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While in political exile on the Channel Island of Jersey in 1853-1855, the great French writer Victor Hugo participated in well over one hundred turning table spiritistic seances. The communications from the spirits, conveyed by a table leg tapping out letters (the precursor of the Ouija board), allegedly came from dead historical and literary personages, including Galileo, Shakespeare, Hannibal, Christ and Mozart; from abstractions like Balaam's Ass, Idea, Drama, India and Russia; from strange, otherworldly entities with names like the Shadow of the Sepulcher, Death, and Archangel Love; and even from aliens, including ETs from Jupiter, Mercury and the stars.
The author of Les Miserables deeply believed in the reality of these communications, predicting that the transcripts of the seances would become "one of the Bibles of the Future." But he said little about these experiences in his lifetime, and the transcripts were not published--and then only in part until 1923, in a volume entitled Chez Victor Hugo: Les Tables Tournantes de Jersey. Though the book, edited by Gustave Simone, enjoyed some popularity in its time, the transcripts were not published again--though this time in a significantly expanded edition--until 1968, when they made up part of Volume Nine of editor Jean Massins monumental, 18-volume Oeuvres Complates de Victor Hugo, published in Paris by Le Club Francais du Livre.
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- Hugo had close encounters of the third kind, communicating with an alien from Jupiter named Tyatafia and with the inhabitants of Mercury. The Mercurians were half-physical, half-spirit, and floated in the atmosphere of their planet like living rays of light.
The seance participants listened to the shade of Galileo discuss the universe in Einsteinian terms.
The participants heard the spirit of Joshua (who 'fit' the Battle of Jericho) explain how he demolished the walls of Jericho and made the sun stand still by utilizing the principles of modern-day quantum holography.
The talking tables not only tapped out hundreds of messages but also drew pictures (with a pencil attached to a table leg), notably of the inhabitants of Mercury, and, mostly correctly, of the thoughts of loved ones in the minds of the participants. The spirit draughtsman of the Mercury pictures claimed he was fourteenth-century French alchemist Nicholas Flamel, and his drawings contained alchemical formulae paralleling the descriptions of the Mercurians.
The French poet Andre Chanier, guillotined during the French Revolution, appeared and dictated the final verses of the poem he had been working on before he was executed. The verses, exactly matching the style and quality of the stanzas of the living Chanier, were channeled when Victor Hugo was not at the seance, confounding those critics who believe the contents of the Jersey island seances came from the unconscious mind of that great poet. Chanier also described his own beheading and what came after, in the first-ever channeled description of a near-death experience, and one the most graphic, compelling and moving ever.
English literature was well represented, with long disquisitions from William Shakespeare and brief, mysterious visits from Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott.
The table composed music with one of its legs posed on the keyboard of a piano. One of the spirit composers was, allegedly, the spirit of the Ocean itself; the other was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who also sometimes spoke at the seances.
A number of spirits claimed they were the shades of beasts who, in myth and legend, had helped mankind. This included the Lion of Androcles, who spared Androcles in the Roman Forum because the Christian had earlier removed a thorn from the lion's paw; Balaam's Ass, who, permitted by God to speak, set the erring Moabite Holy Man Balaam back on the path of righteousness; and the Dove of Noahs Ark, who guided the ark of humanity to a new and safe resting place.
These animal-entities told Hugo that, though animals couldn't reason, they could glimpse God; the entities further communicated to the novelist-poet-playwright a thoroughly modern Animals' Rights and Plants' Rights agenda, insisting that, since all beast and plant life contained souls, even those forms of life should be treated with the utmost love and respect. As Chapter 21 of the Conversations entitled "I love the Nettle and I Love the Spider: The Fifth Religion of Victor Hugo"--makes clear, the poet embraced these beliefs wholeheartedly, returning crabs and lobsters to the ocean, allowing his property to be overrun by wild animals, and refusing to cut flowers or to have them cut in his presence. Hugo even maintained a careful respect for stones, which were also, according to the spirits, vessels of conscious soul matter.
The turning table channeled a lion speaking the language of lions and a comet speaking the language of comets and drawing its own self-portrait.
The spirits preached a new doctrine of reincarnation, or metempsychosis, which included lifetimes as animals. They claimed that human souls advance steadily through stone, animal and plant lives up a Great Chain of Being that leads them to existence as an angel, but that they are in constant danger of backsliding if they commit serious crimes; such souls risk tumbling all the way back down the Chain to immediate reincarnation as a stone. The spirits declared that Cleopatra, to cite an example, had been reincarnated as a worm. At one seance, the personification of Metempsychosis itself spoke to Hugo and the other participants, summing up the doctrine of metempsychoses in each of 14 brilliant statements.
The spirit called Death asked Hugo to set up a last will and testament for his writings in such a way that his words would continue to appear posthumously from the grave--in "periods of human crisis, when some shadow passes over progress, when clouds blot out the ideal." The year 2000" was one date mentioned.
...The brilliant Carthaginian general Hannibal, who came close to conquering the Roman Empire in the third century B.C., appeared and described in fantastical terms the imperial city of Carthage as it was before the Romans razed it.
Perhaps most amazingly, the spirits seemed to speak from the very hearts of stars, describing a universe filled with gleaming stars which were obliged to help weeping stars, and of worlds of reward upon which dwelt souls of men and women who had lived lives deserving of reward; these latter worlds were obliged to help punitary planets inhabited by human souls who had lived wrongly and therefore now had to undergo a purgatorial existence. The spirits who spoke to Hugo seemed uncertain as to which worlds were those of reward and which were ones of punishment, suggesting at one point that Jupiter was a "retirement home" for geniuses like Mozart and Aeschylus, and at another that that planet was a minor orb inhabited by the baleful likes of a Tyatafia. The spirits seemed to assert ultimately that all physical planets were punitary, while worlds of reward were ethereal non-physical globes of living light.
But the spirits were never ambivalent in their assertion that all advantaged entities in our universe are under a strict moral imperative to help all less advantaged entities; this moral imperative was communicated to Hugo with firmness and with urgency.
