Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 49.djvu/537

Rh the elected 'spiritual' vanguard of humanity. Not to understand these facts is not to understand the potent factors giving rise to the phenomenon."

In some way or other this grop of occultists, whose leader I shall call Miss J, got the notion that Mr. Le Baron was the reincarnated spirit of the Pharaoh of the Exodus. Miss X's mother, they thought, had loved that king in a previous incarnation, and was still watching over his transmigrations. The time was now ripe for him to be forgiven his sins and to be brought to the light, and she was to make of him an instrument for a fuller revelation of God to humanity. They impressed this delusion upon Mr. Le Baron with all the energy of conviction. "Unless it be borne in mind," he says, "that the air was full of a greedy expectancy concerning the appearance of a reincarnated prophet, no solution of this problem is possible." His common sense protested, and he would not, perhaps, have been much affected had not a traitor within the camp presented itself in the form of his own highly suggestible and excitable nervous system, which caught the ideas with which he was surrounded and reflected them to the confusion of his understanding. This automatism first appeared in the form of writing. "My credulity was as profoundly sincere as it was pitifully pathetic. It was aroused by the narration of the purported history of a finger ring supposed to have been worn ages ago by a vestal virgin in one of the ancient temples of Egypt. Miss J believed she wore the ring in those days, and was herself the vestal virgin. On one occasion, in August, 1894, she asked me to place the ring on my finger and attempt automatic writing. I did so. Violent jerks followed, leading to scribbling upon the sheets of paper which were laid before me. This she attributed to spirits, and the placing on of the ring was in some way a sign to call them into activity. The 'invisible brotherhood' were subsequently declared to be en rapport with me, and in the exact ratio of my credulity concerning this assertion did this singular, insentient, emotional mechanism co-operate with the sensations of my common consciousness, and at times assume intelligible proportions."

The circumstances under which automatic speech appeared he was not able to fix with precision. He recollected two occasions, but was not able to say which came first. On one, he was at a seance at Miss J's house. He was asked to lie upon a couch upon which Mrs. J had lain during her last illness, and to look at a brilliantly illuminated portrait of her. In a short time he was seized with a convulsive paroxysm of the head and shoulders; this was followed by a flow of automatic speech purporting to emanate from the spirit of Mrs. J, and fully confirming his friends' notions. Upon another occasion he was in a pine wood