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- We would like to draw your attention to a publishing
event of unusual importance to students of channeling and of paranormal
phenomena in general, including UFOs.
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- While in political exile on the Channel Island of Jersey
in 1853-1855, the great French writer Victor Hugo participated in well
over one hundred turning table spiritistic seances. The communications
from the spirits, conveyed by a table leg tapping out letters (the precursor
of the Ouija board), allegedly came from dead historical and literary personages,
including Galileo, Shakespeare, Hannibal, Christ and Mozart; from abstractions
like Balaam's Ass, Idea, Drama, India and Russia; from strange, otherworldly
entities with names like the Shadow of the Sepulcher, Death, and Archangel
Love; and even from aliens, including ETs from Jupiter, Mercury and the
stars.
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- The author of Les Miserables deeply believed in the reality
of these communications, predicting that the transcripts of the seances
would become "one of the Bibles of the Future." But he said little
about these experiences in his lifetime, and the transcripts were not published--and
then only in part until 1923, in a volume entitled Chez Victor Hugo: Les
Tables Tournantes de Jersey. Though the book, edited by Gustave Simone,
enjoyed some popularity in its time, the transcripts were not published
again --though this time in a significantly expanded edition-- until 1968,
when they made up part of Volume Nine of editor Jean Massinâ's monumental,
18-volume Oeuvres Complètes de Victor Hugo, published in Paris by
Le Club Francais du Livre.
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- Never, until now, has there been any attempt in the English
language to analyze the content of these seances, and never, until now,
have the transcripts been published in any language other than French.
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- This is because, up until our day, many of the communications,
despite their passion, poetry, and brilliance, have remained mysterious
to the point of obscurity.
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- In our millennial time, with channeling once more in
vogue, and much material being channeled allegedly not only from humans
but also from aliens, Victor Hugo's conversations with the spirits have
suddenly taken on new meaning.
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- A newly-published book from New Paradigm Books, Conversations
with Eternity: The Forgotten Masterpiece of Victor Hugo, translated with
an intensive commentary by John Chambers, with an introduction by Martin
Ebon placing this period of Hugo's life in historical context, presents,
for the first time in English the best of these communications, interpreting
them in the light of modern times, of what we presently understand channeling
to be, and of modern-day physics. Here is some of what happened during
these revelations:
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- * Hugo had close encounters of the third kind, communicating
with an alien from Jupiter named Tyatafia and with the inhabitants of Mercury.
The Mercurians were half-physical, half-spirit, and floated in the atmosphere
of their planet like living rays of light.
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- * The seance participants listened to the shade of Galileo
discuss the universe in Einsteinian terms.
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- * The participants heard the spirit of Joshua (who 'fit'
the Battle of Jericho) explain how he demolished the walls of Jericho and
made the sun stand still by utilizing the principles of modern-day quantum
holography.
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- * The talking tables not only tapped out hundreds of
messages but also drew pictures (with a pencil attached to a table leg),
notably of the inhabitants of Mercury, and, mostly correctly, of the thoughts
of loved ones in the minds of the participants. The spirit draughtsman
of the Mercury pictures claimed he was fourteenth-century French alchemist
Nicholas Flamel, and his drawings contained alchemical formulae paralleling
the descriptions of the Mercurians.
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- * The French poet André Chénier, guillotined
during the French Revolution, appeared and dictated the final verses of
the poem he had been working on before he was executed. The verses, exactly
matching the style and quality of the stanzas of the living Chénier,
were channeled when Victor Hugo was not at the seance, confounding those
critics who believe the contents of the Jersey island seances came from
the unconscious mind of that great poet. Chénier also described
his own beheading and what came after, in the first-ever channeled description
of a near-death experience, and one of the most graphic, compelling and
moving ever.
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- * English literature was well represented, with long
disquisitions from William Shakespeare and brief, mysterious visits from
Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott.
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- * The table composed music with one of its legs posed
on the keyboard of a piano. One of the spirit composers was, allegedly,
the spirit of the Ocean itself; the other was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart,
who also sometimes spoke at the seances.
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- * A number of spirits claimed they were the shades of
beasts who, in myth and legend, had helped mankind. This included the Lion
of Androcles, who spared Androcles in the Roman Forum because the Christian
had earlier removed a thorn from the lion's paw; Balaam's Ass, who, permitted
by God to speak, set the erring Moabite Holy Man Balaam back on the path
of righteousness; and the Dove of Noah's Ark, who guided the ark of humanity
to a new and safe resting place. These animal-entities told Hugo that,
though animals couldn't reason, they could glimpse God; the entities further
communicated to the novelist-poet-playwright a thoroughly modern Animals'
Rights and Plants' Rights agenda, insisting that, since all beast and plant
life contained souls, even those forms of life should be treated with the
utmost love and respect. As Chapter 21 of the Conversations --entitled
"I love the Nettle and I Love the Spider: The Fifth Religion of Victor
Hugo"-- makes clear, the poet embraced these beliefs wholeheartedly,
returning crabs and lobsters to the ocean, allowing his property to be
overrun by wild animals, and refusing to cut flowers or to have them cut
in his presence. Hugo even maintained a careful respect for stones, which
were also, according to the spirits, vessels of conscious soul matter.
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- * The turning table channeled a lion speaking the language
of lions and a comet speaking the language of comets and drawing its own
self-portrait.
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- * The spirits preached a new doctrine of reincarnation,
or metempsychosis, which included lifetimes as animals. They claimed that
human souls advance steadily through stone, animal and plant lives up a
Great Chain of Being that leads them to existence as an angel, but that
they are in constant danger of backsliding if they commit serious crimes;
such souls risk tumbling all the way back down the Chain to immediate reincarnation
as a stone. The spirits declared that Cleopatra, to cite an example, had
been reincarnated as a worm. At one seance, the personification of Metempsychosis
itself spoke to Hugo and the other participants, summing up the doctrine
of metempsychoses in each of 14 brilliant statements.
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- * The spirit called Death asked Hugo to set up a last
will and testament for his writings in such a way that his words would
continue to appear posthumously from the grave --in "periods of human
crisis, when some shadow passes over progress, when clouds blot out the
ideal." The year 2000" was one date mentioned. Curiously, it
is only now, in our modern world with its understanding of Einsteinian
physics and quantum holography, that these transcripts can be read with
any degree of understanding. The spirits almost seem to be specifically
addressing our millennial times. In the person of Joshua, they appear to
be hinting at methods, which we may not be able to grasp until well into
the twenty-first century, of harnessing the essentially unitary nature
of our physical and non-physical universe.
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- " The brilliant Carthaginian general Hannibal, who
came close to conquering the Roman Empire in the third century B.C., appeared
and described in fantastical terms the imperial city of Carthage as it
was before the Romans razed it.
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- " Perhaps most amazingly, the spirits seemed to
speak from the very hearts of stars, describing a universe filled with
gleaming stars which were obliged to help weeping stars, and of worlds
of reward upon which dwelt souls of men and women who had lived lives deserving
of reward; these latter worlds were obliged to help punitary planets inhabited
by human souls who had lived wrongly and therefore now had to undergo a
purgatorial existence. The spirits who spoke to Hugo seemed uncertain as
to which worlds were those of reward and which were ones of punishment,
suggesting at one point that Jupiter was a "retirement home"
for geniuses like Mozart and Aeschylus, and at another that that planet
was a minor orb inhabited by the baleful likes of a Tyatafia. The spirits
seemed to assert ultimately that all physical planets were punitary, while
worlds of reward were ethereal non-physical globes of living light. But
the spirits were never ambivalent in their assertion that all advantaged
entities in our universe are under a strict moral imperative to help all
less advantaged entities; this moral imperative was communicated to Hugo
with firmness and with urgency. All these beliefs, conveyed to Victor Hugo
in 1853-1855, are so much like those channeled by modern-day trance mediums
that they could have been written yesterday and not 150 years ago.
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- Can all this be true? Is metempsychosis a reality? Did
the Spirits of Death and of Galileo and of Christ and of Balaam's Ass speak
to Victor Hugo, in the mid-nineteenth century, of Einsteinian physics and
quantum holography? Is the entire universe a single, conscious, living
entity? Do and must gleaming stars help weeping stars? Do all beasts, plants
and even stones encapsulate souls, thereby having the right to the same
love and respect as human beings?
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- Conversations with Eternity, The Forgotten Masterpiece
of Victor Hugo, translated with a commentary by John Chambers, with an
historical introduction by Martin Ebon, illuminates all of these questions.
For further information, visit the web site of NEW PARADIGM BOOKS/The Journal
of Pan-Dimensional Literature at:
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- http://www.newpara.com
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