Theodore Flournoy
Smith’s three distinct spirit stories were narrated in a serial-like form. The story of the princess Simandini began with her committing sati in 1402, following the death of her husband, the prince Sivrouka Nayaka of Chandragiri (or in some versions, Tchandragiri) in “Kanara on India’s west coast”. Simandini, as a later séance episode revealed, had been an Arab maiden who had fallen in love with Sivrouka. Smith cited customs, costumes and even the architecture of the time.
As Simandini, Smith replicated in every sense an “Oriental” princess with “the poses of a priestess”, singing “exotic melodies, played with an imaginary monkey”. She even “stretched on a sofa with the snake like movements of a real princess”. But what appeared extraordinary was the Sanskrit Smith spoke and wrote in – a language she had, as her past showed, little idea of. Her writing also revealed a few Arabic phrases.
Flournoy’s search of Geneva’s libraries turned up a volume on Indian history written in French by an obscure historian called De Marles. The book contained the entire story of Sivourka Nayaka and his ill-fated wife. A later search also revealed a book of elementary Sanskrit grammar in the very room Smith gave her séances in. As Flournoy rationalised, Smith perhaps knew of the story. She had even learnt something of Sanskrit grammar, but all this also appeared to suggest Smith’s amazing powers of memory and imagination.
Smith’s second story had her behaving like an aristocratic lady, speaking French as it was spoken a century before. Flournoy deduced that she was now Marie Antoinette, France’s doomed queen. Her spirit companion – someone who reveals the medium’s story, speaking through her for the audience – was called Leopold Balsamo or Cagliostro, an occultist (much like Rasputin) who had the real Marie Antoinette’s devotion.
Flournoy’s reasoning was that Smith might have read works such as Alexandre Dumas’ Memoirs of a Physician, which detailed experiences that fit Smith’s descriptions of late 18th-century Paris, and that she had possibly woven Dumas’ writings and those from other works into her trances.
But it was the third story that appeared even more extraordinary, as Smith described her journeys to the planet Mars. As written down by Flournoy, Smith – speaking in “Martian” – talked of “brilliant colours”, her “flight into space”, and then seeing a world quite like earth, but peopled with disembodied spirits, many of them long dead. She spoke of “carriages gliding by, with no horses or wheels but emitting sparks”; “of houses with fountains on the roof”; and men and women dressed almost similarly.
Flournoy’s close analysis of Martian revealed it to be a kind of French with only some “letters and words (inter) changed”. Soon, Flournoy, with all his rational explanations, found he was no longer welcome at Smith’s séances. Smith later won the attention of a rich American lady, who offered to be her patron.
Studying mediums