Victor Hugo’s Conversations with the Spirit World:

 A Literary Genius’s Hidden Life                         By John Chambers


Victor Hugo’s Conversations with the Spirit World covers a hitherto undocumented (except in part by Conversations with Eternity) portion of Victor Hugo’s life:  August 1853 to December 1855, when, while in political exile on Jersey island in the English Channel, he participated in numerous "tapping-table” séances. Only with the publication in 2002 of the fourth and final volume of daughter Adèle Hugo’s diary have all the details of this tumultuous period become known. Not until 1923 were some of the transcripts of the seances first published in France; only in 1970 did they appear in large number. Victor Hugo’s Conversations with the Spirit World is the first translation into English of the transcripts of these always beautiful, often harrowing, seances. It is also the first introduction to the English-speaking world of lengthy portions of Adèle Hugo’s richly-detailed and beguiling diary.

Scholars differ as to the state of Hugo’s mind during this period on Jersey Island. Some think he was suffering from a form of schizophrenia.  Others believe he was in a state of grace, about to ascend to a higher level of awareness. In general, the French intelligentsia is embarrassed by this flirtation with the spirit world of their greatest literary genius. Be that as it may, the transcripts, translated at length in this book, attest that well over 100 spirits manifested through the tapping tables to Victor Hugo, his family, and fellow political exiles. They included shades of the illustrious dead such as Shakespeare, Plato and Galileo, and spirits who said they’d never been alive, like the Shadow of the Sepulcher and Death. Aliens from Mercury and Jupiter spoke through the tables, with the Mercurians channeling drawings of themselves. Jesus, during three visits, condemned Druidism, faulted Christianity, and suggested a new religion with Hugo as its prophet. The spirit of Mozart, using a real piano, tried to channel a symphony. Led by Balaam’s Ass, the entities set forth a strange and forbidding picture of our cosmos as a kind of giant prison shaken by the winds of a metempsychosis entailing the passage of every soul through plants, animals and stones as well as humanoids. They tried to tell Hugo and his friends how to cope with this fearsome unforgiving cosmos.

This is only part of the story. At the same time the Hugo family, around and about the seances, comes to life in the pages of this book. They live in a microcosm of seething political and personal turmoil. In Victor Hugo’s Conversations with the Spirit World, lengthy and lively vignettes focus on each of them in turn, with all their strengths, foibles and shining individualities. Hugo’s three children, in their twenties, vital, talented, indomitable, have reluctantly followed their father into exile. They chaff against being cut off from their birthright of participation in the vibrant, ongoing life of France. There is Charles, the oldest, the reluctant medium, furious and rebellious under his apparent compliance; Adèle, the diarist, on the verge of schizophrenia, falling in love with the dangerous Lieutenant Pinson; François-Victor, troubled but scholarly and best able to take advantage of this exile, who sets about translating the plays of Shakespeare. The book follows their difficult days and nights while also focusing on the lives of the other political exiles, including the Hungarians and especially their leader Count Sandor Teleki, who, valiant but war-weary, finds unexpected solace in the tapping tables. There is a midnight vignette of the French Emperor Napoléon III, Hugo’s greatest enemy, wandering through the corridors of his palace. All this, and much more, is interwoven everywhere with the contents of the seances as well as being gathered into seven entirely new chapters:

“Channeling the Enemy” (Napoléon III)
“The United States of Europe: Was Victor Hugo a Grand Master of the Priory of Sion?”
“Victor Hugo and the Kabbala”
“When the Tapping Tables Spoke Hungarian: On Jersey with Veterans of Kossuth’s War of Independence”
“Other Voices, Other Rooms: The Romance and Tragedy of Adèle Hugo”
“Victor Hugo, William Blake and James Merrill: Three Visionaries, One Vision”
“Act One of a New Play Channeled from William Shakespeare”


Table of Contents

Introduction:  “Victor the Grandiose” by Martin Ebon
I -  Jersey Island:  Setting for a Séance
II. - Léopoldine Beckons
III. - Channeling the Enemy  
IV. - When the Spirits Spoke Hungarian  
V. - The Shadow of the Sepulcher
VI. - Hannibal Storms the Tapping Tables
VII. - God’s Convict
VIII. - André Chénier Loses His Head But Ends Up Keeping It
IX. - William Shakespeare, Channeled and Translated
X. - Metempsychosis Speaks
XI. - Victor Hugo and the Zohar
XII. - Martin Luther on Doubt
XIII. – Other Voices, Other Rooms
XIV. - The Secret Life of Animals
XV. - Roarings of Ocean and Comet
XVI. - The Lady in White
XVII. - The Lion of Androcles
XVIII. - Astral Voyage to the Planet Mercury
XIX. - Planets of Punishment and Worlds of Reward
XX. - “You Will Awaken Me in the Year 2000…”
XXI. - The United States of Europe
XXII. – William Blake, Victor Hugo and James Merrill:  Three Visionaries, One Vision
XXIII. - Galileo Explains the Inexplicable
XXIV. - Joshua Brings Down More Walls
XXV. - Jesus Christ Revises His Thinking
XXVI. - The Jersey Spirits:  Reality and Legacy
Appendix A - A Channeled Play by William Shakespeare: Act One
End Notes
Works Cited
Index

Victor Hugo’s Conversations with the Spirit World contains almost all the séance transcripts that  Conversations with Eternity [DETAILS] contains, with the addition of several more. (Click HERE to read the list of the spirits who came to Victor Hugo on Jersey island.)

Victor Hugo’s Conversations with the Spirit World contains fourteen dramatizations of the day-to-day life, both before and after coming to Jersey island, of members of the Hugo family, other political exiles, and others involved in the events of  the book. These dramatizations include: 1. (Ch. I), Victor Hugo; 2. (Ch. III), Napoleon III; 3. (Ch. IV), Count Sandor Teleki, Hungarian exile; 4. (Ch. VI), Victor Hugo’s father, General Joseph-Léopold-Sigisbert Hugo; 5. (Ch. VIII), André Chénier, famous French poet; 6. (Ch. IX), Victor Hugo’s younger son, François-Victor Hugo; 7. (Ch. X), Auguste Vacquerie, voluntary French exile living with the Hugos on Jersey; 8. (Ch. XI), Victor Hugo in Paris in the 1840s; 9. (Ch. XIII), Victor Hugo’s younger daughter, Adèle Hugo; 10. (Ch. XV), Charles Bénézit, French exile and composer; 11. (Ch. XVI), Victor Hugo; 12. (Ch. XXI), Victor Hugo; 13. (Ch. XXII), James Merrill, Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet who wrote poetry similar to Hugo’s; and 14. (Ch. XXVI), Victor Hugo’s older son, Charles Hugo.

John Chambers says: "We're delighted that Inner Traditions/Bear is publishing this new, greatly expanded version of Victor Hugo's adventures with the spirit world. New Paradigm Books is a very tiny publishing company. Inner Traditions is a very big publishing company. The new Victor Hugo 'conversations' will receive wonderful distribution and exposure."
 

2/11/2008:  Inner Traditions/ Bear (Destiny Books) will publish a second book by John Chambers in the Spring of 2009.  The working title is

24 Great Men and Women:
24 Encounters with the World Beyond
 Picture display, below right, courtesy of & © 2008, Your Own World, USA, <www.yowusa.com>

Table of Contents

Introduction. Prague’s Other Universe. Chap. 1. Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571); Chap. 2. Michel de Nostradamus (1503-1566); Chap. 3. Ben Jonson (1572-1637); Chap. 4. Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727); Chap. 5. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832); Chap. 6. William Blake (1757-1837); Chap. 7. Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1869); Chap. 8. Mary Wollstonecroft Shelley (1797-1851); Chap. 9. Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850); Chap. 10. Victor Hugo (1802-1885); Chap. 11. Jules Verne (1828-1905); Chap. 12. Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910); Chap. 13. Madame Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891); Chap. 14. W.B. Yeats (1865-1939); Chap. 15. H.G. Wells (1866-1946); Chap. 16. Thomas Mann (1871-1950); Chap. 17. Harry Houdini (1874-1926); Chap. 18. Winston Churchill (1874-1965); Chap. 19. Carl Jung (1875-1961); Chap. 20. Sri Yashoda Mai  (1882-1944); Chap. 21. Doris Lessing (1919-  ); Chap. 22. Norman Mailer (1923-2007); Chap. 23. Yukio Mishima (1925-1970); Chap. 24. James Merrill  (1926-1995).

A number of these chapters have already appeared in Atlantis Rising magazine.
 

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 been a full-time English instructor at Dawson College, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and assistant editor at McGraw-Hill Publishing and managing editor at International Thomson Publishing, both in New York, NY. He has published numerous articles on subjects ranging from ocean shipping to mall sprawl to alien abduction, and is the author of Conversations with Eternity: The Forgotten Masterpiece of Victor Hugo (1998). Seven of his essays appeared in Forbidden Religion: Suppressed Heresies of the West, published by Inner Traditions in November 2006.  He is the director of New Paradigm Books Publishing Company and lives in Boca Raton, Florida, with his wife Judy.