Mysterious Stories

By Tadeusz Oszubski

We learn history at school from the perspective of wars, gigantic social processes, the fate of countries and even continents. To facilitate understanding and remembering these events, scientists and teachers present the achievements of selected figures living in the epochs in question: their deeds, conquests, and artistic achievements. History, however, has an equally important but little-known realm.

 

These are extraordinary events in the lives of well-known people and special achievements of little-known but extremely interesting figures.

On the mysterious side of the story, Heinrich Himmler meets John Dee, and Gilles de Rais meets Isaac Newton.

The book "Mysterious Stories" proves that facts can be stranger than literary fiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Royal Hawaiian Press
• Release date: Sep 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201640965

Book preview

Mickiewicz and the ghosts

From the half 19th century, spiritism aroused the interest of scientists, aristocrats, and maidservants. People from all walks of life took part in screenings during which attempts were made to establish contact with the spirits of the dead. Spiritism became a kind of pop culture fashion that flared up at the end of the Romantic era. No wonder that many artists from those times became interested in mysticism, including Mickiewicz, one of the three Polish national poets.

Adam Bernard Mickiewicz was born on 24 December 1798 in the present-day Lithuanian Nowogródek. As befits a spiritual romantic born on Christmas Eve, the national bard was interested in spiritism. This fashion, however, fell on the end of life of the author of Pan Tadeusz. The writer died two years later, in the year 1850 in Istanbul, during the last national mission of the bard. Mickiewicz's evocation of ghosts took place in Paris, and since the poet was already a very mature man, he carefully assessed the causes and effects of this phenomenon. It should be emphasized, however, that he considered the manifestations of the ghosts of dead people as real.

Two or three years before the bard's death, at the beginning of the second half of the 19th century, seances became very popular in the capital of France, where Mickiewicz lived at that time. No wonder, because in this place and time the foundations of the spiritualist doctrine were created by the author of the Book of Spirits, the the the famous Allan Kardec, under the pseudonym, or the French physician, astronomer and physicist Hippolyte D. Rivail, born in 1804 and died in 1869.

On May 26, 1853, Mickiewicz wrote in a letter to Karolina Towiańska, the wife of the famous messianist who was staying in Zurich, with whom he had an argument at the time: phenomena like voices, tapping, and ghosts. I am reading an extraordinary trial right now, where a lot of witnesses confirm a similar phenomenon. I have seen the experiments made, but I do not mix with them. It seems to me that these spirits which Providence now permits to bump matter to move materialized minds belong to a very low realm and many falsehoods will arise from here into the world. "

The next day, Adam Mickiewicz, personally and in his own apartment, sat down at a spiritualist table. He was accompanied by his wife, Celina née Szymanowska, with whom he married in 1834, which resulted in 6 children.

On May 27, 1853, in the afternoon, the Mickiewicz's were visited by a larger company, 14 people, including gentlemen Lenartowicz, Goszczyński, Służalski, and only one woman, young Zofia Komierowska. It was in the diary of Mrs. Komierowska that the description of the screening at Mickiewicz's, published 31 years after the bard's death, in the magazine Bluszcz was preserved.

Someone from the arrivals mentioned the spinning tables, that they are taking care of them more and more, wrote Komierowska. The poet sat down at the heavy oak table, urging the whole society to follow his example. In the midst of complete silence and solemn atmosphere, we all sat around, holding the tips of the fingers resting on the table.

We held our hands in this way for half an hour in complete silence and in a solemn atmosphere, reported Mrs. Zofia. The table, however, did not show any particular symptoms, it stood completely still.

Mickiewicz ended the meeting. The impatient poet signaled for the rise from the chairs, saying that it was possible to make this attempt once, but he would definitely not come back to it again.

The session at the poet's office did not work, everyone was more or less disappointed. What was the cause of the failure? A witty ending to this incident was given by Stanisław Wasylewski in his book Under the charm of the underworld, published in 1923. Wasylewski wrote: The ghosts, prone to chatting with just any comtess in salons and any apothecary in Proszowice, and any bookseller in Kraków, boycotted the grandmaster of bard poetry and did not deign to answer the summons of the Polish romantic's senate.

Despite the unsuccessful screening, Mickiewicz continued to be interested in spiritism. After all, Mickiewicz included his interest in the afterlife in various cultural contexts in some of his previously written works, in Dziady, in Ballads and romances. The spiritual sphere was so close to him that he saw even national matters connected with it, and it was not by accident that he joined the messianists of Count Andrzej Towiański from the Circle of God's Cause for several years.

On September 29, 1853, Bohdan Zaleski, one of the participants in that unsuccessful experiment, met the bard in the Arsenal Library, where Mickiewicz had been employed since 1852. And the gentlemen again talked about spiritism. I found Adam, Zaleski noted in his diary. He took me upstairs, he was happy and talked about the ghosts at the table for almost an hour. The same was true on October 31, that is, on the eve of the All Saints' Day. I found Mickiewicz with Różycki in the park. We chatted together about spinning tables.

In the last years of his life, Mickiewicz believed that contacts with ghosts do take place, but it is a suspicious or even blasphemous activity. The writer seemed to have a feeling that many years after his death, he would go to screening as a ghost thanks to Malwina Gromadzińska, who was considered a fashionable medium in Lviv.

Mrs. Gromadzińska has gone down in history by interviewing another bard, Juliusz Słowacki, who lived in the years 1809–1849.

Juliusz Słowacki, when asked at the screening by Mrs. Gromadzińska about the details of working on the poem Kordian and asked for tips on the education of young people, was to answer the following: I will answer the first question later. My thoughts back then were so different and bizarre that I don't want any of it. Give another question that might help and advise you, oh! Youthful dreamers, like everyone else your age ...I'd love to ...Słowacki will give you some advice in his free time and give you some rhymes ...but different today ...today there is no fantasy dreamer anymore, the purified spirit sees differently and would write other history today for Polish children! .

The spirit of the bard reportedly signed this statement. The world interview with the author of The Silver Dream of Salomea also appeared in the Lviv periodical Grave Light. Referring to this text, the then experts in Słowacki's work ironically stated that the great Juliusz had lost his talent after his death.

On May 29, 1869, Malwina Gromadzińska took care of Mickiewicz, who had been dead for 14 years. During a screening organized in one of the fashionable salons of Lviv, Gromadzińska wrote in the so-called automatic writing, a sketch on Tadeusz Kościuszko and Napoleon Kościuszko. The medium claimed that the text was dictated by the spirit of Mickiewicz from the afterlife. The work was published in the first spiritualist periodical, Light Afterlife, published in Polish. However, literary scholars decided that it was a fraud that the text was amateur, unworthy of the pen of the author of Pan Tadeusz.

Was Gromadzińska a fraudulent medium? Or maybe it was some malicious spirit impersonating the national bard? For example, Słowacki, with whom he didn't like himself during his lifetime. Before he died, Mickiewicz had a well-established opinion on this matter, which he presented in the above-mentioned letter to Towiańska.

Himmler, the dark knight

Heinrich Himmler was a romantic. Except that he was equally naive and sentimental. Because who else would dream in the early 1920s to go to Russia with their family and live there on a farm? Like the Roman Cincinnatus, he wanted to be a soldier fighting for his homeland, and in times of peace to cultivate a farm. These dreams were at odds with Himmler's petite build and not the best health. If the times were different and other friends, it is possible that Heinrich would have been working on the farm while managing someone's property and reading poems to his wife in the evenings. The whirlwind of history, however, carried him in an ideologically surprising direction, elevating him to the top of