The RevenantsThe Academy defines this word as: “It is said of the spirits that supposedly
come back from the other world”. The Academy does not
say: that come from the other world. The spiritists are the only ones crazy
enough to dare to say such things. Yet, one can say that the belief in revenants
is universal. It is evidently founded on the intuition about the existence
of the spirits and in the possibility of communicating with them.
From that stand point, every spirit that manifests its presence through
the writings of a medium or by knocking on a table would be a revenant.
However, that almost sepulchral name is reserved to those who become
visible and come, as the Academy rightly supposes, under more dramatic
conditions. Are these old wives tales? The fact itself, no; the accessories,
yes. It is widely known that the spirits may be seen and even under a
tangible form; that is what is real. But the accessories form the fantastic
through which fear, which exaggerates everything, ordinarily follows the
phenomenon that is so simple that can be explained by a very natural law,
consequently having nothing magical or diabolic. Why then are revenants
feared? Precisely due to those accessories that imagination insists in making
terrifying, because imagination had been terrified before and had perhaps
believed to have seen something that was not true.
They are generally presented in a lugubrious way, coming preferably
at night, particularly at the darkest nights, at fatal hours, in sinister places,
appearing zombie like or dressed in a very strange way. Spiritism, on the contrary, teaches that the spirits may show up anywhere, at any time, during
the day or at night; that they generally bear the same appearance they
had when alive; that only imagination created the ghosts; that those who
show up, far from inspiring fear, most of the time are friends or relatives
that come to us for fondness or even unfortunate spirits that we can help.
They are also sometimes the jesters of the spiritual world, making fun of
us and enjoying the fear that they inspire. It is understandable that the
best thing to do with those is to have fun also and demonstrate to them
that we have no fear. As a matter of fact, those spirits most of the time
limit their action to making noise, rarely becoming visible. Most unfortunate
is the one who takes them seriously for they multiply their jokes. It
would be the same as exorcising a Parisian brat. Even supposing that it is a
bad spirit what bad could it do? Wouldn’t it be a hundred times more rational
to fear a living bully than a dead bully that became a spirit? In fact,
we know that we are constantly surrounded by spirits whose only difference
from the so-called ghosts is that we don’t see them. The adversaries
of Spiritism will not refrain from accusing you of accepting a superstitious
belief. However, they cannot deny the fact of the visible manifestations,
attested, explained in theory and confirmed by many witnesses, and every
denial cannot even impede the manifestations from happening since there
are only a handful of people who don’t remember nor have any memory
of one case of such a nature and that cannot be disputed. The best thing
to do then is to be informed about what is true or false, possible or impossible
in those stories. It is by explaining, reasoning about these things that
we can forearm against fear. We know several people who were afraid of
ghosts. Now that they know the meaning of that, thanks to Spiritism,
their strongest desire is to encounter one. We know others who had visions
that scared them; they became fearless after understanding them.
The dangers of fear to weak minds are well known. Well then, one of the
results of an elucidated Spiritist is precisely the cure of that illness, and
that is not one of its least benefits.
