The Equinox (Volume I, Number IX)

THE EQUINOX body, of which it figures every organ in light, has a sight, touch, hearing, smell and taste which are proper to itself; it may, when it is over-excited, communicate them by vibrations to the nervous apparatus in such a manner that the halluci- nation is complete. The imagination seems then to triumph over Nature itself, and produces truly strange phenomena. The material body, deluged with fluid, seems to participate in the fluidic qualities, it escapes from the operation of the laws of gravity, becomes momentarily invulnerable, and even invisible, in a circle of persons suffering from collective hallucination. The convulsionaries of St. Médard, as one knows, had their flesh torn off with red-hot pincers, had them- selves felled like oxen, and ground like corn, and crucified, without suffering any pain; they were levitated, walked about head downwards, and ate bent pins and digested them. We think we ought to recapitulate here the remarks which we published in the Es¢afe¢te on the prodigies pro- duced by the American medium Home, and on several phenomena of the same kind. We have never personally witnessed Mr. Home’s miracles, but our information comes from the best sources; we gathered it in a house where the American medium had been received with kindness when he was in misfortune, and with indulgence when he reached the point of thinking that his illness was a piece of good luck ; in the house of a lady born in Poland, but thrice French by the nobility of her heart, the indescribable charm of her spirit, and the European celebrity of her name. The publication of this information in the Lstafette attracted to us at that time, without our particularly knowing 128