Varieties
Strange Violation of the Grave
Psychological Study
L'Observateur, d'Avesnes (April 20th, 1867) reports the following fact:
“Three weeks ago, a worker from Louvroil, named Magnan, aged twenty-three, had the misfortune of losing his wife, suffering from a breast disease. The deep sorrow he felt was soon heightened by the death of his child, who only survived his mother for a few days. Magnan spoke incessantly of his wife, not being able to believe that she had left him forever, and imagining that she would soon return; it was in vain that his friends tried to offer him some consolation, he rejected them all and shut himself up in his affliction.
Last Thursday, after many difficulties, his coworkers in the workshop decided to accompany a mutual friend to the railroad, a soldier on leave that was returning to his regiment. But as soon as they got to the station, Magnan slipped away and went alone into town, even more worried than usual. He took a few glasses of beer in a cabaret, that completely disoriented him, and it was in that state of mind that he returned home, about nine in the evening. Finding himself alone, the thought that his wife wasn’t there any more overexcited him again, and he felt an insurmountable desire to see her again. He then took an old hole digger and an ordinary shovel, went to the cemetery, and despite the darkness and the dreadful rain that was falling at that time, he immediately began removing the earth that covered his dear deceased.
It was only after several hours of superhuman work that he managed to remove the coffin from its grave. With his hands alone and breaking all his fingernails, he tore the cover off, then taking the body of his poor companion in his arms, he carried it home and laid it on his bed. It must have been about three in the morning by then. After lighting a good fire, he discovered the face of the dead woman, then almost joyfully, he ran to the neighbor who had buried her, to tell her that his wife had returned, as he had predicted.
Without giving any importance to Magnan's words, who, she said, had visions, she got up and accompanied him to his house in order to calm him down and make him sleep. We can imagine her surprise and her fear when she saw the exhumed body. The miserable worker spoke to the dead woman as if she could hear him and sought, with touching tenacity, an answer, giving his voice the sweetness and all the persuasion of which he was capable; such affection, beyond the grave, presented a heartbreaking spectacle.
However, the neighbor had the presence of mind to urge the poor hallucinated man to return his wife to her coffin, which he promised, when she saw the obstinate silence of the one he believed to have brought back to life; it was by faith on this promise that she returned home, more dead than alive.
But Magnan did not stop there and ran to wake up two neighbors who got up, like the burial woman, to try to calm the unfortunate man. Like her too, having passed the first moment of amazement, they urged him to return the dead woman to the cemetery, and this time the man, without hesitation, took his wife in his arms and returned the body to the coffin, from which he had taken her, replaced it to the pit and covered it with earth.
Magnan's wife had been buried for seventeen days; nevertheless, she was still in a perfect state of preservation, for the expression on her face was the same as when she was buried. When they questioned Magnan the next day, he seemed not to remember what he had done or what had happened a few hours earlier; he only said that he thought he saw his wife during the night. (Siècle, April 29th, 1867).
Instructions about the preceding fact
(Parisian Society, May 10th, 1867 – medium Mr. Morin, in spontaneous somnambulism)
The facts are showing everywhere, and everything that happens seems to have a special direction that leads to the spiritual studies. Observe well, and you will see, at every moment, things that seem, at first glance, to be anomalies in human life, and the cause of which we would uselessly seek elsewhere but in the spiritual life. Undoubtedly, for many people these are simply curious events that they no longer think about, once the page is turned; but others think more seriously; they seek an explanation, and by force of seeing the spiritual life rising up before them, they will be obliged to recognize that there alone is the solution of what they cannot understand. You who know the spiritual life, carefully examine the details of the fact that has just been read to you and see if it does not show itself there with evidence.
Do not think that the studies that you are doing on these contemporary subjects and others are lost to the masses, because until now they only go to the Spiritists, to those who are already convinced. No. First, rest assured that the Spiritist writings go beyond the followers; there are people too interested in the matter not to keep abreast of all that you are doing and the progress of the doctrine. Without showing, society, that is the center where the work is carried out, is a focal point, and the wise and reasoned solutions that emerge here give more food for thought than you think. But a day will come when these same writings will be read, commented on, analyzed publicly; people will draw from it all the elements on which the new ideas must be based, because they will find the truth there. Again, be convinced that nothing you do is lost, even for the present, let alone for the future.
Everything is a matter of instruction for the thoughtful man. In the fact that concerns you, you see a man in control of his intellectual faculties, his material forces, and who seems, for a moment, completely stripped of the former; he does something that seems insane, at first sight. Well! there is a great lesson here.
Has it happened? Some people will ask. Was the man in a state of natural somnambulism, or did he dream? Did the Spirit of the woman have any part in this? These are the questions we can ask ourselves in this regard. Well! The Spirit of Mrs. Magnan had much to do with this matter, and for much more than even the Spiritists might suppose.
If we follow the man closely, from the moment of his wife's death, we see him changing little by little; from the first hours of his wife's departure, we see his Spirit taking a direction that becomes more and more accentuated, to arrive at the act of madness of exhuming the corpse. There is something other than grief in this act; and as The Spirits’ Book teaches, as all communications teach: it is not in the present life, but in the past that we must seek the cause. We are only here to accomplish a mission or to pay a debt; in the first case, a voluntary task is accomplished; in the second, make the counterpart of the sufferings that you experience, and you will have the cause of those sufferings.
When the woman died she remained there in the Spirit, and since the union of the spiritual fluids with those of the body was difficult to break, due to the inferiority of the Spirit, it took some time for her to regain her freedom of action, a new work for the assimilation of the fluids; then, when she was able to, she took hold of the man's body and possessed it. Here you have, therefore, a real case of possession.
The man is no longer himself and notice it: he is no longer himself when night breaks. It would be necessary to go into too long an explanation to make you understand the cause of this singularity; but, in two words: the mixture of certain fluids, like that of certain gases in chemistry, cannot withstand the glare of light. That is why certain spontaneous phenomena take place more often at night than during the day.
She possesses this man; she makes him do what she wants; it was she who took him to the cemetery to make him do a superhuman work, and make him suffer; and the next day, when the man is asked what happened, he is stunned and only remembers having dreamed of his wife. The dream was reality; she had promised to come back, and she came back; she will come back, and she will drag him.
A crime was committed in another existence; the one who wanted revenge let himself to be embodied first, and chose an existence that allowed him to accomplish his revenge, putting him in relation with himself. You will ask why such a permission? But God does not grant anything that is not fair and logical. One wants revenge; he must have, as a test, the opportunity to overcome his desire for revenge, and the other must experience and pay for what he made the first suffer. The case is the same here; only the phenomena not being finished, one does not extend any longer: there will still exist something else.
