Абрахам Меррит - Creep, Shadow!

I said, politely:

"I'd like to be a god for a time. Where can I find such storehouse? Or open such hive? It would be worth a few stings to become a god."

The veins throbbed in his temples; he said:

"You mock! Nevertheless, I will give you a hint. Once Dr. Charcot hypnotized a girl who had long been a subject of his experiments. He sent her deeper into the hypnotic sleep than ever he had dared before with any subject. Suddenly he heard another voice than hers coming from her throat. It was a man's voice, the rough voice of a French peasant. He questioned that voice. It told him many things – things the girl could not possibly have known. The voice spoke of incidents of the Jacquerie. And the Jacquerie was six hundred years before. Dr. Charcot took down what that voice told him. Later, he investigated, minutely. He verified. He traced the girl's parentage. She had come straight down from a leader of that peasant uprising. He tried again. He pushed past that voice to another. And this voice, a woman's, told him of things that had happened a thousand years ago. Told them in intimate detail, as one who had been a spectator of these happenings. And again he investigated. And again he found that what the voice had told him was true."

I asked, even more politely:

"And have we now arrived at transmigration of souls?"

He answered, violently:

"You dare to mock! What Charcot did was to pierce through veil upon veil of memory for a thousand years. I have gone further than that. I have gone back through the veils of memory not one thousand years. I have gone back ten thousand. I, de Keradel, tell you so."

Lowell said:

"But Dr. de Keradel – memory is not carried by the germ plasm. Physical characteristics, weaknesses, predilections, coloration, shape, and so on – yes. The son of a violinist can inherit his father's hands, his talent, his ear – but not the memory of the notes that his father played. Not his father's memories."

De Keradel said:

"You are wrong. Those memories can be carried. In the brain. Or rather, in that which uses the brain as its instrument. I do not say that every one inherits these memories of their ancestors. Brains are not standardized. Nature is not a uniform workman. In some, the cells that carry these memories seem to be lacking. In others they are incomplete, blurred, having many hiatuses. But in others, a few, they are complete, the records clear, to be read like a printed book if the needle of consciousness, the eye of consciousness, can be turned upon them."

He ignored me; to Dr. Lowell he said with intense earnestness:

"I tell you, Dr. Lowell, that this is so – in spite of all that has been written of the germ plasm, the chromosomes, the genes – the little carriers of heredity. I tell you that I have proved it to be so. And I tell you that there are minds in which are memories that go back and back to a time when man was not yet man. Back to the memories of his ape-like forefathers. Back further even than that – to the first amphibians who crawled out of the sea and began the long climb up the ladder of evolution to become what we are today."

I had no desire now to interrupt, no desire to anger – the man's intensity of belief was too strong. He said:

"Dr. Caranac has spoken, contemptuously, of the transmigration of souls. I say that man can imagine nothing that cannot be, and that he who speaks contemptuously of any belief is therefore an ignorant man. I say that it is this inheritance of memories which is at the bottom of the belief in reincarnation – perhaps the belief in immortality. Let me take an illustration from one of your modern toys – the phonograph. What we call consciousness is a needle that, running along the dimension of time, records upon certain cells its experiences. Quite as the recording needle of a phonograph does upon the master disks. It can run this needle back over these cells after they have been stored away, turning the graphs upon them into – memories. Hearing again, seeing again, living again, the experiences recorded on them. Not always can the consciousness find one of these disks it seeks. Then we say that we have forgotten. Sometimes the graphs are not deep cut enough, the disks blurred – and then we say memory is hazy, incomplete.

"The ancestral memories, the ancient disks, are stored in another part of the brain, away from those that carry the memories of this life. Obviously this must be so, else there would be confusion, and the human animal would be hampered by intrusion of memories having no relation to his present environment. In the ancient days, when life was simpler and the environment not so complex, the two sets of memories were closer. That is why we say that ancient man relied more upon his 'intuitions' and less upon reason. That is why primitive men today do the same. But as time went on, and life grew more complex, those who depended less upon the ancestral memories than those which dealt with the problems of their own time – those were the ones with the better chance to survive. Once the cleavage had begun, it must perforce have continued rapidly – like all such evolutionary processes.

"Nature does not like to lose entirely anything it has once created. Therefore it is that at a certain stage of its development the human embryo has the gills of the fish, and at a later stage the hair of the ape. And, therefore, it is that in certain men and women today, these storehouses of ancient memories are fully stocked – to be opened, Dr. Caranac, and having been opened, to be read."

I smiled and drank another glass of wine.

Lowell said:

"That is all strongly suggestive, Dr. de Keradel. If your theory is correct, then these inherited memories would without doubt appear as former lives to those who could recall them. They could be a basis of the doctrine of transmigration of souls, of reincarnation. How else could the primitive mind account for them?"

De Keradel said:

"They explain many things – the thought of the Chinese that unless a man has a son, he dies indeed. The folk saying – 'A man lives in his children…'"

Lowell said:

"The new born bee knows precisely the law and duties of the hive. It does not have to be taught to fan, to clean, to mix the pollen and the nectar into the jellies that produce the queen and the drone, the different jelly that is placed in the cell of the worker. None teaches it the complex duties of the hive. The knowledge, the memory, is in the egg, the wriggler, the nymph. It is true, too, of the ants, and of many insects. But it is not true of man, nor of any other mammal."

De Keradel said:

"It is true also of man."

There was a devil of a lot of truth in what de Keradel had said. I had come across manifestations of that same ancestral memory in odd corners of the earth. I had been burning to corroborate him, despite that excusable dig of his at my ignorance. I would have liked to talk to him as one investigator to another.

Instead I drained my glass and said severely: "Briggs – I have not had a drink for five minutes," and then to the table in general: "Just a moment. Let us be logical. Anything so important as the soul and its travels deserves the fullest consideration. Dr. de Keradel began this discussion by asserting the objective existence of what the showman produced. That is correct, Dr. de Keradel?"

He answered, stiffly: "Yes."

I said: "Dr. de Keradel then adduced certain experiments of Dr. Charcot in hypnotism. Those cases are not convincing to me. In the South Seas, in Africa, in Kamchatka, I have heard the most arrant fakirs speak not in two or three but in half a dozen voices. It is a well-known fact that a hypnotized subject will sometimes speak in different voices. It is quite as well known that a schizoid, a case of multiple personality, will speak in voices ranging from high soprano to bass. And all this without ancestral memories being involved.