| Budget Amount *help |
¥1,600,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,600,000)
Fiscal Year 2002: ¥500,000 (Direct Cost: ¥500,000)
Fiscal Year 2001: ¥400,000 (Direct Cost: ¥400,000)
Fiscal Year 2000: ¥700,000 (Direct Cost: ¥700,000)
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| Research Abstract |
For the past three years, my research has brought me to recognize primarily the following new facts and viewpoints:
1. I discovered one characteristic of Hugo's "spiritisme" is the creation of a special text at his deepest subconscious level. I discovered this when I analyzed the manuscripts of the so-called Les Process verbaux des tables tournantes de Jersey in Paris. In addition to the notebook already discovered I found in the National Library of France yet another previously unmentioned notebook.
2. All of Hugo's literary works comes close to all conditions for defining them as "Gnostic," and in many respects, they reveal a "Gnostic" type of thinking. The "Gnostic religion" constitutes therefore one of the most important elements of his "syncretism." His poem, "Ce que dit la bouche d'ombre" (included in his 1856 Contemplations) illustrates most clearly the "Gnostic" hue in all his writings.
3. Allan Kardec's "spiritisme," influenced by Pestalozzi's educational idealism, stressed the moral growth of the individual which, he believed was attainable by the coming and goings of the spirit between the land of the living and the great beyond. The "spiritisme," a "scientific" religion, appeared as a major buttress to the spirituality of the era. In the modern period, the French government founded society upon secularization and scientific rationalism, with the exception of the Catholic Church's social control.
4. We can distinguish two methods in Flammarion's research on "spiritisme." The first was to conduct rigid and hard-fast experiments on famous mediums of the day and to analyze their results, The second was to collect information through the journalistic accounts on thousands of "spiritistic" phenomena for classification and analysis.
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