HPB-SB-3-82

T i

vol. 3, p. 82

H. P. Blavatsky Scrapbooks

from Adyar archives of the International Theosophical Society

vol. 3 (1875-1878)

 

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< The Sacrifice of Life in Hasty Burials (continued from page 3-81) >

after having been put into a coffin, being to all appearance dead, was delivered, by artificial process, of a child, which betrayed no more signs of life than its mother. The infant, when every means of restoration had apparently proved fruitless, spontaneously revived, after the departure of the medical attendant He, on being recalled, had the mother taken out of her coffin, and having resorted ineffectually to every stimulant to bring her to life, left the house once more, recommending that means of resuscitation should be continued. Four hours after his departure, the brother-in-law of the deceased came to inform him of her recovery.

Craniology as a Science

Sir Henry Holland has among his other “Recollections of Past Life,” “A Halt of a Day at Gottingen;” by which it appears he was enabled to visit the veteran Blumenbach, and to spend some time with him in his museum. “At that time his collection of crania was the most complete in Europe, and his deductions from them, however modified by later research, have in effect given basis to Craniology as a Science: a fact admitted to me by Retzius, when I visited his magnificent collection at Stockholm forty-four years afterward. My visit to Blumenbach, hurried though it was, showed me the energy and clearness of his mina, little impaired by years. He had the happiness, among the greatest a man can have, of a definite object of pursuit, unlimited in its scope, and of deep interest in its conclusions. Blumenbach was not a phrenologist in the later sense of the term, but he saw the ethnological value of those distinctions which only large and: well-classified collections of crania can afford.”

Is it a Miracle?

The Fasting Girl of Bois D'Haine–A Wafer Daily and Two Spoonfuls of Water Weekly–No Sleep for Three Years

For several months past the German newspapers have been discussing the case of Louise Lateau, the fasting girl of La Plaie. A correspondent of the London Times, writing from Jena, gives the following information about her: —

At the meeting of German naturalists and physicians recently held in Breslau, Prof. Virchow delivered a speech on a subject which has made no small sensation in many parts of Germany. Some three years ago a book appeared entitled “Louise Lateau, sa Vie, ses Extases, et ses Stigmates.” Not much notice was at first taken of it. This year, however, a pamphlet was published by Prof. Rohling of the Acadan y in Munster, entitled “Louise Lateau, die Stigmatisirte von Bois d’Haine.” The work has reached its ninth edition, and 50.000 copies have passed into circulation. It states that the young woman, to whom it refers, was born in Bois d’Haine, in the diocese of Fournais, a Walloon district of Belgium. In her childhood she suffered much from illness, and showed extraordinary real in the performance of her religious duties.

In 1866 she became subject to ecstasies, of which we shall afterward speak, and two years later, on the 21st of April, 1868, on a Friday, just at the time when she had completed her novitiate in the third Order of St. Francis of Assisi, stigmata—that is to say, marks representing the wounds of Christ—made their appearance on her body. They were received by her just similar as signs w ere by St. Francis and other saints. They first appeared as red places on the skin, out of which afterward blood issued. On the first Friday there were bleedings (Blutumgen) on her left side, the following Friday there were similar bleedings from her feet and from her hands. Eventually, on the 25th of September, spots appeared on her brow which one could recognize as decidedly similar to those a crown of thorns would produce.

She had become subject to ecstasies, generally occurring on Fridays, and these still continue. While under these influences, she loses all sensibilities for the outer world, ft is stated that she cannot even feel electric shocks. She has extraordinary visions. More recently she has found sleep and food unnecessary to existence, and we are informed that, for the last three years, she has only eaten a wafer daily and drunk two spoonfuls of water weekly. During all this time she has never slept.

Such are the facts which have been gravely recorded in the pamphlet, and the fact that it is written by a “professor,” who declares himself unable to explain the phenomena, has brought the story under the notice of a class of persons who are not likely to attach importance to contemporary miracles. Prof. Kohling did not feel satisfied with the success of his pamphlet. He wrote to Prof. Virchow as to a great physiologist, to ask him his opinion about this very remarkable phenomenon. In his letter, he remarked that the Catholic Apologetics lay down the principal that a phenomenon may only thus be treated as a miracle when science has proved unable to explain it according to fixed incontrovertible laws. The Germania, a leading paper of the extreme Roman Catholic party, is so convinced that a miracle has occurred that it also appeals to Prof. Virchow. It asks him why he does not make the phenomena the subject of careful study, and tells him he would find an occupation in the examination of this case as likely to promote the interests of science as anything he could do in Sweden or Norway,—referring, no doubt, to his presence at an Archeological Congress at Stockholm.

Prof. Virchow treats the case as one of a class familiar to him. He does not think it would be of so much service to science as the Germania believes to visit Bois d’Haien. He has been sixteen or seventeen years physician to the department for sick prisoners at Berlin, and knows very many kinds of simulation. One case has come under his notice of ceasing to take nourishment, in which the whole supply of food was consumed in an extraordinary manner. “It has given him,” he says, “the greatest trouble, even perfectly organized as his hospital is, to trace out the tricks and shifts to which such persons as Louise Lateau resort.” Still, despite all the annoyance likely to result, he would not object to receive the girl into his establishment, and would look carefully into her case, which he admits has become of serious importance, now that the colportage is still carrying thousands of pamphlets on the subject into every village of the Rhine, and a great part of the country is in a ferment about it.

The Liberal press speak of the woman with disgust, while the Ultramontane papers believe in the miraculous fasting and bleeding of Louise. In connection with this discussion, the following advertisement has appeared in the Breslau Morgen Zeitung:—

“Grown-up girls who wish to be stigmatized, or to be instructed in the art of stigmatizing others, may confidentially communicate with Mrs. Francisca Schlecker, midwife, 20 Corn Street. Humane treatment Cheap Prices. Absolute secracy guaranteed.”

The advertiser is said to be a Roman Catholic.

Dr. Hitchman on Prof. Tindall's Spiritualism and Materialism

Dr. William Hitchman, of this town, delivered two scientific and philosophical addresses yesterday afternoon and evening in the Islington Assembly-rooms, on behalf of the Liverpool Psychological Society, under the respective titles of “Prof. Tyndall’s Materialism,” and “Prof. Tyndall’s Spiritualism.” There was a large and attentive audience on both occasions. As a matter of course the celebrated address of the President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Belfast came in for a goodly share of critical dissection at the hands of the doctor, who is himself no novice in dealing with the spiritual, mental and physical constitution of mankind, having been for many years a well- known lecturer on metaphysics in various institutions here and elsewhere, as well as on anthropology, zoology, and the natural history of men, animals and plants, especially at the Anthropological Society. The lecture on “Materialism” was delivered in a scientific rather in a polemical spirit; albeit the lecturer evidently wanted to hurt, as well as hit, the opponents of that spiritual philosophy, ancient or modern, which maintains the existence in man of an immortal “something,” called spirit, soul or mind. There is no more identity of nature, said the lecturer, between molecular motion and human thought than there is between the taps of an electric telegraph machine and the mechanical pulsations of a lover’s heart, or the broad, catholic-inspiring thoughts of reason—soaring, as it were, on angel-wings to heaven, and entering the eternal protest of the intellect against the identity of two sets of conceptions as adequate or equivalent representations of spirit, mind and matter. I must believe my eyes—in health of body and soul. I cannot deny the truth of what I hear and see, or feel and know, and induction is philosophical. Law rules spiritual phenomena, quite as much as physical phenomena, and the impartial mind is just as free from the possibility of error in spiritualism as it is in materialism, when it elicits I by a vigorous logic that spiritual truth which underlies each group of material facts presented to human senses Controverting the statements of Prof. Tyndall, step by step, throughout the chief principles of organic science, he strongly maintained the spirituality of man, both for time and eternity. Whilst sincerely admiring the brilliancy of Prof. Tyndall’s learning and genius in mathematics and physics. Dr. Hitchman vehemently denounced his so-called “spiritualism,” as alike dishonoring, degrading and debasing, not only to that pure dignity of soul, which a lover of Catholicism in literature, science or philosophy should invariably display in the interests of Goo’s eternal truth and justice, whether pertaining to the things of spirit or matter, but to bis distinguished office <... continues on page 3-83 >

Editor's notes

Sources

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  Spiritual Scientist, v. 1, No. 11, November 19, 1874, p. 128

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  Spiritual Scientist, v. 1, No. 11, November 19, 1874, p. 130