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.That the phenomena are really of supernormal origin and emanate from the disincarnate spirits of the other beings, who return to earth and take temporary possession of the organism of the medium, talking through her mouth and writing with her hand while she is in a somnambulistic state.‘2.That the phenomena are the product of and originate in the subliminal consciousness of the medium.‘The first theory, exemplified by Mrs Jackson’s earlier address, adduces as the essential argument in its support the frequently observed occurrence of mediums in trances speaking languages or expressing information that they do not know and cannot possibly know in their ordinary lives.‘The second theory, instead, credits the subliminal consciousness of the true medium with quite extraordinary powers of knowledge, memory, invention and understanding.When I first began regularly attending the séances of Hélène Smith, I hesitated for some time before coming to a final conclusion about which theory best describes the phenomena I then saw, and of which you have all been a witness today.In my present lecture, I will defend the hypothesis of the second theory.‘Let me attempt to explain why, by first saying that of all the traits that I discover in her tale of Martian romance – which consists in several dozen sessions similar to that which you witnessed today, but greatly varied and containing very little repetition of information – the most salient feature is undoubtedly this: its profoundly infantile character.’The audience gasped collectively.Surely this was unheard-of insolence, stated so bluntly in the hallowed circles of the SPR!‘The candour and imperturbable naivety of childhood,’ continued the professor, ignoring the noise, ‘which doubts nothing because it is ignorant of everything, is necessary in order for one to launch himself seriously upon an enterprise such as the pretended exact and authentic depictions of an unknown world.An adult who is at all cultivated and has any experience of life would never waste time in elaborating similar nonsense; Mademoiselle Smith less than anyone, intelligent and cultivated as she is in her normal state.‘In general, it is the sitters who gather as much as they can of the strange words pronounced by Mademoiselle Smith in her states of trance, but, as you have just seen, that is very little, since Hélène, in her Martian state, often speaks with a tremendous volubility.Moreover, a distinction must be made between the relatively clear and brief phrases that are later translated by Esenale, and the rapid and confused gibberish the signification of which can never be obtained, probably because it really has none, being only a pseudo-language.‘Although as you saw, Hélène can preserve a certain memory of her visions in the waking state, and make reproductions of some of the things she saw, her verbo-motor hallucinations of articulation and of writing seem to be totally incompatible with her preservation of the waking state, and are invariably followed by amnesia.Hélène is always totally absent or entranced while her hand writes mechanically, and she is not aware of speaking Martian automatically, and does not recollect it.This incapacity of the normal personality of Mademoiselle Smith to observe at the time or remember afterwards any of her verbo-motor automatisms denotes a more profound perturbation than that which she experiences during her reception of visual hallucinations.For this reason, it is not surprising to me that her visual experiences bear an obvious resemblance to those which surround her in her ordinary life: the Martians closely resemble the human beings of our own planet in their appearance, and their houses and trees are mere fanciful variations upon ours.‘The Martian language, produced in a state of deeper trance leaving no memory behind, appears far less similar to anything familiar to us.Yet proceeding by analogy, I determined to inspect it more closely to see whether, in fact, it was not actually much more similar to Mademoiselle Smith’s native French than it appeared on the surface.I began by a complete examination of the strange alphabet in which she wrote down the Martian sentences during her experiences of automatic writing.‘Now, it is not always easy to represent a language and its pronunciation by means of the typographical characters of another.Happily, the Martian, upon detailed examination and in spite of its strange appearance and the fifty millions of leagues which separate us from the red planet, turned out to be in reality so near a neighbour to French in both alphabet and syntax, that one can only conclude that either French-speakers are astoundingly lucky in having a language that is so close a neighbour to Martian, or that Mademoiselle Smith has invented the Martian language entirely, based on her intimate subliminal knowledge of her mother tongue.Let me give two simple examples supporting my claim that the pretended Martian language is nothing but an infantile travesty of French: it will suffice for you to contemplate for one moment the two sentences spoken in Martian here in this hall, whose translations are written upon the board before you:‘Cé évé pléva ti di benez essat riz tes midée durée!’‘Dodé né ci haudan té méss métiche Astané!’‘If you compare these sentences to their English translations, you may already be struck by a general similarity in sentence structure, compared for example with that of the Chinese
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