John Chambers

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Victor Hugo's Conversations With The Spirit World : A Literary Genius's Hidden Life

During Victor Hugo's exile on the Isle of Jersey, where he and his family and friends escaped the reign of Napoléon III, he conducted “table-tapping” séances, transcribing hundreds of channelled 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 sceptic, some of the “conversations” may seem self-serving at best, the subconscious wishes of the naïve 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 channelled 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 kabbalistic 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.