Two Souls-One Body?- Part One

In a small set of posts, I would like to talk about the case of Iris Farczady. I happened across the story last year and thought it was intriguing. It involves a lot of paranormal and esoteric questions, religious philosophy also and I thought the story was interesting in its own right. I had wanted to do some posts about paranormal phenomena here at MFM and thought this one would be a great one to start with. Iris Farczady was born in Budapest in 1918. She became known by another name; Lucia Altarez de Salvio. The story of how she came to be known by a different name is what I find so interesting. Iris was born in an upper class family. She had a normal life growing up. She did well in school, especially in the study of languages and mathematics. There was a bit of the unconventional in her families background however, and she also excelled in another area-that of trance mediumship.

Before Iris turned 15 years old she was taking part in a seance, apparently led by her mother. Many different types of 'spirits' spoke through her as she was in a trance. Some of the supposed discarnate entities claimed to be from other planets and some spoke different languages. These entities-whatever they were didn't leave sometimes when the seance was over. Some of them stayed around for days. In an interesting note as to what follows later in the story, some of the 'spirits' begged to be released from the body and mind of Iris.

In 1933 an entity invaded Iris, this one showed no signs of ever wanting to leave. Iris' mother was very distressed about this, but assumed like the other 'spirits' had, it would eventually go away. Mrs. Farczady could not have been more wrong. The spirit said her name was Lucia Altarez de Salvio. Lucia claimed to have died three months prior to the possession in 1933. She said she had been a working class woman from Madrid and had 14 children (she later claimed 15). Lucia also claimed to have been a believer in communism. Lucia knew a lot about Madrid's churches and the saints they were named after. Many years later in an interview done in April 1998 with the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), she could still recite the Lord's prayer in Spanish. One of the particpants in the interview was Titus Rivas an author and researcher from the Netherlands, whose native tongue is Spanish. Rivas claimed that it would not have been unusual at all for Spanish communists to have Catholic sympathies. They identified with the zeal and the suffering of the early Christians, much like believers in 'liberation theology' do these days, especially in Latin America.

I do not think this series is going to be very long at all -I just thought it was an interesting story and would be a good one to put in between the Hadrian/Antinous series in addition to the poetry and my attempts at writing. I expect the H/A saga to go on for a bit more and hope to have the next part of that series here early tomorrow evening.

The picture is called "Duality" by Paresh Maity-2005