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Dr Robert Crookall - More Astral projections

Case No. 382 - Reine (P.E.Cornillier's model)

The 'double' of Reine, an artist's model aged 18 "ignorant of everything concerning psychical phenomena, as well as of the spirit-theory", was released from her body by mesmeric passes. Release was said to be aided by ‘discarnates’. The details are given in Cornillier's The Survival of the Soul (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd.,1921).

As her "astral" body disengaged from the physical, she said, "When I feel this cold creeping over me, I am afraid, and unconsciously I arrest the disengagement. ... But I must become just like a corpse-it is necessary. ... I get Vettellini to help me. I have got to conquer that fear."

Reine was reluctant to return to the body and wept at the thought. But she said (while in trance):

"It is better that I should remember nothing when I awake."

Cornillier was told (by Vettellini) that if she did remember her out-of-the-body experiences (which included 'Paradise' conditions) she would thereafter be dissatisfied with earth-life.

Reine was an exceptional person with an inborn interest in psychic matters, yet quite uneducated. She had a strange interest in a crystal ball which was in the studio of Cornillier, the artist. After its use was explained to her and she had unsuccessfully tried to "scry" she insisted that she "ought" to see in the crystal.

Although at first her clairvoyance was aided by various 'deliverers', she soon dispensed with their services and controlled her own psychic gifts. ….Although Cornillier, by his magnetic 'passes', helped her to disengage her 'fluidic' or 'astral' body, she insisted that she was thereafter autonomous and his "equal". Moreover, she refused to allow anyone else to help her.

'When exteriorized, Reine not only saw her own physical body, but also had "a precise view of her own internal organs, which she described". Cornillier said that she spontaneously described her own 'double' as "a smoke-like form" coming from her body-her whole body, but chiefly the head-which was, she declared, much more herself than the body sleeping in the chair: it was "luminous".

Reine saw the dead and "co-operated" with some of them in aiding the living, the newly-dead and the 'earthbound': she had super-normal faculties, including telepathy, clairvoyance and pre-cognition. She saw her own 'silver cord', comparing it with "a ray of sunlight, filtering through into a room".

Like many others who left the physical body in the 'double', Reine also claimed to find herself immediately in any place of which she thought and in which she wished to be. In the course of such “Journeys" she frequently (correctly) described details which were unknown either to her normal consciousness or to that of her hypnotizer. That is, there was a strong suggestion of an actual 'Journey" tending to rule out pure clairvoyance and/or telepathy as the explanation.

One of the most interesting observations made in this case is as follows:

"Reine perceived her own Astral Body, somewhat larger than her real one and quite luminous ... and at the same time saw herself lying asleep."

Cornillier, her "magnetizer", asked, "Where then, was the centre of vision at that moment?" He continued, "It is she herself who answers me, saying that in those first seances her fluidic vision remained still in her physical body, because her fluidic Body was not yet completely disengaged. She perceived what was disengaged of her fluidic body by looking at it from her physical body. ... A fairly complete disengagement is necessary before the centre of vision passes into the fluidic body."