CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH OF MLLE. SMITH
The psychological history of Mlle. Smith and her automatisms is
naturally divided into two separate periods by the important fact of
her initiation into spiritism at the beginning of 1892. Before that
time, not suspecting the possibility of voluntary communication with
the world of disincarnate spirits, she naturally manifested nothing
more than a few spontaneous phenomena, the first flutterings of her
mediumistic faculties which still lay dormant, the exact nature
and progress of which it would be interesting to know in detail;
unfortunately, in the absence of written documents concerning that
pre-spiritistic period, we are confined to the statements of Hélène and
her parents in regard to it, and the untrustworthiness of the memory in
connection with events of a remote past is only too well known.
The spiritistic period, on the contrary, extending over the last seven
years, and infinitely more fertile in artificially promoted (_e.g._,
the seances) as well as in spontaneous manifestations, is much better
known to us; but in order to comprehend it intelligently, it is
necessary first to pass in review the few facts which we have been
able to gather relating to the pre-spiritistic period—that is to say,
the childhood and youth of Mlle. Smith. That will be the subject of
this chapter.
Mlle. Smith has lived in Geneva since her infancy. After attending
school, she entered as an apprentice, at the age of fifteen, a large
commercial house, where, as I have already stated, she still remains,
and where, little by little, she has risen to a very responsible
position. Her father, a merchant, was a Hungarian, and possessed a
remarkable facility for languages, which is of interest to us in
presence of the phenomena of glossolalia, a subject which will be
discussed hereafter. Her mother is a Genevese. Both enjoyed excellent
health and attained a venerable old age. Hélène had a younger sister
who died in early childhood, and two brothers older than herself, who
are now fathers of families and established abroad, where they have had
successful business careers.
I am not aware that M. Smith, who was a man of positive character, ever
displayed any phenomena of automatisms. Mme. Smith, however, as well
as her grandmother, has experienced several thoroughly characteristic
phenomena of that kind, and one, at least, of Hélène’s brothers, it
appears, could easily have become a good medium. This is another
instance of the distinctly hereditary tendency of mediumistic faculties.
M. Smith, a man of active and enterprising character, died quite
suddenly, probably of an embolism, at the age of seventy-five years.
He had left Hungary in his youth, and finally established himself at
Geneva, after having travelled extensively in Italy and Algiers, where
he remained for several years. He spoke fluently Hungarian, German,
French, Italian, and Spanish, understood English fairly well, and
also knew Latin and a little Greek. It would seem that his daughter
has inherited these linguistic aptitudes, but only in a latent and
subliminal manner, for she has always detested the study of languages,
and rebelled against learning German, in which she took lessons for
three years.
Mme. Smith, who is a kind-hearted woman, with much good, practical
sense, is sixty-seven years of age. Neither she nor her husband was
ever a nervous or psychopathic subject, but both showed a marked
tendency to broncho-pulmonary affections of a somewhat alarming type.
Mme. Smith has, besides, suffered frequently from rheumatism. Hélène
does not appear to have inherited these tendencies; she has always
enjoyed robust health, and has not even had the slight diseases usually
incidental to childhood.
Although both M. and Mme. Smith were Protestants, through a chain of
peculiar circumstances their daughter was baptized a Catholic shortly
after her birth, her name being inscribed some months later on the
register of the Protestant church of Geneva. The memory of this unusual
baptism has certainly not been lost by Hélène’s subliminal imagination,
and has duly contributed to the hypothesis of a mysterious origin. Of
the years of childhood I know nothing specially interesting. At the
intermediate school, at which she passed only a year, and where I have
consulted the records of her class, she was not distinguished either
for good or ill from the point of view of deportment, but she certainly
did not reveal the full measure of her intelligence, since she failed
to pass the examinations at the end of the year, a fact which decided
her entrance upon an apprenticeship. On the other hand, the worthy
pastor who gave her religious instruction somewhat later, and who has
never lost sight of her since, has furnished me with most eulogistic
testimonials as to her character; he remembers her as a young girl of
serious disposition, intelligent, thoughtful, faithful in the discharge
of her duties, and devoted to her family.
M. Smith never showed the least trace of mediumistic phenomena; from
having been very indifferent, or even hostile, to spiritism until his
daughter began to interest herself in it, he finally succumbed to her
influence and became a believer in that doctrine towards the close of
his life. Mme. Smith, on the contrary, has always been predisposed
to it, and has experienced several phenomena of that nature in the
course of her life. At the period of the epidemic of “table-tipping”
which raged in our country about the middle of this century, she too
experimented quite successfully for a while upon the table with her
friends and acquaintances. Later, she had some sporadic visions. The
following is one of the most typical. While her little daughter three
years old was ill, Mme. Smith awoke in the middle of the night and saw
an angel, of dazzling brightness, standing by the side of the little
bed with its hands stretched out above the child; after some moments
the apparition gradually dissolved. Mme. Smith awakened her husband and
told him of the fatal significance which she attached to the vision,
but he, unable to see anything, ridiculed her superstitious fears. As
a matter of fact, the child died on the following day, to the great
surprise of the physician attending her. This is a fine example of true
maternal presentiment, subconsciously felt and transferring itself into
the normal consciousness by a visual hallucination which borrowed for
its symbolic content an appropriate popular image.
Mme. Smith never knew her mother, who died shortly after her birth; but
she recalls and has related to me some characteristic visions of her
grandmother, who brought her up; various phenomena connected with one
of Hélène’s brothers (hearing of steps in the night, etc.) have proved
to her that one of her sons, at least, is a medium.
Hélène Smith was certainly predisposed, both by heredity
and temperament, to become a medium, as soon as the outward
opportunity—that is, the suggestions of spiritism—should present itself.
It is evident, indeed, from her recital of events, that she was more
or less visionary from her infancy. It does not appear, however, that
she ever manifested phenomena capable in themselves of attracting
the attention of her family. I have not been able to discover any
indication whatever of crises or attacks of an abnormal nature, not
even of sleep-walking. Her automatisms have been always almost entirely
confined to the sensory or mental sphere, and it is only from her
own narratives that other people have any knowledge of them. They
assume the double form of reveries more or less conscious, and of
hallucinations properly so called.
1. _Reveries._—The habit of falling into reverie, of building castles
in the air, of transporting one’s self into other conditions of
existence, or of telling one’s self stories in which one plays the
chief rôle, is more frequent among women than among men, and in
childhood and youth than in mature years. This propensity seems to
have always been extremely marked in the case of Mlle. Smith, since
from her school-girl days she has shown herself to be of a sedentary
and domestic temperament, preferring the quiet companionship of her
mother to the games of her comrades, and her needle-work to out-door
recreations. The fragments which have survived in Hélène’s conscious
memory are all that is known to us of the content of these reveries,
but it suffices, nevertheless, to reveal to us the general tone of her
fictions, and to show us that the images suddenly surging up before
her mental vision had a peculiar, often very fantastic, character,
and which enables us to see in them the beginnings of her later great
somnambulistic romances. It is to be noticed also that the designs,
embroideries, varied artistic works, which were always the favorite
occupations of her moments of leisure and in which she excels, were
almost always, from her infancy, not copies of exterior models, but the
products of her own invention, marked with the bizarre and original
stamp of her internal images. Moreover, these pieces of work grew under
her fingers with an ease and rapidity that astonished herself. They
made themselves, as it were.
She was always fond of indulging in day-dreams, and recalls many a
half-hour passed motionless in an easy-chair, on which occasions she
was accustomed to see all kinds of strange things, but, being of a very
reticent nature, she seldom mentioned them to her parents for fear of
not being understood. She used to see highly colored landscapes, a lion
of stone with a mutilated head, fanciful objects on pedestals, etc. She
does not remember the details, but does clearly recollect that they all
bore a close resemblance to her Hindoo and Martian visions of later
years.
These phantasmagoria also appeared to her in the night. She remembers,
among other things, to have seen, when about fourteen or fifteen
years old, a bright light thrown against the wall of her room, which
then seemed to be filled with strange and unknown beings. She had the
impression of being fully awake, but it suddenly occurred to her that
she must have been dreaming, and it was only then that she comprehended
that it was really a “vision” which she had experienced.
2 _Hallucinations._—In the foregoing examples it would be difficult to
say to exactly which category the psychologic facts belong, especially
the nocturnal phenomena, and one may hesitate whether to regard them as
simple dreams of a very vivid character, hypnagogic or hypnopompic[3]
visions, or as veritable hallucinations. On the other hand, we
undoubtedly have the right to give the latter designation to the
numerous apparitions which Mlle. Smith has when in full possession of
her senses in the daytime.
One day, for example, as she was playing out-of-doors with a friend,
she saw some one following her, and mentioned the fact to her
companion, who could not see any one. The imaginary individual, after
having followed her around a tree for a moment, disappeared, and she
was unable to find him again.
Of an entirely different order are the strange characters which she
remembers having sometimes involuntarily substituted for French letters
when writing to her friends, which must be regarded as graphomotor
hallucinations. These were undoubtedly the same characters which at
other times appeared to her in visual images.
This was the prelude to the phenomenon so frequently experienced
by her in the last few years, and of which we shall hereafter see
many examples—namely, automatic writing, mingling with her ordinary
chirography in her waking state.
Alongside of hallucinations like these, which do not show any
intentional or useful character and are only a capricious and
fortuitous irruption into the normal consciousness, mere dreams or
fancies filling up the subconscious strata, there are also manifested
in Hélène’s case some hallucinations of a manifest utility, which have
in consequence the sense of messages addressed by the subliminal
consciousness of the subject to her normal consciousness, by way of
warning and protection. It is to be noted that these hallucinations,
which might be called teleological, have lately been claimed by
Leopold, although he has no recollection of, and does not assert
himself to be the author of, the earlier ones.
The following is a curious example: At about the age of seventeen or
eighteen, Hélène was returning from the country one evening, carrying
a fine bouquet of flowers. During the last minutes of the journey
she heard behind her a peculiar cry of a bird, which seemed to her
to warn her against some danger, and she hastened her steps without
looking behind. On her arrival at home the cry followed her into her
room without her having been able to see the creature from which it
emanated. She went tired to bed, and in the middle of the night awoke
in great pain, but was unable to cry out. At that moment she felt
herself gently lifted, together with the pillow on which she lay, as
if by two friendly hands, which enabled her to recover her voice and
call her mother, who hastened to comfort her, and carried the flowers,
which were too odorous, out of the room. Leopold, on being interrogated
recently during a somnambulism of Hélène as to this incident, coming
up again after so many years, has a very clear recollection of it and
gives the following explanation.
It was not really the cry of a bird, but it was he, Leopold, who
caused Hélène to hear a sort of whistle, hoping thereby to attract her
attention to the danger lurking in the bouquet of flowers, in which
was a great deal of garden-mint of powerful odor. Unfortunately Hélène
did not understand, and retained the bouquet in her room. He adds that
his failure to give a more clear and intelligible warning was due to
the fact that it was at that time impossible for him to do so. The
whistle which Hélène took for the cry of a bird was all that it was in
his power to utter. It was again he who intervened at the moment of her
nocturnal illness by raising her head in order to enable her to call
for help.
I have no reason to doubt the substantial accuracy either of the
account given by Hélène and her mother, or of the explanation
recently furnished by Leopold. The incident belongs to the category
of well-known cases where a danger of some sort not suspected by the
normal personality, but which is subconsciously known or recognized,
is warded off by a preservative hallucination, either sensory (as
here—the cry of the bird) or motor (as in the lifting of the body). The
subliminal consciousness is not always able to give a clear message;
in the present case, the auditive automatism remained in a state of
elementary hallucination, a simple whistle, without being able to
elevate it to a distinct verbal hallucination. Its general warning
sense, however, was understood by Hélène, thanks to the confused
feeling of danger that she felt at the same time. Moreover, this
confused feeling, which caused her to quicken her steps, it seems to
me, ought not to be considered as the consequence of the whistle she
heard, but rather as a parallel phenomenon; the appearance or the odor
of the mint she was carrying, while not attracting her conscious
attention, nevertheless dimly roused in her an idea of the danger
lurking in the flowers, and that idea in turn affected her clear
consciousness under the double form of a vague emotion of danger and
a verbo-auditive translation which did not go so far as to formulate
itself explicitly.
Under circumstances of a nature calculated to cause a strong emotional
shock, and especially when the psychic sphere which involves the
sentiment of modesty is strongly acted upon, Hélène has a visual
hallucination of a man clothed in a long, brown robe, with a white
cross on his breast, like a monk, who comes to her aid, and accompanies
her in silence as long as the necessity for his presence continues.
This unknown protector, always silent, each time appearing and
disappearing in a sudden and mysterious manner, is no other than
Leopold himself, according to the recent affirmations of the latter.
We should naturally expect that Hélène would have had in her youth many
striking experiences of prevision, marvellous intuition, divination,
etc., which are among the most diffuse forms of teleological
automatism. Such, however, does not seem to have been the fact;
neither she nor her mother has recounted to me anything remarkable of
this nature, and they confine themselves to a general affirmation of
frequent presentiments, which were subsequently justified as to the
persons and events with which they were connected.
All the examples which I have above cited concur in bringing to light
the strong penchant of Mlle. Smith towards automatism. But from the
point of view of their meaning there is a notable difference between
the teleological phenomena, presentiments or hallucinations of a
manifest utility, and those which have none—mere reveries and other
perturbations, which are altogether superfluous, if not actually
detrimental, to Hélène’s normal personality.
There are dreams and other automatisms absolutely useless which have
insinuated themselves without rhyme or reason into Hélène’s normal
life. One does not know how or in what manner to interpret these
phenomena, capricious and fortuitous as they seem to be, and they
remain isolated, inconsiderable facts, without bearing and without
interest, since they cannot be attached to any central principle, to
one mother-idea or fundamental emotion.
We are, therefore, reduced to certain conjectures, the most reasonable
of which is that these diverse fragments make part of some vast
subconscious creation, in which all the being of Mlle. Smith, crushed
and bruised by the conditions which the realities of life have imposed
upon her, as is more or less the case with each one of us, gave free
wing to the deep aspirations of its nature and expanded into the
fiction of an existence more brilliant than her own. All that we know
of Hélène’s character, both as a child and as a young girl, shows us
that her dominant emotional note was a sort of instinctive inward
revolt against the modest environment in which it was her lot to be
born, a profound feeling of dread and opposition, of inexplicable
_malaise_, of bitter antagonism against the whole of her material and
intellectual environment. While showing herself always very devoted
to her parents and brothers, she had only feeble natural affinities
for them. She felt like a stranger in her family and as one away from
home. She had a feeling of isolation, of abandonment, of exile, which
created a sort of gulf between her and her family. So strong were these
feelings that she actually one day seriously asked her parents if it
was absolutely certain that she was their daughter, or whether it was
not possible that the nurse might some day by mistake have brought home
another child from the daily walk.
This want of adaptation to her environment, this sort of mysterious
homesickness for an unknown country, shows itself in a characteristic
manner in the following fragment of narrative, in which Hélène, who has
always attributed great importance to dreams, tells of one in which
an isolated house figured. “To me this retired mansion, in which I
lived alone, isolated, represents my life, which from my infancy has
been neither happy nor gay. Even while very young I do not remember to
have shared any of the tastes or any of the ideas of the members of
my family. Thus during the whole of my childhood I was left in what I
call a profound isolation of heart. And in spite of all, in spite of
this complete want of sympathy, I could not make up my mind to marry,
although I had several opportunities. A voice was always saying, ‘Do
not hurry: the time has not arrived; this is not the destiny for
which you are reserved.’ And I have listened to that voice, which has
absolutely nothing to do with conscience, and I do not regret it, for
since I have engaged in spiritism I have found myself so surrounded
with sympathy and friendships that I have somewhat forgotten my sad
lot.”
This quotation speaks volumes in regard to the turn of mind and the
emotional disposition which ruled Hélène as a little girl. It is
surely, so to speak, the vulgar story and the common lot of all; many
a child, many a youth, many an unrecognized genius, feel themselves
suffocating in their too narrow environment when the latent energies
of life begin to ferment. But there are differences in kind and in
degree. With Mlle. Hélène Smith the sentiment of not having been made
for her environment, and of belonging by nature to a higher sphere, was
intense and lasting. Her mother always had the impression that Hélène
was not happy, and wondered that she was so serious, so absorbed, so
wanting in the exuberance of spirits natural to her age. Her father
and her brothers, not comprehending the real reasons for this absence
of gayety, taxed her very unjustly with pride and hauteur, and accused
her sometimes of despising her humble surroundings. There are shades of
feeling which can only be understood when they have been experienced.
Hélène well knew that she really had no contempt for her material and
social environment, which, on the contrary, inspired her with respect,
but which simply was not congenial to her nature and temperament.
To this fundamental feeling of imprisonment in a too paltry sphere was
joined, in Hélène’s case, a timid disposition. Darkness, the least
noise, the creaking of the furniture, made her tremble; by day, a
person walking behind her, an unexpected movement, the ringing of
the door-bell, gave her the impression that some one wishing to harm
her had come to seize her and carry her off. On the whole, Hélène’s
tendency to be startled by everything and nothing constituted with her
a grievous panophobia, a state of fear and insecurity which greatly
strengthened her impression of want of union—of _mésalliance_—with an
environment to which she was decidedly superior.
It is easy now to see the connection between that depressing
emotionalism which was the attribute of Hélène’s childhood and the
slightly megalomaniac tone of her later subliminal romances. The idea
intrudes itself that, in spite of—or by reason of—their apparent
contrast, these two traits are not independent of each other, but
bound by the tie of cause and effect. But this causal connection is
in great danger of being interpreted in a precisely inverse sense by
the empirical psychologist and the metaphysical occultist. The latter
will explain Mlle. Smith’s curious impression of strangeness and
superiority to the base conditions of her actual existence, by her
illustrious previous incarnations; the psychologist, on the contrary,
will see in that same impression the wholly natural origin of her
grandiose somnambulistic personifications. In default of a complete
understanding, always dubious, between these so different points of
view, of which we shall speak later, it will be advisable to adopt at
least a provisional _modus vivendi_, based on the party-wall of the
native constitution or individual character of Mlle. Smith. On the
farther side of that wall, _in eternity_, so to speak, _a parte ante_
which precedes the arrival of Hélène into this life, the occultist
will have full latitude to imagine such a succession of existences as
it shall please him in order to explain the character she has had from
her infancy. But on this side of the wall—that is to say, within the
limits of her present life—the psychologist will have the right to
ignore all these prenatal metempsychoses, and taking for his point of
departure the innate constitution of Hélène, without troubling himself
about anything she may have received by the accidents of heredity or
preserved from her royal pre-existences, he will endeavor to explain
by that same constitution, as it reveals itself in her daily life, the
genesis of her subliminal creations under the action of occasional
exterior influences. The occultist, then, can have the pleasure
of regarding Mlle. Smith’s characteristic trait as a child, that
impression of solitude and wandering about in a world for which she
was not made, as _the effect_ of her real past greatnesses, while the
psychologist will be permitted to see in it _the cause_ of her future
dreams of grandeur.
The emotional disposition which I have depicted, and which is one of
the forms under which the maladaptation of the organism, physical and
mental, to the hard conditions of the environment, betrays itself,
seems therefore to me to have been the source and starting-point
for all the dreamings of Hélène in her childhood. Thence came these
visions, always warm, luminous, highly colored, exotic, bizarre; and
these brilliant apparitions, superbly dressed, in which her antipathy
for her insipid and unpleasant surroundings betrays itself, her
weariness of ordinary, commonplace people, her disgust for prosaic
occupations, for vulgar and disagreeable things, for the narrow house,
the dirty streets, the cold winters, and the gray sky. Whether these
images, very diverse, but of the same brilliant quality, were already
existent in Hélène’s subconscious thought while still a child or a
young girl, we are unable to say. It is, however, probable that their
systematization was far from attaining to such a degree of perfection
as they have presented during the past few years under the influence of
spiritism.
All the facts of automatism to which Hélène can assign a vaguely
approximate date group themselves around her fifteenth year, and are
all included between the limits of her ninth and twentieth years.
This evident connection with a phase of development of major importance
has been confirmed to me by Leopold on various occasions, who says
that he appeared to Hélène for the first time in her tenth year, on an
exceptional occasion of extreme fright, but after that, not until about
four years later, because the “physiological conditions” necessary to
his apparition were not yet realized. The moment they were realized,
he says, he began to manifest himself, and it is at the same period,
according to him, that Hélène commenced to recover memories of her
Hindoo existence, under the form of strange visions of which she
comprehended neither the nature nor the origin.
After the age of about twenty years, without affirming or believing
that her visions and apparitions ceased altogether, Mlle. Smith has no
striking recollections of any, and she has not told me of any psychic
phenomenon experienced by her in the series of years immediately
preceding her entrance into spiritism. We may infer from this, with
some reason, that the ebullitions of the imaginative subconscious
life gradually became calm after the explosion of the period we have
mentioned. They had been appeased. The conflict between Hélène’s inner
nature and the environment in which she was forced to live became less
fierce. A certain equilibrium was established between the necessities
of practical life and her inward aspirations. On the one hand, she
resigned herself to the necessities of reality; and if her native pride
could not yield to the point of condescending to a marriage, honorable
undoubtedly, but for which she felt she was not intended, we must
nevertheless pay homage to the perseverance, the fidelity, the devotion
which she always brought to the fulfilment of her family and business
duties. On the other hand, she did not permit the flame of the ideal to
be extinguished in her, and it reacted upon her environment as strongly
as possible, making its imprint upon her personality well marked.
She introduced a certain stamp of elegance into the modest home of
her parents. She arranged for herself a small _salon_, coquettish and
comfortable in its simplicity. She took lessons in music, and bought
herself a piano. She hung some old engravings on her walls, secured
some Japanese vases, a jardinière filled with plants, cut flowers in
pretty vases, a hanging lamp with a beautiful shade of her own make,
a table-cover which she had put together and embroidered herself, some
photographs curiously framed according to her own design; and out of
this harmonious whole, always beautifully kept, she evolved something
original, bizarre, and delightful, conforming well to the general
character of her fantastic subconsciousness.
At the same time that Mlle. Smith succeeded in accommodating herself to
the conditions of her existence, the state of latent timidity in which
she lived gradually diminished. She is still occasionally overcome
by fear, but much less frequently than formerly, and never without a
legitimate exterior cause.
Indeed, judging her by these latter years, I do not recognize in her
the child or young girl of former days, always timid, trembling, and
frightened, taciturn and morose, who has been depicted to me by herself
and her mother.
It seems to me, then, that the wildness of the dreams and automatisms,
which were symptoms of a tendency to mental disintegration, which
marked the years of puberty, was succeeded by a progressive diminution
of these troubles and a gradual gaining of wisdom on the part of
the subliminal strata. We may presume that this harmonization, this
reciprocal adaptation of the internal to the external, would in time
have perfected itself, and that the whole personality of Mlle. Smith
would have continued to consolidate and unify itself, if spiritism had
not come all of a sudden to rekindle the fire which still slumbered
under the ashes and to give a new start to the subliminal mechanism
which was beginning to grow rusty.
The suppressed fictions aroused themselves, the reveries of former
years resumed their sway, and the images of subliminal phantasy began
to be more prolific than ever under the fertile suggestions of occult
philosophy, rallying-points or centres of crystallization—such as the
idea of former existences and reincarnations—around which they had
only to group and organize themselves in order to give birth to the
vast somnambulistic constructions the development of which we shall be
obliged to follow.