Mother's Chronicles - Book Three

9

Madame Theon

"I shall tell you about Madame Theon." Mother addressed her class of very young children. As there was no bar to their elders listening to her, many of us attended these 'classes.'

"Madame Théon was born in the Isle of Wight," began Mother. "She lived in Tlemcen with her husband who was a great occultist. Madame Theon herself was an occultist with great powers, she was a remarkable clairvoyant and had mediumnistic faculties. Her powers were of an exceptional order. She had received an extremely thorough and rigorous training, and could exteriorize, that is to say, from her material body she could go out in a subtle body, in full consciousness, and do this twelve times in a row, up to the extreme limit of the world of forms —on which I shall speak to you later when you can better understand

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what I am talking about. Just now I will recount a few small incidents which I myself saw when I was in Tlemcen, as well as a story she narrated to me."

Mother gathered the reins of her thoughts. "The nature of the incidents is more external, but very amusing.

"She remained almost always sunk in a trance, but so well had she trained her body that even when in a trance —that is, when one or more parts of her being were exteriorized — her body had a life of its own and she could walk about and even attend to certain chores. She worked a lot, because she was able to speak freely in her trance and describe what she was seeing, which was noted down and out of which a teaching was formed, which, by the way, was published. On account of all this and the occult work she was doing, often she was tired, in the sense that her body was tired and it needed to restore its vitality very concretely.

"Now one day when she was particularly tired, she said to me, 'You shall see how I am going to recover my strength.'

"She had plucked from her garden ... It wasn't a garden, it was an immense estate with centuries-old

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olive trees, fig trees as I have never seen elsewhere; it was a marvel, on a mountain slope, beginning from the plains and extending almost halfway to the top. In this garden there were many lemon trees, orange trees . . . and grapefruit. Grapefruit flowers smell even nicer than orange blossoms. The flowers are big like this, and she knew how to extract the essence herself—she had given me a bottle of it. Well, she had plucked a large grapefruit, big like this, big and ripe, and she lay down on her bed and put the grapefruit on her solar plexus, here, like this, holding it in both her hands. She lay down and rested. She didn't sleep, she rested.

"'Come back in an hour,' she told me.

"I returned after one hour.... And the grapefruit was as flat as a pancake. Which shows that her power to absorb vitality was such that she had absorbed all the life of the fruit and it had become limp and quite flat. I saw this myself." Mother challenged her audience, "Try it yourselves, you'll never succeed!" A burst of laughter was the only response she got.

"Another time, and it's even more amusing . . ." she paused considering how to proceed. "But first let

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me tell you a little something about Tlemcen, for probably you don't know about it. Tlemcen is a small town in southern Algeria, almost on the edge of the Sahara. The town itself is built in a valley encompassed by a circle of mountains, not very high but higher than hills all the same. The valley is fertile, green, superb. The population over there consists mainly of Arabs and rich merchants, in any case the town is very — it was, I don't know what it's like now [in 1957], I am speaking to you of things that happened at the beginning of the century; very prosperous merchants lived there and, from time to time, they came to visit Theon. They knew nothing, they understood nothing, but they were greatly interested.

"One day, towards evening, one of them turned up and began putting questions, ridiculous moreover. So Madame Theon said to me, 'You will see, we shall have some fun.'

"In the verandah of the house there was a big table used for dining, a very big table really, quite wide, with eight legs, four on each side. It was massive, you know, and heavy. Chairs had been arranged at some distance from the table for receiving the man.

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He sat at one end, Madame Theon at the other; I was seated on one side, as was Mr Theon. All the four of us were there. Nobody was near the table, we were all at quite a distance. Well then, he went on asking questions, as I said rather ridiculous ones, on the powers one could acquire, what one could do with 'magic,' as he termed it. She looked at me, uttered not a word and kept very still. Suddenly I hear a cry, a cry of fright. It was the table that had started moving, and with almost a heroic movement was charging down on the poor man who was seated at one end! It went and struck him. Madame Theon hadn't touched it, nobody had touched it." Mother let her words sink in. "She had simply concentrated on the table and, you see, with her vital power she had made it move. At first the table had wobbled a little, like this, then it began moving slowly, then suddenly, as with a single bound, it threw itself on that man, who left never to return!" We thoroughly enjoyed the man's discomfiture.

"She also had the power of dematerializing and rematerializing objects. But she would never say anything—she didn't boast, she never said, 'I am going to

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do this,' she didn't say anything —she did it quietly. She didn't attach much importance to these things, knowing that they only went to demonstrate that there were other forces than the purely material ones.

"When I went out in the evening —towards late afternoon I used to go walking with Mr Théon to see the countryside, to walk in the mountains, to neighbouring villages —I locked my door; it was my habit, I always locked my door. Madame Théon rarely went out, for the reasons I have told you, because most of the time she was in a trance and liked to stay at home. But when I returned from my walks and opened my door —which was locked, consequently nobody could have entered —I always found on my pillow a sort of small garland of flowers. These flowers grew in the garden, they are called 'Four o' Clocks.'¹ We have them here, they open in the evening and have a wonderful smell. A whole alley was full of them, with big bushes, high like this. The flowers are remarkable, I think it's the same thing here also, on the same bush

1. Mirabilis, Also known as 'Marvel of Peru.' Mother gave it the significance: "Solace = The blessings the Divine grants us."

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there are different coloured flowers: yellow, red, mixed, purple. The small flowers are like . . . like the Blue Bells¹; n-no, rather like the Morning Glory,² but that is a climber while those are bushes —we have them here in the gardens. She always tucked some behind her ears, because of the nice smell. Oh, it smells delicious! Well then, she used to take a walk in the alley, between the large bushes which were this high, and she would cull the flowers; and then, when I returned the flowers were in my room!" We were lost in Mother's narrative and before the full import of her words could sink in she continued. "She never told me how she did it, but well, certainly she didn't enter my room.

" 'Weren't there flowers in your room?' she once asked me.

"I replied, 'Yes. Oh, yes!'

"That's all. So then I understood that she had put them there."

Mother glanced at her spell-bound audience

1.Campanula: "Joy's Call = It is modest and rarely makes itself heard."

2.Ipomoea or Convolvulus: "Artistic Taste = Is pleased with beautiful things and is itself beautiful."

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and took a deep breath. "I could tell you many stories, but I shall end with one she told me, which I didn't see myself."

She closed her eyes as if to get a better picture. "As I was telling you, Tlemcen is almost next to the Sahara and it has a desert climate, except in the valley where a never-drying river flows and makes the whole land very fertile. But the mountains were absolutely arid. Only in the plots held by agriculturists did something grow. Now, Théon's park, the big estate I mean, was, as I told you, a marvellous place. Everything grew there, every imaginable thing, and in magnificent proportions. Well, she related to me —they had been there for a very long time [seventeen or eighteen years] —that five or six years earlier, I think, it had been considered that these arid mountains could cause the river to dry up one day, so it would be better to plant trees there. And the Administrator of Tlemcen had given orders to plant trees on all the neighbouring hills, a wide cirque of hills, you know. He had said that pines should be planted, because in Algeria maritime pine grows very well; and they wanted to try it out. Now, for some reason or the other — through

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an oversight or a whim, nobody knows! —instead of ordering pines they ordered firs! Fir-trees belong to northern climes, and are not at all trees of desert lands. And these fir-trees had been very scrupulously planted. Madame Theon had seen this and, I think, wished to make an experiment. It so happens that after four or five years those firs had not only sprouted but had become magnificent, and when I myself went to Tlemcen the mountains all around were entirely green, magnificent with trees.

"'You see, these aren't pines, they are firs,' she told me.

"In fact, they were firs." Mother asked the children, "You know that firs are Christmas trees, don't you?" They said Yes in unison.

"They were firs. Then she narrated to me that after three years, when the firs had grown big, suddenly, one day, or rather one December night, just as she had gone to bed and put out the light, she was woken up by a very slight noise —she was very sensitive to noise. She opens her eyes and sees something like a moonbeam —there was no moon that night —lighting up a corner of her room. Then she perceived a little

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gnome there, like those one sees in the fairy-tales of Norway or Sweden, Scandinavian tales. A small little fellow, with a big head, a pointed cap and pointed shoes, he was dark green, with a long white beard, and fully covered with snow.

"So she looks at him —her eyes were open —she looks at him and says, 'Why ... Eh, but what are you doing here?'

"She was a little troubled, for in the room's warmth the snow was melting and making a puddle on the floor.

'"Whatever are you doing here?'

"Whereupon he smiled his most amiable smile at her and said, 'But we have been beckoned with the firs! The firs, they call the snow. They are trees of snowy lands. As for me, I am the Lord of the Snow, so I have come to you to announce that ... we are coming. We are called, we are coming.'

"'Snow?. . . But we are next to the Sahara!'

"'Ah! You should not have put firs!''

"Finally she told him, 'Listen, I don't know whether what you are telling me is true or not, but you are making a mess of my floor, off with you!'

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"So off he went. The moonlight was gone with him. She lit a lamp, since there was no electricity. She lit a lamp and saw ... a small puddle of water where he had stood. Therefore it wasn't a dream, it really was a little being who had made the snow melt in her room. And the next morning, when the sun rose, it rose over snow-covered mountains. That was the first time. Nobody had ever seen that in the country.

"From then on, every winter —not for long, just for a short time —all the mountains are covered with snow."

Mother looked at the expectant faces before her, but smilingly shook her head. "That's my story."

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