Considerations on Bergzabern's Beating Spirit

Spiritist Magazine — Journal of Psychological Studies — May from 1858 > Considerations on Bergzabern's Beating Spirit

Allan Kardec continues the subject of the previous post about the Beater Spirit with new facts. He seemed not to want to extend the previous one and continued his text with this new title to which we will now refer.

How the Doctrine Regards Bergzabern's Beating Spirit

It is easy to give the explanation requested by the narrator that we have just quoted: There is only one, the one given by the Spiritist Doctrine. These phenomena are nothing extraordinary for people familiar with those to which the spirits have accustomed us. The role that certain creatures lend to the imagination is known. Undoubtedly, if the girl had only had visions, the partisans of hallucination would have flagged themselves. But here there were material effects of an unmistakable nature and which had a large number of witnesses. It had to be admitted that everyone was hallucinated to the point where they thought they heard what they didn't hear and saw motion in immobile things. Now, this would be an even more extraordinary phenomenon.

How does the hierarchy of Spirits occur?

Unbelievers have only one resource left: to deny. It's easier and takes the guesswork out of it.

Examining things from the spiritist point of view, it becomes evident that the spirit that manifested itself was inferior to the girl's, as it obeyed her; he even subordinated himself to his assistants, for they gave him orders. If we didn't know from the Doctrine that the so-called Beating Spirits are at the bottom of the scale, what happened would be proof of that.

It really would not be conceivable that a high spirit, like our sages and our philosophers, would come to amuse himself by beating marches and waltzes and, in a word, playing the role of a minstrel or submitting to the whims of human beings. He appears with the features of an ill-looking creature, a circumstance that only corroborates this opinion. In general the moral is reflected in the wrapper. It is therefore demonstrated to us that the scout de Bergzabern is an inferior spirit, from the class of frivolous spirits, who manifested himself as others did before and still do today.

Why did the scout manifest?

But for what purpose did it manifest itself? The news does not say that he was called. Today, when we are more experienced in these things, such a strange visitor would not be allowed in without him informing what his purposes were. We can only make a conjecture. It is true that he did nothing to reveal malice or ill intent, for the girl did not suffer any physical or moral disturbance. Only men could have shocked his morals, hurting his imagination with ridiculous tales. Luckily they didn't. This Spirit, however inferior it was, was neither evil nor malevolent. He was just one of those so numerous spirits, which, at times and despite our, we are surrounded. He may have acted in those circumstances on a mere whim, as he could have done so at the instigation of high spirits, with the aim of arousing the attention of men and convincing them of the reality of a higher power outside the corporeal world.

faculty of physical phenomena

As for the child, it is certain that he was one of those mediums of physical influence, endowed, in spite of himself, with such a faculty, and who are for other mediums as natural somnambulists are for magnetic somnambulists. Managed with prudence by a man experienced in this new Science, this faculty might have produced things still more extraordinary, and of a nature to throw new light on these phenomena, which are wonderful only because they are not understood.