yes. Had the Grim Gatekeeper, with all his violence and his nega­
“Are you suffering less?” tivity-—which had somehow provoked the barking of all the dogs
Yes. H the area—cleared a path for the Gray Lady to come?
“Why were you suffering so much a little while ago?” What grim gateway had the Grim Gatekeeper opened up?
The ghosts. They would never know. He was never to return to the table.
“Are they no longer there?”
No. This was by no means the last time the seance-goers would
The group pursued this line of inquiry for a few minutes. But
ear the dogs barking in the night in some mysterious complicity
the Grim Gatekeeper was not at all forthcoming. The barking ^’th, or some reaction to, the spirits that seemingly milled around
picked up again. The table moved convulsively.
turning table. And the spirits had still more to say about the
“Do you hear the dogs?” asked Hugo. “Can you tell us why ^trange> secret spiritual world of the beasts, particularly those, like
they’re barking?” ^aam’s Ass, who had managed to reach out and touch the realm
They see the blackbirds.
tnan and thereby carve out for themselves some important and
“Do you mean, the ghosts?” Coterie niche in their hierarchy of the beasts.
There was no response from the table.
At the seance of July 7, 1854, Théophile Guerin had a long-
A few brief, unenlightening exchanges followed. The dogs went
c°nsidered and carefully-worded question to put to the spirit called
on barking loudly. Abruptly, the table swiftly rapped out the words: 'dea:
Shut your mouths, dogs.
«On the subject of beasts, Balaam’s Ass told us that man did
The dogs immediately stopped barking.
not know what his mistake was and that the animal did not know
Here are Victor Hugo’s notes on this moment, preserved in the What its crime was. Regent’s Diamond recently informed us, to
transcripts:
contrary, that the beast knows why it is a beast. He insisted on
from near andfar The dogs were howling.all.across thewere
There plainyappings
andall even declaring that we should think of the crime of every
easL of every plant and of every stone as the counselor, guide and
across the beach. And we could hear very clearly that they all stopped S^epherd of that beast.”

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 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY
the forgotten MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO
[Ed.: The transcript ofthis seance has been lost. ’Regent’s Dia-
took suffering upon himself for the tiger. The Dove of the Ark
uttered through the sky for the serpent. Saint Antoine’s pig
s leIded the goat with its love. Balaams Ass took thought for
Ideas answer went as follows:
e thistle. The Lion of Florence—he who is the greatest of

The world has made progress not only with regard to man­ —saved the stones of his city. So then, what came to pass?
kind, but also wrth regard to animals, plants and stones. In the od said: ‘Man knows his punishment; beast, plant and pebble
know their crime. I let man know half the mystery; I’m
Manhind knew nothing of its etting beast, plant and pebble know the other half.’
fa speaking thus, God had taken a revolution into the hearts
sciousness. Adeep shadow lay upon universal con- beasts that cannot speak The den had had its Calvary; the
^gel had had its Golgotha. The stable had had its cross. The
to li^t^rt manki“d he ««J -
^^ds nest had brushed against heaven. It is only that, mystery
to Irve. Socrates showed him that he had a right to think. Jesus
revealed to him his right to love. These tWe me“k ^th euxg the garment God wears, He does not reveal to dead ani-
^als that when alive they have saved beasts, nor does He let
ows th^t hy^’Ae ea^e. “ S°me Patt °f shad'
g and stones know that they have been their own saviours,
easts, plants and stones still on earth will tell you that they
their crime. Balaams Ass, the Lion ofAndrodes, the Dove
¡shed Then on pi . j^ewthat it was being pun- Q the Ark will tell you that they do not know theirs. Why has
isned. 1 hen an immense light shone forth Tk»!.. a cc A
came out of Ae night; it held a lioL, • h d °f God ^°d decreed thusly? Perhaps because He does not want the bene-*
imparted by that lightning bolt hum**^8 ^° f gleanl j|Ctor t0 know what benefit he has conferred. Perhaps because
God who was smiling. The AiinJkZr4“81“ a 8limPse a e wishes to hold back some portion of happiness from the
V. *. a™ a¿ Bibk “ * ■* ^teady blissful. Perhaps because he wishes to spare the newly-
[Ed.: Idea seems to be sulestinv Z> * ^eased beasts the shock of knowing what crime they have just
of Christianity—presumably^with*P P ** °”y the plated, and that, when he bestows Paradise, he always gives
which can only be redeemed through the FaUofMa” axvay only a little so that eternity may remain full.
came to understand that divine £L Íh2Tr
ished,] ? Behind its state ofbeingpun- Guérin did not fully accept this explanation. He protested:
The beasts, the plants and the stones- Tk l • j 11 die midst of the splendid things you’ve just told us, there is
Aeir Jesus Christs. Balaam’s Ass was tO°’ *“* had Otle point that seems obscure to me. You say that man and beast
half-light shone on animals as shone ° d*°Se' Sam r ^ch know half the secret: that man knows his punishment, and
e beast knows its crime. I have trouble understanding that dis-
• The Lion of Androdes tlnction. The beast has awareness of its crime; it is also aware of

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the forgotten MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO
its suffering (since, if it were not, it wouldn’t be suffering). To for life, and that they held in their heads ‘the thought of cert^n
know that you have acted badly, and to know that you are suffer­ deliverance.’ In what sense are you telling us t at eas
ing: Is that not the same thing as knowing that you are being ther the certainty nor even the hope of being i erat . .
punished?”
The animal knows what crime it has committed. It knows t
will be forgiven for that crime. While awaiting that pardon it
For it to know its crime is not for it to know its punishment. knows that it is suffering. What it cannot do is «establish the
By punishment, I mean hope of deliverance. By punishment, I
connection between that suffering and whatever else maybe
mean certainty of forgiveness. By punishment, I mean ascen­
v°lved. Where reason begins, the animal leaves o • e
sion. Man knows that he is suffering, but he also knows that he
attempt to draw the simplest conclusion is for it to st
is mounting ever upward. The beast knows that it is suffering,
abyss. There is no such thing as a naive animal.
but it does not know that it is freeing itself from suffering. It has
And there the dialogue on animals ende , at eas
instinct and suffering, and the knowledge of its crime. But, be­
But the gods that governed the turning tab es- there were
tween that instinct and that suffering, it lacks the faculty of rea­
any such—were not content with merely inte ectu ~
son. The animal suffers and knows; man suffers and thinks.
all along, they had sought to provide concrete examp> e
The working of the mind that reestablishes the connection be­
tween suffering and punishment, that is to say, the connection 1854. .here had beS«„ » W’ •—""“S“1’'T“*
a rad here, a 8Xe a,«, a 1™ »fX—
to forgiveness: Man has that, and the animal does not. Man
w°uld come to be for this sub-echelon o rkpacts-The Lion
reasons; the beast does not. Man is logical; the beast is not.
Man makes calculations; the beast does not. Man draws conclu­ guiling of all the Jesus Christs of the hierarchy o
°f Androcles.
sions; the beast does not. Never does a dog total up the blows it
has received. A cat doesn’t know how old it is. A monkey may
be able to put a clock out of kilter, but it can never set the time.
The beast represents the absence of mind; what is quite simple
for you-drawing the conclusion from suffering that there is
punishment—it finds impossible. If the beast reasoned, it would
speak Language is nothing but the beating of thought’s wings.

But Guerin was still not satisfied:

“You say that by punishment you mean hope of deliverance,
and that the beasts don t know their punishment The White Lady
told us quite the opposite. She told us, in her own terminology,
that beasts, plants and stones knew that they were not condemned

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filled with surprises, he shambled through to deliver the self-por-

trait of himself, the Lion of Androcles.
Chapter Twelve Manes are the hairpieces of sovereign brows. The lion is the
Poet of the solitudes. The lion is up and about before the rising
Sun. The lion forgives, the lion muses. The lion is the roaring
°f the wind, the silence of the desert.
THE LION OF ANDROCLES My mane is the whip of the air. My claw is might, my glance
Is goodness. My muzzle tears the tiger out of the desert and
reods babies from their mothers.
The lion had dominion over the tiger. In the Roman Circus,
e bestowed the graces that Nero refused to bestow: He spared
^drocles, he saved Daniel, he grew as still as God Himself, and
e kissed the foot of Ideal Behavior. The lion is the power that
k‘:
^akes men great and the mercy that makes men good.
j j pay oy George Bernard Shaw, Androcles and the I am that lion.
Lion.
I salute you.
And then he was gone.
.he ™, h was to become obvious very quickly that this wasn’t one of
ogy of the channeled spirits ofJersey island T' T-’ COsm° ' y°ur ordinary, garden-variety type of channeled emblematic ani-
is cast in the same mould as Balaam’s Ass ’ He Andr°C'e.S ^als. fr wasn’t just that he spoke beautifully, and (as we will see)
soul on the animal rung of the Cr ni • $ lmPrlsoned Wr°te beautiful poetry; so did practically everyone else who passed
re.ch«d .p„ the .„I JG Tfh”" °f »“"S *> though the tables at Marine-Terrace. It was also that he was
»ul. ls.hl!»h«m,aehim.X1 Í m T”n'd h”m’" lerce, fearless, rude and unpredictable. Apart from his poetry, he
Jesus Christs of the world of beasts? ' '' '° °f ardly spoke at all, and when he did it was mostly to hurl insults.
Whatever the reasons, this lion L. j- j didn’t dialogue. He didn’t show up for appointments.
who did him a good deed is a member I™ TtheJ™ But he was quite the warrior-poet! He engaged in poetry-duels
spirits of the turning tables of Jersey id j PantheOn of beaSt' ^ith Victor Hugo. They borrowed lines from each other; and, at
Balaam’s Ass, or the Dove of the A rU co’ ' Seems as if’ like °ne point, they simultaneously created virtually the same poem.
he shuttles between the spirit worldT °fMobammed’ erhaps most important of all, the Lion of Androcles dictated one
glimmer of his mission to the seances ” h“mankind- The first the most beautiful channeled poems ever to wend its way out of
forth on January 6, 1854, when JT^^'ne-Terracepeeped iIat mysterious place where channeled poetry is created—a poem
n,at the tail-end of a long seance rhat seemed to testify to the truth that, in the Hugolian universe

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THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO
of the turning tables, animals do not know that they are being
punished, and do not have the power of reasoning, but can see an explanation. It yielded up no tapping. They would have to
God. wait till tomorrow and ask again; that was when the next seance
When the Lion of Androdes had finished reciting his self-por­ was scheduled. And thus it was that, on Feb. 18, Vacquerie aske
trait, he had saluted the group—had been saluted by them in turn— Aeschylus, now in attendence, why the Lion had acte as e a
and had left abruptly, promising to return that following Tuesday, Was it because the group had failed to show up for the rendez­
Jan. 10, at 9:00 p.m. vous of Jan. 10? Aeschylus responded:
But it was the seance mavens themselves who missed the ap­
pointment. When, on February 17, the Lion suddenly re-ap­ This lion is enormous, andfidi ofcatastrophes,
peared—interrupting a poetry-reading by Shakespeare!—he was You were in the wrong, thinkers, to put him out oj sorts.
somewhat less than majestic: It will be necessaryfor Hugo to toss him several stanzas.
Good day, imbeciles. So that he has, ifhe returns, some tasty bones to munch
“Who are you?” asked Vacquerie.
The Lion ofAndrodes. Whether or not the Lion had taken offence, it was now
Victor Hugo, Mme. Adèle and Charles were at the seance Vacquerie who took offence- all the while insisting that he wasnt.
along with Vacquerie. The latter confronted the lion jovially: “Do It was Vacquerie in particular who had, he exp aine , een toi mg
you have a communication to impart to us, aside from this friendly t0 prepare the questions-in-poetry for Aeschylus. now
greeting?” was being told dismissively—there was not even a mention o
Ask me questions in poetry, just as you did Aeschylus self!-—that it must be Hugo who composed the lines for the Don
and Molière. of Androdes. This was hardly an expression of their gratitude to
him for his efforts! Vacquerie protested mildly to the late, great
The group had always prepared such verse questions-which
Aeschylus had insisted these greats must have-carefully in ad­ Greek tragedian.
vance; they didn’t want to try to pass off dashed-off poetry on
these i lustnous dead Mme. Hugo pointed this out to the Lion And so, I will unsay it. Write linesfor that Lion.
of Androdes: If wed known you were coming, we’d have pre­ You are the one I choose. Above all, make tiempne.
pared verses Improvised ones can only be unworthy of you.” Since before this lion consents to eat his lune >
This kick in the ass makes donkeys of you all. Farewell. There must be lots ofmarrow in those bones to munch.
And then the Lion was gone.
This disturbing interchange provoked a lively discussion among But what if Hugo were more than willing to write the lines?
the seance-goers. What kick in the ass” had the lion been refer Would Vacquerie still get to do them?
ring to? Had he taken the excuse offered by Mme. Victor Hugo as Yes.
a refusal, and been insulted? They begged the table to give them It wasn’t till March 23, with Molière in attendance, that the
Lion of Androdes came pouncing back to the tables. Vacquerie,

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THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO
his verse-questions ready, prepared to read them. He was left open-
Paris, that city of sin now ruled by the tyrannical NaP^ ™-
mouthed; just as quickly as he had come, the Lion pounced off.
Disgusted, Vacquerie read his lines to Molière. The soul-destroying nature ofthe modem metropo s was
This rapid coming-and-going perhaps wasn’t as arbitrary as it that the great poet Charles Baudelaire had recently taken up, but
looked. The stage had been set for a dramatic confrontation be­ splenetically, darkly, without hope of redemption. In
theme would be counterbalanced by that of a world of nature
tween Victor Hugo and the Lion of Androdes. Claudius Grillet
writes: which retained a certain primeval goodness, where e >
however savage, were at least less savage than man an
From time to time, the tables and Hugo borrowed from each
other. It was as if the tables read the poet’s mind and responded to
the preoccupations that besieged him at that moment, while he in In the last few lines of his poem, Hugo brings
turn exploited the themes they presented to him, and submitted Androcles into the hideous city whose sho ng e
himself to their literary influence. l'on Hugo has just draeribed. far almow a hundred Un ,
dating¿J. Thisbo® has««fo.d.
Of what I now wish to demonstrate, a lion shall be the wit­
ness. Guess who came through on March 24,1854, in answer to in a state of serene, amoral purity as compare wi beholds
the conjurers’ calls? The Lion ofAndrodes! You should know that, kled licenciousness of the ancient Romans. e ¡mpulse
a month earlier, on February 28, Victor Hugo had completed a M« k in the city; and then, rtk . ^en.
long poem whose title was To the Lion of Androdes. Thus this «Hove and piW itturns back ;o.«d *e d««. S» »■»>•
animal, before haunting the drawing room, had sojourned for some Alan being the monster, you, O lion, are e j.
time in the poet’s study at Marine-Terrace.” Now the Lion of Androcles, deigning for the fi«“““
It now emerged that Hugo, like Vacquerie, had responded to awhile at the seance, recited his own poem.
the Lion’s initial request to Ask me questions in poetry, just as you ,ram left off: with *
did with Aeschylus and Molière. He had the very poem with him tormented, unholy city is not there, we ar
that night. And, since Vacquerie had used up his Lion poem on middle of his desert.
Molière the night before, the way was now clear for Victor Hugo
to read his poe^ to the Lion without offending his sensitive friend. The desert was somber, arid, impassable
He read the poem-it was 96 lines long-from beginning to The sandy plains gave way to dunes.
end At the time when day is born,
Alone in these vast places where Go
“To the Lion of Androcles” would appear in The Legend ofthe
Centurie^ in September 1859, in the section entitled Decadenee of speaks and shows himself,
Tike a king toward a king, I go to encou
Rome. Its a brifcantly Hugolian tirade against the decadence of
the modern city. On the face of it, it’s a brilliant tirade against the The sun which comes toward me.
decadence of ancient Rome. But Hugo is aiming at modern-day
We climb, both of us, in our superb haughtiness,

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the forgotten MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO
The slope, he gilding it and I trampling its grass.
We recognize one another. I was alone, I was alone on that beach as immense
I am proud to have him for host of my lair, As an immense page.
He is proud to see mingling on my belly
The hairs of my mane with his rays Did Victor Hugo write this poem himself, communicating it
unconsciously to the psychics around the table? Certainly, he didnt
Thus lived I, alone, dreaming beneath my mane, lhink so. At the very end of the first edition of the poem, Hugo
Conducting the sun in the sky to my den, took great pains to dissociate the poem—and himself from the
Majestically, mercifully, turning tables; in a note, affixed “in the margin, he wrote as fol­
Dreaded without anger and strong without violence, lows:
And saying to the desert: judge ifyour silence
Be worthy of my roaring. YouwiUfindinthevolumes^^
« response ofThe Lion ofAndrocles to this poem, no f
I opened to the clear brightness my dazzled eyelid, in the margin. I am simply ^-The phenomenon of
I listened from time to time to the prophet Isaiah nomenon to which I was a witness seve ... trv bv means
Singing the praises of the God he served,
Because we are warriors in the selfsame army oftappings and stanzas emerge from th
Therefore responded we one to the other: I toying that never did I mix in with my Im & .rthose ¡^as. 1
the lion, he the angel, from this mystery, nor with my ideas a sing o unique
From the two ends of the desert. always religiously left them to the Unk^ ofthem in my
a»thor; I do not even admit to there be g
Gentle goodness was the breath of my mouth. w°rk; I pushed them aside even to allow g
I could have brought about calm in the wild hurricane n, I„a *».. «-» .
Tamer of surging floods.
I could hive, in applying to it my marble will, lble are a fact, and the internal creations f S
Under each one of my feet stronger than tree trunks toall which separates these twofacts n0 breach in this
Held captive one of the four winds. otts ofobservation and ofscience. ' ke swh a breach. On
Walk and to borrow something would
The desert was vast, impassable and somber, Reside ofscience, which which forbids it. It
I reigned luminous like a lighthouse in shadow, a great and true, an obscure and cert £ literary con-
There I lifted up my lofty brow,
In the endless desert that begins again and again
Myselffrom it, making it a rule to accep

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THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO
tion, and wishing to keep my work, such as it is, absolutely mine and
personal.
And, monstersfed on massacre and shame
Claudius Grillet, in Victor Hugo, Spiritist, cites a number of Tame giants on whom oppobrium is heaped,
examples of how, intermittently over the next few months, the Heartless and mindless,
Lion of Androcles recited lines from time to time that were en­ They raise against saints their sacrikgious paw
tirely similar to those written by Hugo ten days before, or two And their blood-stained claws that bury
years before,; or more. themselves....
To those disinclined to believe in the supernatural origins of
messages tapped through tables, this won’t come as any surprise. “I am the one who has underlined the last two nes.
But even the most hardened skeptic has to wonder, with regard to ously, they did not satisfy the tapping spirit, e termina
a seance which took place on April 25, 1854, what strange opera­ stanza, and goes off to redo them. .
tion of the human soul was manifesting itself here. Something “During the interruption which lasted sever mimi e , ,
happened which is likely very rare in the annals of channeling: his part, got down to work, and wrote the following three
^nes, showing them to no one else but Auguste Vacquerie.
The simultaneous creation of poetry—of a high order—by a
discarnate-entity poet on the one hand, and a real-life—and great­
poet on the other. They tore open the saints expiring in the mire
Let s look at the narrative of Claudius Grillet: And their hideous claws enlarged the woun
We are no longer talking about mutual borrowings that pre­ In the side ofJesus Christ.
suppose that one work was written before the other We are talk-
ing about simultaneous creation. (During the seances,]...the Lion “Almost immediately, the table begant0 „.j.
is improvising. That sort of an effort can’t be sustained without P'eted the Lion of Androcles’s stanza in the follow & y
causing a certain fatigue. Bear in mind, too, that the dictation of in the same terms as Hugo:
his lengthy poem has not been accomplished at a single stretch [it
has been spacgd out over more than one seance], and betrays a Theirpaws tore open the martyrs in the mite,
certain hesitation at times. AndJesus Christ took their claws within his wounds,
“It so happens that, on the evening of April 25, the Lion, in O gibbet, for your nails.
the course ofa superbi¡mprovisation...hesitated. The table stopped
tapping. He was in the middle of railing against tame lions, who, "Bear in mind that Vacquerie, himself a poet,
not content with just agreeing to be slaves, also consented to being It was Charles Hugo andThéophile Guénn who that eve g
accomplices to human despicableness, and to becoming, in the Ptaced their hands on the pedestal table.
Roman arena, the executioners of martyrs. t “The ...» be b.d h»d *e ..ble. ta. “ ’
own aloud. There was general consternation a

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the forgotten MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO
Mme. Hugo asked the Lion/table: ‘Did you read my husband’s
lines before doing yours?’
“The reply was:
“No.”
Chapter Thirteen
And that is almost the last that the seance-goers heard of the
Lion of Androcles, at least explicitly. On the night of Sunday,
August 6, 1854, he appeared only long enough to proclaim—-in Roarings of ocean and comet
Latin, mysteriously and beautifully:
Omen, Lumen, Numen Nomen Meus. [Portent, Light,
Numinous Divinity, is My Name.]
This numinous divinity was about to pave the way for even We shouldn’t be too surprised to find Victor Hugo participat­
more numinous goings-on. These would include a visit from The es in a seance at which The Ocean spoke. After all, the poet
Ocean, a visit from a Comet, and a voyage to the planet Mercury. regarded himself as the reflection of nature itself.
These visits would be, in some baffling manner, bound up However that may be, on April 22, 1854, at 4:00 p.m., no less
with the ancient art of alchemy. an entity than “The Ocean”—first introducing itself as your
Heighbour—came tapping through the turning tables at Marine­
terrace.
Guérin and Victor Hugo were present, with Mme. Hugo and

w!ic. F„
Germany; now—perhaps partly because n .• r:nunw_
for many months by the soundlof for him, a
natTo^nd ^Xern'^f'freeXm^fmThVfutme Federated Repubfic of

France and Germany. Hugo himself, of course, would wnte the

lyrics.
The Ocean agreed, and began to dictate a string of musical
"otes. Theophil! Guérin, the sole person present with musical

took them down. , T< n

When the table had finished tapping, Hugo aske
what it would like to call its composition.

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THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO
My Noise, it replied.
“What name would you like to give it?” asked Hugo. ing brat disgusts me! Make a real orchestra for me, and 111
The Thundering. °‘SÍlÍAe loud noises, all the tumult, all the din, all the
They would have to have a musician make music from these
notes. anger of sounds free-floating in space, the morning wm ,
And, on that note, the session ended. evening wind, the wind in the night, die wind in e tom , so»
sandstorms, gusts which run their violent fingers¡ e ma
The next day, at 2:30 p.m., with Guérin, Charles and Mme. beings through the manes of trees, the rising o ti es on o
Hugo present, Guérin had bad news to report. The composition, beaches, the plunging of rivers into the sea, cataracts, water­
he told The Ocean, made no sense when it was transcribed. Per­ touts, the vomiting ofcacaphonous tumult from
belly of the earthtL sound lions make, the sounds elephants
haps he had transcribed it wrongly. “Where should we make the
changes?” he asked. make with their trunks, that impregnable sn ■
The Ocean seemed confused. It suggested falteringly that they coils, that whales moan in their warm, wet nas pass
change the key to fàh. Then it tapped out a series of seemingly mastodons breathe in die bowels of the earth, t a
irrelevant syllables, beginning, To a daff— die sun whinny in the depths of the sky; t e
Victor Hugo arrived on the scene. “The air attempted on the the wind whistles in the cages ofthe air, that fire and water spe*
flute by Mr. Guérin didn’t amount to anything, ” he repeated, forth in insults, the first from the bottom of the vo
having caught the last exchange. Perhaps, he suggested, just chang- the second from the depths of die orehestra.
ing the key would solve the problem. Take all these, and then say'
The Ocean began to wax eloquent. It was as if it were trying Make harmony of this racket, mak which has
out words: The immensity is fidi of birds which perch on the make peace with its combats. Be tht^maestro o^
powerfill organ of God like sublime bars of music. The sea ®o master. Be the conqueror of immens ty.
makes the music. The sky writes the words. The name of the «dm the violence, kiss the mane ofthe elements- Make
poet is love, the name of the musician is power— «nd, foe., ».
This didWt exactly sound to the onlookers like The Ocean of *' tongue of fire of celeuhl W1““®' ” wb ich is on it,
yesterday. Suddenly, the table fell silent. ’n to this enormous union ofthe forces of nature
Hugo asked the spirits to explain themselves fo»ees before you. have stared lov-
Änd suddenly the energy had returned, powerfully, and Ocean- Marry the two-beareddx Ae sky
hke-at least, like The Ocean they had listened to the day before. mgly across at each other for 6,000
This entity had a lot to say: the priest of that majestic church
^Usic with your flute!
Your flute pierced with litde holes like the ass hole ofa poop-
Victor Hugo was impressed ,andjapo ge “We lack the means

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 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY
the forgotten MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO
to try out your music," he excising “All . ,
and it’s not our friend’s fault that all heUh'ZTh" ’ PÍan°’ Yes.
musicians on earth—I didn’r “Is a Hute- The greatest Can he come this evening?”
Olir on I1W ÍÜ7
Yes, and there is a way this can be done: Place the table in
even you? We can’t believe you’re serin. I JUSt Aat’ t0°’ °nt of a piano. The table will strike the keys, and from that
Will you continue what you’ve begun th an?°yed yìth our friend! y°u will take notation.
revolution? Tell us!” ’ at Marseillaise of a future And, though The Ocean promised it would ask The Twilight
The Ocean replied: y. send Mozart along to them at 9:00 o’clock that evening, the
I’d very much like to satisfy vou , iennese maestro didn’t show up—that very same Mozart who
annotating my music. You hXe to’unJ of
always claimed that he only wrote down the music that flooded
inanimate objects to be able to umk de”t!nd the language of
^bidden into his head.
haven’t got a visible form. That’s h beings ,ike me who
Q so it was that a mc^-Marseillaise, to be composed by The
are dialogues between perfumes anT S0U,S’ nere
cean, never quite got created.
does a rose converse with the dead !“ S“cil a 16 ^evert^e^ess’ i* *s recorded in the transcripts for Tuesday, May
attic window sill commune with oil’ a* ?Jar °l?iasmine on an ’ 1854, that, starting at 9:00 p.m., music was composed once
Tbe music I tried to dicta7eml Sky
Q°re by the turning table, this time using the method that The
it lacks accompaniment. Th ^°U yestew^r ® beautiful, but
l^Cean bad suggested just before it left. Under the direction of
couldn’t be brought into your hoZ° Tk“ W°“ld do t™k
Ozart s shade, the pedestal table was placed on a larger table which
keys, a white and a black, dava nA „• l . PIano has only two ^aixie up to the level of the keyboard of the piano which had been
night foil of souls. Z 46 <lay filli of birds, the
^r°ught into the room. Charles Hugo and Guerin placed their
Madame Hugo protested: “Yesterd. ^ds on the table. It moved slowly toward the piano, and struck
Why did you say yes yesterday?” X you agreed t0 do ekeys. Tunes emerged—the new tunes of Mozart. A musician
Calm down, commanded The Ocean ^^Uied Bénézit who was in attendance (the remainder of the par-
That s no answer!” an’
*pants were Mme. Hugo, Victor Hugo and Vacquerie) anno-
The music has been made.
. the sounds that came out of the piano. A technical discus-
“If it’s been made, how do we wt k . l°u ensued between this recording secretary and the dead com-
Try to find a way. 8 ù to bcar lt?
Ser- Mozart claimed to be composing a symphony. Here and
“Is it free of error as M. GnAin
ere’ startling bits of melody emerged. The technical discussion
Olltinued till the end of the seance.
about it when you see him. m«s«cian. Talk to Mozart
bio symphony has been preserved!
They couldn’t help being i •
you send Mozart to us?” askedVictor SUggestion- “Can If the lion could speak, we would not understand him; so said
Estrían philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. On April 4, 1854—

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 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

with a comet blazing high in the skies above Jersey island—a lion The comet is coming. ?M
spoke in lion language through the turning table. When asked for “Is that what the two words legurru and fohe mean.
a translation, it tapped out: The comet is coming. Then it chan­ Yes.
neled a drawing of the comet, and then a drawing of itself, which “Does the roaring of lions have meaning.
might have been the comet—and this only for starters...
In short, a seance extraordinary even by the standards of these At this point, Francois-Victor Hugo took his leave of
seances took place on this night early in April, and, to a lesser ’»ce. His father went on: “You were telling us a o
extent, nine days later, on April 13—one which opened up whole Would you like to continue?”
new vistas in the turning table experience. In attendance at the Yes.
earlier seance, which began at 9:00 p.m., were Victor Hugo, “Continue.” through the
Auguste Vacquerie, Charles Hugo and Francois-Victor Hugo. For Before the viper. The star_ withia
the first part of the seance, Mme. Victor Hugo and Théophile celestial grave. The comet is the serpe ®P
Guerin held the table. times when humanity is about to reopen the tombs of th
“Who’s there?” asked Guerin. ^'per on the earth, boa in the sky. catastrophic sym-
Legurru. Hugo asked: “Besides the mysterious and catas P
“Is that your name?” holism of comets already described by ’ovide with
Yes. ^,rgil in his Diroe Cometoe, might you distances
“Who are you?” a few exact details about comets, about their paths, their distan
Fohe— from other celestial bodies, and so forth.
The energy was troubled, irresolute. It was decided that Charles
Give me a pencil. fctched table,
Hugo should replace Guérin at the table. This was done
Charles Hugo and Guérin got UP k . one of them
Victor Hugo asked: “Did you indeed mean ‘Legurru Fohe?’”
one smaller and with three legs o q £
Yes. '»«ng in . pencil. The, pl^ * ‘1,“‘
“Were you speaking French?”
Paper, then “held” it in the customary manner. *
No.
Almost immediately, the table began to mo ,
“What language were you speaking?”
tUte with its pencil leg. the transCript:
The language of animals.
At this point, Victor Hugo adde
“What animals?”
■dn hour-and-a-halfago, as we were í Saint-Hélier,
Lions.
“Lions on this earth?”
hisfather he had seen a comet. V
There was no answer.
t0 have a look. , ,... head. To this
“What does legurru mean?”
The pencil-table at first drew what looked 1

138 139
 WHAT THE TURNING TABLES DREW (D
A. Self-portrait
of a comet, or the forgotten MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO
alchemical
formula?
bocK it attac^e<^ a ta^’ Partly filing the tale with tiny, globular
[s JCS Beneath the tail it wrote the Latin words, semen astrorum
e the stars]. [See Drawing A, page 140]
°f ' /U^° Iecofded ,n his notes: We ask the lion to draw a portrait
tS^f‘ does. [See Drawing B, page 140]
to j rne' Hugo asked: “Are you able to draw, and are you willing
B. Self-portrait Jaw, the thoughts I’m having right now?”
of the lion that
pjct e table drew a picture of a young woman. It framed the
spoke the
language of pjc^Ure ,n a heart. To the left and a little higher up, it drew a
lions pag^p^f a grave w’th a cross overlooking it. [See Drawing C,

th' Hugo had in fact, as she now told the company, been
^er deacl daughter, Léopoldine.
éophile Guerin asked the table if it would draw what he
linking.
(-L. ^he table drew a picture of a woman with her heart visible
Coji 1 her breast. Then it drew, above her head, a ship’s hull. It
[S nected the woman’s heart to the hull with a long thin filament.
ee Drawing D, page 140]
he h IS Guérin deeply. It was, in fact, the image of what
^een thinking, he told the group. What was that? they
to ^echned to answer; it was too personal. (Hugo added
C. Mme.
thinking of kr’ IS n°tes the evening that, in 1852, Guérin had a been tran-
Léopoldine thaf51 ak°ard a vessel called The Duguesclin. Hugo thought it likely
D. Théophile t^ch draw’n8 was the heart of Guérin’s mother, sadly at-
Guérin think^^f t0 the hull of the ship on which her son was sailing away
his mother’s j| 171 her.)
linked to the 1
of the ship yWi11 you draw what I’m thinking?” asked Auguste Vacquerie.
which he was
transported tapped the turning able.
dje^ e table swiftly drew a picture of a woman’s medallion. It
Wa|| a m*niature painting which looked as if it were hanging on a
near the medallion. At the bottom of the sheet of paper, it

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THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO
drew the seeming profile of Auguste Vacquerie’s, which it con'
“Why is it bothering you?”
nected to both the medallion and the painting. It tapped out,
above the painting, the Latin words, dearteadfamiliam... [Ed.: Its light is too bright. ill

from the art ofthefamily. Commentators have pointed out that the They closed the window—and, returning, discovered that t e
table was silent, and could not be coaxed back into li e.
painting resembled a Christ on the Mount of Olives by Eugène
Delacroix belonging to Auguste Vacquerie.\ ance was over. . .
It seemed that, this time, the pencil leg had not succeeded in Had the table, on April 4, been able to channel drawings be­
depicting what was in the mind of the participant at the seance. cause of the unusual and powerful proximity of the elemental en­
The following dialogue ensued: ergies of a comet? Was the energy that called itself a lion suggest­
ing on April 13 that the brightness of the moon was bothering i ,
Vacquerie: “That’s not what I was thinking.”
Lion: No. and that that was why it could not translate fecoifecoi.
“Why didn’t you draw what I was thinking?” Did fecoilfecoil mean, “The moon is bothering me.
You doubted. was the lion, on this second night, transmitting the e ement
If I doubt, you have a simple enough way of making me ergies of the moon in the same way as it had nine ays >
believe. And that’s to draw what I asked.” seemingly been transmitting the elemental energy o t e comet.
I can’t. Some of the answers to these questions may ie in a re __
bave not mentioned thus far. Semen astrorumy see o
“You did it for Mme. Hugo and for Guerin.”
rbe Latin words written on the drawing of the comet y t p
They didn’t doubt.
icg—are ancient alchemical terms, referring to the vitality

There was a coda to this semi-extraterrestrial seance. On Thurs­ tain precious metals which play a catalytic role in c e p
day, April 13,1854, at 9:45 p.m., with Victor Hugo and Auguste Cesses. The viper, mentioned in the odd apocalyptic ™essag
Vacquerie present, and Mme. Hugo and Charles sitting at the tbe lion, is also an ancient alchemical term, viper
table, a second encounter took place with the language of lions tefers to the volatile Philosopher’s Stone.
and—could it have been the energy of the moon itself? What was alchemical terminology doing in the strange, o
There came a quick rapping at the table, to which Victor Hugo Worldly drawings channeled at Marine-Terrace.
responded: “Tell us your name.” The encounters with the elemental energies of ocean, co ,
Fecoilfecoil. and perhaps moon, had been, it would turn out, a wa
“What language are you speaking to us? Is it still in the lan- In barely two months, vaster cosmic powers would be sum­
guage of lions? moned to the tables-energies which also carried with them
Yes. ^natures of ancient alchemical knowledge.
“What does fecoil mean in the language of lions?” The participants at the seance were to go on a voy g
The moon is bothering me. Planet Mercury.

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THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

they do detect it, friendly interspecies discussions ensue about the

equality of all life in the universe. Victor Hugo was so entranced
by this story that he devoted a great deal of space to its retelling in
Chapter Fourteen
the long Preface to St, Anthonys Pig written on Guernsey island
1857* 1_ 1 L J
In 1781, the English astronomer Sir William Herschel had
VOYAGE TO THE PLANET MERCURY discovered the planet Uranus—the first discovery of a planet since
ancient times. In 1846, it had been a Frenchman, astronomer
blrbain Jean Joseph Leverrier, who had pinpointed the location o
die planet Neptune (partial or whole credit for this discovery is
On July 24,1854, the seance-goers at Marine-Terrace traveled also given to English astronomer John Couch Adams). The c assic
to the planet Mercury.
Work of French astronomer Camille Flammarion, The P warty of
They seem to have done it partly on the wings of alchemical Worlds, would be published in 1856; a copy was in Hugo’s book­
formulae. shelves on Guernsey island. .
To properly set the stage for this Close Encounter of the Chan­
Almost overnight, Alan Kardec’s mid-nineteenth century Spir­
neling Kind, we must backtrack a bit. itist movement appropriated all the new astronomy an o e
Speculation about what types of beings might exist on other
speculation stemming from it. So compelling was e Pintlst
worlds had been rife for well over a century-and-a-half, ever since
craze that even a number of astronomers, including a^in\arion’
the Roman Catholic Church had begun to relax its strictures against
experimented with mediumship. The spirits had to e^’
talking about the plurality of worlds. In no country was there
recorded in The Spirits* Book, that our sun is “not a world in a -
greater interest than in France. In 1752, Voltaire had published ited by corporeal beings,” though it was a meeting p ace or sou s
Micromégas, his tale of a 20-mile-tall inhabitant of a planet revolv­
of the highest order, and a region from which vital energy was sent
ing around the star Sirius who travels through interstellar space
°ut into the Solar System. On the other hand, “the souls of many
using sevey million-league boots, balloons, a horse, and a comet,
Persons well-known on the earth are said to be reincarnate
finally arriving in our Solar System. Micromégas—who has 1,000 Jupiter, one of the worlds nearest to perfection. Jo$eP rasset,
senses—lands on Saturn and befriends a typical inhabitant of that
'n the translation The Marvels Beyond Science (1910), quotes
ringed world, a dwarf only a mile high (and who has only 72 flammarion as saying that, at seances chaired y ec> astrono
senses). Together the two of them head for earth, conferring while
«ter Victorien Sardou had “as a medium written queer pages con­
en route with the archbishops and inquisitors” of Jupiter; they
cerning the inhabitants of the planet Jupiter, an pro uce p
pass up Mars, it being so small that Micromégas is afraid he won’t
Presque and surprising drawings in order to depict things an
be able to find a place to sleep. Arriving on our earth, the two
beings in this gigantic world. One of those drawmgs showed us
giant ETs have difficulty even noticing there is life here; but, once
Mozart’s house, and others the mansions of Zoroaster and Ber-

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THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO
nard Palissy (the Renaissance pottery designer whose work was
enjoying a revival in Paris), who are, it appears, neighbors in that
planet.” Jupiter was generally regarded as a post-life retirement Detectable here are the first faint whispers of the great inter­
home for earthly geniuses! Theosophical Society founder Madame stellar chorus which will soon come welling out of the turning
Blavatsky, in asserting that she was in constant channeled contact table: the descriptions of the “worlds of reward and the punitary
with assorted ascended masters’ on the planet Venus, was only Worlds” and of the dynamics exchanged between the the two. First,
though, we should take note of the strange information which
one voice among many channels speaking out in era when the
ether was foaming with such interplanetary contacts. Was being increasingly conveyed to Hugo and Company about
This passionate channeling of the planets and of the life thereon the planets of our Solar System and their alleged inhabitants. It
would become a feature of the Hugolian seances. The beginnings will be easy for a non-believer in the reality of the spirit world to
would be humble, and somewhat at variance with standard Spirit' conclude that the material that follows came directly from Hugo
ist doctrine. Sometime between September 29 and December 6, himself, unconsciously in touch with the mediums holding the
1853 (the exact date of the seance has been lost), a purported alien table. After all, the great poet had written, long before, in Apri,
from Jupiter, calling him- (her-? it-?) self Tyatafia, came tenta' 1839—though it may actually have been much later -in the poem
lively tapping through the table. The dialogue, brief, doleful, and which appears in The Contemplations under the title Saturn
heavily prompted by Hugo, went as follows:
Saturn: enormous sphere! Star ofgloomy aspect!
Who are you? -Tyatafia. - “Is the word you just said from a Convictprison in the sky! Prison glintingfrom its air vents.
language known to us?” - No. - “Is it the language of a people World a prey to haze, to gusts, to darkness!
from this globe? - No. - So you’re a being who inhabits a planet Hell made out ofwinter and ofnight!
other than ours?” - Yes. - “Which one?” - Jupiter. - “Do the
beings who inhabit Jupiter have a soul and a body? Are they com­ For those who believe in the reality of the spirit world, though,
posed of matter and mind like us?” - No reply. - “Are the inhabit­ it will be just as easy to believe that the knowledge contained in
ants of Jupiter as advanced as us with regard to their metaphys­ Saturn had been communicated to Hugo on an unconscious eve ,
ics?” - No. - “Is Jupiter then a planet less fortunate than ours?” - by the same spirits who would one day be speaking to im irect y
Yes. - “According to whether they behave themselves badly or through the tables. . ..
well, do human beings, after death, end up on ill-favored globes or Whatever the sources of these messages, as spring turne into
in happy lands? -Yes. - Is there, on Jupiter as here, physical and summer and the last ice-floes disappeared from around Jersey is-
moral suffering?” -Yes. - “Are there those among our group here land, more and more data about our Solar System was eing eame
who will end up on planets less fortunate than these [Earth and to the avid seance-goers at Marine-Terrace. Ear y on, esc yus
Jupiter]?” - Reply not recorded. - “So you know how were going had revealed to Hugo and Company that the shades of Mo iere
to spend the rest of our lives?” - Yes. and Shakespeare, along with that of Aeschylus imse , ewe
Jupiter, which, like all the other planets in our Solar System, was

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THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO
under the control of the “Archangel Love.” About the time Hugo
and the Lion of Androcles were poetry-duelling, the spirits told The table was silent.
the group that the souls of Moliere and Shakespeare had left the It was 10:10 p.m. The participants decided to use the smaller
environs of Jupiter and were winging their way earthward to be le, the one with one leg ending in a pencil. They placed a piece
reborn as helpers of mankind. “They will be priests of an im' paper under the pencil leg. The table began to move.
mense religion,” declared the Shadow of the Sepulcher. Victor Hugo asked why the spirits had been so quiet that
But, three weeks before the seance-goers were made privy to evening.
this startling intelligence, an interplanetary seance had taken place The table drew—swiftly? slowly? there is no record of how fast
that had boggled the minds of even the hardened seance mavens of moved a picture of a clock with its hands set at 10:00 p.m.
Marine-Terrace. It’s certainly an exaggeration to say that, on the e group asked what this meant. The table sketched a lion sit­
night of July 26, beginning at 9:25 p.m., the spirits engineered a ing before a door. [See Drawing E, page 150]
live TV broadcast from Mercury, the closest planet to our sun. Is the Lion annoyed?” asked Hugo. They wondered why it
But it’s true to say that the turning table, one of its legs ending in adnt responded to the reading of its poetry.
a pencil, drew a series of pictures which seemed meant to describe The table drew a highly complicated sketch. It seemed to
Mercury and its inhabitants, and which also contained Latin sub' show an archangel enfolding in its body a head, the moon, three
titles which had their counterparts in the ancient hieroglyphics of Stars and three planets. The table sketched a second, smaller lion;
alchemy. this figure seemed to be unsuccessfully trying to gain entry into
the body of the archangel. Hugo’s notes on the seance are pre­
In attendance at the seance that evening were Kesler, Pinson, served in the transcripts:
Guerin and Victor Hugo. Charles and Mme. Victor Hugo held From the looks of[this]... it would seem to be that the Shadow of
the table. Sepulcher—ofwhich it is undoubtedly the representation—gov-
A few weeks before, the Lion of Androcles had promised he erns the sun, our earth and the moon, the solar planets and the stars
would reappear on this date. But, initially, no one came at all; the fOrfning our galaxy [The figure] having explained that the Lion has
table sat unmoving for half-an-hour. In an effort to make some' ^een called back, I repeat the question, ‘Is the Lion annoyed?
thing happen, Victor Hugo read aloud the final lines of the Lion’s The pencil-table leg wrote: No.
most recent poem. They are very beautiful,” he remarked to the Was the complicated figure in the drawing in fact the Shadow
table on finishing. “I think there’s someone in the table who will the Sepulcher? The table wrote: forbidden.
hear them.” Who are you?” asked Hugo.
In ieply, the three-legged piece of furniture slid along the floor, The table wrote: Flamel.
then turned around and around to the accompaniment of sharp It is almost certain that most of the seance participants would
cracking noises. immediately recognized this as the name of the great fifteenth
“Is anything bothering you?” asked Hugo. century French alchemist Nicholas Flamel, whose writings had
CRjoyed a revival of interest in France in the eighteenth century.

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 I
WHAT THE TURNING TABLES DREvf®
E. At 10 p.m., the
Lion of Androcles the forgotten MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO
is excluded from
the realm of the At least, what was to happen a few minutes later certainly
archangel. The
signature, “Flamcl,’ suggests this.
appears in the Hugo asked if the table wanted to keep talking with drawings,
upper left-hand
corner Or would it like to tap out words? The table wrote, drawing.
They sharpened the pencil and put a fresh piece of paper un-
der the pencil-leg. Hugo asked the spirit if it would, draw what
was in your thoughts when you came to us.
The pencil leg moved quickly. There began to emerge ene
u a series of drawings even more esoteric than the ast. ey
not only drawings; Latin phrases were attached to eac o
^hich helped to clarify and reinforce the drawings. it
Latin phrases incorporated within them, the drawings oo
what like hieroglyphs; in the light of what the seance-goers were
F. Interplay ‘ apparently, about to learn, it wouldnt have been inaccurat
alchemic?!
hieroglyph"
»i
G. These four legs of an animal. Above this-attached to .t but flat, as .f
depictions 0 ;
inhabitant*"
one dimension—was a distended quadrilateral shape, w.th he
Mercury / fowling, mustachioed face of a man on one en , >
their counfC other-touching the tail of the animal-the tip of a,lo"&
in alchenn1*'
Hat which stretched back from the top of the mans head. [See
formulae a
^^Wha^tever^ked^a bewildered Victor Hugo, did this represent?

The table wrote four Latin phrases in the body of the

^re: animales corpus, vultus homines, petasus tnsant, tres partes
Clentiae. excellent classical education.
Everyone at the seance had an
'ey would have known immediat y “expression, or
Phrases meant, literally, “body of an animd
c°untenance, of a man.’ The meaning “three Darts
so immediately obvious; while the fourth phrase meant three parts
knowledge.”

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THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO
Just minutes before, the author of the drawings had identified
himself as Nicholas Flamel; that may have been one reason why Hugo asked: “What world does this being inhabit?”
the men immediately saw in the phrases alchemical significance. The spirit wrote the word, Mercury.
According to Hugos notes in the transcripts, Théophile Guerin Hugo—to repeat his words in the notes now entere into sev
quickly asked the table if the message—he seems to have been eral details about Mercury and askedfor an explanation ofthe being.
referring to the third phrase,petasus insani, in particular—referred The table wrote beneath the latest set of drawings, in Latin.
to “the unique metal?” Sex habet lampadas, duos oculos semper apertos, caput enorme,
Petasus is the word (it has many other meanings as well) for Sed levissimum, corpus longum, sed tenuissimum non m^n lica
the broad-brimmed hat of Mercury, the messenger of the gods. ^ateriam, solidam, sedfluidam, non spirai, sed lucet, ja et ux
Mercury is also the unique metal,” in that it was the substance °^em.
whose presence many alchemists deemed essential for the trans­ This passage translates into English as:
mutation of base metals into gold. It has six torches/suns; two eyes which are always °Pe*J’
But the table didn t answer Guerins question; instead, it wrote, ei*ormous head, but very light; a long but very s en er o y;
in French, the word: Adjourned. doesn’t eat solid material, but rather liquid, it oesnt
but shines instead; it has a spouse.
Hugo asked: Can you draw us a figure corresponding to man,
half,matter, half spirit, and inhabiting the world where you now It had a spouse? Hugo asked the table to, “Draw the female of
are?” this being for us.” The pencil sketched a second, smaller, y ra
>¡ke figure, a little to the right of the first. Hugo wanted to know
Its not exactly clear how Hugo made this leap from alchemy
*f Mercury was a “world of reward?” Yes, wrote the pend. Draw
to astronomy. Shortly before, of course, the table had drawn the
picture of Archangel Love, with, apparently, the planets of our Us its actual shape,” Hugo requested. The table drew a small arde
Solar System incorporated within its body. But corpus animales Mth rays emanating from it and with a tail attac e .
màvultus hominis do not exactly mean “half matter” and “half Were the beings that had just been sketched subject to infirmi­
spirit;” it may be that Hugo possessed a great deal of knowledge of ties and illnesses like men? They can lose their torches, rep
the language of alchemy of which we are not aware, enabling him ^ble, in an apparent allusion to the six globular objects attached
to make some esoteric correspondence. the bodies of the Mercurians.
The table answered Yes to his question, “Do they grow old and die? asked Hugo.
They slipped a fresh piece of paper under the pencil leg. h Yes.
proceeded to draw a figure lesembling the microscopic water-ani­ “Draw one of their temples for us. nknr
mal, the hydra. Six tiny sun-like objects floated near the body, The table drew what looked like the interior of a arjge p ■
attached to it by tiny filaments. [See Drawing G, page 150] “Draw Several Mercurian creatures seemed to be nest e in
us the dwelling place of this being,” Hugo asked. The pencil ganism. The table-pencil labeled this organic-looking ed.fice,
sketched what looked like clouds around the figure

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THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO
Jupiter, and you on Mercury? Why this difference of dwelling
place?” possibly survive under these conditions.
The pencil wrote Majores sunt quem ego. (They are greater But perhaps Mercury is inhabited by no form of life as we
than I.) know it. That could be why the information was communicated
“Do you promise to come back?” asked Adèle. to Victor Hugo and Company in the form of ‘alchemical hiero-
Yes. glyphics.’ If this was the case, the strategy seems to have wor e
Hugo had no trouble somehow interpreting the phrases
“When will the lion return?”
In eleven days. animales and vultus hominis as meaning half matter an
Adèle made sure that she and the table understood each other: spirit,” and believing that they might refer to semi-corporeal crea­
“Sunday, August 6, at 9:30 in the evening.” tures living on the surface of Mercury.
Then, at a quarter past midnight, this channeled broadcast Is Mercury inhabited by beings so different from us t at,
from another planet ended. they or their intermediaries wished to communicate eir essence
to us, they would find almost nothing remotely resem ing
in the costume boxes of images and concepts in our ea s.
What can these channeled interplanetary hieroglyphics” front
Mercury possibly have been all about? It seems as if the spirits were forced to resort to e sym o ic,
hieroglyphical language ofalchemy in order to communicate som
Guérin had immediately associated the word/>eXas«i with the
cap of the Roman god Mercury. Hugo had almost as quickly knowledge of Mercury. Luckily, at least bits and pieces of is
concluded that it was the planet Mercury and its inhabitants that knowledge were in the minds of the unusually inte igent an
‘earned seance-goers on Jersey island. .
were involved. The word insani (the complete third phrase was
petasus insani) means foolish,” or “insane.” Mercury dashes around The sketches of the Mercurians are actually suggestiveo
the sun once every 88 earth-days, while turning on its axis at the Writings ofNicholas Flamel. Asection of the
very slow rate of once every 59 earth-days. Was the spirit who iaculo ( Basle, Switzerland, 1583) headed ’Ä* FM
wrote these words alluding to the planet Mercury, in the light of ^nnotationes" (“Annotations ofNicholas Flamel ), d.scuss« the
its contradictory extremes of motion, as a foolish, insane traveler? Wold nature of mercury-its masculine and femmine^seed¡and
Gan there possibly be life on Mercury, anyway?
It seems unlikely. Over most of the planets surface, the tern" the male and female Mercurians. The CArnpnr
perature varies by more than 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, from mi" microscopic, water-dwelling hydra; in alchemicaLfere Ae
nus 279 degrees in mid-winter to 801 degrees in mid-summer. ;s often identified with the hydra. Flame Ae of
Mercurys atmosphere is only one hundred-billionth as dense as Unperfect but is congealed in the veins ^¡nannthe
that of the earth. The planet is relentlessly bombarded by lethal the metals, and that the metallic ^^¿^Meiurians nestled
solar radiation. tfee ofmercury. This latter is reminiscent
Scientists cannot see how any form of life as we know it could ’n the templum of Mercury. «cra2y»__the
When the spirits refer to the

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 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY

the forgotten MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

insani—motion of Mercury, are they also alluding to the strange
and unpredictable features of the element mercury when used in
the alchemical process?
During that communication on that night in July on Jersey
island, were the spirits seeking to describe a sentient life-form on Chapter Fifteen
the planet Mercury of a radically different “density” from ours,
one with only partly a physical component? Perhaps life on Mer­
cury is in essence closer to light than to matter. Was the table, in
CHANNELING GAIA AND METAGAIA
seeming to say that each Mercurian “floats” in the atmosphere
shiningly borne up by six miniature “suns” or “torches,” striving
to get across the concept of a life-form which is essentially impli­
cated in some strange web of kinship with solar energy itself--*'
In the early 1970’s, British biochemist James Lovelock decided
with the sun itself? The spirits have intimated that there is love of he wanted to rechristen our planet Gaia.
a sort on Mercury: There are “spouses;” there are “templum” But,
ultimately, it seems that what is there is virtually unknowable to Gaia is the ancient Greek word for the go ess o n*tu
Lovelock had come to the conclusion that our p anet is not j
us earthmen and earthwomen as itself—too much “Other” than
dead body with a film of life stretched over its surface, but a single,
ourselves.
hving, self-regulating entity. And he decided at,.since *
But how could it possibly be that ancient hieroglyph-like al­ Poking at our world in quite a new way, he nee e a new
chemical formulae, forged on earth, could serve to communicate
to us hints of the unknown interplanetary riches of our Solar Sys­
The name caught on. Today, Lovelock ison^
tem?
scientists who believe that Gaia can contro mi on
Thats the question which we’ll address in the next chapter, Processes by itself, including the amount o s t m wv t
when we try to understand the true nature of the Terran and cos­ surface temperatureand the capability,
mic energies which were now beginning to invade the turning happens to our planet is not random, o °
tables. as a whole of maintainmg itself mi a a Leson,
Other contemporary sciennsts, such_ 8 ^^Mind.
gan to wonder if Gaia might not possess mnlvthecol-
OT,e „ beim ta Mi-d ¡«1"« °" y
I««, ofd our mtarh. ta, h
w»th all of the conscious, self-regulating acets o ou
.„ggr.rrf to M M1”d. * ~
God and is perhaps what some people mean y .
rized that it resides in each one of us, in our total interconnected

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THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO
social systems,” and in the ecology of our planet.
Other researchers are beginning to believe that, up till only a . evcfi antedates the origins of language and comes out of a lost
few thousand years ago, man himself lived relatively unself-con' une when sight could hear space shudder and smell could sense
sciously in this ‘sea of Gaia! He did not experience himself as cut ne interpenetration of each in all....
off from the world around him as we do today; rather, he was If we begin to understand that our ancestors did have intelli­
aware of himself as being something like an unthinking, natural gence and a sensitivity to wind and weather, plants and planets,
part ofthe universe, in a state ofdynamic, interactive kinship with en we can begin to appreciate that for a pre-industrial culture,
the clouds that flowed across the sky, or the gazelles that glided ne endowed with perceptual acuity and imagination, but no mi-
across the plains, or the grass that sprouted beneath his feet. I ^scopes or telescopes, that a feeling for the life at their feet in the
In From Atlantis to the Sphinx, Colin Wilson writes of such could easily transform itself into images of half-human
archaic peoples that: “We have to imagine them surrounded by cs and fairies, salamanders and ondines, sprites and nymphs,
unseen presences, some visible, some invisible. And we have to and goblins.”
picture them in closer contact with nature than we can conceive.” 'T’L
t nompson implies that mankind was essentially channeling
Wilson says Egyptologist Schwaller de Lubicz was trying to con­ ,s apprehension of the world—channeling Gaia—when, slowly,
vey some sense of this awareness belonging to primitive man when ?Ver the course of centuries, practically without conscious voli-
he described the ancient Egyptians as living in a world where fi» it fashioned the bodies of ancient story-telling that became
“...every living being is in contact with all the rhythms and har­ °Ur fi^yths and fairy tales.
monies of all the energies of his universe. The means of this con­ If what Thompson says is true, then you might expect myths
tact is, of course, the self-same energy contained in this particular fairy tales to express a “planet s eye” view of reality, one that
living being. Nothing separates this energetic state within an in­ 2^orfipassed stones, grass, trees, animals, natural elements, the
dividual living being from the energy in which he is immersed...”
cs, and even the heavenly bodies whose movements through the
De Lubicz, explains Wilson, sees primitive man as immersed . Cs the Mind of Gaia “saw” or was in touch with—not to men-
in a sea of energies like a fish in water. “It is as ifhe is a part of that ,ofi the human beings, also encompassed by Gaia, which move
sea, a derider knot of energy than that which surrounds him and Across its surface.
sustains him. This sea of energies’ is not far different from what Ifi a spectacular piece of literary analysis of the fairy tale,
James Lovelock and his followers today call Gaia.
.Punzel, in Imaginary Landscape, Thompson comes breathtak-
American cultural historian William Irwin Thompson also dose to proving that fairy tales do indeed express a “planet s
believes that archaic man apprehended the universe in a very dif­
view of reality. He may even have succeeded in accomplish­
ferent way than we do. Thompson thinks that archaic man trans­ es this extraordinary task.
lated this apprehension into myths and fairy tales. He writes, in b ^le has discovered that Rapunzel is not only a story about people,
Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds ofMyth and Science (1989): fit also a story about vegetation, heavenly bodies, and man as an
The imagination is an ancient faculty, perhaps so ancient that Coricai/anthropological entity in Europe in about 4000 B.C.
hets see how he does this, for on the strength of his analysis

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 conversations with eternity
the forgotten MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

le^k*61^ ha5 a11 *nner’ tower-like stem that rises up to attract pol-
n earing insects. If the stem fails to attract the insects, the
giri-child Rapunzel is taken from h k^ Stoiy opens*the
> »! . 5:"° " b« <r • lik^T Pa1* the co^umn splhs in two and the halves “will curl
fe 6 ra*^S or co^s on a maidens head, and this will bring the
ra.ded to gather the herb rapu^Hor busband had
e stigmatic tissue [from inside the column] into contact with
desperately craved in her pregnancy A 7^*°” WhÌch hÌS WÌk
e male pollen on the exterior surface of the stylar column.”
reparation in the form of the fruiTlf k 0US W'tch demanded
hompson also shows us that the relationships of the five per-
Rapunzel. Terrified, the Darens k • Pre8nancy: the infant
W7L parents submit ^ns in Rapunzel mirror the relationships of five heavenly bodies
When Rapunzel comes of age the wit k k
t ey would have been observed in the night sky at the begin-
tower that has neither door no! stair Í hef “P in a hi8h
^ng of the third millennium B. C. First, Thompson explains
near the top. When the witch w but °n,y a window
at the herb rapunzel is a “fivefold” flower, that is, one associated
“Runzel, RapunzelJetdownXrrair’R^^^^0“1’
y archaic man with the planet Venus because it is a “mirroring
golden tresses down from the J j " Rapunzel lets her long
o«^p™Mpz.tr/r’"' t”“1' -/ ection of the pattern that the apparent movement of Venus
makes in the sky.” The historian then goes on to show that if
the next day and calls out “Ran i ntua^’ hie returns
apunzel represents Venus, then the witch, or sorceress, whose
hair. Rapunzel does so, and he climZ ’ ?Punze1, let down your
name is Gothel, or “Bright God,” represents the moon, the Prince
ensues. The prince returns da7Z ,IUP ST“' A,0Veaffair
be associated with Mars, the mother with Mother Earth, and
pregnant. 7 ®er day, and Rapunzel becomes
e father—because of his rapid and frequent movements between
The witch finds out what J,,, k
e mother (earth) and the witch (the moon)—with Mercury.
off Rapunzels locks and banishes Fu™us, she cuts
h sounds a little preposterous. Yet, when we follow his reason-
the prince returns and calls our tk “the waste,ands. When
mg and the planetary charts Thompson provides us with to show
sheared tresses. The prince climi,6 the witch ,owers
e apparent movements of the heavenly bodies as they would
witch, ¡Leaping out the window h ? “ Confronted by the
ave been observed in about 4000 B.C., we see that he is making
he is blinded by the thorn bushes 6 k"í Unharmed «“pt that
Eventually, the nri ” 7 ' Ae bottom- a compelling case.
the wasteland where she^ZsiZ^0-^ in On yet another level—too complicated to be mentioned in
a^y detail here—Thompson argues that Rapunzel is a description
fathered. Her tears of joy resto "k— T" b°y he has
0 the period around 4,000 B. C. when the shift to patrilineal
is athers kingdom, where he event k 'eads ber back to
^°ciety is being felt, with all its tension with the old ways of 6,000
live happily ever after. entually becomes king and they
•O.” Thompson suggests that the transfer of the baby Rapunzel
to the domain of the witch may represent the dynamic of the
Pknt rapunzel. He explains that mgressive harking-back of a new, still-precarious patriarchal soci­
ety to a nostalgically-recalled matriarchal society where women

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THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO
wise in the lore of plants and planets ensured a certain stability.
When, at the conclusion of the story, the Prince and Rapunzel are interconnectedness with the geological processes . of
reunited after having been separately cast out by the witch, and the earth, even as that experience, and the immediate memories
begin to raise the male-female twins that are the fruit of their *at experience, were slowly and surely t0 preserve
union, we witness the patriarchal society vigorously reasserting As mankinds conscious mind took o > ckknlanet His
itself once again, and this time permanently. This, then, accord­ *at archaic apprehension of the inner workings of h P •
ing ta Thompson, is Gaias, planet’s-eye expression of the group of most powerfid sensing had been ^^^Xhgly degree
humans which constitute a part of its nature—an anthropological baser metals into the more precious, w
aspect of Gaia s nature. °f abstraction, with »
» of lh. „poticncc bo ..T » “tXoXablo
What does all this have to do with channeled descriptions of m what came to be an alchemical form, knratorv.
the planet Mercury apparently expressed in alchemical formulae? him to try to reproduce these P'0“““® planet Mer-
Let s think for a moment about alchemy in the context of Gaia- Let’s return to our Jersey island v pg linR experi-
When we were all to a great extent unself-consciously a part of Cury- It seems as if, over the months o eir
Gaia immersed in a sea of energies like a fish in water”—we
P^ce, the flow of'fluid’within the group hadbwmeMr^^^^^
must have been able to sense all around us not only the presence of h>r them to be able to pick up, throug amplified by
animals and our fellow men, the changes in trees, and the move­ foe elemental energies of Gaia, of our e ’t-c-j by the comet;
ment of the skies, but also the geological-chemical changes taking 'The Ocean;” and then similar energies as moon?
place within the earth itself (it is a measure of how different that
ai»d then related energies as exetnp e on that night
state of being must have been from our own that we can speculate
that archaic man must have sensed these aspects of Gaia not around . Could this group have become tespon ¡ng from the re-
m July, 1854, to channel cosmic energies: because
him, but within him).
g'°ns around the planet Mercury which, for what-
At a certain level, we must, since we were active* participants
c°ming from for beyond the earth, an . our earth
in the Mind of Gaia, have unconsciously listened’ to the evolu­
^er astronomical reasons, were streaming
tion of minerals in the earth, even to the transmutation of base
w‘fo unusual vigor that night? Aege Metagaia
metals into gold.
Encountering the energies of the themselves (this may
And then the long centuries began when, for whatever rea­
^ergies from Mercury sought to perso spirits) in some
sons, man began to be separated out from his primeval state of have been non-volitional, or stage-manag
immersion in Gaia. £
The science ofalchemy may have begun with mans slow, stum­ or another. boxes in the heads of
bling, and only increasingly aware efforts, over those centuries, to And, in searching through c°St^’.e e|emental planetary
^'ctor Hugo and his learned fríen , which t0 man¡.
somehow encode the essence of his felt experience of his dynamic
^ergies could only find one bit o c ° ,8formljae of mankind
*®t their presence: the ancient ale e

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THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO
which were encodings of the elemental planetary energies of the
earth. (Th
b e quasi-science ofastrology may also have begun as an attempt
These alchemical hieroglyphics, representing the last recorded qY arc aie man to encode and preserve his steadily diminishing,
speech of our planet speaking from its depths, were then chan- immediately-felt, apprehension of the stars and planets. But
neled through the turning tables—at least, those aspects of the at is another question—though not unrelated to the one we
hieroglyphics which resonated to some aspect of the planet Met' ave keen discussing.)
cury; Li ¿tS ^asc*nat,n£ t0 see that, in James Merrill’s The Changing
We saw that William Irwin Thompson, in his analysis of « S t at Sandover, it is also possible to interpret some of the vaster
Rapunzel, found at least three aspects of itself which Gaia had angelic communications channeled through the Ouija board as
expressed in its creation, through generations ofhuman agency, of Unifications of the energies of Gaia—this being an interpreta-
this fairy tale: that of the vegetal, that of the apparent movement °n that James Merrill himself was inclined to favor.
of the heavens as observed from the earth, and that of mankind, ^ne these communications appears in the final book of the
the anthropological. i .°^ ^crlp^for the Pageant, where the discarnate spokesperson
It’s striking that, in the strange hieroglyphs communicated to ^mst0 ke Mother Nature herself. This cosmic entity tells Merrill
the seance goers on Jersey island, we also find three levels of ex­ his Ouija board partner, David Jackson (who is, apparently,
pression, this time having to do with the planet Mercury as a genuine psychic of the two) that she is the sister to—virtually
Metagaian whole: that ofthe vegetal (the templum, which resembles ride of—‘God Biology!’ So powerful is her discarnate pres-
organisms of the plant world), that of the ‘anthropological’ (the e that more often than not she speaks through the Ouija board
strange, hydra-like, sunbeam-like inhabitants of the planet), and some smaller portion of herself—possibly to lower the elemen-
that of the geological (perhaps the principal reason why the ** Voltage.
Mercurian energies were obliged to pull in alchemical formulae Twice she manifests as the Vegetal World, telling Merrill and
for their expression). th° T°n St°ry t^ie history Grass an^ A** Wars of

Th® above should be considered only as a suggestion, as pre­ Q Wars of the Trees” are a part of Celtic mythology, as Robert
liminary notes toward the understanding ofthese unusually strange ^teves famously demonstrates in his book, The White Goddess. In
commmunications which came through the turning tables on Jer­ b at c°ntext, they are generally considered to be accounts of wars
sey island. Its all a bit too schematic, as expressed above. The etween tribes and priests whose identities are disguised by the
processes are complex, perhaps ultimately unfathomable. But, of the trees (these names were very powrful, and consti-
when we look at what happened in the light of the concepts of ted the names of the letters of the magic alphabet of the Druidic
Gaia and Metagaia, we do begin to get some glimmerings as to Dards).
why this material osensibly channeled from Mercury might have But Mother Nature doesn’t seem to be thinking of this when
come through in a form resembling Terran alchemical formulae. e tells her story to Merrill and Jackson. She claims that she is
<ing about the real Wars of the Trees! THOSE WARS OF THE

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 THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO
CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY
guace, and through this network even to-
TREES CAN BE SAVAGE, she says to the bewildered writers at day in FREEZING tundras as word s
the Ouija board. When they protest that trees cannot possibly go (‘DROUGHT! FLOOD! ICE! MAN!’) WE SHRIN ,
to war with each other, being, to say the least, extremely slow-
moving creatures, she corrects herself, then goes on with her story: Vance
And on it goes, to the amazement of both Merrill
WELL, PLANT EVOLUTION IF U MUST. THE
^ugo, had he been present as a spirit at this se^e* „
STRONG & CLEVER DRIVE OUT THE REST: A VAST have been surprisedùven if he had not been filled m on sJldte
SLOW PROCESS WE CAN NEVER QUITE KEEP ACCU­ secrets of the universe after his death: He had, after > P
RATE HISTORIES OF. VARIOUS FRAIL FERNS & EVEN The Ocean itself, and heard its mighty tale of searc g gr
THE PALM TREE WERE EXTERMINATED BY A GREAT and endeavour over the millennia. He, too, it seemed, had
(W)R1NGING PROCESS; ROOTS FLEW IN THE AIR; THE
OAK ET AL SURVIVED. BUT THE ELM WAS WEAK­ tened to the voice of Gaia*
ENED...
At a seance a short time afterward, Mother Nature settles down
to manifesting a very specific portion of herself: the Grass. Then,
as that entity, she narrates the history of that species of vegetation:
LET ME NOW SAY MY SOUL SPEAKS FROM WITHIN
THE GREENNESS OF A BLADE OF GRASS. I TAKE THIS
HUMBLE STATION TO BEST IMAGINE HOW IT WAS,
THAT FOURTH OR FIFTH DAWN, WHEN LOOKING
OUT I SAW THE RISING SUN OVER A FAINT HAZE OF
GREEN SPROUTS. WE PEOPLED THE VIRGIN EARTH,
AND FOR A LONG SPELL RULED IN A CONGRESS OF
SLOW BUT PROFOUND COMMAND, IN LEAGUE WITH
THE AGID AND MINERAL COUNCIL...
SO THE RACES OF VEGETABLE GREEN BEGAN,
THEIR SITES APPORTIONED WITH THEIR AT­
TRIBUTES, AND ASIDE FROM SOME PROFUSION &
SOME SLIGHT EXTINCTION THEY HAVE SENSIBLY PRE­
VAILED FOR 980,000 SUN YEARS.
AND NOW LET ME TALK OF THE TONGUES & WAYS
OF COMMUNION AMONG US. OUR ‘RULING’ ONES,
THE FAMILY OF MOSS, ESTABLISHED A TACTILE LAN-

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deployment of his literary legacy should be such that certain of his

works would only be released in times ofhuman crisis, when people
were ready to hear, and needed to hear, what he had to say.
Hugo agreed to do what the turning tables requested.
Chapter Sixteen
Here is how it all came about, beginning with the words of
Death, on September 19, 1854, at 1:30 p.m. Present at that se­
ance were Victor Hugo, Francois-Victor Hugo, and Auguste
“...YOU WILL AWAKEN ME Jacquerie. Holding the table were Mme. Hugo and Charles Hugo.
IN THE YEAR 2000...”
This is what Death had to say:

During their lives, all great minds create two bodies ofwork:
Are you a genius? And, if you re not, have you ever wondered their work as living beings, and their work as phantoms of the
what it was like to be one? oight Into the living work they throw the living, terrestrial world;
On September 19,1854, the spirits, in the person of‘Death,’ hito the phantom work they pour that other, celestial world.
told Victor Hugo that all creative geniuses live double lives. The living speak to their century in the language that it un­
One was the living person who, during the day, labored to derstands, work with what is possible, affirm the visible, effect
create works of art despite all the difficulties of everyday life. die real, light up the day, justify the justifiable, demonstrate proof.
The other was the phantom’ self, who rose up in the night Engaged in this work, they fight, they sweat, they bleed; while in
(while the living person looked on askance!) to roam the savage this martyrdom, genius must bear with imbecility; a flame, it
and exalted reaches of the afterworld in search of visions essential Oiust bear with shadow; the chosen, it must bear with the crowd,
to the creative life of the artist. On waking up, the living person, and die, Christ-like, the dowry ofthe world, between two thieves,
scarcely able to find words to express these adventures experienced ^ilefy scorned, and wearing such a heavy crown of thorns that a
beyond time and space, would labor all day to clothe them in the
donkey could graze upon its brow.
language $f everyday reality. While the living being creates this first work, the pensive
Having revealed to Hugo the secret of the dual identity of Phantom, in the night, in the silence of the universe, awakens
creative geniuses, Death went to describe for him some of the within the living human being. O terror! What, says the human
adventures of those phantom selves in the afterworld. being, this isn’t everything? No, replies the specter. Get up! Get
Death had a reason for telling Hugo all this. on your feet! There’s a high wind blowing, dogs and foxes bark,
He wanted to persuade the poet to stipulate in his Last Will darkness is everywhere, nature shudders and trembles under God’s
and Testament that many of his works should not be published for whipcord; toads, snakes, worms, nettles, stones, grains of sand
20 years, for 40 years, for 60 years, and so on.
*Wait us: Get on your feet!
The spirits felt that much of Hugos material would not be You’ve just worked for man. That s fine! But man is nothing,
understood for many, many years to come. And they felt that the

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THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO
man isn’t the bottom of the abyss, man isn’t the headlong fall
pales, the lamp gets frightened. How quickly they pass, these
into horror. The animal is the precipice, the flower is the gulf,
phantom-ideas! They enter the brain, glitter, terrify and disap­
it’s the bird that makes you dizzy, it’s from the worm’s eye that
you see the grave. pear; the eye of the specter-writer catches sight of them hovering
there by the light of the phosphorescent whirlwinds of the black
Wake up! Come perform your other work Come gaze upon
what cannot be gazed upon, come contemplate the unseen, come spaces of immensity? They come from infinity and they return
find that which cannot be found, come leap the unleapable, come to infinity; they are splendid and grim and frightening; they in­
justify' what can’t be justified, come make the unreal manifest, seminate or they thunder; they are what created Shakespeare,
Aeschylus, Molière, Dante, Cervantes; Socrates was bom from a
come prove what can’t be proven.
phantom-idea; they are transparent and through them you can
You ve been day; come be night; come be shadow; come be
darkness; come be the unknown; come be the impossible; come see God; they are great, they are good, they are majestic; crime,
be mystery; come be infinity. You’ve been the lace; come be the suffering, matter itself, flee before them; they are the tremen­
dous electric current of universal progress. Woe unto evil! is
skull; you ve been the body; come be the soul; you’ve been the
living; come be the phantom. Come die, come be resurrected, t-heir cry; and it is a formidable hour when they pass by in the
shy, taking flight toward the Sabbath of the immense mystery,
come create, and come be bom.
I wish that, having seen your burden [as a creative genius affrighted and seated upon the prodigious broomstick of the in­
during the day], man could see you taking flight and sense con­ anities and of all the witches of Paradise!
fusedly your formidable wings passing in the stormy sky ofyour
Calvary. Living being, come be wind of night, noise of forest, They took a break; Charles was exhausted. Then Victor Hugo
foam of wave, shadow of den; come be hurricane, come be the asked the table to “complete what you’ve begun.”
horrible dread of the savage darkness. If the herdsman shivers,
may it be your step that he has heard; ifthe sailor trembles, may The work continues; the work is completed. The day-work
it be your breath that he has heard. I bear you away with me; the talked, ran, cried out, sang, spoke, blazed forth, loved, fought,
lightning flash, our pale horse, rears up in the clouds. Come on! suffered, consoled, wept, prayed. The night-work, wild and un­
Enough sun. To the stars! To the stars! To the stars! sociable, kept quiet. But now the eagle has finished with the
The phantom ceases to speak and the terrible work begins. sun, and the bat begins to stir in the grave. He’s dead, it’s very
The ideas in that work no longer have a human fece: the phan­ ^Ultimate, says evil, it’s very fortunate, says error, its very fortu­
tom-writer sees phantom-ideas; the words quake with fear, the nate, says envy No, says the tomb, I’m not closing up, I m open-
words thrill> through your every limb, the paper begins to rattle up. I’m not the wall to life, I’m the door. You think hes said
like a vessels sail m a storm, the feather pen feels its beard bris- ^erything. Mistake. Look, listen, tremble, it s night in the cem-
dmg the inkwell becomes the abyss, the letters blaze forth in etery» the grave is there, humble, forgotten, deep; there the grass
fire, the table vacillates, the ceiling trembles, the window-pane Murmurs all alone against the ruins; all of a sudden, the stone
’«ts, the epitaph is roused, and someone emerges from the sep­

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CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY
Death had set a second seance, for the next day, Wednesday,
ulcher. It’s the phantom. What’s he coming to do? He’s coming Sept. 20, beginning at 1:00 in the afternoon. Victor Hugo was
to Ihre; he’s coming to speak; he’s coming to fight; he’s coming to Present, and Mme. Hugo and son Charles were seated at the table.
take the place of the living; he’s becoming man; he’s going, he’s When Death re-appeared, Hugo had a complex question. He
running; he’s filling the world; he’s making the heavy screw of Wondered why, in the second part of his disquisition o t e ay
the terrified presses turn; with his dizzying breath he’s making before, Death had seemed to imply that, after death, the p antom
the letters of frightened lead leap; he’s in the steam engine; he’s self became the ‘editor’ of the creative genius, whereas, m the ear­
in the wheels of the machine; and you glimpse his mysterious lier part of his address, Death had seemed to be saying at * e
arms waving excitedly in the workshop and distributing death’s phantom self collaborated with the living person unng
work to the living. He’s in the crowd; he’s in the theater; he’s in time- . c L-
the street; he’s coming abruptly to surprise the sleeping world, Hugo was anxious to know what were the implications for his
and, unknown, he surges forward like the unexpected, he be­
°wn life as a writer. r
comes the dream of the century whose Idea he is. No more Death’s answer was strange, beautiful bewi enng. te
disputes; man is dead and the worms are chasing the crows; pos­ *ard, the seance attendees would wonder if he had not been de-
terity deeply moved, crowding together, penetrated by a sacred scribing what creative genius at work must be i e, in i e, ut m
horror, enters its feared and solemn theater. Take your places the night, in the afterworld, making up its own rules and remain­
for infinity; the chandelier of the stars and the footlights of the ing open to spontaneity and the unexpected, t seeme as i t
constellations are lighted up: To your places! The drama is be­ phantom self must—or, even, to express its being, was o ige
ginning. Silence. The winding sheet is going up. I’m getting to to embrace all the spheres of earthly existence, roc , p ant, amm
your question. It’s a delicate one. Above all, what we wish is and recognize them all as being suffuse wi so
that man act out of his own free will; in these matters, I cannot
command you. Publish if you want. The only thing I wish to Spirit, do you not have secret thoughts, visions, mysterious
say is this: Be the Oedipus of your own life and the Sphinx of Perspectives, fears, lightning transportings-away into e in
your own grave. Me? Does not your hope for the infinite sometunes pour .«elf
•ft. Mo the unfathomable? Don’tyou find yourselfturning abruptly,
The seance ended at 7:30 p.m. Precipitously, upon God? Haven’t you had constdlation tempes»
If what Death had to say seems confusing, we have to remem­ íhipwLts among the sta«? Has your raft never cofoded
ber that Death was trying to describe two things which are almost >ith Saiurn and touched upon the sandba« of Äe MtUty W
impossible to describe. One is genius, which has always been un- Mtve your two eyes never gotten so filled up ® a e“7*
at omab e. The other is the relationship of the genius to the Millions of stars that your yelids became die to shores of the
afterworld,happening while the artist is alive! This second (assum­ Mnament? Has your anchor never seatc e out e ® ®*n 0
ing it exists!) is even less fathomable than the first, since our space­ M night and has it never wanted to sound the abyss. Arent you
time universe scarcely has the words with which to describe it.

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CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY

a searcher after skulls, a gravedigger ofworlds, a Hamlet ofsuns, before:

a stroller through the cemetery of immensity, a seizer of planets,
Be on your guard, man of matter, soldier of an unpending
one of heavens digging spades? Have you never cried out, Yes!
revolution, be on your guard, possible governor, watch out, re­
yes! yes! in the midst of this great grim No? Have you never
spectable common sense, vested influence, reflective character,
stood your ground against moonless nights and said, Good! to
be on your guard, sentry of the real, because this is the marching
starry nights? Have you never thought sometimes that you were
order of the ghastly corporal of the impossible, because this is
being brought before a tribunal of speechless planets? Have you
murmured in your ear by the gray patrol of skeletons. Dont be
never been frightened, have you never shivered, have you never
so bold as to repeat in a loud voice with your living .ese
felt your hair stand on end and be caught in the stars as if io
Nocturnal words of the grave. Do not be at this point in things
dreadful pulley-wheels? Have you never reflected on all the forms
so intrepid as to sound the frightful, to sound the re^e* e ° e
that creation takes? Have you never reflected on faces and glances,
ghosts and tn appear on your barricade with a fune s ou or
on lips and faces, and often also on the teeth between those lips?
Are you not in love with some of these forms and in terror of a flag, with a skull for a cannon, with an epitaph as a slogan.
With myself as a soldier, with your phantom as a bugler, and
others? Aren’t you just a little smitten with Venus? Are you not
with your gravestone as a paving stone. Be on your guar , or
extremely frightened of Saturn? And while you sense above your
rather, take pity! Take pity on the sufferers who need you, on life
head the stars speaking to you, don’t you sense pebbles speaking
to you in your shoes? Do you not carry on intrigues with certain foviolable, on the scorned woman, on the ignorant masses, o
«tot desert the guillotined for the dead, the children for the corpses,
brambles on the beach? Don’t you impute souls to antmak? Dont
«he cradle for the sepulcher, the man for the ghost, the relative
you impute souls to stones? Don’t you impute souls to plants?
for the absolute, and the wounds for the stars.
Dont you impute a soul to the dust, a soul to the ashes, a soul to
the gutter, a soul to the garbage, a soul to all that the body fC"
The session ended. It was five o’clock. Death said that he
jects, a soul to Judass spit, a soul to Magdalenes tears, a soul to
the blood of Jesus? Isnt it somewhere there, trembling, vacillat­ ^ould return the next day. t
On Saturday, September 23, 1854, at 3:15 m the afternoon
ing, affrighted, between this sky and this earth, between all the
Hugo began the session with another question, t a to o wit
worlds so high above and all the souls so flu* below, between this
his political mission that had ended up bringing him as an exde to
Paradise and this Hell, between these sparks and these stones,
Jersey island. He hoped you could expect the phantom self as
isnt it somewhere there, and do you not ask what is the formi"
guarantor of the genius state, so to speak, because bringing essen­
dable tinder-box which will make the constellations leap upward
tial visions of eternity from the afterworld to the amst-to also
like sparks from these pebbles?
bring visions that would enable the writer to work for mankind, as

Charles was exhausted. They took a long break. When they a political animal, as someone acting as one among a num er o
«Hen in a group to which he was subservient. Was the specter self
returned, the table held forth with even more vim and vigor than

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THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO
able to adjust its needs and goals to higher purposes than just
the wind answers*. This living being isnt a living being. Lets go
those of the individual?
into this dead person’s place. This dead person isn’t a dead per­
To this, Death seemed to reply that whatever the circumstance
it was essential to be joyful, to be free and to embrace the entire son. Let’s go into this phantom’s place. This phantom isnt a
phantom. Let’s go into this dwelling place. This dwelling place
world.
isn’t a dwelling place. Let’s go into this tomb. This tomb isn’t a
tomb. What’s that smoke, then? O crowd, you’ll know one day,
However you do it, make your phantom work come alive;
till then, don’t come near, tremble and hope, and believe; one
make it complete; compose it with every philter of mystery; fill
day you’ll see the work; till then, be satisfied with the smoke, be
it with horror, lightning flashes, thunderclaps, foam; toss in toads»
snakes, spiders, bats, caterpillars, scorpions, centipedes, vile be** satisfied with the noise; be satisfied with the clouds, and gaze
from afar at this radiance and listen from afar to that tumult o
ings, crawling beings, damned, pensive, pale, bristling; peer
the formidable hammer and the enormous anvil, of the earth
closely at the shadows boiling in the cauldron with the starry lid;
light up immensity with an atom, make a fire ofpain and a smok­ and the shy, of God’s two palms giving the sign of eternity.
ing God will rise up out your work in the glow of milions of
sparks; he will emerge as a column of darkness with millions of Death was far from finished. The next seance took place on
Friday, September 29,1854. At this session, which began at 3:15
lights; he will flash out as a grim giant with a crown ofconstella­
in the afternoon, Death had a very specific request to make. The
tions on his head; make your works one of the chimneys of the
human soul; may the sleeping earth, half-opening its heavy eyes, spirits wished Hugo to continue to speak and to write, after his
death, for the coming ages of mankind.
perceive on the horizon your roof covered with a cloud of stars,
and say: What’s he doing? Where is that unknown, that splendid Present at the seance were Victor Hugo, with Mme. Victor
Flugo and Charles holding the table. Death began to spe
smoke, coming from? What is that chimney from which it gushes
up into the sky? And may the wind reply to the earth: That is
one of the forges ofthe night; it is there where they make suns; it Truthfully, this would be an astonishing and an immense
is there x&here they take the fetters off convict-man; it is there thing- until now gteat minds died like small ones, e o y'ur
where they heat black horse collars white-hot in order to fashion fed, the works finished: open sepulchers, dosed books. Their
last word on earth was expressed by their last sigh; their epitaph
planets from them; it’s there where they take down Jesus from
the Cross and use the nails to attach the sky a little better to the t*as their fereweU; and that Aeschylus, that Dante, that Cervantes,
earth; its there where they pull blazing brands from the fire and that Shakespeare, that Molière, who had been eadi tn their time
the moral weight ofthe world, these blocks ofgenius, these rocks
put out conflagrations; it s there where with hammer-blows they
shape stars of torture into stars of happiness and pincer-globes of thought, these immensities, these planet-sized brams, these
into key-globes, and where they construct the locks of the firma­ feteheadhs with the horizons of deserts and indentations that made
ment. Let s go into this living being’s place, says the crowd. But fountains; alas! As soon as their grave was hollowed out ten
feet under the sky, they were no longer more than a bit ofdust m

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a pile of ashes, a bit of nothingness in a mass of night, a little from time to rime, in periods ofhuman crisis, when some shadow
silence in a lot of darkness, nothing but atoms which held no passes over progress, when clouds blot out the ideal, suddenly
surprises for infinity. opens its lips of stone and speaks? People seek; your grave finds.
What! Those skulls were all of a sudden hushed up? O, stu­ People doubt; your grave affirms. People deny; your tomb proves.
por! Is it possible? Let s go into their cemetery, stir up their graves And what does it prove? What it contains; it proves, with I do
with our feet, and listen. They say nothing. They say nothing. not know what somber and solemn authority all the truths which
They say nothing! But, speak, mouth ofAeschylus! Think, brow today still lie in the future. Thou, dead, you help the living.
of Shakespeare! Blow windy phrases, eye sockets of Dante! Weep, Thou, mute, you educate them. Thou, invisible, you see them.
eyes of Molière! May our footsteps awaken you! May they make Your work does not say ‘Perhaps.’ It says, Certainly It does
your ashes make a noise; may your bones when we touch them not resort to subterfuges; it goes straight to the point. Know
resonate, and feel like sleeping bugles fallen from the hands of a that a ghost does not hide behind rhetorical devices. Ghosts are
legion of archangels! Worms, that dare nibble at such corpses, bold, shades do not blink before the lights. So, make for the 20th
flee! Shrouds, tremble! You, marble, listen! You, coffin lead, melt century an affirmative work, rather than one for the 19 century
and turn into a set ofprinter s fonts, become letter, become word, ^hich engenders doubt. Seal it up with you in your sepulcher so
and become life; take vengeance, lead; take vengeance on the that, at certain rimes decided by yourself, people will come look­
coffin; and you, earth, gather up the words of the dead, and ing for it.
thou, humanity, breathe in the breath ofthose words, hear them, Christ was resurrected only once; you can fill your grave with
drink their sepulchral sweat, and eat their luminous flesh. Wail­ Resurrections; you can, if my advice seems good to you, have an
ing humanity, these sinister mounds that, here and there, rise up extraordinary death; you would say while dying: you will awaken
in cemeteries, are the breasts of love; humanity, suckle at these in 1920, you will awaken me in 1940, you will awaken me in
tombs. But no, these tombs no longer have any milk, these i960, you will awaken me in 1980, you will awaken me in the
mothers who call themselves Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare, Year 2000. Your death would be a formidable rendez-vous ar-
Molière, are dead; their sweet masterpieces no longer have new R^nged with the light and a formidable threat launched against
kisses to estow; their lips no longer have new lessons to lavish benight. The generations would behold with huge admiration
on us, alas! Alas! These tombs are dead. titis prodigious tomb marching through a century in the hum
Addressing Victor Hugo directly: Thou, may your posthu-
be still a living thing, so that at certain intervals it Abruptly, death was gone. The table had been deserted. Hugo
will be able to talk to posterity and tell it unknown things which Recorded in the transcripts, “It was 6:30 p.m. It was dusk. The
will have had time to ripen in the grave. What is impossible R^oon was on the horizon.”
today is necessary tomorrow. In your Last Will and Testament, In vain, the participants tried to get the table moving again.
space out your posthumous works, one every ten years, one ev­ Hey had to abandon their attempt; it seemed as if the table had
ery five years. Can you not see the greatness of a tomb which, abandoned them.

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THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

Death returned one more time in this particular sequence of

small role, is already beginning to be glimpsed, and thanks to the
discourses. This would be the denouement. The spirit would
publication of this book, will be accessible to everyone, an pro
provide a flattered and excited Hugo with specific details as to
ably the basis of a new religion—all this at the time w en my
how he could, in a sense, “cheat” death.
posthumous works will appear.
The pivotal seance was held Sunday, October 22,1854, begin­
“Do you mean, which I’m inclined to believe, that I should
ning at 2:30 in the afternoon. One ofVictor Hugo’s closest friends,
simply put aside, to be published after my death, works of pure
Paul Meurice, was in attendance, from France, along with his wife.
thought and poetry, penetrated with your new phi osop y> an
Victor Hugo and Auguste Vacquerie were there; Mme. Hugo and
affirming it, augmenting human light, as do, without preten ing
Charles Hugo were seated at the table.
to teach and reveal, all the great works of art and of poetry to
Paul Meurice would eventually be one of the three executors
which I am comparing, of course, nothing of w at ave one.
ofVictor Hugo’s Last Will and Testament. Considering the con­
Or should I put aside those of my works which mix, to a particu­
tent of this particular seance, it is uncanny that he should have larly profound degree, divine intuition with human creation n a
been there that afternoon.
Word, what should there be in my tomb, a prophet or a poet. My
Death announced itself. Hugo had a lengthy question:
“You’ve given me a sublime piece of advice and, if you give me reason says a poet, but I await your answer.
the time, 111 follow that advice. But at the same time as these Perhaps the spirits meant all of this. Perhaps cy meant, o,
that, in some mysterious way, they intended to work with Hugo
works willed by me to the twentieth century, and before them,
«Ar his death, and help him to create, and somehow to insemi­
this book [the transcripts of the turning table conversations], which
will certainly be one of the Bibles of the future, will probably have nate, whole new works into the consciousness of mankind.
appeared. It will not, I think, be published during the lifetime of Here is what Death had to say in reply.
any of us, the current interlocutors of these mysterious beings,
but, when it does appear, it will say everything that I will have We re talking about a formidable work called Advice from
^*°d; the earth disappears; the sepulcher, that great stone bat,
reserved for my grave; it will say it, it will say it before the posthu-
mous m^ does, and it will say it with more authority. Then my Gpens its wings of shadow in the dusk of the resurrection and
material from my grave will appear, and it will be discovered that e*ts in its flight against the blazing pane-glass window of the
my revelation has already been revealed. ®tars; die sinister bird goes from planet to planet, and its night
A part of that revelation has been part of human tradition fot Cry> each times it touches the edge of a constellation, becomes a
centuries, another part has been created by me (which doesn’t mean 8°ng of light; it emerges out of the dusk bringing the dawn; it
that it doesnt come entirely from God, man being only a chimney takes flight from Hell and announces Paradise; it departs as an
through which the divine flame passes), another part has been said ?^d and it arrives as a lark; it escapes from the old trunk of the
by all of you, beings of the unknown, in our dialogues with the u,*ian tree and alights at the end of each branch at the point
tripod-table. The whole picture, in which I am only playing a ''diere the fruit becomes a star, it leaves the hollowed-out spaces
skulls and it leaps from paradise to paradise, and it nests from

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CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY

And, then, suddenly, the seance was over. Death would teturn
joy to joy, and it sits on all the globes one alter the other and
hatches in the sky the egg of every archangel. no more.
But the spirits were soon to reveal to Hugo some ofwhat Deat
O living one, here’s my advice for you: Your soul’s work must
had asked him to reveal to future generations.
be your soul’s journey; you must not prophesy; you must pre­
dict, you must draw predictions in the starry sky, trace your itin­
erary there, designate with your fìnger your inns, and attach the
relay horses oflove to your thoughts and, invisible traveler, mark
out in advance the unknown steps on the great route made up of
precipices which leads to the wild hotel of the incomprehen­
sible; governor of immensity, you must say in those pages what
are the planets that await you, and speak of their civilizations,
and of their light and shadow, of their thorns and of their flow­
ers, oftheir place in the horror or of their walk in the joy, of their
cries or of their hymns, and, from the depths of your grave, the
world must hear you say: There is in infinity a world called Sat­
urn, and which suffers; there is in infinity a world called Mer­
cury and which suffers; there is in infinity a world called Mars,
and which suffers; O my God, what punitary stars there are!
What crucified constellations! Lord, your heavens are covered
with wounds; your stars are drops of blood! Your suns are be­
come gangrenous, your moons are afflicted with the horrible
pestilence of punishment, your constellations, which have been
on theirknees for millions ofyears, have ended up breaking their
skulls and their fists against the darkness, and are no longer any
more than hellish stumps; your creations are no longer mot®
than shreds of flesh, your halos are no longer more than rags of
sunbeams, the greatest ofyour creations have their heads cut off>
your firmament is an immense gutter in which all the corpses
roll, and your splendid iron horses of light, mad with rage and
taking the bit in their teeth, draw and quarter every inch of hnx
mensity.

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CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY
that the worlds of reward were non-physical worlds, bright globes
of light upon which the rewarded souls did not even have to con­
tend with the forces of gravity.
The spirits grappled in earnest with this question on e es
Chapter Seventeen day, August 16, 1854. In attendance at this seance were Victor
Hugo and Francois-Victor Hugo; holding the table were Mme.
Hugo and Charles Hugo.
PUNITARY PLANETS The spirit called Death spoke (this was a month before he was
AND WORLDS OF REWARD to take up the subject of the ‘phantom’ self), ostensibly in answer
to Victor Hugo’s question: How can a human being predict the
future?
Beginning in late August, 1854, and with a powerful surge
forward in November, the revelations of the Jersey island spirits Study human astronomy in depth. It is filled with germs of
moved far beyond the confines of our Solar System. While there truth from which you will be able to extrapolate greater tru
were worlds close to us—Mercury, Saturn and Jupiter, notably-" For example, you will find it possible to establish the exact no-
where the souls of the dead (in what guise it was not clear!) Ian* •Uendature of your planetary systems of wor ° 311
guished or rejoiced through lifetimes meant to punish them or Punitary worlds, as a function of their distance from the sun.
reward them, that was only the beginning: Our galaxy and pet" The laws of the heavens conform to the laws of the earfo;
haps all the galaxies swarmed with worlds of reward or punitary that law is the devotion of the great for the snidi, of the good for
planets. Ae bad, of the rich for the poor, of the beautifulfor «gfer, of
Sometimes, when we read the occasional poem (there were not the just for the unjust, of the joyfol &>' *e joyless and of the
many) that Hugo wrote on the subject, we get the sense that every
planet in our universe is a punitary world. Certainly, that was
what Balaams Ass seemed to be suggesting when he declared that
our entire universe was a prison. But there seemed to be except by the stone of the martyrs cross, it ....
tions; for example, earthly geniuses like Aeschylus and Mozart had Poisonous plant by the perfumed plant; it is e *
been enjoying, at least till their services were required again, rest' the ferodo^ beast by the beast of strength and the beast of ge de-
ful retirements on Jupiter.
Ue«s; it is the deliverance of the cnmin y
But if every planet was a punitary world, where were the worlds the deliverance of the punished soul by the rewarded soul, it is
of reward? Were they the stars? Hugo himself had believed for * tbe deliverance of the false idea by the true i ea.
while that 5,000-foot-high giants lived on our sun. But the spirit Finally, it is the deliverance o^e^P^e
had said nothing about this (at least as far as we know), and it
t®g star, and the enormous sacrifice o p
would be consistent with Balaams Asss philosophy to suppose

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THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO
starry skies contain rare and prodigal constellations whose mis­
sion is to draw gently and ceaselessly close to worlds in misery» to the Southern Cross.
and little by little to bring light to them with a day that begins as Thus composed, the firmament should appear to you in
if it were dusk and finishes up in a blaze of flames. There are Victor Hugo interrupted: “I’ve written lines that skirt around
these ideas without accepting them. In some, I portray Go as
other constellations, equally sublime, whose function is not to
draw dose to, but to draw close to them, these planets—and sifting stars and souls in the same sieve; in others, that begin, Eart
that requires a double effort, a double and terrible labor. Some is to sun as man is to angel, 1 explain that the „punishment is in
of these gleaming stars descend, others mount up; some are en­ direct proportion to the distance from the sun.
gulfed by shadow; others set themselves to sweating cascades of —a new light. The placement ofworlds, the roles played by
light; these latter fling themselves into swimming in the firma­ globes: These are not arbitrary matters. I’ve just broadened ho­
rizons in your mind that had to be broadened. Moreover, we
ment and hauling pale and disheveled stars up from the depths
of the night; these gleaming stars descend into the great black will speak of these matters again.
hearth of heaven and, with hardly a murmur, transform them­ Now I have arrived at your question. But, e re a
selves into fires of straw and of sticks ofwood so as to warm up *t> one more thought: .
the corpses of these pitiful drowned stars. In the punitary planets, there are men, beasts, plants and
O, good and strong constellations who become servants of stones that contribute to the liberation of their wor , just as, m
these hideous mortuaries of punishment! Oh, good stars that the worlds of reward, there are suns which contri ute to e
harness themselves to strayed stars! Suns that become seeing-eye setting-free of the punitary worlds. While the fevored star is
dogs! Globes that change into wooden bowls for the poor! Lights toiling to save the punitary planet, sometimes rt receives p
that become the faithful companions of closed eyes! Pleiades, from man, sometimes from animal, sometimes om p ^t an
planets, sun-beams, torches, living splendors, flaming lions, fite sometimes from stone: Star helps man, man helps star, star helps
bears, carbuncle scorpions, diamond Aquariuses, tigers, panthers, animal, animal helps star, star helps plant, plant helps star, star
leopards, elephants—a dazzling menagerie of formidable suns that, helps stone, stone helps star. At night, at the our o e so ,
through love, become the poodles and Newfoundland dogs of When the body sleeps, words of love are exchanged between the
the immensity! n*an engaged in rescuing and the star engage m rescuing.... e
In sdch a way do the heavens resemble the earth; a continual martyred animal talks to the liberating star, die plant undergo­
ing trials chats with the charitable planet, and the gram of sand
rescue of stars by stars takes place there. Great stars exist just as
do great men; there is the star of Socrates, of Galileo, of John being crushed underfoot cries out ‘Help! to the speck of light.
Huss; the star of Joan of Arc, of the Macabbean Pleiades, of
Dante; the star ofMolière, of Shakespeare, and, in the mid-point Earlier in the seance, Vacquerie had returned to a subject that
of the heavens, in the storm and the glory, surrounded by cloud J^ugo had taken up with the soul of Niccolo Macchiavelli six
and flame, there is the sun ofJesus Christ, nailed magnificently Months before. Macchiavelli had revealed that, while saints and
Martyrs helped mankind while they were alive, their opposite num­

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bers—those who had done mankind ill while they were alive— working together with other extraterrestrial peoples in the Asso­
after death ended up helping the human race. Their growing ciation of Worlds, which numbers 360 planets, to help refine the
remorse over their wrongdoing was mentally communicated to vibrational tone of our Earth. “The Association is made up o
their spiritual heirs—their descendants in bad deeds—and some* many different levels of civilizations and dimensionality, all choos­
how had a mitigating effect on this new generation of wrongdo­ ing to agree to interact on levels that are mutually reinforcing in a
ers. As the Archangel now expressed it to Vacquerie: beneficial and positive way,” explains Bashar. So in this way our
Human life has two sorts of benefactors» the good and the Association of Worlds has made itself known to you (Arcturus,
wicked, the martyrs who, while on earth, bestow upon it their Bashar adds, is “the gate of energy through which communication
suffering, and the executioners who, when dead, bestow upon it from other dimensions of experience is funneled into your ’men
their repentance. The benefactors of life bleed, the benefactors sion of experience”).” . .
ofdeath weep. The first sort have names like Galileo, John Huss, The Arcturians, like the Essassani, have contacted us in order
Savonarola, Socrates, Joan of Arc, Dante; the second sort have to help us (and, indeed, it seems to be extremely urgent . at we
names like Nero, Heliogabalus, Tiberius, Torquemada, Charles Earth people learn to resonate to a higher level, and almost imme
IX, Henry VIII, Caesar Borgia. Calvary has two names: Jesus diately); but, for them to be of any service, it is essenti t at we
and Judas. make a maximum effort ourselves. Their representative, . pae,
This phenomenon of the punished dead on the punitary worlds tells us that, “the primary determination for the acceleration o
trying to soften the evil instincts of their descendants on earth was Earth’s surface areas rests upon you, humans, and vefY e tl™e
still another thread making up this universe of the Marine-Terrace remains for the completion of your duties. It as en to .
spirits where every component of the natural and the supernatural generation to assist its star-based brethren in trans orming
strove to help every other component. earth....[It] is not our place to demand that you re nquis w at
you prefer to retain. Divine, Absolute Intention allows^o leeway
To this dynamic of gleaming star helping weeping star, there for those serving the Light to preempt the responsibility each o
are striking analogies in modern-day channeled literature, espe­ you must take for living your life.” As Bashar exp ains, ^ss^°
cially that ostensibly channeled from aliens. In Songs of the emnly: “We are in interaction to put ourselves out of a jo . ur
Arcturians, by multidimensional telepath’ Patricia Pereira, the dearest desire is to have there come a day on your planet when you
Arcturié star-system certainly qualifies as a gleaming star; we are do not need us at all.” .
told that: [I]t s multidimensional interfacing harmonics make it Both Bashar and Palpae reveal that, in some mysterious (for
an ideal gathering place for multistar-multidimensional beings who us) fashion, the Arcturians and the Essassani, in helping us, are
serve the Christed Energy for the upliftment of universal vibra­ also helping themselves; we are equally important to t ein in is
tion throughout this sector of the galactic core.” task of rising to higher dimensional/vibrauonal levels. Patricia
We are likewise informed, in Bashar: Blueprintfor Change, chan­ Pereiras star people explain that they are, “presently situated in
neled by Darryl Anka, that Bashars people, the Essassani, are fifth- and sixth-harmonic phases,” and that, they are preparing

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THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO
for [their] ascension into seventh and eighth phases in conjunc­
tion with Earth’s inhabitants rising to fourth and fifth.” This Though there is no concept of souls expiating sins here, in
phrase, ‘in conjunction with’ seems to establish a primary con­ other respects this is strikingly like the dictates of the Jersey is an
nectedness between the Arcturus system and our Solar System. spirits. Revealing to Hugo the secret of the speci ac ties o
We’re led to surmise, by extention, that such interconnectedness animals, ‘Drama’ had admonished the poet:
between heavenly bodies is a rule in the universe; and this cer­ Why do you poets always talk about roses and butterflies
tainly seems to echo what the turning table spirits intimated about with love, and never with love about thistles, poisonous mush­
the categorical imperative of all entities in the universe to seek to rooms, toads, slugs, caterpillars, flies, mites, worms, vermin an
help one another. mfiisoria? Certainly, these are ill-favored creatures, but...an en
As Palpae and Bashar tell it, this sounds like something built there are pebbles and seashells!..
into the very fabric of the universe itself: an interconnectedness In a more complex fashion, it s made clear by e spirit gui es
which is one face of the cosmos. Bashar says casually—this seems ofJames Merrill that all aspects of the universe are utterly interde-
be an ever-present fact ofinterstellar development—about his own Pendent. The Changing Light at Sandover records the references
people, the Essassani, that: “Our civilization is going from fourth of the spirits, not to a God as we understand Him, ut to a o
density to fifth density, which is a non-physical state. Above the Biology’—one of a galactic pantheon of brother gods, and the
fifth are non-physical states, up to and including seventh density, one who has been charged with the task of creating our o ar ys
and then you go into an entirely different octave of dimensional tern and seeing to the experimentation of different sentient re­
forms on Earth. It seems that, as the twentieth century nears its
experience...” Three to five centuries before, the Essassani have
undergone a rapid vibrational movement upward from third to finish, this “Pantheon-God’ is as desperate for our attention as we
fourth density; they called it ‘Shakana,* and, in its final stages, it are for his. The angels say that he is languishing in e a sence o
the faithfid attention of his beloved Man, and that our creative
seems to have consisted of a three-day sleep of the entire popula­
tion, out of which every member emerged transformed. energy is essential to the maintenance of his vit ity.
Honoring and loving animals—in fact, all so-called “lower
species is part and parcel of this intrinsic order of the cosmos, The story of Patricia Pereira, multidimensional ^ne^'
dior of Songs of the Arcturians and its two sequels, Eagles of e
according to the channeled extraterrestrial guides. The Arcturians
Hew Dawn and Songs ofMalantor, is an amazing example of how
explain fo Pereira that: In your role of planetary caretaker, you
will be urged to elevate your level of appreciation for and associa­ someone in real life has experienced in a real way this essentud
tion with other life forms inhabiting Earth. The entire spectrum dynamic of the universe which calls on all of us to exercise and
of Earths flora and fauna are held in Oneness within the interga- Manifest its intrinsic interconnectedness.
lactic family, and thus are they all well in God’s bounteous house. In January, 1985, Pereira was a divorced medical transcrip­
Therefore, be honorable before the presence of butterflies and tionist living in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, learning Ta! Ch. dance as a
moths, before the weeds and grasses that grow in rocky places/ Meditative power tool and working in one of Boise, Idahos argest
hospitals. She was shy. “I was a private person, she says. Id

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never done anything that could remotely be categorized as promo­ One sunny June morning, just when she was at her busiest
tional work for the community or the planet.” putting together a demanding promotional event, A Night with
One night, at a friend s house, she happened to open a book Wolves, sponsored by Boise State University, Pereira was meditat-
called Of Wolves and Men. Though she’d never thought about *ng when, “word thoughts started to drift through my head that
wolves before, she couldn’t put the book down. A few days later seemed similar, yet different, to mine.” The next day, she found
she went to a public lecture on wolves. She was shocked to learn herself writing poetry that didn’t seem to come from her at all. A
that the wolf was near extinction in the U.S., with only 1,200 left few days later, the words began to tell her she was communicating
in the Michigan area and 12 or 13 in all of Idaho-Montana. Eu­ ^dth extraterrestrials from the region of the star Arcturus, in par­
ropean and Russian wolves had already been practically eradicated. ticular one *Palpae’—her principal Arcturian collaborator-guide.
Sizable populations still roamed in Alaska and Canada, but open Over the next few weeks, Pereira hovered between denial and
hunting was permitted. belief. The energies of the presences built up. She was told it was
Pereira left the lecture, she says, “in tears, my heart ravaged.” A Ae Arcturians who had maneuvered her into reading Of Wolves
few days later, she learned the Idaho Legislature was trying to su­ andMen, the book that had launched her into a relationship with
persede the Endangered Species Act and kill the remaining wolves another species. Now, it seemed, they had come to her because
in the state. Appalled, and (most uncharacteristically for her) Ae had graduated,’ and was ready for the next step. Pereira quotes
spurred to public action, Pereira called the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Palpae in the Introduction to Songs ofthe Arcturians*. [N]ow that
Service and asked an endangered species biologist what she could You’ve proven yourself capable [of courage, determination, and
do. Talk to kids about wolves,” was the the answer. ^Hl], how about doing something even more outlandish than sav­
Pereira summoned her courage and made a decision that would ing wolves in cattle-sheep country? The thing is, we want you to
utterly change her life: She agreed to go round to schools and talk Ave the Wolf Recovery Movement. You have it all set up; now
to the kids about wolves. want you to pass it on to somebody else...
Six extremely packed months later, the medical transcription­ A whirlwind of activity began once more for Pereira, similar
ist turned wolf protector had founded the Wolf Recovery Founda­ t0 that which had launched the Wolf Recovery Foundation. Two
tion, an educational vehicle designed to promote the re-introduc- weeks after the major University of Boise event, Pereira resigned
non of wild wolves into their natural habitats in Idaho, specifi­ from the foundation, loaded up her car, and headed for Spokane,
cally G&cier, Yellowstone and Central Idaho Wilderness. These Washington. In a week, she had a new job. She read, studied and
six months—and the 24 that followed-were the most demand­ r<ed to the Arcturians daily. It would be a few years before her
ing and exhilarating of Pereira’s life. Whatever the difficulties, this Ast channeled book was published—but now there are three.
period seemed to have an immense flow to it. “I worked my butt She had bent down and helped a species on a “lower” echelon
off and hardly had time to sleep,” she recalls. “But I never had to °f the Great Chain of Being, the wolves. And that, it seemed,
push—or, I had to push myself only, for determination and con- Ad made it possible for the Arcturians to bend down and help
stant courage.” her.

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 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY
THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

In June, 1633, he was condemned to life imprisonment for vehe­

ment suspicion of heresy,” but his sentence was swiftly commute
to house arrest. He continued his work on motion and on e
Chapter Eighteen
strength of materials until his death at Arcetri on Jan. 8, 1642.
Galileo is universally regarded as one of the greatest an rav
est of all astronomer- physicists. It’s hard to imagine what etter
GALILEO EXPLAINS shade there could be to discuss the universe as a whole.
THE UNEXPLAINABLE This must have been the opinion of the spirits ofJersey is an
Por, on Sunday, Dec. 10,1854, at 9 o’clock in the evening,Galileo
Galilei appeared at the turning tables. .
Galileo Galilei, a pioneer of modern physics and telescopic He was to give two memorable lectures which wou pic up
astronomy, was born near Pisa, Italy, on Feb. 15,1564. By drop­ where the living Galileo had left off, and (along wi a ir e
ping objects from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, he demonstrated ture, delivered in almost the same tenor, by the S a ow o e
that Aristotelian physics was wrong in assuming that speed of fall Sepulcher) would advance the discussion by giant steps into a
was proportional to weight. In 1592, Galileo became professor of that sounds amazingly like that of todays quantum p ysics.
mathematics at the University of Padua, where he remained until Present that night were Victor Hugo, Fran9ois-Victoi-Hugo,
1610. Mik. Adèle Hugo, Auguste Vacquerie and Theophde Guenn.
By 1604, after a number of scientific discoveries, including Seated at the table were Mme. Victor Hugo and Charles Hugo.
that of the vector, he had formulated the basic law of falling bod­ Galileo, the table rapped out, without being prompted.
ies. In 1609, hearing news of the newly invented Dutch tele­ “Speak,” said Victor Hugo. .... ,» a-
scope, he began to construct his own telescopes, including a 20- I’ve come to respond to V.ctor Hugo’s objectton about the
power instrument that enabled him to see the lunar mountains» scientific inexactitude of the cosmology of the rabies. Let
the starry nature of the Milky Way, and previously unnoted ’’plan­ formulate that objection.
ets —its moons—revolving around Jupiter. By the end of 1610» Hugo held forth at length:
he had observed the phases of Venus and had become a firm be- “This isn’t an objection. It’s an observation. ,
liever in the Copernican theory of the sun-centered universe. This “In the admirable words of the seance o cto er ,
belief ran counter to Church doctrine, however, and the Holy tassai being who spoke seemed to me to con escen u ens
Office at Rome issued an edict against Copernicanism early it1 the human point of view, that is, to the illusion that the heavens
1616. Present to humans when we look at fictidous
In 1632, Galileo published his famous Dialogue, consisting of Obviously, what we humans call
an impartial discussion of the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems* Roupings, putAtogether from stars to toeus, and a big
appearbtg
thatseems
the Le si«. "mail star that is near
For his efforts, he was called to Rome for trial by the Inquisition-

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 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

star that is far away seems small. Two stars which appear to be constructed. But infinity is anonymous. Eternity doesnt vea
side-by-side and of the same size, and which we couple together in birth certificate. Time and space are frightened unknowns ca
a constellation, may in reality be separated by enormous distances, teening through immensity. Space cannot throw a glance, n
and, in infinite space, may belong to groupings that are quite dif­ does time have feet; the first is a shadow that fells across a gul,
ferent. and the second is a gulf that fells across a shadow. Time and
“Our construction of the constellations, then, is purely arbi- space: two masks, two appearances, two visions, two earni,
trary, and the result of an optical illusion. Obviously, there are two impossibilities, two eyes wide with horror, two paws
true constellations; but those that we think we see are false con­ led by punishment they’ve given, two formidable jaws rising ou
stellations. °f the unfathomable depths. . . » k
“Now, since we frail humans are well able to understand this, But time and space do not have a fece. r, it is a ce
it seems to me that the table should be able, in speaking of such does not speak, a fece that does not hear, a ce at *
lofty matters, to speak to us wholly in the splendid language of the formulate. God speaking is God language, God language is
truth. We don’t regard ourselves as being unworthy to hear such mouth, God mouth is God body, God body is God man, God
language. So the table should be able to say to us: About the man is God beast, God beast is God plant, God plant is God
constellations you see: It’s your eye that groups them and your Pebble. Can you imagine it? God pebble! He who is not even
illusion that constructs them; all the names you give them—Le°’ G0dstar! .... . There is no alphabet of
Capricorn, Sagittarius—are names of your monstrous beasts and No, there is no celestial language. d„n’t
of your dreams. There are actual constellations which do not bear tbe uncreated, there is no grammar o Terras-
terrestrial names but rather celestial names. Here is what those bH.ur.p.1- na.™
names are. These are the constellations I want to talk to you about/ trial, infinity is not an unknown type o
Galileo replied: Professors of Divine Language, substitute lecturers m the Fac
»Jty of Immensity. sunlight and un-
My answer is in two parts. No; everything is nameless, ^^thing is sun
Firstly: If the table had to speak not human language bn* Rowing, everything is ^¡^“^¿rers^e has no
celestial language, you wouldn’t understand a word. In celestial mid roving. Immensity is a family n0 genealogy>
language, man is not called man, nor beast beast, nor plant plant» Passport, heaven has no particulars. ^er fire nor place.
nor pebble pebble, nor earth earth, nor air air, nor water watet, creation has no Christian name, God is ne®
nor fire fire. Heaven is not called heaven, star is not railed star, AH that which is uncreated is be
constellation is not called constellation and God is not called language is bedaztiement, to express is to be in-
God. dent, clarity of speech is lu®‘n"S‘2<íial language is to blaze
Where there is no body, there are no words. Words are fash" «tantiy overwhelmed, «. speak the 1^ lighting up
ioned from physical reality; then, from those words, ideas at^ *°rth in flames, the speaking-forth o

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 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

the sky with stars, the shutting-up of heaven is the dosing of the filled with all of Gods truths; there is no error in the absolute;
lips of darkness, and each letter ofthis stupendous vocabulary is the relative is not the relative; lies are no more lies than discover­
a conflagration across which blows the breath ofthe dark mouth ies are not discoveries. Hershel finds nothing new for God; true
of night. The dictionary of infinity is filled with the punctua­ astronomers are no more truthfill than the false; all human tele­
tion of stars, and what would you say, puny man, if, to speak to scopes are more or less contained in a single one; this isn’t the
you in the language that you want, this little table, instead of translation of what I’m saying, nor is it a mistranslation.
syllables, words and sentences, suddenly hurled in your ear mil­ You say to me: I want the real heaven and not an imaginary
lions of stars, launched Jupiter, Aldebaran and Saturn in your heaven; I want the real firmament, real constellations, real suns;
face, and spread out on your page the immense ink blot of the I want the total immensity of God, without a break, without a
starry night while adding corrections with furious comets? gap; I want the abyss without emptiness; bring me infinity; bring
me mystery; I demand a map to the tomb, the itinerary of the
The table stopped abruptly. It was clear that Galileo had fin­ resurrection; may they show me the incommensurable, sound
ished.
out for me the unsoundable, open the seals of heaven for me. I
Do you want to come back on Sunday?” asked Hugo.
want to search the premises of the stars. Human constellations,
The table tapped out, Yes.
your papers. Big Dipper, identify yourself. Capricorn, you’re
lying. Aquarius, you’re lying; you’re a suspicious character. Fir­
On Sunday, Dec. 17, 1854, at 9:45 p.m., Galileo came back mament, you’re a suspect; I want to search your pockets; no more
to the table as promised. Théophile Guérin and Victor Hugo
subterfuges. Lock all the doors; let no star escape! Handcuff
were present, while Mme. Hugo and Charles Hugo held the table. God; I’ve got to question Him! And now, dark night, come be­
You only responded to the secondary part of my question, fore the court. And now, radiant day, answer. And now, accused
not to the primary, Victor Hugo began. “What my question had
suns, rise in your seats. I am president ofthe night-time court of
to do with in particular was the real constellations as distinct from
the assizes; I have a jury of ghosts; the court is declared in ses­
the false constellations put together by man.”
sion. Silence in the gallery of the stars!
Let the witness Galileo enter!
That is your other mistake. Listen: I’ve talked about how the
I enter, and I say: O you who live, do I know heaven? Have I
tables, totimake themselves understood by you, are forced to use
traveled over its immensity, not having traveled over eternity?
your language. Now: Your language is merely a set of conven­
How can you expect me to tell you about the tenants and the
tions, your language is a smoke-screen emanating from your
borders of infinity when it is not tenantable and when it has no
mouth and covering the stars with clouds.
borders? No one has ever been privy to the confidences of that
Does that mean you humans are wrong about everything?
immense being who is the accused, namely, mystery itself. It has
No. In feeling out the heavens, your hands sometimes touch the
no intimate friends who can confide its nature to you; it alone
radiant knobs of divine doorways. All of man’s falsehoods are
knows its secret. Not a single star will speak up. The conspira­

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tors of shadows will all shut up, and the secret society of the time the quarry of black marble gives the sculptor a vision of
what the completed statue will look like; and God, what heaven
stars will cover for God. Truth will swear no oaths, the absolute
is like. That’s it. The firmament is a colossal riddle to which
will not allow itself to be intimidated, and no examining magis­
trate will put paradise on the Stand. No clerk of this court will there are million of keys; one star negates another, the heavenly
draw up a list of constellations, no attorney will leaf through bodies all deny and affirm each other, and no one knows if these
God’s file, and no sentences will be pronounced before the crowd millions of gold duckets that radiate out their light belong to the
in this courtroom, such as: The suns are acquitted, the constel­ realms of negativity or to the realms of positivity.
lations are convicted, the Big Dipper is declared liquidated, the
Galileo stopped. The seance had ended, at 1:20 a.m.
complaint against Jupiter is dropped, and Aldebaran will be re­
leased and allowed to recirculate in the skies. As for creation,
What did Victor Hugo think of this session? He has left his
we’ll keep our eye on it, and immensity is sentenced to monitor­
reactions in a note among the transcripts. Here they are, slightly
ing the elevated thoughts of mankind for a hundred million years.
I, Galileo, declare that I do not know the contents of infin­ abridged:
Tm not going to insist anymore. Its becoming obvious to me,
ity; I don’t know where it begins and where it ends; I don’t know
what comes before, after, in the middle, to the right, to the left, from what the table said this evening—and on several other occasions
east, west, south or north; I don’t know its inside or its outside; as well-that this world ofthe sublime, which has consented to com­
municate with our world ofshadows, will not allow itselfto be forced
I see heavenly bodies, heavenly bodies, heavenly bodies; I see
stars, stars, stars; I see constellations, constellations, constella­ by usto reveal its secrets...
tions; I see sunbeams mixed with cloud-bedecked splendors with The world of the sublime wants to remain sublime. It doesn't
great blazings-forth of flame, bedazzlement lost in contempla­ want to reveal the exact details ofits nature; or, at least, it wants that
exactitude to consist only ofa confused vision ofenormousness shot
tion, contemplation plunged in bedazzlement; I’m caught up hi
through with prodigious bursts oflight and shadow. The world ofthe
the prodigious turning of the golden-hubbed wheel of heaven.
tublime wants to be our vision, not our science....It does not want
Where is it going? I have no idea.
Night is the beaten track of the stars. I look up at the night human reason, or the establishedfacts ofhuman science, to have any­
and all I see are millions of wheels of all the wagons of the con­ thing to do with its definition...... Ina word, it wants man to remain
quering forces of the eternal, launched at top speed toward a In a state ofdoubt. Visibly, that is the law, and I am resigned to it.
goal that is invisible. I am an ignoramus of the unknown. I But Hugo is greatly distressed that this towering earth genius,
dont know the first heavenly body any better than I know the Galileo, who fought bravely all his life to destroy illusion on earth,
last. I defy you to find anybody who can say any more about the now takes the side ofillusion! Galileo, who could have called himself
night than I can: Its a mine fidi of shadows with veins filled with Reality, takes the side ofAppearances!... Hepractically ended up saying
Ves and No, he who was brought to his knees by No, and who got up
stars; you can only hollow out a shadow with a shadow, just as
you can only polish a diamond with a diamond; from time to saying Yes!

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CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY

a costume box in our minds from which other-dimensional enti­

Obviously, he cant be wrong, and he knows what he’s doing; and
ties must pluck earthly identity if they wish to speak to us. When
ifhe refitses to explain this position ofhis regarding appearance and
Galileo tells Hugo, You can only hollow out a shadow with a
reality, it must be because appearance and reality are a part ofwhat
shadow, just as you can only polish a diamond with a diamond,
the human eye sees, and man must continue to live in a state ofDoubt.
the poet cannot connect that sentence with the ‘simple’ statement
Hugo is concerned at the extent to which the tables mix to­
with which Galileo had begun—namely, to paraphrase, that, “you
gether clarity and unintelligibility. The more secrets they reveal,
can only talk about the world of the sublime in the language of
the more they seem to leave the seance-goers groping in the dark.
the world of the sublime—and the world of the sublime has no
He is frustrated because, they reveal nothing except in their own
time, and never in ours. There are moments when they thicken the language.”
It must have been that the spirits read Hugo’s worried note.
clouds even while they suffuse them with splendors—but with the
At any rate, on Monday, Dec. 18, 1854, there appeared at the
splendors ofthe lightning bolt rather than the [edifying! splendors of
seance the formidable if benign figure of the Shadow of the Sepul­
the sunbeam. Every time we begin to see a little more distinctly, this
cher, whom the seance-goers were increasingly coming to regard
mysterious world closes up. It seems that we must be certain ofnoth­
as a sort of “district manager”—the spirit who directed (and in
ing; it is in that that consists the expiation ofour sins on the human
some mysterious way encompassed within himself) the comings
plane. Hugo ends up by declaring that, despite what appears to
him to be the deliberate obscurantism of the tables, he still be­ and goings of the other spirits.
Perhaps the Shadow of the Sepulcher had come to try to suc­
lieves that the world of the sublime actually exists, and that the
ceed where his lieutenant, Galileo, had failed.
spirits of the Jersey island tables are its representatives.
Did he succeed?
This immense genius, Victor Hugo, may be, whatever his good Let’s listen to his words:
will and towering intelligence, mistaken when he writes: The world
I’ve come to bring you, not one of the keys to heaven which
ofthe sublime wants to remain sublime. It doesn’t want to reveal the
must remain closed to human science, but one of the keys to
exact details ofits nature. Hugo lived well before relativity theory;
God the whole power of whom is to fling open the gates to the
he came from a time when men and women still believed that?
loftiest progress of which the human spirit is capable. The fir­
behind the transitory illusions of sensory perception, behind the
mament is full of abrupt and somber doors; it’s an eternal din of
confused Ind jumbled notions we all have of what really is—there
brass hinges and splendid nails and flaming bars and luminous
really is a really is ! Hugo and his contemporaries still believed
pincers. But God has no door-bolts; his way of shutting himself
that, behind the everyday world of appearances, there was an ob-'
up is to exist without limits; his wall is the unlimited; his hori­
jectively real and unchanging superstructure.
zon is the impenetrable; you don’t enter into him, because in
That is why there are certain places that the mind of Victor
him everything is majestically free to move to the striding of its
Hugo cannot go to (and the minds of his extremely bright com'
own soul. You could take endless trips in his bottomless being;
panions at the turning table). It cannot go to the place that posits

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Helen’s illusion you want? [Ed.: Wishing to be awarded the golden

you could lose themselves in this God, in this Word, in that inex­
tricable network of flashing roads, in that virgin forest of apple (obtained by Mercury) as the most beautijul goddess of all,
Aphrodite bribed Paris» the mortaljudge» to choose her; in return» she
efliilgence. God is the great wall and he who is above all acces­
sible; he escapes into the inaccessible, and he gives himselfto the helped him abduct Helen, thus causing the Trojan War. Helens illu­
accessible. He does not steal away, he does not isolate himself» sion was that ofthe existence on earth ofideal beauty. Tantalus was
he does not flee. He is all alone everywhere; millions of worlds condemned to an eternity of being plagued with hunger and thirst
compose this enormous, solitary being; crowds ofcreations make while food and drink were kept just out ofhis reach.] Do you want
the optical point of view of Herschel? Do you want the mirage
up this immense anchorite; the multitudes of the heavens con­
of the planet to your left instead of the will-o-the-wisp of the
stitute this prodigious cavern which he is; the throngs of heav­
enly bodies and the populations of suns are the soul and the planet to your right? Do you desire, not the absolute, but a dif­
unity of this tranquil monk who tosses over our world his rough ferent relativity from your own, not the truth, but a different
falsehood from your own, not the true meaning, but a different
homespun hair shirt of clouds. Universal liberty creates this in­
commensurable prisoner. God is in on this mystery in secret. counter-meaning?
Are you fond of smoke, are you a fog gourmand, are you
God is the prison master moved to pity by every slave, but a slave
himself. He is nothing but misery; he is nothing but pain; he is starved for shadow? You think you re asking for a bigger piece of
nothing but pity. God is the mighty tear of infinity. I come then reality but you’re asking for a bigger pile of lies; you want a
to tell you Gods thoughts regarding this firmament about which greater variety of cloud, but not the full light of day. You want to
be able to make a bundle of light out of a heap of shadows; and,
you want to know more. And so, first, I ask you: Why more,
finding that your world doesn’t see into heaven clearly enough,
and not everything? Since you’re asking anyway, why ask for so
little? You’re not very demanding! What difference does a crumb you complain at not having been notified of three or four more
of the sky more or less make to you? What a mediocre appetite planets, and you write self-pityingly: If only I were blind enough
for infinity is that which asks for an additional portion of stars not to know how much more there is to know! Whereupon, like
and which complains to its jailer about its ration of heavenly petulant street urchins, you throw rocks at the streetlights of
bodies! That s some mighty will you’ve got ! That’s a really awe­ God.
inspiring revolt! Some fear-inspiring riot! You know what I would do if I were in your place? Id ask for
Several golden apples more or less for dessert! Poor man­ all or nothing; I’d insist on immensity; Id read the riot act to
kind. My, you really would have been proud ofyourself if Galileo infinity, I’d raise my barricade to the top floor of the sky, I d
had revealed to you, instead of the miserable point ofview ofthe finish the revolution, I’d want to know everything, hold every­
earth, the miserable point of view of Jupiter, or the miserable thing, take everything; I wouldnt let the sky off the hook about
point of view ofVenus, or the miserable point of view of Saturn, Paradise; I wouldn’t let it hide Hell from me; I’d even put myself
or the miserable point of view of Mars! Is the mistake of Mer­ in the abyss; I’d make my brain the engulfer of God; I’d give
cury the fruit that seduces you? O, Tantalus of the heavens! Is ft myself a formidable mouthful of infinity: I d be an immense and

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CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY

is the total of God. There is no figure one thousand, there is no

terrible Gargantua [giant in book by Rabelais] ofstars, a colossal
figure one hundred, there is no figure ten, there is no figure two;
Polyphemus [one-eyed giant in the Odyssey] of constellations, of
God only counts to one. The sky is one immense constellation.
whirlwinds, of thunders; I’d drink the milk-basin of the Milky
There are not even two groupings of heavenly bodies; there is
'Why; Fd swallow comets; I*d lunch on dawn; Fd dine on day only one. There are not millions of leagues; there are not mil­
and I’d sup on night; I’d invite myself, splendid table-compan­ lions of feet, there are no distances under the sky; there is only
ion that I am, to the banquet of all the glories, and I’d salute
nearness, there is only one family, there is only one people, and
God as: My host! rd work up a magnificent hunger, an enor­
there is only one world.
mous thirst, and I’d race through the drunken spaces between All these little constellations are false groupings relatively
the spheres singing the fearsome drinking song of eternity, joy** speaking and true groupings absolutely speaking; the Big Dip­
ous, radiant, sublime, hands full of bunches of grapes made of
per and Aquarius and Orion are couplings tailor-made for see­
stars and my face purple with suns! I wouldn’t leave a star ing and which don’t disturb the celestial harmony, all these heav­
unturned, and at the end of the banquet, I’d pass out beneath
enly bodies see each other, and know each other, and attract
the table of the heavens radiant with light! each other, and love each other; they seek out each another and
But you, you’re more modest: You ask the world for alms,
they find each other; they understand each other and they en­
you merely beg from God, you stretch out your hand as you say
liven each other; among them there are those who communicate
to him: a little star, please! I’m getting to the question that pre­ between themselves; there are those who marry, who beget chil­
occupies you. Your scientists are going to laugh, you tell me, at dren, and who are entombed; there are no solitary heavenly bod­
our astronomy; they’ll holler: What is the meaning of these con­ ies, there are no orphaned heavenly bodies, there are no wid­
stellations which have no meaning? They’re raking our optical
owed stars, there are no lost suns; there is not a single corner of
illusions seriously! There doesn’t have to be any connection be­
the night that is in mourning; there is not a single day that is
tween the stars we’ve used to make up the grouping of the Big
abandoned; there is not a single sphere that is not all by itself the
Dipper, the grouping of Capricorn, and so, and so. There are
hub of thg heavens! the entire vault of the sky is filled with a
incalculable distances between these worlds whose roles you mii
single heavenly body that is always in the process of expanding;
together in the sky! You impute common actions to stars that
all the other heavenly bodies are merely the seeds of this heav­
the starsiare not aware of! You joke about grouping together
enly body-flower. An immense need for devotion, that is the law
stars that are millions of leagues apart and which have never
of the worlds; night is a democracy of stars; the firmament is a
spoken together. Some gag, that! Is the sky the hand of a juggler
symbolic republic that mixes together heavenly bodies of every
upon which heavenly bodies leap about and perform tour de
rank and makes manifest brotherhood and sisterhood by...
forces? Is your astronomy a conjurers’ table on which gifted
Victor Hugo interrupted: “1 said: The fixture is the hymen of
enough magicians can make distances do away? No constella­
men on earth/ And ofthe stars in the heavens,
tions, no sky, no God....
.. .by divine effolgence. The heavenly-body palace helps the
O, scientists, beyond your calculations there is unity. Unity

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CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY
mistaken in my thinking; but I do not believe the world ofthe sub­
heavenly-body workshop, the heavenly-body workshop helps the lime, which speaks such magnificent language to us, is mistaken ei­
heavenly-body garret, the heavenly-body garret helps the heav­ ther. It does as it must with respect to us: It leaves us doubting. The
enly-body cellar, the heavenly-body cellar helps the heavenly- table ended up practicallyjeering at me: It asked me, What difference
body prison; the infinitely small is the younger brother of the does a crumb ofinfinity more or less matter to you? I will insist no
infinitely great; a genius star an idiot star; Hercules-suns are al­ further. I believe in my heart that I am right, but I bow my head
ways close to cradle-suns; the faces of happy worlds are forever silently before the sublime being who spoke to me yesterday, and who
peering about at the side of unhappy worlds; punitary stars are
ended with such lofty, and such gentle, words.
always weeping at the side of stars of reward; stars of reward are Victor Hugo
always smiling at the side of punitary stars. Consolation is the
form reward takes. There is always a heavenly-body dove close
to a heavenly-body tomb. There is always a sun that is dressing
wounds close to a sun that is bleeding. Immensity is the love
song of eternity. Love, love: You are the supreme solution, you
are the final figure, you are God’s billion and the prodigious sum
formed by every dazzling zero in the starry firmament. You are
the supreme calculation, the treasure of the sepulcher, the heri­
tage of the dead. You are packed full with resurrection, and you
turn the celestial wine-vaults into places of splendid celebration.

The table stopped tapping. The seance, which had begun at

1:30 p.m., had gone on till 7:00 p.m.

Was Victor Hugo mollified?

On Dec. 19, 1854, he wrote the following note, which was
preservec| in the transcripts:
I persist in making no objection. AU this is enormous. Still, 1
dont confuse enormousness with immensity. God alone is immense.
It seems to me that what was personally addressed to me confirms my
earlier note. The great Biblical reproaches are there, but under A
differentform: According to the lights ofmy conscience, I do not be~
lieve that I have merited them.
As far as all the rest of it is concerned: I do not believe that I

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CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY
How was it that Joshua was able to accomplish these colossal
tasks? He had an intimate knowledge of the (we had supposed)
late twentieth concepts of nonlocality and quantum holography,
and was able to use this knowledge to manipulate the physical

world.
Chapter Nineteen Such were the amazing truths which seemed to emerge from
this watershed turning table session, which began at 9:30 p.m.,
and at which Victor Hugo was present with Mme. Hugo and
JOSHUA ON Charles holding the table.
QUANTUM HOLOGRAPHY The table was a brand-new one, borrowed from the Allixes;
the regular table had become permanently twisted out of shape by
the movements of the spirits.
To know in our hearts, to understand beyond understanding, Joshua announced himself, and began:
that all of the parts of the universe are dynamically and lovingly
interconnected, that they are all in the same place and are all the Man is not a simple I. He is a complex I.
same thing, is to have powers that are Godlike. This is the mes­ In his epidermis, there are millions of beings who are mil­
sage that Joshua, the Israelite warrior who leveled the walls of Jeri­ lions of souls. In his flesh, there are millions of beings who are
cho with trumpet blasts and forced the sun to stop in its tracks, millions of souls. In his bones, there are millions of beings who
brought to Victor Hugo and his friends in two turning table ses­ are millions of souls. In his blood, there are millions of beings
sions on December 28 and 29,1854. who are millions of souls. In his hair, there are millions of be­
It is startling to realize just how appropriate it was that Joshua ings who are millions of souls. In his nails, there are millions of
should have been the one to deliver these power-bestowing words. beings who are millions of souls. Each breath exhaled from his
He is one of the few humans we know of in all of history who has mouth is a whiff of souls; each glance from his eyes is a radiating
connected with a gleaming star (our sun) and made it stop in its
outward of souls.
tracks, this being necessarily in accordance with Gods purposes, The biggest nest of all is in the brain. There, every fiber is a
and whi^h significantly improved the fortunes of these ancient soul that thinks; an idea takes shape only on account of the slow
Israelite representatives of our punitary world. and painfid work of every prisoner soul laboring beneath the
Moreover, Joshua must have connected with the souls of the vault of the human skull. A brain is a solitary confinement cell;
stones that made up the walls of Jericho. That must have been an idea is an escape from that cell. All the limbs of a mans body
how, using sound in a way we cannot yet comprehend, he per­ are prison corridors. His head is a solitary confinement cell.
suaded these sentient creatures of the world of stone to give way, Man is a prisoner who also serves as a prison. Man is an im­
and we can only suppose that they, too, rejoiced at the outcome, mense I filled with imperceptible I s; he is a world unto himself.
since they—like the sun—were carrying out God s will.

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beast and of plant. The globe contains all the I’s of man, of
He is a hell to the tips ofhis nails and a hell to the roots of his beast, of plant and of pebble. The sky contains all the I’s of all
hairs; his veins are rivers filled with drowned bodies; his bones the globes. God contains all the I’s of all the heavens; but this is
are hitching posts hung with horses’ collars; his hairs are the
only the very beginning of the horizons.
cords of an invisible whip with whose grim throngs the wind You’ll see; you’ll see; you’ll see. O, all-powerfulness of God!
lashes the convicts imprisoned in his skull. He has made of the world something which cannot be lost; he
Man is filled with criminals about to be executed; he is the has placed the seed of every being in each being; he has made
instrument of those executions even as he is the one about to be every fruit the pit, and every pit the fruit; he has enclosed man in
excuted. He is both hanged man and noose, both crucified and the beast and the beast in man, plant in pebble and pebble in
the cross. plant; he has put the star in the sky and the sky in the star, and
He is a man who is drawn and quartered, whose four limbs he has placed himself in everything and everything in himself, in
draw and quarter the world, and whose arms and legs are as such a way that if one day it were to happen that a whirlwind, a
many furious horses bearing bleeding souls away into the un­ flood, or a hurricane destroyed men, beasts, plants and stones; if
known. Man arises in the evening, in the world of shadows, and
it were to happen that a comet devoured the stars and, annihilat­
all nature looks upon him with great dread; heaven says, it is ing itself, left nothing more of creation than a single grain of
Christ; earth says, it is Calvary. Man carries on his head a gigan­ sand, God would smile and, taking that grain of sand in his
tic crow which is eternally in flight and wlinxe huge wing he only hands, toss it up into space while crying out: ‘Emerge, millions
glimpses at night. Muse on this abyss:
Man is an I peopled with Is who do not know him and whom of worlds!’
he does not know. Each I in its turn is full of other I’s, and so on Joshua had brought the first part of his discourse to a close.
to infinity. The I of the man lives in complete wholeness, and
To us, what he said sounds astonishingly close to a description of
each I interior to the man is equally completely whole. Man the new, emerging modern-day concept ofa holographic universe.
knows nothing of his being. He cannot know what lives, dies Here is a little of what Michael Talbot has to say on the subject in
and is born within him. Man is but the principal soul of the
human body; there are within him the souls of other men, ani­ The Holographic Universe.
“Unlike normal photographs, every small fragment of a piece
mal souls, plant souls, souls of stones. There is more: There are of holographic film contains all the information recorded in the
the souls of stars. Man is the world; man is the sky; man is the whole....This was precisely the feature that got [neurophysiologist
infinite; man is eternal; man is the seed of creation tossed to the Karl] Pribram so excited...it seemed equally possible for every part
four winds and scudding through the great gulfs of God. of the brain to contain all the information necessary to recall a
An immense atom, the slightest I contains a complete pat­
tern of all the I s. The beast contains all the I’s of man. The whole memory...”
“As soon as physicist [David] Böhm began to reflect on the
plant contains all the Is of the beast. The pebble contains all
hologram he saw that it...provided a new way of undrstanding
the I s of the plant. The globe contains all the I’s of man, of

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order. Like the ink drop in its dispersed state, the interference light’s hour upon the middle of night s clock-fece; I stopped noon
patterns recorded on a piece of holographic film also appear disor­ upon midnight.
dered to the naked eye. Both possess orders that are hidden or How had Joshua stopped the sun? He seems to be saying that
enfolded....The more Bohm thought about it, the more he be­ he understood that God has put the sun within himself, Joshua,
came convinced that the universe actually employed holographic and himself, Joshua, within the sun; the Israelite seems to have
principles in its operations, was itself a kind of giant, flowing ho­ made contact with the sun in himself and ordered it to stop: I said
logram...” to my soul, you shall not go farther. He seems also to have “told”-
Every part of the universe was contained in every other part! -as if telling a rosary, or a mantra— all the other aspects of the
And the whole was contained in each of those parts! ...Could Joshua universe which he knows are in himself (and which he knows that
really have been talking about something like quantum hologra­ he is in)—the worm, the caterpillar, the rag, the wound—and made
phy? The next night, this entity returned to the turning table. It it clear that it is also on their account that the sun must stop.
was Friday, Dec. 29, 10:15 p.m. In attendance were Mlle. Au­ These bewildering statements were to become clearer when
gustine Allix, Jules Allix, Auguste Vacquerie and Victor Hugo, Joshua continued his disquisition. He would introduce the con­
with Mme. Victor Hugo and Charles Hugo seated at the table. cept of “eliminating” things.
After two minutes or so, the table began to shake. Joshua But they seemed now not to be clear-or even interesting—to
made his presence known. “Do you want to continue from yes­ Victor Hugo. He suddenly changed the subject, asking Joshua if
terday, or should be ask you questions?” asked Victor Hugo. he were the same spirit who had come to them one year earlier and
Some questions. predicted the downfall of Napoleon III for 1855.
“People attribute to you the impossible miracle of making the
sun stand still in the sky,” said Hugo. “How should we take this? You’re wasting time asking me if I know Bonaparte. From
What do you yourself have to say on the subject?” the way you speak ofhim, Bonaparte is a bad fellow. Bad people
We come here not so much to verify facts as to illuminate do not come within my vision. I read words, not erasures.
ideas; however, since you, a man of ideas, are asking me about Lets talk about the stars. Man will find everything, he will
this feet, I’m going to answer you. The sun is the life of nature? eliminate everything and the distances of God from himself.
night is its death. The day is a being who lives for twelve hours There is nothing but distance. Night is only distance from day,
and who drags behind himself a corpse who is dead for twelve evil distance from good, pain distance from happiness, earth dis­
hours. Eliminate night, and you will have a being who is alive tance from sky. Man has already eliminated the distance ofman
for twenty-four hours. I have been prophet, I have been light, from man with democracy, the distance of country from coun­
and I have eliminated night. I ve been the idea of sun who stops try with the railway, the distance of pain from well-being with
its beams from shining upon suffering. I said to my soul, you chloroform, the distance of shadow from daylight with electric­
shall not go farther; I stopped the star upon worm, upon cater­ ity, the distance of life from death with science, the distance of
pillar, upon rags, upon wounds; I made the clock cease ticking, air from earth with the balloon, the distance of sea from earth

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with the steamboat, the distance of fire from coal with the Volta length, and at eyes’ length; and he wants to stop there! and he
pile [the battery], the distance of pearl from woman with the doesn’t want to be able to leap the distance from one star to
diving-bell, the distance of stone from house with the miner, the another! And he wants to be attached to his globe forever—like
distance of iron from tool with the blacksmith, the distance of an animal attached to its collar! and he does not want to be able
lead [used to create type] from idea with the printing house, the to look at the sky in any other way than attached to his leash and
distance of gold from falsehood with paper money, the distance he wants to be restricted solely to that nightly glance! And he
of cradle from grave with the mother, the distance of grave from wants to be the center of the universe! and he wants to put his
cradle with the father, the distance of man from beast with the stamp on the darkness! And he wants to bark at the stars! And
dog, the distance of beast from plant with the garden, the dis** he doesn’t want to take a bite out ofthe starry worlds! Where are
tance of plant from stone with the swallows nest and the scarlet you, the one million leagues that can stop mankind? Let’s see
pimpernel tossed in the cage hanging on the old wall, and the your empty zeros, absurd number; insane fetters, let’s see your
orchard’s wall, the distance of seed from wheat field by the sower, links. You are only darkness, you millions of leagues, and man is
the distance of winter from spring by the ploughman, the dis** a torch with all the boldness of a torch. Watch out, heavenly
tance ofspring from summer by the farmer, the distance of sum** distances: Man hungers for the stars, man is the great voyager,
mer from autumn by the harvester, the distance of autumn from man is the great eater of impossibilities, man is the mighty ig­
winter by the grape-gatherer, the distance of snow from heat by niter of realities; ifyou don’t want him to do these things, he will
the radiator, the distance of matter from idea by art, the distance force you to accept him; he will take you, abysses, in the hollow
of plastic beauty from moral splendor by the Parthenon, the of his hand; he will boot you out, night-mastiff; he will pile you
distance ofpain from the crown of thorns by the Calvary.. [Ed.: up, cloud-firewood, fog-wine shoots, obscunty-coals, and he will
There follows a series of nine examples which are fairly obscure to set fire to this darkness with the colossal spark of his spirit, and
anyone but a lover ofClassical literature and history], the distance of the stars themselves will cry out: Let’s go watch the fire!
yes from no by perhaps, the distance of strength from love by the
promise kept, the distance oftwo arms from the cross by the two This discussion may seem repetitive, even tedious. To this
arms ofJesus Christ, the distance of two arms from Jesus Christ commentator it seems to be no less than a description of nonlocality.
by the knees ofMary Magdalene, the distance of immensity from Nonlocality posits that everything in the universe can be equipresent
eternity oy prayer, the distance ofthe thunderbolt from the abyss at every point in the universe. Thus it is possible, not to go faster
by the lightning bolt captured by the lightning rod, the distance than light, but to act as if the speed of light did not exist.
of Nero from the gladiator by the martyr, the distance of mys** Once you enter the realm of nonlocality, you effectively elimi­
tery from doubt by faith, the distance of faith from mystery by nate all distances. In actual fact, it would seem that effectively
doubt, the distance of the infinitely small from the infinitely there are no distances; there is only nonlocality.
large by the eternally fallen on his knees. Here is what Michael Talbot, in The Holographic Universt, says
He has eliminated every distance at hand’s length, at feet’s on the subject of nonlocality.*

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“An even more surprising feature of the quantum potential filling all space» orchestrated and mediated in their properties by a
was its implications for the nature of location. At the level of our mechanism notyet understood.
everyday lives things have very specific locations, but [physicist
David] Bohms interpretation of quantum physics indicated that KS: Is nonlocality the explanation for the ability ofpsychics occasion'
at the subatomic level, the level in which the quantum potential ally to apport» ’ or transfer objects psychokinetically, over sometimes
operated, location ceased to exist. All points in space became equal very great distances?
to all other points in space, and it was meaningless to speak of
anything as being separate from anything else. Physicists call this EM: There are a number ofsharply conflicting explanations ofwhat
property ‘locality.’” nonlocality means, and so it is very difficult to answer that question;
Former moonwalking astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell, who is but I do believe that the notion ofnonlocality was involved. We must
currently researching the concept of nonlocality, echoed Talbot’s look at the concept ofquantum holography as well as nonlocality to
words in an interview in Kindred Spirit Quarterly, for June-Au­ have a good explanation ofhow these psychic events work. Hologra­
gust, 1997: phy, ofcourse, refers to the indications we have from the structure of
nature—for example, the brains memory-storing capabilities that
KS: In your book The Way ofthe Explorer» you allude to an experi' every part contains the whole. In the past year-and-a-half, research
ment carried out by Alain Aspect in Paris in 1982 as the missing link" I’ve been conducting with European scientists in quantum holography
between the older» dualist view of mind and body as separate and has succeeded in taking the idea ofnonlocality out ofthe subatomic
distinct—the view that has God separate from physical reality and realm and showing that it pertains across the whole spectrum, scale­
making all our decisions for us—and the newer view» espoused by size, from the subatomic to the cosmic. The universe is a hologram,
yourself» ofthe mental and the physical as two aspects ofa single real' with each part containing the whole; the mathematics weve done sug­
ity. Wouldyou explain? gests that nonlocality pertains across all scale sizes.

EM: To my mind» Aspectproved the existence ofnonlocality. He and Not only is the whole contained in the parts throughout the
his colleagues produced a series of twin photons. They enabled the universe, but everything is everywhere at once. The concept of
photons to travel in opposite directions through a conduit that aimed locality suggests that we could immediately be anywhere in the
them at one oftwo polarization analyzers. They saw that each photon universe we wanted, if could just manage to make distance dis­
was still able to correlate its angle ofpolarization with that ofits twin- appear.
Since nothing can travel faster than light» then it wasnt a case of This seems to be what Joshua is saying. It can hardly have
information being transferred from one particle to the other; rather» been easy for him to say this. If even today we find it difficult to
the wave aspects of the particles were in some way interconnected scrape together the concepts and images needed to express the idea
nonlocally and resonated’ so as to maintain the correlation of their of nonlocality, imagine how difficult it would have been 150 years
characteristics. They didn’t behave as particles at all but like fields» ago! Able to draw on arguably some of the best minds of the time,

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CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY

gathered in exile around the tiny table on Jersey island, the spirit
of Joshua—if we may presume for the sake of argument that that
was who this was—is forced to resort to a seemingly interminable Chapter Twenty
litany of examples of eliminating distance to bring two terms infi­
nitely closer together. Presumably, he could have gone on forever.
FOUR RELIGIONS OF MANKIND:
In fact, that was probably the only way he could have made his MOHAMMED ON ISLAM; CHRIST ON
point. He needed to somehow suggest to the seance-goers that DRUIDISM, CHRISTIANITY AND
every instance of separation by distance in the universe can some­ REVOLUTION
how be eliminated—that, in fact, everything is potentially in the
same place.
Seen in this context, the final portion of Joshuas second and A series of seminars on religion, given by the spirits to the
last discourse seems to be a mad, glorious, incredible rallying-cry Jersey island seance-goers—and with the best teachers imagin­
to humanity. Joshua is striving to make us understand that there able!—began in earnest on (probably) Dec. 26, 1853, at 5.00
is no distance in the universe that cannot be bridged—that is, p.m., when no less than Mohammed coming to the turning tables
eliminated—and that the stars themselves await mankind if only to hold forth on the nature of Islam.
we want badly enough to attain to them. And this want, he says, This was one day before Balaams Ass was to reveal to Hugo
is profoundly a part of the fiery spirit of humankind. and Company that our universe is merely a prison for mankind.
We shouldn’t be surprised to learn, then, that Mohammed or
this spirit representing Mohammed, or this confluence of energies
somehow resonating the religious consciousness of mankind also
represented his religion, and indeed all religions, as prisons of the
souls, and as excuses for acts of cruelty.
Present at the seance were Victor Hugo, Mlle. Adèle Hugo
and Auguste Vacquerie. Mme. Hugo and Charles held the table.
“Who’s there?” Vacquerie had asked.
0
Mohammed.
“Speak,” requested Vacquerie.

Shadows still cover the earth. Martyred truth bleeds error

from the nails that fix it to the cross. It is profoundest night.
Despots say: We are the right. Priests say: We are the law. The

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gibbet replies: Yes. The scaffold replies: Yes. The grave replies:
No. The lugubrious hosanna of evil resounds in the song of The student of comparative channeling might want to com­
owls beneath the starry heavens. Crows come to peck out the pare what the channeled Mohammed of Victor Hugos group had
last glance of love from the dying eyes of Jesus. The double to say in 1853 with some of what the channeled Mohammed of
silhouette of gallows and scaffold rises up on the dark horizon, James Merrill had to say in the late 1970’s and early 1980 s.
and we glimpse, standing off in the shadows, religion officiating
at these executions in the name of the cross. Day approaches; Moh.:
morning is nigh. The clouds riding high in the sky, roused to O GOD, O ALLAH BEN ALLAH! LORDS, MEN, WOMEN!
indignation by what they see, are going to open their mouths HERE I AM, JUST AS YOU SEE ME, A SIMPLE MAN...
and launch a flaming star, a light formidable as grape-shot, at NEITHER ALL MEEK LIKE MY PROPHET BROTHER JESU
this world of shadows. The priest-gibbet and the priest-scaffold WHO HAD NO USE FOR WOMEN, NOR BRAINFILLED
will be overthrown. The bastions of shadow will fall, the earth LIKE MY
will tremble beneath those who now stand on it, and heaven will PRINCELY BROTHER-WHAT MAN COMPLAINS OF A
open to those who are on their knees. WHORE? BAH!
NO, JUST AS YOU SEE ME. AND BELIEVE ME, MASTER
Auguste Vacquerie commented: “Even as we speak, three reli­ GOD,
gions are fighting for supremacy in the East; talk to us about these JUST AS SURPRISED AS ANY MAN WHEN MY VISION
religions and their future.” CAME.
ME? ME TO SAY ALL THAT! WHY, I COULD NOT READ,
Catholicism is the rampart against the night. Ancient Greek honorable scribes, imagine! well, i went out,
religion is now a fortress covered with snow. The religion of SPOKE! IT WAS EASY! JESUS, YOU SEE, HAD A
Mohammed is the wall of the flesh. None of them ought to last. DIFFERENT
The Pope says to man: you are not to see; the czar: you are to World to tryto win overto love and mercy...
suffer; the sultan: you are to enjoy. All three are mistaken. I tell
you that the collapse ofall the priesthoods has begun. The priest It was not till over a year later, on Sunday, Feb. 11, 1855, at
of the kdout, the priest ofthe cross, and the priest ofthe crescent 9:30 p.m., that Jesus Christ appeared through the turning table to
are three corpses which will be carried off the battlefield. The speak at length about the similarities and differences between Dru-
saint is no more right before God than the houri, and God no idism, Christianity and Revolution—in this case, the French Revo­
more wants a religion that brutalizes man with asceticism than lution. Christ had dropped by twice before, but only to deliver
he wants a religion that lulls him to sleep with voluptuousness. one sentence on September 15, 1853, Christ announces the res­
Lets go, my son. We must die. I gave you my standard so that urrection, and two on February 27, 1854,1 have the key [to free­
you could conquer. I leave it to you to bury yourself in. dom from imprisonment], and then, in response to the request of

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Judas (also present at the table) to give Judas that key: There it is, down one in heaven. It teaches love in the name of charity and
Judas. hatted in the name of hell. Man is everything; animal, plant,
Attending the seance the night of Feb. 11, 1855, were Mme. stone, nothing. It says: Immortal soul and eternal punishment.
Augustine Allix, Jules Allix, Francois-Victor Hugo and Auguste It heals the sick and tortures the guilty. It gives human sacrifice
Vacquerie. Mme. Victor Hugo and Charles Hugo sat at the table. a place in the firmament, questioning a place in the tomb, physi­
After a brief exchange of civilities, followed by some specula­ cal suffering a place in the immaterial world, and it turns the
tion by Vacquerie about whether all religions complimented and stars into infamous firebrands of a funeral-pyre made of dark­
extended one another, ‘Christ*—or whatever confluence of ener­ ness.
gies was now here represented—launched into a disquisition on Pardon me, my God, but Christianity takes revenge, Chris­
comparative religion that unfailingly emphasized the cruelty and tianity bears away, Christianity punishes unremittingly. Chris­
prison-house nature of every religion. Here is what ‘Christ’ said: tianity dies on the cross and tortures in the lofty heights of the
sly It turns night intn deaths somber will. It talks gloom to the
Druidism is the first of mankind’s religions and the first ex­ sin, matter to die soul. It is the fall into the body and not the
plosion of the soul into the body. The Druids radiate the soul flight of the soul. Druidism pleads with the living body, Chris­
out across the debris of bloody matter. They break the body tianity martyrs the corpse. Christianity wants heaven in flames,
with blows from heaven. They assassinate mankind with blows druidism wants the earth soaked in blood. Christianity is, like
from God. They kill the child with blows ofprayer. They crush all things human, progress and evil. It is the door of light that is
old men with blows of the grave. They turn the splendor of the locked with night. The key is in front of the door; the passerby
soul into the liberator of everything and the murderer of every­ opens the door and thinks he is in the presence of God; but the
thing. The soul of druidism is an angel with hatchet-shaped passerby is mistaken. God is the one who’s not there. God is He
wings. Druidism fills forest, stream, beast, stone, with flecks of who is eternally in flight.
blood that reflect the stars. It spreads eternity with wounds and
immortality with packed sepulchers. It tears suns from the body One week later—on Sunday, Feb. 18, 1855, 9.45 p.m.
of mankind by using torture. It submits the body to the rack of Christ returned to pick up the same theme. Present at the seance
infinity, it tears its flesh with pincers made of the two sides of the Were Mme. Augustine Allix, Jules Allix and Auguste Vacquerie.
firmameht, it pours melted sunbeams into its veins, it draws and At the table were Mme. Victor Hugo and Charles Hugo.
quarters it with the four winds, it beheads it with the golden The table was silent for ten minutes. Then it began to move.
cutting-edge of the moon, and its throws its head into the char** Jesus Christ having announced his presence, Victor Hugo asked
nel-house of enormous darkness. Druidism is the soul’s crime him to proceed.
against mankind. It is eternity, immensity, heaven, stars, light­
ning, thunder, bandits. Christianity is the body happy on earth but tortured on high.
Each time Christianity goes up one degree on earth its goes Christianity is the soul happy on earth but pleaded with on high;

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the essence of druidism is human sacrifice» while the essence of Druidism hides its victims in the dens of animals. Christian­
Christianity is divine sacrifice. ity exposes them to infinity; Druidism hides itself in the woods,
Christianity is composed of two things: love and hate. It Christianity hovers in space; Druidism lives beneath the ever-
makes mankind better and God worse. It possesses a cradle full somber oak; Christianity resurrects pain beneath the ever-radi-
of kisses and a tomb full ofwounds; it cures the living and burns ant blue of the sky: Druidism makes tree branches bristle with
the dead; it blesses the adulteress and burns her corpse; it resur­ horror; Christianity makes the beams of heavenly bodies shiver
rects Lazarus and burns his ashes; the lips of Christianity are with fright; the dolmens ofthe druids are drenched in blood; the
honey and its tongue is fire; it begins with a sunbeam and ends autos-da-fee of the Christians are drenched in sulphur; Islam
with flames; it makes an eden of earth and a hell of heaven; it sees God only in the purple of blood. Jesus Christ sees God only
makes charming flowers and horrendous stars; it illuminates in the purple of fire; religions are great hammer-blows delivered
woman and it sets fire to Venus, it makes dawn white-hot, day to mankind’s skull, each spark putting out a star and lighting up
white-hot and the sunset white-hot; it is the great savior and the a hell.
great executioner; it is the glance that weeps over the earth and
the glance that rises in flames to heaven; it is the sublime weeper A week later—Thursday, March 8, 1855, 9:45 p.m.—Jesus
and the formidable avenger; it dresses the wounds of life and returned once again. Again, Mme. Allix, Jules Allix and Victor
opens the wounds of eternity; it inserts softness into matter and Hugo were present; Mme. Victor Hugo and Charles Hugo were
terror into idealism; it pours balm on man and boiling oil on at the table.
suns. Jesus Christ announced himself. The table began to tap out a
Druidism made hell on earth, Christianity makes it in heaven; strange warm-up:
druidism takes iron, stone, lead, brass and tortures the living Pure or impure. Even or odd. Passage or impasse. Clean or
soul with the material; Christianity tortures the resurrected body Unclear. Pious or impious. Foreseen or unforeseen. Pitying or
with the ethereal; it uses as its tools the lily of the ether and the Unpitying. Vile or worldly. As immense or as small as a cup.
roses of the sky; it gives the dawn the fingers of a tormenten ft Eye or coffin. Rich or fellow. Desert or dessert. Middle or
suffocates the dead beneath the pillow of the tomb; its hell has place. Place or God. God or fire. Fire or blue. [Ed.: In French,
millions of furnaces, millions of fires of live coals, millions of this passage contains a great deal ofrhyming andpunning.}
foneral-^yres; it goes from north to noon and immensity to eter­
Victor Hugo commented: “This is a profound depiction of
nity; it swirls up dust, it flashes, it lightnings, it exhausts birds as mankind, of all flesh-spirit—of myself. Its true, and its strange.
it crushes souls; it has the Milky Way as underground passage» Continue.”
the Southern Cross as crossroads, Saturn as muddy hole in the
road, Mars as precipice, anger as inn, and in the inns hearth I’m continuing. The Gospel had this about it that was tre­
eternal flames for fireplace. Druidism looks at forests, hills, plains» mendous: that it made men brothers, woman womans sister,
and says to them: let us torture. and every child a twin. It put forth mighty words:

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Love one another. Do not do unto others as you would not lambs, but of making tigers love. The upper lip of heaven is
have done untoyourself. Loveyour neighbor asyourself. Aprophet posed not on the sheepfold but on the jungle, on the animals
is not without honor except in his own country and in his own lair, of the animal on desert, on mane, on jaw, on the roaring of
house. The first shall be last. Suffer the little children to come beasts; even Heliogabalus’s nostril sniffs at the breast of God
unto me. Lethe who is without sin cast thefirst stone. Verily Isay [Ed.: Heliogabalus (204A.D.-222A.D.) became Emperor ofRome
unto you, that one amongyou will betray me. Eat and drink: This in 218. His reign was notable for its debauchery]; even Phalariss
is myflesh, this is my blood. And this mighty cry that will issue muzzle moos in the stable of God [Ed.: Phalaris, d. 554 BC, was
through all eternity from exalted mouths confronting the savage tyrant ofAcragas, in Sicily. Some accounts depict him as a cruel tyrant
sky: Eli, Eli, Lamma Sabactani. [My God, my God, why hast who had his enemies roasted alive in a bronze bulL\ ; Caligulas
Thou forsaken me.] nostrils whinny at the Lord, Domitian’s fins swim in the waters
The Gospel took man out of the shadows and elevated him ofthe Lord [Ed.: Domitian (51 A.D.-96A.D.) became emperor of
to the heights. It chased the money-lenders out of the temple Rome in 81 A.D. Initiating a reign of terror in 89 A.D., he was
and re-established weights made of stars in the scales of the di-* eventually murdered by assassins in the pay ofhis wife, Domitilla. ],
vine. It wrung out rags and made pity fall from them in huge Cleopatra’s asp bites the Great Pastor’s heel, Judas s kiss licks the
drops. It turned a deaf-mute God into a living God, who heard star-studded darkness.
and spoke. It brought back sight to suns struck blind by two True religion is an immense taming of wild beasts and not
thousand years of darkness. It remade man, and it made woman« an immense funeral-pyre of lion skins; it is an enormous tender­
It had a mother’s compassion, a father s compassion and a child’s ness for ferocious beings, for foul deeds, for sufferers deformed
compassion. Its eye was the first to gaze at the mother above the by their own bestiality, for the hated of the earth, for the cursed
breast. It wept the largest tear that ever nourished child at of this life.
mother’s breast. It drained the largest cup of sorrow that ever It loves the despised, it rescues the lost, it gilds brass pillars.
mounted through a trunk of pain [Ed.: A reference to poisons ex- It pitied steel bars that were really reeds, muddy souls that were
tracted from trees.}. Finally with hammer-like blows it cracked really chasms, bloody mouths that were really wounds. It peers
the formidable mystery of nature; and, standing on Golgotha» into the depths of the horrible, and laughs at those who grind
bleeding, sublime, forced the four winds of the night to over-* their teeth, and speaks to those who are deaf, and lotens to those
look the Tour gaping wounds of love crucified in the immensity who are dumb, and show itself to those who are blind. It says to
The Gospel made the tomb a merciful thing for repentance, but—' monster mankind: Rise up unto death, which rises up to God.
and here is its error—it made it a merciless thing for the wicked. Grow with all your body. It says to animals: animals, rise up
The great concern of religion should be not so much the just unto death— which rises up to mankind. Grow with all your
as the unjust, not so much the good man as the wicked, not so body.
much the repentant as the remorseful. The monsters of man** It says to plants: Plants, rise up unto death, which rises up
kind are love’s true flock. It is not a matter of giving love to to animals. Grow with all your fell- It says to stones: stones, rise

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up unto death, which rises up to the plants. Grow with all your questioner...
dust. It cries out: Rottenness, excrement, vileness: sow, flower,
radiate! Monstrosities, deformities, terrors: blaze into resplen­ Victor Hugo interrupted: “I composed verses:
dent power! The prophet and the poet
The infinite is the infinite only because it is merciful. If you Choose being over nothingness;
could lose yourself in God, you would find yourself again by The earth listens, worried, to
orienting yourself to the rising of His eternal smile. The firma­ This archangel and this giant;
ment is limited on the north by goodness, on the south by char­ The foul-mouthed crowd,
ity, oñ the east by love, and on the west by pity. God is the great A heap ofwolves and dogs
um ofperfumes out ofwhich the feet ofcreated beings are washed Thatprowl beneath the sky,
eternally; it pours forth forgiveness from all its pores; it exhausts This black, nay-saying bunch
itself in loving; it labours at absolution. The Gospel of the past Barks at the heels ofgenius,
said: The damned. That of the the future will say: The forgiven. Genius, that questioner ofGod. ”

After another week—on March 15,1855, at 9:30 p.m.—Christ ...speaker of negations of the truth, questioner, rebel, com­
was back once more, returning to the theme of a comparison be­ batant; it was the injured of the celestial barricade, the radiant
tween Druidism and Christianity. Victor Hugo was present; Mme. and the bloody, the sublime bearer of the wounds of doubt and
Victor Hugo and Charles Hugo were at the table. the scars of idea. He had several names: his forehead was called
Hugo asked the distinguished spirit to, “continue with the great Moses; his expression Socrates, his mouth Luther, his wounds
things that you have told us.” Galileo and his scars Voltaire. He came out of four deserts, that
of Aeschylus, that of Dante, that of Shakespeare and that of
Druidism had said: Believe. Christianity had said: believe. Molière; and in his torn sandals were the thorns ofevery Calvary
Their words had brought generations to their knees; but one and the pebbles of every prophet who had ever been exiled to the
day, all of a sudden, in the temple, someone unknown entered desert; his gestures were such as to frighten marble columns,
dressed in rags, hair standing on end, feet bare, hands black­ and the spreading-out of his mantle was such as to shake the
ened, ftfrehead held high, and holding the formidable traveling skirts of clouds. He was the vagrant of thundering voice and
staff of the future; it was the beggar human Spirit; it was the blazing eyes. You would have taken him for the lightning en
traveler of twilights; it was the stroller in shadows; it was the route to Sodom. He entered crying: “On your feet, you on your
walker of chasms; it was the shepherd of lions; it was the shep- knees! You’re wasting your time here. Get moving, you who’ve
herd of tigers; it was the seer of the lair; it was the wise, the halted! The world is just beginning. Get to work, you who’re
brave, the crosser of millions of leagues of immensity; it was the relaxing! Faith is aleep, freedom is the wake-up call. I am the
being who doesn’t believe, but who thinks; it was Gods great dawn; wake up, sepulchers. Wake up, slaves. Wake up, you who

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cannot speak Onward, ghosts. Onward, spectors. To the gal**

lop, you statues!” The crowds get up, the black horsemen sit up Then Jesus Christ was gone; not, as far as we know, to return
in bed; you hear 1789 whinnying, the people have only a single to the turning tables.
bond to make, and idealism will be in the saddle. What did the Jesus Christ ofJames Merrill and David Jackson
have to say in The Changing Light at Sandover, published in 1982?
Thursday, March 22, 1855, 9:45 p.m. was the last coming of In all the 500 pages of that great work of poetry, he speaks only
Jesus Christ for which the transcripts have been preserved. Victor once, as follows:
Hugo was present; Mme. Victor Hugo and Charles Hugo were at
the table. After a few minutes, Christ announced himself. At Jesus:
Hugos invitation, he picked up where he had left off: FATHER GOD! YAHWEH? AH LORDS, MY BROTHERS,
SHALOM!
He leaves, and with a slash of the spur to the horses side he His voice is hollow. Like the Buddha, he
leaps over chasms; he hurls himself from the dungeons of feudal Acts out of his own exhausted energy.
days to the roofs of modern-day suburbs; from Bastille to city; WHAT A DEAD SOUND, MY NAME, IN HALF THE
from lord to serf, from king to commoner, from priest to phi** WORLD’S PULPITS.
losopher, from philosopher to atheist, from atheist to God. His WE, AS MY PRINCELY BROTHER SAYS, SPIN DOWN.
remarkable horse is splendid; it boasts Danton for one wing, OUR WORDS
fourteen armies for scales, volcanoes for nostrils, chasms for ears; LIKE GOD’S OWN PLANETS IN ONE LAST NOVA BURST
this horse’s mouth chews up infinity which falls foaming from AND
its bloody bit; he whinnies the reveille, he paws the ground of GRAVITY STILLS & OUR POWER LOSES ITS PULL.
the future, he lashes out at chaos; he is borne away, he rears, he HE & I CAME TO DELIVER LAWS, MINE FOR MAN
takes fright, he unseats the horseman, he kills the stableman, he TO BECOME GOD. WORDS, WORDS. BUT OUR
knocks over the stable, and, if he falls, his four iron shoes spark MESSAGE, BROTHERS!
lightning bolts whose thunder shakes the world; this centaur I BEG OF YOU, INTERCEDE. BEFORE THE WINE
possesses past and future, true and false. Evil and good, mounted RETURNS
on the formidable croup. He flings to the earth what he does WHOLLY TO WATER LET MY FATHER MAKE ME FLESH
not fling to the skies; he scales the heights, he scales the heights, that i may a second time walk earth and
he scales the heights; he bears humanity to freedom, freedom to IMPLORE
equality, equality to fraternity; where will this fugitive from the wretched man to mend, repair while he can.
shadows stop? This taker-between-the-teeth of the bit of im­ AMEN.
mensity? What is there that can stop him? What can his last step
be? If all these religions are finally inadequate, what is mankind to

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THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

do for a religion, or for a code of conduct?

Victor Hugos answer was easy: Do exactly what the turning
tables had been telling them to do all along.
Chapter Twenty-One

“I LOVE THE SPIDER AND I LOVE THE

NETTLE”:
VICTOR HUGO’S FIFTH RELIGION

Musician, philosopher, theologian, and medical missionary

Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) coined the term "reverence for life"
one day while on an African river journey. Schweitzer was over­
come by a mystical sense that all creatures are, in a sense, one; for
the rest of his life he lived by that principle, striving to not even
harm a fly. The Schweitzerian notion of reverence for life had
already appeared here and there throughout human history, per­
haps finding its ultimate expression among the Jainists of India,
whose adherents sometimes wear gauze masks so that they will not
accidentally breathe in a fly and destroy it.
Victor Hugo was equally impressed by the strictures of the
Jersey island spirits that the animal, vegetable and mineral worlds
are all three composed of living, suffering souls as worthy and as
fl
needful of our love as are our fellow human beings. On the Chan­
nel islands of Jersey and Guernsey, and afterward, he made a de­
termined effort to practice exactly what the spirits had preached.
**I love the spider and I love the nettle, he wrote in What the
Shadow’s Mouth Says, early on in that period. Do not mistreat
animals! Peace to plants!” he admonished the reader of the poem.
These two lines sum up Hugo’s attitude, which he was not afraid
to express to one and all, and which, by all accounts, he consis-

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THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

tently expressed in his actions. no more than the toads, of course—but almost. We read, dated
At Marine-Terrace, a piebald greyhound named Lux (Latin for Dec. 16, 1860, in...[Hugo’s Notebooks]', T let the ducks run free
“light”) was the favorite household pet. General Le Flo had given
in the garden, for their Sunday.’”
it to Charles Hugo as a gift. Lux had her own bed, a cushion she One day on the beach on Jersey island, passers-by had seen,
curled up on during the day—and her own place at the family hurrying toward the ocean with a struggling lobster in her hand,
table! Hugo’s daughter, Adèle; she was returning the creature to the sea,
When asked why Lux was so special, the Hugos replied that, no doubt at her father’s request. Another time, Hugo himself was
several years earlier, in Paris, a family friend had been burned to seen striding toward the water with a crab. He would write, in
death while wearing her evening finery. The Hugos were certain—
What the Shadows Mouth Says'.
they could tell by the deep and gentle look in the greyhound’s
eyes—that Lux was the reincarnation of that friend. Ipaid the fisherman who passed by on the strand
Graham Robb writes that when Hugo went out walking after And took that horrible beast in my hand...
lunch, “two dogs and a cat regularly came up to greet him. Hugo
It opened a hideous mouth; a black claw
recognized these creatures as ex-Decembrists [plotters of the coup
Shotfrom its shell, my hand to paw
d’état] transformed into animals who came to beg our forgiveness
...the crab bit me
for their sins.’” 1 told it: Live! Be blessed, poor soul damned to hell
Other animals, as well, reciprocated Hugo’s interest in their And I threw it back into the oceans deep swell...
realm: “On a picnic one day, he was reading aloud from a book
when a cow ambled over, leaned its head on the fence and began In accordance with the spirits’ teachings, Hugos beneficence
to listen. When the book was handed to Hugo’s friend, Kesler, the extended to the world of plants. Auguste Vacquerie wrote in his
cow lost interest and returned only when Hugo started reading journal: “Victor Hugo only likes standing flowers. He outlaws
again.” bouquets, and regards cut flowers as people in agony. We ve never
On Guernsey island, to which the family moved in 1856, Hugo seen him snip a flower, not even for the most attractive of female
insisted that no effort be made to clear the Hauteville-House gar­
visitors...
den of snakes and toads; very soon, his property was infested with “He explains to his grandchildren that flowers live and breathe
the creatures. One day the cook came home with two live ducks like us, are living persons, and that there should not be too many
and prepared to slaughter them. Victor Hugo suddenly appeared. people in an apartment [so the flowers air wont be used up].
He declared that the whole family would go to bed without din­ Today, Hugo would probably have waged a campaign against
ner rather than that blood should be spilled on the property. The the manufacture of women’s cosmetics, not only because they are
ducks were given their complete freedom of the garden. Claudius often developed with experimentation on animals (which he would
Grillet writes that, from that day on, they “survived ostentatiously. certainly have fought as well) but because they can involve the use
Glossy, glorious, garrulous, they were cherished by their master, of the essences of plants, notably flowers. He wrote in What the

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Shadows Mouth Says*. According to Paul Stapfer, a young French professor on Guern­
sey island who knew Victor Hugo well in his later years, “a certain
A sense ofhorror makes the bird'sfathers shiver. English philosopher” had confided to Hugo the nature of his pre­
Everything feels pain. Flowers suffir beneath the scissor, vious lives. Hugo told Stapfer that, “My philosopher gave the
And close in upon themselves like an eyelid closes; probable series of migrations of certain souls, among others mine.
The tint on a womans cheek is the blood ofroses. Here is its history: I have been Isaiah, Aeschylus. Judas Maccabee,
The debutante at the dance, corsaged and whirling to Juvenal [a Latin poet], still more poets, several painters and two
the melody kings of Greece whose names I have forgotten.” Stapfer wrote in
Breathes in, with unwitting smile, a bouquet made ofagony. Victor Hugo at Guernsey that, though a little astonished at having
Weep for ugliness, and weep for ignominy. ruled over Greece, “Victor Hugo seemed to me in the final analy­
sis to be quite satisfied with all his avatars.”
Even the skeptical Vacquerie, who initially objected so strongly In Hugo’s Guernsey island home, Hauteville-House—today a
to the declarations of Balaams Ass, eventually came around to museum to Hugo’s years in exile—there can be seen, in a cartou-
Hugo’s point of view. “Could it be that the oak and the stone che-like frame hanging above the drawing room fireplace, the names
have souls?” he early on wondered in his diary, after a lengthy Job and Isaiah inscribed in large Gothic letters on damask linen.
conversation with Hugo. “I believe they do. The souls of veg­ Hugo also believed he was the reincarnation of these two Old
etables and minerals exist in harsher conditions than the souls of Testament prophets—and of John of Patmos, the author of The
others.” Book ofRevelations and probably the John of the Gospels.
It can be argued that Vacquerie became something of a slave to Hugo’s literary contemporaries, while not doubting his genius,
these beliefs. By 1856, he was writing: “At present, I would no were more reserved when it came to believing he had also pos­
sooner tear a petal from a flower than I would a wing from a fly. sessed genius in many of his previous lives (the concept of ‘previ­
The young ladies who pluck the petals off marguerites to see if ous lives’ being also a difficult one for them to swallow). N. Mar­
someone passionately loves them make the same impression on tin-Dupont wrote about how those closest to him reacted to these
me as priestesses who cut the throats of their victims, then try to beliefs: “Around him, among his friends and family, people didn’t
divine the answers to questions from their dying convulsions. I trouble to hide their scorn. Kesler treated him with outright con­
wouldn’t harm a match. I pity nails. In an execution, it’s the tempt as a hopeless ass.” John of The Book ofRevelations had been
blade of the guillotine that is condemned.” exiled to the Greek island of Patmos; Hugo often referred to Jersey
Hugo was as taken by the spirits’ teachings about reincarna­ island as “his Patmos.” This prompted the journalist Louis Veuillot
tion as he was by their instruction regarding the equality of all life to call Hugo—to his face—“ferisse à Pathmos? The phrase liter­
forms, though the former was an interest that he had been culti­ ally translates as, “Fool of Patmos!” In the vernacular, it has the
vating for many years. Here, his personal vanity may have pow­ emotional force of, “Asshole of Patmos!” Louis Veuillot wrote that
ered his beliefs to some extent. Martin-Dupont himself called Hugo the “Sinai Nutcase,” refer­

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ring to Mosess sojourn on the Sinai Desert—for Hugo also be­ Joyce Tischler declaring, as she continues to do so today, that ani­
lieved he was the reincarnation of Moses. The author Leconte de mals are entitled to exactly the same civil rights as humans; 25
Lisle tried to one-up Martin-Dupont by calling the Guernsey ex­ lawyers on call with the ALDF periodically defend animals in court
ile, “Dumb as the Himalayas!” In bothering to come up with these on animal rights issues. Hugo would certainly have applauded
phrases at all, these ‘friends’ of Hugo’s betray a certain jealousy of this; he may have made analogous suggestions while on the Chan­
his fame and genius. But, beyond a doubt, Hugo’s preoccupation nel islands.
with reincarnation—principally his own reincarnations—was con­ It may have been easy in the 1850’s to ridicule Hugo’s belief
siderably less disciplined than his genuine and abiding concern to that plants have feeling and consciousness and should be treated
show compassion for the other species of our planet. lovingly; by the 1970’s, the climate of opinion was beginning to
change in his favor. In a famous experiment at McGill University,
Whatever the origins of Victor Hugo’s beliefs in the sanctity of in Montreal, Canada, scientists randomly dropped crabs into boil­
the spheres of animal, plant, and stone—however eccentric they ing water and found that plants on the other side of the room
may seem—it cannot be argued that Hugo was, amazingly, at least responded to their pain; electrodes attached to the plant leaves
a century ahead of his time. Only 13 years before Hugo was born, recorded a mild electrical reaction whenever a crab hit the water.
the great English philosopher Jeremy Bentham had drawn ridicule Since then, literally hundreds of experiments have been carried
to himself by claiming, in his Utility Principle ofMorals, in 1789, out, of greater or lesser scientific value, irresistably confirming the
that animals, like humans, suffered and therefore had the right to notion that plants have consciousness, perhaps of a highly com­
life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Up till then, most of plex sort.
Bentham’s contemporaries had believed—and many would con­ Do rocks have consciousness, and should they be treated with
tinue to believe—that animals were little more than automata, loving kindness? Certainly, there doesn’t seem to be a Rocks’ Rights
clockwork machine-like creatures that made a noise when stepped movement on the horizon. But it is interesting to note that, in the
on only because their ratchet gear-like body parts were grinding. channeled masterpiece of James Merrill, The Changing Light at
Only slowly and painfully over the nineteenth century did the Sandover, the spirit guides inform the author that some of the
belief take hold in Europe that animals were conscious creatures more distinguished (and now dead) human personages in the poem
capable of feeling pain. It was not until 1975—almost a century have reincarnated in stones, apparently to acquire knowledge and
after Hugos death—that the Australian philosopher Peter Singer experience of those realms (there is no punishment involved here;
published his landmark book, Animal Liberation, which put forward it is a privilege). Discussing the English poet W.H. Auden, who
the belief that animals were the victims of what he called has taken life again as a mineral deposit, the guides suddenly re­
“speciesism,” and suffered prejudice simply because they were a mark that:
different species and therefore presumed to be less advantaged than OUR WITTY POET SURFACING OFF ALASKA AS A
man. In 1979, the Animal Legal Defence Fund (ALDF) was VEIN OF PURE/ RADIUM HAS HAVOCKED A NOSY RA­
founded in San Francisco, California, with its Executive Director DIO SHIP. 58 IN LIFEBOATS!

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hesitation, the Bishop offers Jean Valjean dinner and a bed. In the
Finally, it is noteworthy that not only does the academic disci­ middle of the night, Valjean gets up, steals the Bishop’s silver cut­
pline of Interspecies Communications now exist, but one of its lery, and makes his way swiftly out of the house.
founders, Dr. Jim Nollman, claims to have discovered that chick­ In the morning—only minutes after his servant has informed
ens, buffalo and fleas have their own language along with whales the Bishop that the cutlery is gone—Valjean is brought back to
and dolphins (with other such discoveries on the horizon). These the house in the company of the police. They have stopped him,
newly-detected beast languages are, seemingly, startlingly differ­ searched him, found the cutlery and arrested him. Now they have
ent in essence from our own. These claims of the new Interspecies come by the Bishop’s to return his stolen goods on the way to
Communications scientists may seem bizarre and improbable. But taking Valjean back to prison.
they are among early warning signals that the traditional, science- “Ah, there you are!” says the bishop, instantly greeting Valjean
sanctioned barriers between man and animal (e.g. “animals by fondly. “I’m glad to see you! But I gave you the candlesticks, too,
definition don’t have language”) are beginning to crumble. It is which are silver like the rest and would bring two hundred francs.
becoming increasingly apparent that, with regard to the positions Why didn’t you take them when you took your cutlery?”
of Balaams Ass on consciousness and feeling in animals and plants— The Bishop goes to the mantlepiece, takes the two silver candle­
which most of Hugo’s contemporaries thought lunatic—whatever sticks that are there, and gives them to Jean Valjean. He com­
powers moved the turning tables were absolutely right. mends the police for simply trying to do their job, and tells them
they may go. After they have left, he steps close to Valjean and
One of the most wonderful moments in all literature comes in says, “Do not forget, ever, that you have promised me to use the
Book Two, Chapter XII of Les Misérables, the novel Hugo com­ silver to become an honest man.”
pleted in 1862, seven years after his channeling experiences on Jean Valjean is dumbfounded. The Bishop continues: “Jean
Jersey island had come to an end. Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good. It
We all know the story of Jean Valjean, imprisoned on the gal­ is your soul I am buying for you. I withdraw it from dark thoughts
leys for stealing a loaf of bread. His sentence extended because of and from the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.”
several escape attempts, he is finally released after 19 years. He The former convict stumblingly thanks the bishop, and takes
makes his way to the little town of Digne. Valjean carries with his leave.
him the yellow passport of the ex-convict. For this reason, though The seed of charity has been planted in Jean Valjean. Initially,
he has money, no one will give him food or lodging. he mightily resists the power of this immense act of goodness.
He finally comes to the house of M. Bienvenu-Myriel, the Little by little, it takes firm hold, little by little transforming his
Bishop of Digne. Victor Hugo has devoted the first 100 pages of life. By the end of the book, he has himself performed great acts
Les Misérables to carefully building up the character of the Bishop. of selfless charity which eventually bring him total redemption.
We come to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is an ut­ This authentic, overpowering gift of love which Bishop Myriel
terly good man, a man of immense and selfless charity. Without gives to Jean Valjean at the beginning of the novel is Victor Hugo’s

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supreme expression of his belief in the need for all of us to love all
of creation unconditionally and unreservedly. At the seance where
he was the first to expound these beliefs, Balaam’s Ass told the
participants that, “it is in the having doubts that the punishment
lies. For man to know his error would be for him to know his Chapter Twenty-Two
judge, would be for him to know God. And the certainty of Gods
existence makes for Paradise on earth.” The seance-goers did not
understood this, seeing it as more of an intellectual conundrum; MADMAN OR ARCHAIC MAN?
the worthy Auguste Vacquerie replied by pointing out to Balaams
Ass that he had just told them what their error was, which meant
that, “If what you’re telling us is true, then, if we accept what
you’re saying, our punishment will cease. And it follows from that In order to communicate the single letter ‘Z,’ the talking table
that our lives will cease, since the only reason we have been bom at of Jersey island would have had to tap 26 times.
all is to be punished. The very world itself would cease to be, if By any reckoning, it would have taken it an extremely long
our punishments vanished by virtue of our having had our true time to communicate even the simplest of messages.
natures revealed to us!” French psychiatrist Jean de Mutigny is only the more thor­
But what Balaam’s Ass really meant was that this understand­ ough of a number of critics who insist that it would have taken
ing must come from the heart. And, if it does, then the world will the tables so long to transmit the messages attributed to them that
indeed cease to be—but only in the far more exalted sense in which the transcripts ofJersey island cannot possibly be accurate accounts
it has ceased to be for Bishop Myriel, who moves throughout it of what was actually communicated.
with the utter ease of complete love. In Victor Hugo and Spiritism (Victor Hugo et le spiritisme, 1981),
Dr. de Mutigny makes his case using as an example the December
17, 1854 dialogue between Galileo and Victor Hugo.
He notes that:
■ The seance took place between 9:45 p.m. and 1:20 a.m.: 215
minutes, roughly 13,000 seconds.
■ The text contains about 4,000 letters.
■ It takes an average of ten taps to identify a letter (an average
calculated on the basis of the letter A counting as one tap and the
letter Z requiring 26 taps).
And draws from this the conclusion that Galileo would have
had to communicate at the astonishing rate of three taps per

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second—without taking into consideration stops between letters De Mutigny supports his diagnosis with the following asser­
and breaks during the seance. tions:
De Mutigny concludes that: “With the best will in the world, ■ There was a high incidence of insanity in the Hugo family: On
it is totally impossible, over two-and-a-half years, to decipher mes­ Victor’s wedding day, brother Eugène went mad and had to be
sages evening and morning at the rate of three taps a second. It institutionalized; the Hugos surviving daughter, Adèle, was schizo­
was thus totally impossible for Victor Hugo, despite his genius, to phrenic and had to be placed in an institution eventually as well.
be capable of such record keeping.” ■ Asa political figure, Hugo often displayed hostility of a patho­
So, where did the lengthy transcripts come from? De Mutigny logical sort toward his opponents.
believes that when Victor Hugo sat down after every seance to ■ In some of the poetic and literary personae he created while
transcribe a “good” copy, he proceeded, without knowing it, to do in exile, Hugo showed a strong tendency toward solitariness.
“automatic writing.” Therefore, much of what we read (though it ■ Hugo’s handwriting changed radically from 1853 onward; de
comes from the same ‘source’ as the material channeled through Mutigny sees this as having considerable psychological significance.
the tables—Hugo’s troubled mind, according to de Mutigny) was ■ De Mutigny regards Hugo’s residence on Guernsey island,
placed in the transcripts after the actual seance. Hauteville-House, as “a veritable house of the paranoid. It was a
De Mutigny believes that Victor Hugo unwittingly perpe­ combination church, sacristy, funeral chapel, pagoda and cave of
trated this fraud because he suffered from a rare mental disease Ali Baba.”
known as fantasticalparaphrenia. ■ De Mutigny regards much of Hugo’s poetry written in exile as
To make his case, de Mutigny begins by listing the characteris­ pathological and suggestive of a tendency toward paranoia. “All
tics of fantastical paraphrenia as set forth in Anty’s Abrégé de his work is obsessed with the beyond, cemeteries, shadow,” says
Psychiatrie (Abridgement of Psychiatry) 1971 edition, page 118. the psychiatrist. “The poet had even mixed coffee grounds with
These are, notably: ink to better express all this” (this is a one of a group of Hugo’s
drawings which his biographer, Graham Robb, sees as amazingly
■ Often, debut of the illness in the person’s thirties, character­ avant-garde: “Romantic tableaux created using the techniques of
ized by worry, anxiety, paranoia, and a generalized sense that the post-Romantic art”).
world is hostile. De Mutigny concludes from all this:
■ In later years, exorbitant fantasies, full-blown megalomania (i.e., “Victor Hugo, believing, in all good faith, that he was deci­
delusions of grandeur) and a sense that the person is here on a phering the messages of the tables, while in the grip of his de­
vitally important cosmic mission. lirium did automatic writing and produced ‘hugolisms.’
■ Persistance of paranoia and a sense of persecution. These feel­ “These messages were totally unconscious, a sort of personal­
ings greatly plague the sufferer, though he or she is often aware ity-splitting which has as its effect the attributing to another what
that they are afflicted; there are periods of remission. you yourself have edited.”

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 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

A number of objections can be raised to what Dr. de Mutigny what was virtually world-wide acclaim.
has to say. If a poem like What the Shadows Mouth Says, written at the
A general one is that Hugo did not always, or even often, have height of the seances, can be seen (as de Mutigny sees it) as over­
in his head beforehand what the tables told him. Usually, when he ripe with the darknesses of the imagination and touching at times
did, he interrupted the spirit and told it so, and this is recorded in on the pathological, Les Misérables is a great masterpiece of sanity.
the transcripts. Hugo demonstrates the surest of touches in his depiction of ev­
There are a number of occasions where his wife, Adèle, makes ery walk of European life, including the historical, the social, the
this clear. For example, she tells Balaams Ass that, while already political, the economic and the philosophical. Beneath the some­
believing what the spirit has just said about metempsychosis, Vic­ times lightly overblown Romantic surfaces of his characters, the
tor Hugo had “never believed that pebbles, plants and animals had psychology that drives them is rendered with great clarity and
souls.” truthfulness. Though the book was long criticized for its seeming
A further objection is that it was not always Hugo who made digressions, it is becoming clearer and clearer that these are not
a “good” copy of the transcript after the seance. Sometimes that digressions at all, but devices which greatly broaden and deepen
task devolved upon Vacquerie; other times, upon Hugos daugh­ the canvas of the novel while maintaining it all of a piece.
ter, Adèle. Les Misérables is wise and prophetic as are few other works of
Still another objection is that there is no reason to suppose art. Writes Dr. Robb in his Victor Hugo: A Biography: “With his
that the participants waited till the end of every word, or till the seemingly unrepresentative life, his egocentrism, his isolation and
end of every sentence, to decide what the spirit was saying and his bizarre, patchwork religion, Hugo has produced the most lu­
write it down. Moreover, it is often the case during seances that, cid, humane and entertaining moral diagnosis of modem society
since the words are “coming through the head” of the psychic, ever written.”
that person simply repeats them, thereby rendering the table, or Here and there, the messages of the tables peep out, giving the
the Ouija board, or whatever, temporarily unnecessary. Anyone novel added resonance. We’ve seen that Bishop Myriel has at­
who has attended an Ouija board session, in particular, will recog­ tained to the state of heart advocated by Balaams Ass; and there is
nize this as a common practice. more than one lengthy allusion to the interrelated, ‘holographic,’
For both these reasons, the seances at Marine-Terrace could ‘implicit’ universe as presented by the spirit of Joshua during the
have gone by much more quickly than we have tended to suppose. seances.
A final and overwhelming objection is that it is hard to imag­ With the publication of Les Misérables, the novelistic career of
ine how an author with even a touch of madness could have cre­ the 60-year-old Hugo was far from over. He wrote three more
ated so stunning a masterpiece as Les Misérables. Hugo first con­ novels, The Toilers of the Sea, The Man Who Laughs, and Ninety-
ceived this novel in 1845, calling it Les Misères; he put it aside Three. All three are increasingly being regarded as masterpieces in
when he went into exile, but in 1860 took it up again in earnest, their own right, with Dr. Robb seeing implicit similarities be­
completing its 1,500 pages in 1862 and having it published to tween Toilers ofthe Sea and Moby Dick. The poet/visionary con-

248 249
 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

tinned to write poetry, including the masterful Contemplations of that, throughout his life, Hugo composed his poems in a pattern
his late 70s; he would go on to produce works as varied as the which consistendy fell into a poetic year corresponding to the so­
poetical/non-fictional On BeingA Grandfather and a group of one- lar year. “April, May, June, July, August and October are his rich­
act plays prefiguring the style of Samuel Beckett. est months; September, November, December, January, February
It may well be that Victor Hugo suffered, not from a patho­ and March his poorest. The most prolific is always June and the
logical mis-organization of creative energy, but from an excess of least prolific February.”
creative energy. He had enormous vitality. George Steiner writes When, in the Legends ofthe Century, Hugo tells the story of
in Tolstoi or Dostoevsky of Tolstoi that his, “gigantic vitality, his Noah and the Ark, he alludes very briefly to the legend of Og, one
bearish strength and feats of nervous endurance, the excess in him of a race of titans who were destroyed in the Flood—except for
ofevery life-force are notorious. His contemporaries, such as Gorky, Og, whom Noah allowed to ride on the Ark. Hugo is no sufferer
pictured him as a titan roaming the earth in antique majesty. There from mental disease; he is that Og—a prediluvian figure, a titan
was something fantastical and obscurely blasphemous about his from the time when Gaia reigned and all men were bathed in its
old age. He passed into his ninth decade every inch a king.” energies. He is archaic man, an astonishing throwback who has
Exactly the same can be said ofVictor Hugo. The ‘human mag­ managed to retain his connection with the sea of Gaia which is
netic field (also associated with table turning) was á medical the sum and more than the sum of the parts of the earth. It may
vogue of the time, and several anecdotes indicate that Hugo had be that it was this quality—Hugo s fundamentally archaic nature,
an unusually powerful field of this sort. He told Paul Stapfer: his still-living attachment to Gaia—that enabled him to play a
My son Francois, when he was an infant, had insomnia. We pivotal, catalytic role in drawing to Jersey island the powers and
tried all the usual methods to make him sleep, without success, energies that took shape around the turning table.
and he became so ill we began to think we were going to lose him. This is not to overly-romanticise the great romantic! He had
“I tried making magnetic passes over him. He slept for 15 flaws, including a runaway promiscuity—perhaps one expression
hours without waking up. This sleep was so restorative and so of his “archaic” nature!—that drove his wife Adèle to despair and
beneficial that the doctor, in wonderment, could only acknowl­ that signaled not only a thirst for life but also, on its dark side, a
edge that hed been cured, without knowing why. And Francois terror of life, which drove him again and again into, so to speak,
kept saying to me: O, father, go on! More! More! That makes me his mother s arms.
feel so good.’” But it is consoling to think that Hugo lived among us, and
Hugo also told Stapfer that once, in the salon of Bertin the not so long ago. In our day and age, when so much of literature
Elder, he attached a small weight to the end of a thread, held the and public discourse has been reduced to aridity, banality and sleaze,
other end to his forehead and made the weight describe circles we can perhaps hope that the vast new interest in channeling in
inside the crown of a hat. Dr. Robb suggests that the poet had a our times signals the return of more titans—and Hugos—of the
poetic year, which might tentatively be associated with seasonal race of Og.
fluctuations in the magnetic fields of vegetation.” Robb explains

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 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

POSTSCRIPT

The turning table seances at Marine-Terrace ended some time

in the autumn of 1855. There was some disillusionment. After
more than two years, none of the spirits’ predictions had come
true—particularly the one suggesting that the empire of Napo­
leon III, and their exile, would end in two years from September,
1853. Hugo’s doctor advised him to give it up. Vacquerie had About the Authors
come to the conclusion that the turning tables merely articulated
the thoughts of those present. Madame Hugo had failed to com­
municate with Delphine de Girardin, who had just died of cancer. John Chambers (translation and commentary) has an M.A. in En­
As the last straw, Jules Allix, an enthusiast for the tables, had gone glish (Toronto) and studied at the University of Paris. His previous
mad during a seance. He sat immobile on the Hugos’ blue sofa translations include “Phase One: C.E.Q. Manifesto,” in Quebec: Only
for four hours and merely said, “I’ve seen things.” Two days later, the Beginning. He has been a full-time instructor in English at Dawson
Augustine, his sister, found him flat on his stomach, trying to College, Montreal, and assistant editor at McGraw-Hill Publishing
magnetize a watch so that it stopped at 12 o’clock. and managing editor at International Thomson Publishing, both in
In the rush of events, and Victor Hugo’s other work, the tran­ New York. He has written numerous articles on the Paranormal.
scripts were lost sight of for years. Not till 1923 were they pub­
lished at any length, in Gustave Simon’s Chez Victor Hugo: Les Martin Ebon (Introduction), who served for twelve years as Ad­
Tables Tournantes de Jersey, from Conard, Paris. ministrative Secretary of the Parapsychology Foundation,New York,
In 1968, most of the known transcripts—constituting a sub­ is the author/editor of more than eighty books, including They
stantially longer text than Simon’s volume—were published as a Knew the Unknown and Prophecy in Our Time. His most recent
part of Volume IX of Jean Massin’s monumental, 18-volume Vic­ work is KGB: Death and Rebirth.
tor Hugo: Oeuvres Completes, from Le Club Francais du Livres,
Paris.
These Conversations with Eternity were translated using Dr.
Massin’s text. By no means all of the transcripts were translated.
And many more—perhaps as many as half—remain in private
hands and have never been published.

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 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

Massin, Jean, Ed. Victor Hugo: Oeuvres Competes. Tome 9. Paris:

Le Club Francais du Livres, 1968. (18 volumes).
WORKS CONSULTED Maurois, Andre. Olympio: The Life of Victor Hugo. New York:
Harper, 1956.
Anka, DarryL Bashar: Blueprintfor Change. A Message from Merrill, James. The Changing Light at Sandover. New York: Knopf,
Our Future. Redmond, WA: New Solutions, 1990. 1996.
Appelbaum, Stanley, ed. Introduction to French Poetry: A Mitchell, Dr. Edgar. “Interview: Message from Space.” Kindred
Dual-Language Book. New York: Dover, 1991. Spirit Summer (June-August) 1997: 35-38.
“Art of Poetry XXXI: James Merrill. Interview, The.” The Paris Pereira, Patricia. Song ofthe Arcturians. Hillsboro, OR:
Review No. 84 (Summer 1982): 184-219. Beyond Words, 1996.
Baudouin, Charles. Psychanalyse de Victor Hugo. Geneve: Mont —. Eagles ofthe New Dawn. Hillsboro, OR: Beyond Words,
Blanc, 1943. 1997.
Catalogue. Maison de Victor Hugo. Paris: Ville de Paris, 1934. —. Songs ofMalantor. Hillsboro, OR: Beyond Words, 1998.
Chambers, John. “The Channeled Myths of James Merrill.” Robb, Graham. Victor Hugo: A Biography. New York: Norton,
TheAnomaUstNQ. 5 (Summer 1997): 41-58. 1998.
De Mutigny, Jean. Victor Hugo et le Spiritisme. Paris: Nathan, Simon, Gustave. Chez Victor Hugo: Les Tables Tournantes de
1981. Jersey. Paris: Conard, 1923.
Ebon, Martin. “Victor Hugo: A Two-Year Dialogue with Ghosts.” Steiner, George. Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old
In They Knew the Unknown. New York: World, 1971: Criticism. New York: Dutton, 1971.
53-60. Stevens, Philip. Victor Hugo in Jersey. Chichester, Sussex:
Gaudon, Jean. Ce Qui Disent les Tables Parlantes: Victor Hugo Phillimore, 1985.
à Jersey. Paris: Pauvert, 1963. Talbot, Michael. The Holographic Universe. New York:
Georgel, Pierre. Drawings by Victor Hugo. London: Victoria HarperCollins, 1991.
and Albert Museum, 1974. Thompson, William Irwin. Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds
Gobron, Gabriel. History and Philosophy ofCaodaism. Saigon: ofMyth and Science. New York: St. Martins Press, 1989.
Tu-Hai Publishing House, 1950. Wilson, Colin. From Atlantis to the Sphinx. London: Virgin,
Grillet, Claudius. La Bible dans Victor Hugo. Paris/Lyons: 1996.
Emmanuel Vitte, 1910. Wolfe, James R. “Deep Inside the Patmos Cave.” In Doomsday!
—. Victor Hugo Spirite. Paris/Lyons: Emmanuel Vitte, 1929. How the World Will End—and When. Ed. Martin Ebon. New
“Hugo Turns the Tables.” Times Literary Supplement York: Signet, 1977: 101-111.
[London] No. 3,295 22 April 1965: 308.
Hugo, Victor. Les Misérables. New York: Signet, 1987.

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 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

able to see the Angel of the Lord 45 D as expressed in The Changing Light at
Index Sandover 165
Bashar 72
Daniel 78, 123
Bashar: Blueprint for Change. A Message Hugo as archaic man within 251
Dante 78, 171, 178, 186, 188, 231
from our Future 72 Galileo 186, 188, 194-195, 204, 231
A de Girardin, Delphine 16, 21 Gospels 118
Bateson, Gregory 157
de Girardin, Emile 21 Grass, The 166
Baudelaire, Charles 127
Advicefrom God 181 de Lisle, Leconte 240 Grasset, Joseph 22, 145
Baudouin, Charles 61
Aeschylus de Lubicz, Schwaller 158
beasts. See animals Graves, Robert 165
78, 124, 125, 126, 147, 171, 178, 184, 231 de Mutigny, Dr. Jean
Beckett, Samuel 250 Gray Lady, the 84, 117
home on Jupiter 147 Victor Hugo and fantastical paraphre­
Bentham, Jeremy 240 Great Chain of Being 47, 94, 111, 122
afterworld, the 168 nia 245
Biard, Léonie 12, 15 Grillet, Claudius 54, 59, 126, 130, 236
described by Death, the spirit 168 Death
Bishop Myriel 9, 242, 249 Grim Gatekeeper, The 114, 116
described by Jean-Jacques Rousseau 168, 169, 172, 173, 175, 181, 185 Guérin, Theophile 80, 86
Bishop of Viviere 23
34 Decadence ofRome 126
Black Lady, The 84 Guernsey 16, 145, 235, 247
described by Shakespeare 78 Denizart-Rival, Hippolyte-Leon 22
Blavatsky, Madame 146
described by the Shadow of the DiraeCometae 139 H
Blianche Damme, La 84
Sepulcher 31 dolmen 19
Blue Crystal Planet 72 Hand'lslande 9
alchemy 148, 155 Don Quixote 77
Book ofNumbers 46 Hannibal 37-43, 101
its birth as emerging from Gaia 162- Doña Sol 11
Bug-Jargal 6 Hauteville-House 15, 236, 239, 247
163 Doomsday! How the World Will End—and
Byron, Lord 81-82 Hell 174, 181, 205
Allix, Jules 24, 96 Why 74
Androcles 108, 122, 123 nature of 50
C Dostoevsky, Fyodor 70
Animal Legal Defence Fund (ALDF), The Helt, Montague 81
Dove of the Ark 47, 110, 119, 122
240 Calvary 170, 188 Hemani 10, 11
Drama, The 111-113
Animal Liberation 240 Cao Dai 1,3, 15 drawings, channeled 139-140, 145, 149 Herschel, Sir William 35, 145, 205
animal rights 241 Carthage 38—41 Drouet, Juliette 12, 17, 18, 20 hieroglyphics, interplanetary 151
animals 44 Catholicism 222 Druidism 224-226, 230 Holographic Universe, The 217
ability to glimpse God 111, 113 Cervantes, Miguel 77, 79, 171 Durrieu, Xavier 34 holography 211, 213, 219
as Jesus Christs 118, 122 Changing Light at Sandover, The Homer 69, 78
as not knowing their punishment 68, 71, 165, 233, 241 E Hugo, Adèle (daughter) 11, 17
119, 120 channeling Hugo, Adèle Mme.
Emile 34 10, 11, 14, 17, 18, 79
language of chickens, buffalo and fleas explanation 68-69
Essassani, planet of 73 Hugo, “Brutus”. See Hugo, General
242 Chätiments (Punishments) 15
Exile’s Journal, The 85 Hugo, Charles 11, 29, 36, 41, 89
Anka, Darryl 72 Chénier, Andre 52-55
Ezekiel 78 most "fluid;" most gifted psychic at
archaic man Chieu, Ngo Minh 2
as part of Gaia 158-159 Christianity 225-226, 230 F table 29
Archangel Love 109 Christ on its vengeful nature 225 sees ghostly lights in drawing room 85
as protector o| Solar System 152 Cleopatra 229 Flamel, Nicholas 149, 155 Hugo, Eugène 9, 247
Arcturus 72 as a worm 59 Flammarion, Camille 145 Hugo, Francois-Victor 11, 80, 89
Association of Worlds 189 Comédie Fran^aise 10 "fluid" 23, 29 sees ghostly lights in drawing room 85
Auden, W.H. comet 139, 144, 163 “fluidomania” 23 translator of Shakespeare’s plays 76
reincarnation as a mineral 241 Complete Works of Victor Hugo 84 fourth density 73 Hugo, Joseph-Abel 6
Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Fox sisters 22 Hugo, Léopoldine
B The 35 French Revolution 52, 70 11, 12, 20, 29, 30, 141
Contemplations, The 147, 250 From Atlantis to the Sphinx 158 Hugo, Sophie 4
Balaam 46
Corneille, Pierre 76 Hugo, Victor 5, 27, 73, 123, 126
Balaam’s Ass 44-46, G arranging for posthumous works 178-
110, 118, 119, 122, 181
Gaia 157-159
184, 221, 238, 242, 244, 248, 249 as distressed by condescension of

256 257
 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY THE FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE OF VICTOR HUGO

67, 71, 165, 223, 233, 241 Pantheon 17

Galileo 195-196 souls of distinguished dead on 145 Metagaia 163-164 Paradise 36, 171, 174, 181, 205
as exponent of the philosophy of the visit from inhabitant, Tyatafia 146 metempsychosis 45, 59-61 Paris Review, The 68
tables 235-238 Juvenal 239 Micromégas 144 Patmos 74
as suffering from fantastical paraphre­ Mitchell, Dr. Edgar 218 Pereira, Patricia 72
nia 245-247 K Mohammed 50, 107, 108, 122, 221 relationship with wolves 190
awakened by ghostly doorbell 89 as channeled at Marine-Terrace 221 phantom self 168-169
Kardec, Alan 22, 59, 145
belief in his previous lives as eminent as channeled in The Changing Light at Pigeon of Mohammed 122
Kardecists 45
prophet 239 Sandover 223 Pinson, Albert 17, 79, 79-81
Kesler, Kennet de
biography 4-17 Molière plants
19, 92, 94, 95, 96, 236, 239
century ahead of his time on animal 79, 88,104,124,125,126,148,171, 178,186 McGill experiment indicates they have
and plant issues 240 L home on Jupiter 147, 153 consciousnes 241
haunted by Lady in White 84-87 Moon, the 163 plants, world of 44, 47
magnetism; connection to nature, Gaia Last Day ofa Condemned Man 70 Moses 50, 78, 231, 240 Plurality of Worlds, The 145
250-251 Le Flo, General Adolphe 26, 31, 236 Mother Nature posthumous work
nocturnal hauntings of 84 Learned Ladies, The 88 as Gaia, the self-regulating planet of Victor Hugo 178
on Jersey island 18-24 Legend of the Centuries, The 126, 251 Earth 157 prison
poetry contests with the Lion of Legueval 36 in The Changing Light at Sandover physical universe as 45
Androcles 126-128 Les Miserables 7, 9, 13, 248 165 Psychanalyse de Victor Hugo 61
refusal to cut flowers 237 Les Misères 248 Mozart 137, 184 punishment 93-94, 95
talks to shade of daughter 27 Leverrier, Urbain Jean Joseph 145 his home on Jupiter 145 punishment, life as 47
Hunchback ofNotre Dame, The 7, 12 Lion of Androcles 47, 118, 119, 122- his shade composing music 137 punitary worlds 147, 182, 184-188
hydra 124, 148 Jupiter as 146
Lion of Florence 119 N Satum as 147
appearance of Mercurians 155
element in alchemy 155 Louis XVI 53
Napoleon 5, 38, 39, 41 Q
Louis-Philippe 13
Napoleon m 13, 15, 17, 69, 215
Lovelock, James 157, 158
Napoleon the Small 15 quantum holography. See holography
Luther, Martin 102-105, 231
Idea 106 Negroni, Princess 12 Quasimodo 9
Iliad, The 69 M Neptune, the planet
Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds of discovery 145 R
Myth and Science 158 Macchiavelli, Niccolo 187 Ninety-Three 249 Rapunzel
interspecies communications 145, 242 Marine-Terrace 15, 25, 86, 148 Noah 108, 251 as an expression of Gaia 159-160
Isaiah 78, 128, 239 Mars, the planet 144, 204, 226 Noilman, Dr. Jim 242 rapunzel
as punitary world 182 nonlocality 211, 217
Marvels Beyond Science, The 22, 145 as a 'five-fold' herb mirroring Venus
O 161
Massin, Jean 84
Jackson, David 165, 233 Regent’s Diamond 117
Mercury
Jainists 235 $ Ocean, The 133-134, 167 reincarnation 59
as alchemical 'unique metal* 152
Jericho 210 Odes et Poésies Diverses 8 Revelations 74, 75, 239
mercury
Jersey 14, 15, 16, 18, 147, 237 Og reward, worlds of. See worlds of reward
alchemy 155
Jesus Christ titan rescued by Noah 251 Robb, Graham 236, 247, 249
Mercury, the god 204
79, 174, 176, 186, 188, 223, 230 On Being A Grandfather 250 Robespierre, Maximilien de 53, 58
drawing of cap/’petasus' channeled
Joan of Arc 104, 107, 108, 186, 188 Ouija board 165, 248 Romanticism 7
152, 154
Job 239 Mercury, the planet 154 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 33, 34
John of Patmos 74, 239
P
as punitary world 182 S
Joshua 219 as world of reward 153 Palissy, Bernard
Julius II, Pope 54 inhabitants of, as channeled 153, 156 his home on Jupiter 145 Saint-Hélier 18, 21, 86, 139
Jupiter, the planet 144, 184, 198, 204 Merrill, James

258 259
 CONVERSATIONS WITH ETERNITY

Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin 11 turning tables

Satan: The Suns Go Out 89 description of use 22
Saturn 198 Tyatafia 146
“Saturn” 147
Saturn, the God 204 U
Saturn, the planet 144, 173, 226 Uranus, the planet
as punitary world 182 discovery 145
Scott, Sir Walter 82, 83
Scripts for the Pageant 165 V
Shadow of the Sepulcher
30, 32, 33, 106, 148, 149 Vacquerie, Auguste
Shakespeare, William 20, 26, 76, 85, 94, 244
76, 79, 171, 178, 186, 231 convert to the philosophy of the tables
home on Jupiter 147, 153 238
shooting Vacquerie, Charles 20
quality in plants 72 Valjean, Jean 242-243
Sirius 144 Venus, the goddess 226
Social Contract, The 34 Venus, the planet 204
Socrates as home of'ascended masters' 146
50, 55, 107, 108, 118, 171, 186, 188 as mirrored in the herb 'rapunzel' 161
Solar System, the 145, 147, 152 Victor Hugo at Guernsey 239
Songs of the Arcturians 72 Victor Hugo et le spiritisme (1981) 25
Sophocles 78 Victor Hugo, Spiritist 54, 130
sound Victor Hugo: A Biography 249
as used by Joshua at Jericho 210 viper
Spiritism 14, 22, 45, 59, 145 cometas 139
Spirits’Book, The 145 Voltaire 6, 144, 231
St. Anthony's Pig 145 W
Stapfer, Paul 239, 250
Stevens, Philip 86 Way of the Explorer, The 218
stones What the Shadow's Mouth Says
as most punished 44 45, 60, 235, 237, 249
interior as ultimate jail 63 White Goddess, The 165
Joshua the Israelite connecting with White Lady, the 84-
210 85, 85, 88, 91, 95, 120
reincarnation of W.H. Auden as 241 Wilson, Colin 158
suicide 36 worlds of reward 147, 184-189
as non-physical worlds 185
Joshua the Israelite connects with the
Talbot, Michael 213 sun 210
Teleki, Sandor 70, 80 Jupiter as 146
Terror, The 53 Mercury as 153
The Man Who Laughs 249
Theosophical Society 146
Thompson, William Irwin 158, 164
“To the Lion of Androcles” 126
Toilers of the Sea 249
Tolstoi, Leo 70, 250

260
U.S. $13.95/Can. $20.00
NEW PARADIGM BOOKS

n 1853-1855, the great.Frencji writer Victor Hugo,

I while in exile on the island of Jersey, channeled

thousands of messages from the famous dead.

The.spirits told him that powerful energies from

beyond the grave and from other star;systems were
trying to raise up the vibrational level of our earth.

They told him our participation was essential.

The messages to Hugo; of great passion,, power

and poetry, were exactly like those of the trance'
mediums of today—only 150 years ahead of their time.

They have never been surpassed, and only recently

has their meaning begun to be understood. Here they
are, difficult to obtain in French and translated into
English for the first time ever, with a commentary.

Prepare to enter into a whole new universe—one

exploding with the grace of God, astounding in its
revelations, and harrowing in the service that it now
demands of us.