Otherworldly literature (translated)

By Ernesto Bozzano

- This edition is unique;
- The translation is completely original and was carried out for the Ale. Mar. SAS;
- All rights reserved.

In this text the author analyses 12 cases of psychographics - i.e. dictated by entities that self-qualify as spirits of the dead - whose events go beyond the obvious explanation of activity due to autosuggestion or rudimentary dream processing. In the cases described and analysed, a series of solid clues seem to allow the attribution of the writings examined to interventions outside the medium. We start from the experience of Enrichetta Beecher-Stowe and her famous novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, from that of Francesco Scaramuzza and his works dictated by none other than Ludovico Ariosto and Goldoni. The conclusion of the unfinished novel Edwin Drood, dictated to the medium directly by Dickens, is also discussed. Particular attention is paid to the mediumistic experiences of Victor Hugo and Oscar Wilde and to the William Sharp-Fiona Macleod cases and the even more intriguing one of Patience Worth and Mrs. Curran. We then move on to the voluminous Writings of Cleopas dictated to Miss Geraldine Cummins, and the sacred writings dictated to Rev Bush which come directly from spirits who lived at the time of Christ.
The text is characterised by Bozzano's particular style, which always strives to treat 'supernormal' events using methods and language as close as possible to those of classical scientific analysis.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anna Ruggieri
• Release date: Jun 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9788892864283

Book preview

PREFACE

Ernesto Bozzano was born in Genoa on 9 January 1862. From his earliest years he showed a marked love of study, which led from literature to scientific philosophy, which was then the prevailing discipline. Among philosophers, Spencer in particular attracted him because of the universality of his mind and his work.

However, in 1891, he received a letter from the French psychologist Prof. Ribot, announcing that he would have a new journal - Annales des Sciences Psychiques - then founded by Prof. Carlo Richet. Prof. Ribot urged Bozzano to read carefully the contents and to express his opinion about it. The result was disastrous, because Bozzano, imbued with the scientific philosophy of the time, found it scandalous to speak of telepathic transmission of thought at great distances, and, in any case, of extra-sensory perception in general.

Professor Rosenbach, of Petersburg, wrote an article in the Revue Philosophiqu in which he raged against the intrusion of these new telepathic experiences into the sacred enclosure of official psychology, but he did so with such deficiency and poverty of argumentation that Bozzano said to himself: "If these are the objections, then the question posed by Psychical Research subsists in all its force.There is therefore a great problem to be solved with new methods and data: the problem of the Soul. I shall perhaps devote my life to investigating it.

So it was. From 1891 onwards, until his death, for 53 years, he lived and worked, locked in a room and hosted by his brothers, exclusively in favour of his beloved science - Metapsychics - of which he was to become one of its most illustrious representatives.

The consequences of 53 uninterrupted and persevering years of study were:

his appointment as an honorary member of the Society for Psychical Research, in both its English and American sections, and of the Institut Métapsychique International, as well as his collaboration with Light and Shadow, the "Revue Spirite, the Revue Métapsychique", Psychica, Light, the "International Psychic Gazette, The Two Worlds", etc.;

his reputation as the greatest living scholar of metapsychic phenomena, a reputation that was unanimously acknowledged by the greatest authorities of metapsychics as well as by representative elements of other conceptual activities; a series of works that began in 1903 and continued until his death. I would like to point out that during the years of the last war, since he was no longer able to receive any more books or journals from abroad, nor to collaborate with articles in magazines, he undertook to redo and update, quadrupling in size, that marvellous series of monographs which had initially been published in Luce and Ombra or in Anglo-French-American specialist journals.

I am now publishing this series of monographs in the series of Metapsychic Studies I edit (Europa Publishing House, Verona).

Letteratura d'Oltretomba is precisely one of the seventeen that Bozzano, friend and teacher, gave me in 1943 with the task of publishing them after his death. Letteratura d'Oltretomba is one of these masterly explorations in the field of the most extraordinary phenomena of the mind.

Bozzano's works need no particular comment: his prose is incisive, lucid, fluid, above all clear, unequivocal, unmistakable. Even the reader who is mediocrely versed in these themes feels immediately transported by the strength of the logical thought and the sharpness of the ideas.

As I said, his fame was worldwide, as evidenced by the fact that his books were translated into English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Greek, Romanian, Serbian and even Catalan.

Of all his works, during the years of the last war, he updated seventeen; however, nine others remained, which he wished to entrust to my hands, together with all his great metapsychic library and all his private papers, so that I might see to their definitive compilation.

I believe I am not lacking in reverence for the Maestro by publishing a small typewritten note that I found among the papers I inherited; a note that he had written exclusively for himself. It reads:

"Prof. Ismael Gomes Braga says of me:- "Bozzano goes beyond his time; his hour is at work; glory will come tomorrow.... (Revue Spirite, 1934, p. 311).

Let's forget about the glory - comments Bozzano - to which I have never aspired, but Braga's observation struck me, because I for one have always been persuaded not to work for my generation, but for posterity, who will find in my works an inexhaustible treasure of facts, as well as considerations and intuitions indispensable if we want to erect on unshakable foundations the Temple of the new Science of the Soul.

Prof. Charles Richet had expressed himself in a similar way when he wrote to Bozzano:

"And now I want to speak to you in confidence. It is true what you have surmised. What neither Myers, nor Hodgson, nor Hyslop, nor Sir Oliver Lodge have been able to achieve, you have achieved with your masterly monographs, which I always read with religious attention. They make a strange contrast with the caliginous theories that clutter our science. Please believe in all my feelings of dislike and knowledge,

Professor Richet himself emphasised this last word.

Ernesto Bozzano died in Genoa on 24 June 1943: a great spirit has left this earth; but his Work lives and will live on among us as one of the highest and most beneficial signs of the human mind. The great comforter of souls has returned to his kingdom.

Gastone De Boni.

LITERATURE FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE

Among the multiple forms that mediumistic manifestations of an intelligent order take, there is also that of the manifestation of literary works, sometimes very voluminous, dictated psychographically by entities claiming to be the spirits of the departed.

It is not necessary to observe that many of these mediumistic productions do not withstand the most superficial critical analysis, proving to be clearly the fruit of a coarse and more or less rambling oneiric-subconscious elaboration, with somnambulistic personifications concreted by suggestion or autosuggestion; Personifications which can do no better than make use of the resources of culture and intelligence inherent in the conscious personalities from which they derive, with the consequence that the literary works of the supposed communicating spirits often prove so rudimentary as to betray their origin, thus removing all doubt on the subject.

This does not prevent us from finding, alongside the pseudo-mediums, genuine mediums, through which are sometimes produced literary works of great merit, which give rise to serious reflection, since they cannot in any way be attributed to a subconscious elaboration of the very limited general culture of the mediums who dictated them. This leads logically to the inference that such productions can indeed be attributed to extrinsic interventions; All the more so when one considers that, in addition to the evidence to be found in the form, style and individual technique of the literary dictation, as well as in the calligraphic identity, there is also other important cumulative evidence consisting of personal details ignored by all those present and found to be true, or in equally true quotations ignored by all and referring to historical, geographical, topographical, linguistic and philological elements, sometimes of a complex and almost always rare order; as well as in detailed, colourful, lively descriptions of the environment and customs of very ancient peoples; all circumstances that cannot be explained in any way with the convenient hypothesis of the subconscious emergence of knowledge acquired by the medium and then forgotten (cryptomnesia).

The aim of this paper is to analyse the main manifestations of this genre, especially since today we obtain dictations that have a high theoretical value in a decidedly spiritualist sense.

In this order of events, very little of theoretical importance was achieved in the past; however, I cannot refrain from mentioning it briefly.

* * *

Case I.

And I begin with a case of transitions in which one does not know what solution to adopt in judging whether the way in which a famous literary work was extrinsic is to be attributed to extrinsic interventions or to a state of psychic over-excitement that is quite common in the 'crises of inspiration' to which brilliant personalities are subjected.

However, the case is interesting and instructive, given the author's notoriety and the great influence that the literary work alluded to had on the historical and social events of a great nation. I am referring to the famous writer Enrichetta Beecher-Stowe and her famous novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, which effectively contributed to the abolition of slavery in the United States.

The family environment in which Enrichetta Beecher-Stowe lived could be regarded as highly conducive to spiritual interventions. Professor James Roberton, writing in 'Light' (1904, p. 388), observes:

"Her husband, Professor Stowe, was a clairvoyant medium. He often saw ghosts of the dead around him, and this in such a distinct and natural way that it was sometimes difficult for him to distinguish 'incarnate spirits' from disembodied ones.

As for Mrs. Beecher-Stowe, she was also a great psychic, subject to frequent bouts of nervous depression, with phasic psychic absence, and had enthusiastically embraced the spiritualist movement that had begun in America some years before.

With regard to his great novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, I take the following information from Light (1898, p. 96):

"Mrs. Howard, a close friend of Mrs. Beecher-Stowe, provides the following suggestive information as to how this famous novel was dictated. The two friends were travelling, and stopped overnight in Hartford, on their way to the home of Mrs. Perkins, Stowe's sister. They both slept in the same room. Mrs. Howard had undressed at once, and from her bed was watching her friend who lingered in automatically combing her curly hair, showing in her appearance a state of intense mental concentration.

At this point the narrator continues:

This morning I received letters from my brother Edoardo, who is worried about me, because he fears that all this praise, all this fame created around my name, may not awaken in me a burst of pride, to the serious detriment of my Christian soul. So saying, she put down her comb, and exclaimed in a passionate voice: Beautiful soul, that brother of mine! But he would not care if he knew that I did not write that book! - How so? - I asked in amazement, - wasn't it you who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin? - No, she replied, I did nothing more than take note of what I saw. - What do you mean? You have never visited the Southern States. But all the scenes of my novel, one after another, unfolded before my vision, and I only described what I saw. - I then asked, Did you at least plot the events? - Your daughter Annie reproached me for having caused Evangelina to die, but I was not to blame, and could not prevent it. I felt as if the dearest person in my family had died, and when her death came, I was so overcome by it, that I could not take up my pen for more than a fortnight. - I asked, Did you know that poor Uncle Tom had to die, too? - He replied, "Yes, I knew that from the beginning, but I did not know how he was to die. When I came to this point in my story, I had no more visions for some time.

In another issue of the same journal (1918, p. 315), the following period on the same subject is reported:

One evening, towards sunset, Mrs. Beecher-Stowe was walking alone, as usual, in the park. Captain X. saw her, approached her, and taking off his hat respectfully, spoke to her as follows: 'In my youth I too read, with immense emotion, Uncle Tom's Cabin. Allow me to shake the hand of the author of this memorable novel. - The septuagenarian author held out her hand, remarking brightly: I didn't write it. - What! You didn't write it? - the captain asked, astonished, Then who did? - She added: God wrote it, and it is He who dictated it to me.

In the first of the quoted passages, one observes a spontaneous emergence from the writer's subconscious of cinematic visions indicating the unfolding of the novel's action, which is very similar to the way in which other writers of genius, such as Dickens and Balzac, dictated their novels. The latter, in turn, saw the characters and scenes they had imagined unfold before their subjective vision. The difference between their visions and those of Beecher-Stowe would be precisely in the latter circumstance: that they witnessed the unfolding of events created and directed by their conscious imagination, whereas Beecher-Stowe passively witnessed the unfolding of events that she had not created, and which were often in absolute contrast to her will, which would never have caused the two holy creatures described in her novel to die. This fact is important, and would tend to differentiate the subjective visions common to writers of genius from those of Beecher-Stowe, just as the stereotyped, automatic type-objectivities as obtained by hypnotic suggestion have nothing in common with the independent, freely acting mediumistic personalities as manifested by real mediums.

And the presumption that these were not purely subjective visions acquires greater force as a result of the second of the quoted passages, in which Beecher-Stowe explicitly states that she transcribed her novel as if it were dictated to her. This would show that the famous writer was a mediumscriber, a circumstance that would agree with the other noted by her biographers, that she was subject to phases of psychic absence, which presumably were states of incipient trance.

From another point of view, I note that Beecher-Stowe's exclamation: God wrote it! implies that the mediumistic dictation was anonymous; that is, the spiritual agent had concealed his or her individuality, presumably content to fulfil on Earth the mission he or she had assumed to contribute effectively, by means of a moving and heartrending account, to the great humanitarian work of the redemption of an oppressed race.

All this seemed to me to be legitimately induced by what was being said, but I do not insist on it, since the inductions themselves are not sufficient to conclude in favour of the extrinsic origin of the novel under examination. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that the bases on which the inductions in favour of a purely subjective explanation of the states of mind in which the writer found herself when she dictated her great novel, appear more deficient on analysis than the spiritualist interpretation of them.

Case II.

I shall now report on a second case of the kind that occurred in Italy many years ago; it is a case that can no longer be described as a case of transitions like the preceding one, and this especially because in it one does not find the theoretical uncertainty deriving from the fact of the communicating personality who does not reveal his presence. In this last episode, on the contrary, the mediumnic personalities operating explicitly declare to be them; but it is found that from the evidential point of view, the modalities in which the mediumnic dictations are expressed are so lacking that they raise much more doubts than in the previous case.

Professor Francesco Scaramuzza was the director of the Academy of Fine Arts in Parma, where he taught painting, an art in which he had achieved considerable excellence. He was nonetheless deprived of literary culture, since at the age of