From the Mother's anecdotes

"Madame Théon was born on the Isle of Wight and she lived in Tlemcen with her husband who was a great occultist. Madame The on herself was an occultist of great powers, a remarkable clairvoyant, and she had mediumistic qualities. Her powers were quite exceptional; she had received an extremely complete and rigorous training and she could exteriorise herself; that is, bring out of her material body a subtle body, in full consciousness, and do it twelve times in succession. That is, she could pass consciously from one state of being to another, live there as consciously as in the physical body, and then again put that subtler body into trance, exteriorise herself from it, and so on twelve times successively, to the extreme limit of the world of...... I shall speak to you about that later, when you can understand better what I am talking about. But I am going to tell you about some small incidents I saw when I was in TIemecen myself, and a story she told me I shall also tell you.

The incidents are of a more external kind, but very funny.

She was almost always in trance and she had trained her body so well that even when she was in trance, that is, when one or more parts of her being were exteriorised, the body had a life of its own and she could walk about and even attend to some small material occupations.... She did a great deal of work, for in her trances she could talk freely and she used to narrate what she saw, which was noted down and later formed a teaching - which has even been published. And because of all that and the occult work she was doing, she was often tired, in the sense that her body was tired and needed to recuperate its vitality in a very concrete way.

Now, one day when she was particularly tired, she told me, "You will see how I am going to recover my strength." She had plucked from her garden - it was not a garden, it was a vast estate with ancient olive trees, and fir trees such as I have never seen anywhere..., it was a real marvel, on a mountain-side, from the plain to almost half way up - and in this garden there were many lemon trees and orange trees... and grapefruit. Grapefruit has flowers which have an even better fragrance than orange blossoms - they are large flowers and she knew how to make an essence from them herself, she had given me a bottle - well, she had plucked a huge grape- fruit like this, (gesture) very large and ripe, and she lay down on her bed and put the grapefruit on her solar plexus, here, (gesture) like this, holding it with both hands. She lay down and rested. She did not sleep, she rested. She told me: "Come back in an hour." An hour later I returned... and the grapefruit was as flat as a pancake. That meant that she had such a power to absorb vitality that she had absorbed all the life from the fruit and it had become soft and completely flat. And I saw that myself! You may try, you won't succeed!"


The Mother, Questions and Answers, 1957-58, Centenary Edition, vol.9, pp.58-63