Xenoglossy

 Xenoglossy  by Marinus Jan Marijs

Dr Ian Stevenson defines xenoglossy as`speaking a real language entirely unknown to [the speaker] in his ordinary state’. As Stevenson notes there are numerous published reports of cases of xenoglossy, but most of them contain too little information to permit a test of their validity.

Dr Ian Stevenson is one of the most respected scientists in the United States. He has done specialized research into xenoglossy and his book Xenoglossy (Stevenson 1974) is one of the leading scientific studies in this area. In it he documents a study he made of a 37 year old American woman. Under hypnosis she experienced a complete change of voice and personality into that of a male. She spoke fluently in the Swedish language—a language she did not speak or understand when in the normal state of consciousness.

Dr Stevenson’s direct involvement with this case lasted more than eight years. The study involved linguists and other experts and scientists who meticulously investigated every alternative explanation.

Fraud was ruled out for number of substantive reasons which Stevenson outlines in his study. The subject and her physician husband were thoroughly investigated. They were under extreme and continuous close scrutiny, did not want publicity and agreed to the publication of the study only if their names were changed to protect their privacy. Both the husband and wife were considered by their local community to be honest and decent and their behaviour exemplary. Certainly there was no motive for personal profit. On the contrary they experienced a great deal of inconvenience to fully complete the study over many years.

Cryptomnesia—the recollection of a foreign language learned in the earlier years of a person’s life was also ruled out. Years of investigation of the subject failed to raise any possible suggestion that either she or her parents had learnt the Swedish language in her younger years or associated with anyone Swedish.

Another case Stevenson investigated with equal care was reported in the July 1980 edition of the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research. It involved an Indian woman named Uttar Huddar who at aged 32 spontaneously took on the personality of a housewife of West Bengal in the early 1800s. She began speaking Bengali instead of her own language Marathi. For days or weeks at a time speakers of Bengali had to be brought in to enable her to communicate with her own family. (Victor Zammit)

                                     Pentecost, by Jean Restout  (26 March 1692 – 1 January 1768)

Xenoglossy in the bible: Descent of the Holy Spirit Acts 2:1-11

^“1 And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place.² And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.³ And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them.⁴ And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.⁵ And there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven.⁶ Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language.⁷ And they were all amazed and marvelled, saying one to another, Behold, are not all these which speak Galilaeans?⁸ And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born?⁹ Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and in Judaea, and Cappadocia, in Pontus, and Asia,¹⁰ Phrygia, and Pamphylia, in Egypt, and in the parts of Libya about Cyrene, and strangers of Rome, Jews and proselytes,¹¹ Cretes and Arabians, we do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God”.

From Encyclopedia.com:

Speaking in a language unknown to the speaker in the normal waking state. It is different from what is commonly called glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, a form of vocalized religious experience characteristic of some religious movements, such as Pentecostalism. It has been compared with automatic writing, writing in a language unknown to the writer.

Speaking in an unknown language is perhaps a far more impressive phenomenon than writing in it. Subconscious visual memory may account for occasional reproduction of foreign sentences, but the explanation becomes more difficult if the problem of intonation is added, since it necessitates an auditive memory, the subconscious retention of fragments of strange languages actually heard somewhere at some time.

In religious revivals, the outbreak was a sign of celestial inspiration. The recitals of the refugees from the Cévennes, reported in Le Théâtre Sacré des Cevennes, by M. Misson (London, 1707) contains numerous accounts of the gift among unlettered Camisard (French Protestant) adults and infants, who spoke French in the purest diction (see also Tremblers of the Cevennes ). The phenomenon was also noted among the Convulsionaries of St. Medard in 1730.

One of many early cases, among them the testimony of Judge John W. Edmonds. His daughter, Laura Edmonds, was the first medium in modern Spiritualism reportedly with a gift for xenoglossy. Supposedly, foreign sitters could converse through her with spirits in their native language, even if it was a country as remote as Greece or Poland. Judge Edmonds wrote in a letter dated October 27, 1857:

“One evening when some 12 or 15 persons were in my parlor, Mr. E. D. Green, an artist of this city, was shown in, accompanied by a gentleman whom he introduced as Mr. Evangelides, of Greece. He spoke broken English, but Greek fluently. Ere long, a spirit spoke to him through Laura, in English, and said so many things to him that he identified him as a friend who had died at his house a few years before but of whom none of us had ever heard. Occasionally, through Laura, the spirit would speak a word or a sentence in Greek, until Mr. E. inquired if he could be understood if he spoke in Greek. The residue of the conversation, for more than an hour, was, on his part, entirely in Greek, and on hers sometimes in Greek and sometimes in English. At times Laura would not understand what was the idea conveyed, either by her or him. At other times she would understand him, though he spoke in Greek, and herself when uttering Greek words….

“One day my daughter and niece came into my library and began a conversation with me in Spanish, one speaking a part of a sentence and the other the residue. They were influenced, as I found, by a spirit of a person whom I had known when in Central America, and reference was made to many things which had occurred to me there, of which I knew they were as ignorant as they were of Spanish…. Laura has spoken to me in Indian, in the Chippewa and Menomonie tongues. I knew the language, because I had been two years in the Indian country.”

According to the book Modern American Spiritualism, by Emma Hardinge Britten (1870), in addition to Laura Edmonds, the gift was demonstrated at an early period by Jenny Keyes, who sang in trance in Italian and Spanish, and by a Mrs. Shepherd, Mrs. Gilbert Sweet, a Miss Inman, a Mrs. Tucker, Susan Hoyt, A. D. Ruggles, and several others whose names she was not permitted to make public. They frequently spoke in Spanish, Danish, Italian, Hebrew, Greek, Malay, Chinese, and Indian.

In 1859, 19 people testified in the Banner of Light to 34 cases of persons who occasionally spoke or wrote in tongues. J. J. Mapes and Governor Nathaniel P. Tallmadge bore witness to numerous instances in which uneducated mediums conversed with strangers in the streets in various foreign languages.

A decade later, a Mr. Lowenthal testified in England before the Committee of the London Dialectical Society: “I am frequently made to speak the language of another nation. I believe it to be an Indian language. My mouth utters sounds that I do not understand and which have no meaning to me. I think it is the language of some North American tribe. It is a soliloquy, and I get an impression on the brain, an idea that it means so and so. A voice articulate but not audible conveys a meaning to me. I have been among the Indians a great deal, and it sounds to me like their language.”

Archdeacon Thomas Colley wrote of having heard the “Mahedi,” a materialized Egyptian in the mediumship of Francis W. Monck (who knew no English), speak in that language under the control of Monck’s regular guide, “Samuel.” This appears to be the only instance on record where a claimed materialized individual was used as an automatic instrument by another spirit.

The Italian medium Alfredo Pansini, who, with his brother Paolo, was the subject of reported bodily transportation by mediumistic power, spoke in a sort of hypnotic trance at the age of seven, in French, Latin, and Greek, and recited several cantos of the Divina Commedia. On one occasion, according to accounts, he spoke successively in twelve different voices. Frederik van Eeden recorded in the Proceedings of the Society of Psychical Research (vol. 17, 1901, pp. 59, 75) a Dutch conversation with a deceased friend through the medium Rosina Thompson:

“During a few minutes … I felt absolutely as if I were speaking to my friend myself. I spoke Dutch and got immediate and correct answers. The expression of satisfaction and gratification in face and gesture, when we seem to understand one another was too vivid to be acted. Quite unexpected Dutch words were pronounced, details were given which were far from my mind, some of which, as that about my father’s uncle in a former sitting, I had never known, and found to be true only on inquiry afterwards.”

Many German Orientalists testified that when the stigmatic subject Thérèse Neumann relived the Passion of Christ, she spoke in ancient Aramaic. The weakness of the case is that the phrases she used exist in print with translations in modern languages.

The New York Evening Post reported on November 10, 1930, the case of a four-year-old girl at Warsaw. Although the parents of Marie Skotnicki spoke only Polish, she developed the extraordinary habit of talking to herself in a foreign tongue that no one about her could understand but was later established to be pure Gaelic. It is important to add that her great-grandfather came from the Island of Lewis in the Scottish Hebrides.

In The Two Worlds (March 31, 1933), F. H. Wood wrote of the medium Rosemary and “Lady Nona,” her ancient Egyptian control: “The fact is now established beyond disproof that over 140 Egyptian word-phrases which were in common use when the great Temple of Luxor in Egypt was built, have been spoken fluently through an English girl who normally knows nothing about the ancient tongue.” Howard Hulme of Brighton, Sussex, the translator of the Egyptian phrases, after a preliminary test by mail which resulted in an unexpected but correct Egyptian answer, had also heard Lady Nona speak. After an amazing dialogue in the dead tongue of the pyramid builders, “Nona cleared up many points of pronunciation, gave her own earth name and explained the full meaning of some of her previous language tests.”

In the early 1980s, Dr. William H. Kautz also announced a computer-based project at the Research Center for Applied Intuition (of which he is founder and director) involving the preparation of a translation and lexicon of the Rosemary Egyptian language text, to be studied in conjunction with all relevant publications relating to Egyptian language of the Eighteenth Dynasty, and a reconstitution of vocal Egyptian of the same period. The lexicon was to be compared with written Egyptian language and also with the reconstitution of the spoken form.

The medium Etta Wriedt reportedly spoke in many unknown tongues, and no stranger inflection could be imagined than the archaic Chinese that the voice of “Confucius” used in speaking through the medium George Valiantine to Neville Whymant, the renowned Oriental scholar. Whymant heard 14 languages spoken in 12 séances, and the strangest of all was the speech that came to him in fluent classical Chinese: “Greetings, O son of learning, and reader of strange books,” and gave a complete new reading of poems and of the analects of Confucius, over which learned scholars have differed for centuries. Whymant’s book Psychic Adventures in New York (1931) is among the most convincing twentieth-century records of xenoglossia.