What are spirits made of?

Regarding the substance that sustains spirits and allows them to manifest themselves on the physical plane, i quote an interesting article by Allan Kardec (1804-1869), father of spiritualism, author of fundamental works on the study of ghosts. , spirits and souls in pain, such as: Heaven and Hell (Le Ciel et l’Enfer), The Gospel according to Spiritism (L’Évangile Selon le Spiritisme), Genesis according to Spiritism (La Genèse selon le spiritisme) and The book of spirits (Le livre des spirits).

The article: What are spirits made of? It is found in the 1861 book: The Mediums’ Book (Le livre des mediums).

Separated from the materialistic opinion, as condemned both by reason and by facts, everything comes down to knowing if the soul after death can manifest itself to the living.

The question, reduced in this way to the simplest expression, is clear. It could be asked, of course, why intelligent beings that somehow live in our surroundings, although invisible by nature, could not attest their presence in some random way. Simple reason says that for this there is nothing absolutely impossible and this is already possible.

In an age as ours that almost everything is possibe, in which one tries to be aware of everything, in which one wants to know the why and how of each thing, we really know very little of the nature of the Spirits and of the means by which they can manifest themselves. Once this knowledge is acquired, the fact of the manifestations wiil not be surprising and will fall within the order of natural.

The idea that Spirits are part of people, makes the phenomenon of manifestations incomprehensible at first sight. These manifestations occur within the material world; For this reason, those who believe that the Spirit is the absence of all matter, wonder, rationally,  how can it work materially. But there is the error, because the Spirit is not an abstraction: it is a defined and circumscribed being.

The Spirit incarnated in the body constitutes the soul; when he leaves him to die, he does not come out stripped of all wrappings. All the Spirits tell us that they retain the human form, and indeed, when they appear to us it is under the one we knew them. Let us observe him attentively at the moment when they have just left life; they are in a state of turmoil; everything is confused around him; they see his body healthy or mutilated according to the type of death; on the other hand they see and feel alive; something tells them that this body belongs to them and they do not understand that they are separated from it. They continue to see themselves in their primitive form, and this vision produces, for a certain time, a singular illusion: that of believing that they are still alive .

Once this first moment of turmoil has dissipated, the body becomes for them an old dress, which they have stripped of, and they do not miss it; they feel lighter and as if unencumbered by a weight; They no longer experience physical pain, and are very happy to be able to rise up, travel through space as they did different times, living in dreams. However, despite of the absence of the body, they have a personality; they have a shape, but a shape that doesn’t bother them or embarrass them; Finally, they are aware of their self and their individuality.

What are we to deduce from all this? That the soul does not leave everything in the grave, and that takes something with it.

Numerous observations and irrefutable facts of which we shall have to speak later have led us to this consequence, that there are three things in the human:

1- the soul or Spirit,  in which the moral sense resides

2- The material body, gross covering, in which it is temporarily covered for the fulfillment of certain providential aims.

3- the perispirit, semimaterial fluidic envelope, serving as a link between the soul and the body.

Death is the destruction or, better, the disintegration of the gross envelope, which the soul abandons; the other separates and follows the soul, which is found in this way to always have an envelope; The latter, although fluidic, ethereal, vaporous, invisible to us in its normal state, does not mean that it ceases to be matter, although until now we have not been able to take it and submit it to analysis.

This second envelope of the soul or perispirit exists during the corporeal life; It is the intermediary of all the sensations that the Spirit perceives, the one through which the Spirit transmits its will to the exterior and works on the organs. To serve as a material comparison, it is a conductive electrical wire that serves as the reception and transmission of thought; It is, finally, that as a mysterious, inaccessible agent, is designated by the name of nervous fluid, which plays such a great role  of which not enough account is taken in physiological and pathological phenomena. Not considering the medicine but the ponderable material element, an incessant cause of action is deprived in the appreciation of the facts. But this is not the place to examine this question, we will only observe that the knowledge of the perispirit is the key to a portion of problems hitherto- until now- inexplicable.

The perispirit is not one of those hypotheses that have been resorted to sometimes in science to explain a fact; its existence, revealed by the Spirits, is also the result of observations. During its union with the body, or even after its separation, the soul is never separated from its perispirit.

It has been said that the Spirit is a flame, a spark: this must be understood of the Spirit itself, as an intellectual and moral principle, and to which a determined form could not be attributed; but in whatever degree it is found, it is always covered by an envelope or perispirit whose nature becomes more ethereal as it purifies itself and rises in the hierarchy; in such a way that for us the idea of form is inseparable from that of Spirit, and that we do not conceive one without the other. The perispirit forms,  an integral part of human; but the perispirit alone is not the Spirit as the body alone is not the human, because the perispirit does not think; it is to the Spirit what the body is to the human; that is, the agent or instrument of his action.

The form of the perispirit is the human form and when it appears to us it is generally the one under which we have known the Spirit in its life. It could be believed, according to this, that the perispirit, separated from all the parts of the body, molds itself in some way on it and retains its type, but this does not seem to be the case. It is likewise the form of all the Spirits not incarnated  only have the perispirit; it is the one under which the angels or pure Spirits have been represented at all times; from where we must deduce that the human form is the type form of all human beings.

But the subtle matter of the perispirit does not have the tenacity or rigidity of the compact matter of the body; It is, if we can express ourselves in this way, flexible and expandable. For this reason, the form it takes, although modeled on that of the body, is not absolute; it folds at the will of the Spirit, who can give to it this or that appearance to its liking, while the solid casing offers it insurmountable resistance. Freed from this cage that compressed the perispirit, it extends or narrows, it transforms, in a word, it lends itself to all metamorphoses, according to the will that acts on it. As a consequence of this property,, it is like the Spirit that wants to be recognized, it can, when this is necessary, take on the exact appearance it had in life.

The Spirits, as can be seen, are, then, beings similar to us, forming around us an entire invisible population in the normal state; we say in the normal state because, as we will see, this invisibility is not absolute.

We have said that, although fluidic, it does not cease to be a kind of matter, and this results from the fact of tangible appearances. It has been seen, under the influence of certain mediums, hands appear having all the properties of living hands that have heat, that can be touched, that offer the resistance of a solid body that grabs you, and that suddenly vanish like a shadow. . The intelligent action of these hands, which obviously obey a will, executing certain movements, even playing airs on an instrument, proves that they are the visible part of an invisible intelligent being. Their tangibility, their temperature, in a word, the impression they make on the senses, since it has been seen that they have left marks on the skin, painful blows or delicate caressing, prove that they are made of some material. Its instantaneous disappearance also proves that this matter is eminently subtle and is modified like certain substances that can alternately pass from the solid state to the fluid state and vice versa.

The intimate nature of the Spirit itself is entirely unknown to us; it is only revealed to us by his acts, and his acts cannot affect our material senses except through a material intermediary. The Spirit therefore needs matter to act on matter. Its direct instrument is his perispirit, just as man has his body, since his perispirit is matter, as we have just seen. It immediately has the universal fluid as its intermediary agent, a kind of vehicle on which it acts, as we act on the air to produce certain effects with the help of expansion, compression, propulsion or vibrations.

Considered in this way, the action of the Spirit on matter is easily conceived; It is of course understood that all the effects that result from this enter into the order of natural facts, and there is nothing wonderful about them. They have only seemed supernatural, because the cause was not known; Once this is known, the marvelous disappears and this cause falls entirely in the semi-material properties of the perispirit. This is a new order of fact that a new law comes to explain, and which no one will marvel at in a while, the same thing that happens today with long-distance correspondence in a few minutes by electricity.

Perhaps they will ask us how the Spirit, with the help of such a subtle matter, can work on heavy and compact bodies, lift tables, etc. Surely it would not be a man of science who could make such an objection; Because without speaking of the unknown properties that this new agent may have, do we not have analogous examples under our eyes? Doesn’t industry find its most powerful engines in the most rarefied gases and imponderable fluids? When you see that the air demolishes buildings, that steam carries enormous masses, that gasified gunpowder lifts rocks, that electricity breaks trees and pierces walls, is it strange to admit that the Spirit, with the help of its perispirit, can raise a table, above all, when it is known that this perispirit can become visible, tangible and act as a solid body.

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