Victor Hugo's Conversations with the Spirit World

PARAPSYCHOLOGY / SPIRITUALITY "Truly great and deserves to be in every library, both public and private." --Hans Holzer, Ph.D., parapsychologist and author of Ghosts: True Encounters with the World Beyond and Life Beyond: Compelling Evidence for Past Lives and Existence after Death "Remember that it was after these experiences that Hugo wrote his remarkable Les Miserables." --John F. Miller, III, Ph.D., Journal of Religion and Psychical Research During Victor Hugo's exile on the isle of Jersey, where he and his family and friends escaped the reign of Napoleon III, he conducted "table-tapping" seances, transcribing hundreds of channeled conversations with entities from the beyond. Among his discarnate visitors were Shakespeare, Plato, Hannibal, Rousseau, Galileo, Sir Walter Scott, and Jesus. According to the transcripts, Jesus, during his three visits, condemns Druidism, faults Christianity, and suggests a new religion with Hugo as its prophet. To the skeptic, some of the "conversations" may seem self-serving--at best, the subconscious wishes of the naive participants. But author John Chambers places Hugo's experiments firmly in the tradition of visionary literature and psychic exploration, aligning those experiences with the poetry of William Blake, the table-tapping experiences of the Fox sisters, and the channeled writings of the great modern-day Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Merrill, whose spirits' utterances uncannily resemble those of Hugo's. Hugo's transcriptions are the missing link between the early nineteenth century's fascination with the cabalistic Zohar, reincarnation, and the writings of the Illuminati and the rise of Spiritualism and the societies for the study of psychic phenomena in the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. JOHN CHAMBERS has a Master of Arts in English from the University of Toronto and spent three years at the University of Paris. His previous translations include "Phase One: C. E. Q. Manifesto" in Quebec: Only the Beginning. He has published numerous articles on subjects ranging from ocean shipping to mall sprawl to alien abduction, seven of his articles appearing in Forbidden Religion: Suppressed Heresies of the West. The director of New Paradigm Books publishing company (www.newpara.com), he lives in Florida.