Monition
Monition
Supernormal warning. In the wider sense of the definition of psychic researcher Charles Richet, it is the revelation of some past or present event by other than the normal senses. The Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research (1907, p. 487) published the instance of Mr. McCready, editor of the Daily Telegraph, who was in church on a Sunday morning when he heard a voice calling "Go back to the office." He ran and found a petroleum lamp blazing in his room. It threw out such clouds of smoke that everything was covered with soot.
Monitions may range from trifling events to warnings of death. They occur accidentally and are verifiable as true. All the monitive phenomena lie within the field of nonexperimental telepathy and clairvoyance and include apparitions of the dead and of the living, provided that they are message-bearing. It is characteristic of monitions that they deeply impress the mind of the percipients and permit an accurate remembrance even after the lapse of many years.
They may come in the waking state or in dreams, which sometimes repeat themselves. The borderland between waking and sleeping is usually the most favorable for their reception. They may be visual or auditory—seeing apparitions, or hearing voices, and they often take a symbolical form, for instance, the idea of death being presented by a coffin, as seen by Lord Beresford in his cabin while steaming between Gibraltar and Marseilles. The coffin contained the body of his father. On arriving at Marseilles he found that his father had died six days before and was buried on the day he saw the vision (see Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. 5, p. 461).
As regards perception, monitions may be collective yet non-simultaneous and non-identical, or simultaneous and collective. The former is well illustrated by Mrs. Hunter's case, cited by Ernesto Bozzano in the Annals of Psychical Science (vol. 6, no. 34, 1907, p. 248). Mrs. Hunter saw, in the waking state and in daytime, a large coffin on the bed and a tall, stout woman at the foot of the bed looking at it. That evening the governess saw a phantom woman in the same dress in the sitting room where there was nothing visible and cried: "Go away, go away, naughty ugly old woman."
To quote another instance: "During the winter of 1899, Richet was at home while his wife and daughter were at the opera. The professor imagined that the Opera House was on fire. The conviction was so powerful that he wrote on a piece of paper "Feu! Feu!" About midnight, on the return of his family, he immediately asked them if there had been a fire. They were surprised and said that there was no fire, only a false alarm, and they were very much afraid. At the very time Richet made his note, his sister fancied that the professor's room was on fire."
In simultaneous and collective monitions, the phantom or symbol is perceived at the same time by several people.
(See also monitions of approach ; premonition )
monition
So monitor (-TOR) one who warns or advises; senior pupil in a school, etc. XVI; † backboard XVIII; species of lizard supposed to give warning of crocodiles XIX. — L. monitor (poet.) to guide XIX; (var. techn. uses) control, regulate XX. f. the sb. monitory (-ORY2) warning, admonishing. XV. — L. monitōrius.