The Spiritist Review - Journal of Psychological Studies - 1862

My dear and beloved friends and listeners, you have asked today that I ask my medium about the history of language. I will try to satisfy you. You must understand, however, that it would be impossible for me to handle this important issue in a few lines only, an issue to which another even more import is forcibly connected that is the origin of the human races. May the Almighty God, so benevolent with the Spiritists, give me the necessary lucidity to keep away from my explanation any source of confusion, obscurity and mistakes!

I enter the subject by saying that we must initially admit in principle this eternal truth: The Creator gave all creatures of the same race a special but safe way of understanding each other. Yet, that means of communication called language was all the more restricted the lower the species. That is why savage and less civilized peoples have such primitive languages to the point that many words used in more developed regions cannot find equivalence in their language. It is in consequence of this law that progressing nations create new terms for new findings and new needs. As I said elsewhere humanity has already gone through three great periods: the Barbarian phase, the Hebraic and Pagan and the Christian phase. The great Spiritist period whose foundations we prepare with you will succeed the latter.

Let us then examine the first phase and the beginning of the second one and only repeat here what I have already told you. The first human phase that we can call pre-Hebraic or Barbarian dragged on for a long time and slowly experienced the horrors and convulsions of a terrible time. Humans there were hairy like wild animals and like the beast used to shelter in caves and under trees; subsistence is based on raw meat and human flesh in the most absolute period of anthropophagy. There was no society or family! A few groups wandering here and there in complete promiscuity always ready to devour one another. That is the picture of this cruel time. There is no cult, no tradition and no religious ideas. There is only the bodily need to be satisfied and that is all! Imprisoned in a brute matter the soul remains in a latent condition in its carnal jail. The soul could not do much as this primitive envelope surrounded it and, as such, the intelligence can hardly expand within the limited ability of this underdeveloped brain. Fuzzy eyes, heavy lids, thick lips and a cramped skull all capable of producing a few throaty sounds that constitute their language.

There is no indication that the forefathers of the Hebraic and Pagan races came from that brute animal. Nevertheless, with time, there became the need to defend themselves against other carnivores like the lion and the tiger whose terrible fangs and sharp claws easily dominated an isolated man. It was the password for the realization of the first social progress. Nevertheless, it remained as the period of matter and brute force for this whole period. Do not seek feelings or reason or even language in the people of those days. There is only blind obedience to immediate material needs and the only objective is survival through eating, drinking and sheltering. Nothing beyond. We can say that the intelligent creature is in its germ state but is not there yet. Nevertheless, it is possible to find among the brute some superior creatures, incarnate Spirits with the mission of leading humanity to its objective and speed up the appearance of the Hebraic and Pagan races.

I must add that besides those incarnate Spirits the planet was constantly visited by those ministers of God whose memory was kept by tradition as angels and archangels that almost daily were in contact with the superior and incarnate Spirits that I mentioned. The mission of some of those angels continued during a great part of the second human phase. I must add that the quick picture above of the initial times of humanity teaches you a little about the strict laws to which the Spirits are submitted in going through the exercise of inhabiting planets of recent formation.

Language, properly speaking, as well as social life, only starts to incorporate a structured character in the Hebraic and Pagan era during which the incarnate spirit, always subjected to matter, begins to rebel and break down some links of the heavy chain. The soul ferments and agitates in its carnal prison; it fights hard against the physical limitations of the brain whose matter is made sensitive by the soul itself; there is permanent work through which the performance of the brain and its faculties improves and consequently the physical organs are developed; finally thoughts can be transmitted through clear and limpid eyes. We are now far from the flattened craniums! It is the beginning of the self-identification of the soul and the human being begins to understand that there is something beyond the body.

The soul feels and acknowledges itself and is aware of oneself and begins to understand that it is independent of the body. It is the beginning of the struggle against the oppression of the greatest rival. Humans begin to experience significant change and intelligence moves more freely in a more developed brain. Yet people are still marked and sold like cattle and man is the slave of man; slavery is consecrated by the God of the Hebrew as much as by the Pagan gods and Jehovah, like Jupiter and Olympic, demand blood and live victims. This second phase offers curious aspects from a philosophical point of view about which I have already provided a quick description that will be soon communicated to you by the medium. In any case and to return to the main subject you must rest assured that it was only during the long patriarchal and pastoral periods that human language established a regular progress adopting special forms and sounds.

During that primitive era in which humanity was just leaving the cradle and beginning to mumble in its infancy only a few words were needed for communication for people without any science and whose needs were restricted and whose social relationships stop at the entrance of the huts, primitive families and later on tribes. It was the time when the father, the shepherd, the elder or the patriarch had absolute domination with the right of life and death.

The primitive language was uniform; as the number of shepherds increased they broke away from the paternal protection and founded other regions that were still inhabited with new families and tribes.

Their languages followed different patterns and progressed and from generation to generation modified from the original paternal structure; that is how the several languages were created. Furthermore, and with the disclaimer that my intention is not to provide you with a course on linguistics, it should not go unnoticed that in the most distant and different languages you will find radicals that have almost not changed and whose meanings are almost the same. On another hand since you have the pretension of being from the old world the same reason that corrupted the primitive language is still very much present in your France so much proud of its civilization where you see the terms and meanings varying not from town to town but from county to county. I call the attention of those who have visited Bretagne as well as those who traveled to Provence and Languedoc. There is a variety of idioms and dialects that surprises anyone wishing to compile a single dictionary.

Once primate people, helped by the missionaries of the Eternal, gave certain special sounds to some special ideas the spoken language was created and the modifications suffered later were always the result of human progress; hence and according to the richness of a given language, one can easily establish the degree of civilization of the people that speak that language. I can add that humanity marches towards a common language as a forced consequence of a communion of moral and political ideas and most importantly religion. That shall be the task of the new Spiritist philosophy that we are teaching you today.

Erastus