Lumen

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Flammarion Camille. Lumen

FIRST CONVERSATION RESURRECTIO PRÆTERITI

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SECOND CONVERSATION REFLUUM TEMPORIS

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THIRD CONVERSATION HOMO HOMUNCULUS

FOURTH CONVERSATION ANTERIORES VITÆ

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FIFTH CONVERSATION INGENIUM AUDAX: NATURA AUDACIOR

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Quærens. You promised, dear Lumen, to describe to me that supremest of moments which immediately succeeds death, and to relate to me how, by a natural law, singular though it may seem, you lived again your past life, and penetrated a hitherto-unrevealed mystery.

Lumen. Yes, my old friend, I will now keep my word; and I trust that, thanks to the life-long communion of our souls, you will be able to understand the phenomenon you deem so strange.

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Years, days, and hours are constituted by the movements of the Earth. In space, outside these movements time does not exist; indeed, it is impossible to have any notion of time. I think, however, that the event I am now going to describe to you occurred on the very day of my death, for, as you will see presently, my body was not yet buried when this vision appeared to my soul.

As I was born in 1793, I was then, in 1864, in my seventy-second year, so I was not a little surprised to find myself animated by a vivacity of mind as ardent as in the prime of my life. I had no body, and yet I was not incorporeal; I felt and saw that I was constituted of a substance which, however, bore no analogy to the material form of terrestrial bodies. I know not how I traversed the celestial spaces, but by some unknown force I soon found that I was approaching a magnificent golden sun, the splendour of which did not, however, dazzle me. I perceived that it was surrounded by a number of worlds, each enveloped in one or more rings. By the same unconscious force I was driven towards one of these rings, and was a spectator of the marvellous phenomena of light, for the starry spaces were crossed everywhere by rainbow bridges. I lost sight of the golden sun, and I found myself in a sort of night coloured with hues of a thousand shades. The sight of my soul far exceeded that of my body, and, to my surprise, this power of sight appeared to be subject to my will. The sight of the soul is so marvellous that I must not stop to-day to describe it. Suffice it to say that instead of seeing the stars in the heavens as you see them on the Earth, I could distinguish clearly the worlds revolving round each other; and strange to say, when I desired to examine more closely these worlds, and to avoid the brilliance of the central sun, it disappeared from my sight, and left me under the most favourable conditions for observing any one of them I wished.1 Further, when my attention was concentrated on one particular world, I could distinguish its continents and its seas, its clouds and its rivers, although they did not appear to become larger, as objects seen through a telescope do. I saw any special thing that I fixed my sight upon, such as a town or a tract of country, with perfect clearness and distinctness.

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