Tags: painful out-of-body experience; panoramic life review;
Louis-Alphonse Cahagnet (1850); astral projection; universe in
miniature
Cahagnet’s panoramic life review
(He
opened the doors of perception well before Aldous Huxley.)
A couple of hours ago, I came across a condensed version
of the following excerpt in a footnote running on pages 74 and 75 of Jens
Schlieter’s What Is it Like to Be
Dead? Near-Death Experiences, Christianity and the Occult (Oxford
University Press), 2018. After having very
recently posted on this website the earliest English translation of a
vaguely similar account that was penned by the former Apollonian priest
and prolific author Plutarch (A.D. 46-119), it was hard to resist
finding the original quote in French as well as its English translation
(published approximately 170 years ago). Written by a former
cabinet-maker/furniture repairer turned Swedenborgian mesmerist,
spiritualist and successful author, the Frenchman Louis-Alphonse
Cahagnet (1809-1885), the following passage describes an out-of-body
experience induced by the intake of hashisch. It is unusual, in
that not only the narrator’s departure from his body is described as extremely painful (and it is put
through to the reader in a very cinematographic fashion), but it lasts for a couple of hours (in sharp contrast to the usual,
quasi instantaneous life review that
popular culture claims happens in accidents or at the time of other such
unexpected occurrences) and it is panoramic in scope… The
translation provided below is that of Flinders Pearson (The
sanctuary
of spiritualism; a study of the human soul, and of its relations with
the universe, through somnambulism and ecstasy, London; no date, but
generally the book is thought to have been published in either 1851 or
1853). The original French text is available here.
Please note that I give some links at the bottom of this page and that, as
usual, albeit with the exception of ‘I was a universe in miniature’,
all words made to stand out in green, bold or italics are purely of my
decision.
[…]
Detached from my material body as I felt that
I was, I re-entered and descended
within it as into a house. The most sublime spectacle there
awaited me; one would have said that a fairy hand had made preparations
for it during my absence. I found myself in the midst of a most
complicated universe, which was nothing less than that same material
body, in which I then felt a shock
which commenced in the small of the back, and stopped at the crown of the
head. It was so excessively violent,
and produced so painful an effect upon me,
that it is impossible to describe it to you. Imagine for a moment that
my nerves, blood-vessels, tendons, and most delicate fibres had their
extremities under the epidermis, and that, having a point of junction in
the veins, they then traversed the heart, lungs, and all the viscera; that
an invisible hand shook violently this multitude of filaments; —think of
what they must feel at all their extremities; suppose afterwards that each
of these threads was shaken separately and successively—how painful the
sensation that must result from it. Isaw—I knew—but
I purchased this spectacle at a very high
price in physical agonies. If there is no pleasure without pain,
there is doubtless no pain without pleasure. So it happened to me. The most beautiful spectacle man has ever
seen was the reward of my sufferings—a vast panorama of allthat I hadseen,thought,
orknown
in the course ofmy lifewas represented in
the most brilliant colours, in the form
of transparent pictures,
illuminated from behind by an incomparable light. This panorama unfolded itself around me, revolving with so much rapidity, and
representing so immense a variety of these
images, that I should be obliged to write a volume to describe
to you in detail what I saw in a few hours.
This state is so different from the material state, that it is
wholly impossible, while subjected to its influence,
to appreciate the time that slips away, and the space that exists
between the succession and continuance of these images. I felt a
conviction that I hovered over the centre and
above this microscopic universe, which nevertheless presented to
me the semblances of forms and space, producing the same effect and
impression as material forms and spaces. Being swayed by the idea of
observation and comparison between this state and the material state, I
could not but pronounce in favour of the former. The
material state appeared in all respects inferior—that is to say,
the towns, monuments, public places, gardens, sky and earth, were of
incomparable beauty. I found myself in the
spots I desired to visit, without ceasing to observe that I
perceived them in myself—that they were my domain. I
had got the solution I had been in search of; I understood what man was—I was a universe in miniature;
and I appreciated how it was a clairvoyant could be in Egypt or China
without journeying thither; how he could offer his hand to an African
without change of place. I conclude, first, that this state is the
spiritual state we shall enter on quitting our material state. […]
