with Blumhardt’s[1] Gottlieben Dittus. As Flournoy shows, glossolalia is, so far as it really is independent speech, a cryptomnesic phenomenon, Κατ’ ἐξοχήν. The reader should consult Flournoy’s most interesting exposition.
In our case glossolalia was only once observed, when the only understandable words were the scattered variations on the word “vena.” The source of this word is clear. A few days previously the patient had dipped into an anatomical atlas for the study of the veins of the face, which were given in Latin. She had used the word “vena” in her dreams, as happens occasionally to normal persons. The remaining words and sentences in a foreign language betray, at the first glance, their derivation from French, in which the patient was somewhat fluent. Unfortunately I am without the more accurate translations of the various sentences, because the patient would not give them; but we may hold that it was a phenomenon similar to Helen Smith’s Martian language. Flournoy found that the Martian language was nothing but a childish translation from French; the words were changed but the syntax remained the same. Even more probable is the view that the patient simply ranged next to each other meaningless words that rang strangely, without any true word formation;[2] she borrowed certain characteristic sounds from French and Italian and combined them into a kind of language, just as Helen Smith completed the lacunæ in the real Sanscrit words by products of her own resembling that language. The curious names of the mystical system can be reduced, for the most part, to known roots. The writer vividly recalls the botanical schemes found in every school atlas; the internal resemblance of the relationship of the planets to the sun is also pretty clear; we shall not be going astray if we see in the names reminiscences from popular astronomy. Thus can be explained the names
- ↑ Zündel, “Biographie Blumhardt’s.”
- ↑ “Le baragouin rapide et confus dont on ne peut jamais obtenir la signification, probablement parce qu’il n’en a en effet aucune, n’est qu’un pseudo-langage (p. 193) analogue au baragouinage par lequel les enfants se donnent parfois dans leurs jeux l’illusion qu’ils parlent chinois, indien ou ‘sauvage’” (p. 152, Flournoy, l.c.).
