Tongues, Speaking and Writing in

An Encyclopaedia of Occultism (1920)

The speaking and writing in foreign tongues, or in unintelligible outpourings mistaken for such, is a very old form of psychic phenomenon. It was a frequent accompaniment of the epidemic ecstasy which was so common in mediæval Europe. Thus the Nuns of Loudon (q.v.) are declared to have understood and replied to questions put to them in Latin, Greek, Spanish, Turkish, and other even less-known languages. The Tremblers of the Cevennes (q.v.) spoke in excellent French, whereas French was to them a foreign language. And practically every epidemic of the kind was characterised by the speaking in tongues, which seemed to be infectious, and spread rapidly through whole communities. In these early cases the phenomenon was ascribed to the power of supernatural agencies, whether demons or angels, who temporarily controlled the organism of the "possessed." But analogous instances are to be found in plenty in the annals of modern spiritualism, where they are of course regarded as manifestations of the spirits of the deceased through the material organism of the medium. Comparatively early in the movement there are evidences of speaking and writing in Latin, Greek, French, Swiss, Spanish, and Red Indian languages. Judge Edmonds, the well-known American Spiritualist , testified to these faculties in his daughter and niece, who spoke Greek, Spanish, Polish, and Italian at various times, as well as Red Indian and other languages. Some of these cases are well attested. Two professional mediums (J. V. Mansfield and A. D. Ruggles) are known to have written automatically in many languages, including Chinese and Gaelic, but whether or not they had any previous acquaintance with these languages remains at least a matter of doubt. In still more modern times speaking in tongues has been practised, notably by Hélène Smith, who invented the " Martian language ." On the whole, we may take it that the so-called foreign tongues were generally no more than a meaningless jumble of articulate sounds, of which the spirits themselves sometimes purported to offer a translation. Where there is good evidence to show that the writings were actually. Trance executed in a foreign language, as in the case of the professional mediums mentioned above, there is generally some reason to suppose a former acquaintance with the language, which the exaltation of memory incidental to the trance state might revive. When unknown tongues were written they were seldom found to correspond with any real language.