Death and Its Mystery: Before Death
Camille Flammarion, 1920
An astronomer who weighed the suns once took up the most personal question of all: do we die entirely? Camille Flammarion spent twenty years collecting letters about premonitions, visions and dreams that came true to the smallest detail, and he checked them as one checks observations in an observatory. You will learn which stories he counted as proof of the soul, where he himself doubted, and why seeing the future does not mean losing your freedom.
Who it is for
For those who have lost people close to them and want to understand what can honestly be said about death, and for those who love mysterious stories but are not ready to take them on trust.
An inexplicable fact is still a fact, and an inexplicable explanation is not an explanation at all.
A letter the astronomer could not answer
In March 1907 a letter arrived from the Spanish town of Reinosa. It was written by a widow whose only son had just died. From childhood he had been seriously ill, endured thirteen years of agonising pain, and still tried to be cheerful so as not to upset his family. His mother wrote that in the thirty-two days since his death she had not slept even ten hours in all. And she begged a man she had never seen: “You, astronomer and thinker, who weighs the suns and the worlds, tell me whether souls live anywhere. Can I hope to see my son again? Does he see me?”
The letter was addressed to Camille Flammarion, one of the most famous popularisers of astronomy in France. He received hundreds of such letters. A priest, he reasoned, answers them in the name of faith. A scientist does not sit in the confessional or in the preacher’s pulpit, and can say only what he knows. So he answered honestly: we are still searching, and we do not pretend to have found. And yet he left the mother the hope of one day seeing her son, without promising what he could not prove.
This book is his attempt to answer in earnest. Flammarion had begun it more than half a century before, and finished it in 1920, when the war had taken millions of young lives and the letters from bereaved parents had become more numerous still. His plan is as simple as an astronomer’s plan. Before asking whether the soul outlives the body, one must establish whether it exists separately from the body at all. And one must establish it not with fine phrases but with observations. He repeats: “Facts! Facts!”
One thing must be said honestly from the start: what follows is Flammarion’s conviction and the evidence he gathered, not a result recognised by science. The book is best read as the report of a stubborn researcher who asks to be checked. You will see how he argues with the materialists, which stories about premonitions and prophetic dreams he tested, and what he thought about freedom if the future can be seen in advance. We begin with the question he asked first: what is thought?
The brain remembers, but perhaps does not keep
Émile Littré, author of the famous dictionary of the French language, was a convinced materialist. He reasoned like this: we have never met weight without a heavy body, heat without a warm body, or electricity without an electrified body. So there is no thought without a thinking substance either: thought is merely a property of nervous tissue.
Flammarion knew Littré personally and respected him. But in this reasoning he saw a vicious circle hidden in the word “property”. Weight and heat are impersonal and blind, while the will of even a small child is personal and aware of itself. By placing them in one row, we accept in advance what needs to be proved. It is like saying, he wrote, that salt can produce sugar.
He then leans on the philosopher Henri Bergson. It is customary to think that memories lie in the brain like pictures on a photographic plate. But there is an illness called aphasia: after damage to the brain, a person loses their words. And it sometimes happens that a strong agitation suddenly brings back a word that seemed lost for ever. And when the illness deepens, words go in one and the same order. First come proper names, then common nouns. Then come adjectives, and verbs go last, wherever the damage began. As if the illness knew grammar. Bergson’s conclusion, which Flammarion shares, is that the brain seems to serve to recall, not to keep.
The most touching example Flammarion takes from the sceptic, the mathematician Henri Poincaré. His colleague, Professor Potier, had been bedridden for twelve years, and by the end, according to Poincaré, only his two eyes could be seen. A few weeks before his death he asked for books on mathematics, to take up a subject new to him. Poincaré wrote that until the last day Potier showed that thought is stronger than death.
There is also an experiment that Flammarion invites you to try yourself. Sit down, rest your hands on your knees, and with your right hand lift the fingers of your left one by one: they fall of their own accord. Now want one finger to stay in the air, and it will stay. For Flammarion this is the simplest example of how an idea acts on matter. The brain takes part, but the cause does not lie in its oscillations: the brain, he repeats, is the instrument of thought, not its author.
He sees the weak point himself: usually thought weakens together with the brain, and the answer “the instrument weakens, not the spirit” remains an argument, not a proof. That is why he goes on to cases which, in his view, physiology can no longer explain.
About the author
Camille Flammarion was a French astronomer, founder of the observatory at Juvisy and of the Astronomical Society of France, and one of the most widely read popularisers of science of his time. He wrote the book on death over more than half a century and published it in 1920, five years before his death.
All books by this author: Camille Flammarion
Terms from the book
- determinism
- medium
- aphasia
- aneurysm
- fatalism
- autosuggestion
- Reinosa: A small town in the north of Spain, in the province of Santander. In 1907 a mother who had lost her son wrote to Flammarion from there.
- materialist: A supporter of materialism, the view that everything in the world, thought included, reduces to matter and its properties. Flammarion argues against this view.
- Littré: Émile Littré, French scholar of the nineteenth century, author of the famous dictionary of the French language, a follower of positivism and a convinced materialist. Flammarion knew him personally.
- Bergson: Henri Bergson, French philosopher of the early twentieth century. Flammarion cites his argument that memory is not stored in the brain like pictures on a photographic plate.
- Poincaré: Henri Poincaré, the great French mathematician at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Flammarion calls him a sceptic and cites his account of the last years of Professor Potier.
- Potier: A professor at the Polytechnic School in Paris and a colleague of Poincaré. For twelve years he was bedridden and to the end went on working in science.
- Duran: Duran de Gros, French physician and philosopher of the nineteenth century, a friend of Flammarion. He held that even the most obvious testimony of the senses must be checked, as in the example of the sun’s movement.
- Constans: Ernest Constans, French politician who was Minister of the Interior in 1889. Together with his wife he told Flammarion the story of the book with dynamite.
- Arbusov: A landowner and rural official from Pskov province, who in 1899 wrote to Flammarion about a premonition and a vision on the day of his mother’s death. The name is given as it is written in the French text.
- subliminal: That which lies below the threshold of consciousness: impressions and processes a person does not notice. The word was in use among researchers of the mind at the time.
- Eilsbury: An Englishman who in 1882 described how, at thirteen, he was drowning near the island of Bali and called for his mother, and how she heard his call in England.
- telepathy: The supposed transmission of thoughts and feelings at a distance without the help of the senses. It is not recognised by science; for Flammarion it was one of the main proofs that the soul exists.
- clairvoyant: A person who was believed able to see the hidden or the distant without the help of the eyes. Flammarion called this the sight of the spirit.
- magnetiser: A follower of Mesmer who put people into a special sleep by passes of the hands and by suggestion. Later this came to be called hypnosis.
- Alexis: Alexis Didier, the famous Parisian clairvoyant of the 1840s. Doctors, writers and the magician Robert-Houdin described his experiments in magnetic sleep.
- Robert-Houdin: Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, the best-known French magician of the nineteenth century, often called the father of modern stage illusion.
- Dubois: A clerk of a Paris pawnshop who in 1849 disappeared with a large sum. According to the manager’s account, he was found thanks to Alexis’ hints.
- Frapart: A French physician of the first half of the nineteenth century, a fervent defender of magnetism, who argued with official medicine.
- Bouillaud: Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud, professor of the medical faculty in Paris, a well-known physician of the nineteenth century and a determined opponent of magnetism.
- Galle: A medical student of Lyon, later a doctor, who on 27 June 1894 wrote down the name of the future president and the number of votes before the election.
- Varet: A fellow student of Galle, later a doctor in Annecy. One of the three witnesses who confirmed his prediction.
- Casimir-Perier: Jean Casimir-Perier, French politician, elected President of the Republic on 27 June 1894.
- Geley: Gustave Geley, French physician and researcher of the mind, a colleague of Flammarion at the Institut Métapsychique. He published the story of Galle.
- Sorel: A French officer who in 1919 sent Flammarion an account of a dream of 1911 that came true in 1918, with the signatures of two witnesses.
- déjà vu: The feeling that what is happening now has been before. Psychologists explain it as a fault in memory; Flammarion considered such explanations unproven.
- Tuchkov: A Russian general killed at the battle of Borodino in 1812. The story of his wife’s prophetic dream reached Flammarion through the notes of a travelling Quaker.
- spiritism: The teaching and practice of communicating with the spirits of the dead, for example through a table that answers with knocks. It was very popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
- Künzler: Vera Künzler, a girl from Naples who in 1917 wrote to Flammarion about a prediction that came true in her family. Her mother signed the letter as a witness.
- Liébeault: Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault, a physician of Nancy, one of the founders of treatment by suggestion and hypnosis in the nineteenth century.
All terms
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