CHAPTER II

"_Sit down before a fact as a little child: be prepared to give up every preconceived notion: follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing._"--THOMAS HUXLEY.

TESTS

The tests given to me and to my fellow-investigators through the six sensitives who so ably assisted us during our seven years of experimental work in this little-known field of research--the tests have been so numerous, and were of such a varied character, that I find it somewhat difficult to know which to select out of the hundreds which were recorded in our books officially and elsewhere, the ones which will prove of the greatest interest to inquirers; but I have made extracts from ten of these records, and these, with a few taken from Sir William Crookes's reports on the experiments conducted in his presence, will, in my opinion, be sufficient to prove that we who have witnessed these marvels are neither hallucinated, insane, nor liars when we solemnly affirm that we have both seen and handled the materialized bodies built up for temporary use by entities from another sphere; all the statements made here being true in every detail, to the best of my knowledge and belief.

EXPERIMENT NO. 1

Place--_Lyndhurst, New Forest, Hampshire. Sensitive A, male, aged about 46._

As an example of a simple but exceedingly severe test, I would first record one given to me and a fellow-investigator on the outskirts of the New Forest, one for which no special preparation of any kind whatever had been made.

The sensitive, a nearly blind man, was taken by us on a dark night to a spot totally unknown to him, as he had only just arrived from London by train, and was led into a large travelling caravan, one which he had never been near before, as it had only recently left the builder's hands.

During the day I had made a critical examination of the interior of the caravan, and had satisfied myself that no one was or could possibly be concealed in it. I then locked the door, and kept the key in my pocket until the moment when, on the arrival of the sensitive, I unlocked the door and we all passed into the caravan together. I then locked and bolted the door behind us.

As I have already said, no preparation of any kind had been made for the experiment. It was merely the result of a desire to see if anything could be produced through this sensitive, under extremely difficult conditions--conditions which we considered as so utterly bad as to make failure a certainty.

We did not even possess a chair of any kind for the sensitive or ourselves to sit upon, so we placed for his use a board on top of the iron cooking-range which was fixed in the kitchen-portion of the caravan, whilst we sat upon the two couches which were used as beds in the living-portion of the caravan. There was no music, no powerful "human battery" in the shape of a number of picked sitters; in fact, the conditions were just about as bad as they could possibly be, and yet, within ten minutes of my locking the door behind us, the figure of a tall man stood before us, a man so tall that he was compelled to bow his head as he passed under the six-foot high partition which separated the two sections of the caravan.

He said, "I am Colonel -- who was 'killed,' as you say, at the battle of -- in Egypt. For many years during my earth-life I was deeply interested in materializations, and spent the last night of my life in England experimenting with this very sensitive; and it is a great pleasure to me to be able to return to you--strangers though you both are to me--through him. To prove to you that I am not the sensitive masquerading before you, will you please come here and stand close to me, and so settle the matter for yourself?"

I at once rose and stood beside him, almost touching him. I then discovered that not only were his features and his coloring totally different from those of the sensitive, but that he towered above me, standing, as nearly as I could judge, six foot two or three inches, and was certainly four inches taller than either the sensitive or myself.

Whilst thus standing beside him, and at a distance of about eight feet from the sensitive, we could both hear the unfortunate man moving uneasily on his hard seat on the kitchen-range, sighing and moaning as if in pain.

The entity remained with us for about three minutes, and his place was then taken by a slightly built young man, standing about five feet nine inches, one claiming to be a recently deceased member of the royal family. He talked with us in a soft and pleasing voice, finally whispering a private message to my companion, asking him to deliver it to his mother, Queen --.

EXPERIMENT NO. 2

Place--_Peckham Rye, London, S. E. Sensitive A, male, aged about 46._

An almost equally hopeless task was set this sensitive by the owner of the caravan and myself when we experimented with him at midday on a brilliant morning in July, with sunlight streaming into the room round the edges of the drawn down window-blinds, and round the top, sides, and bottom of the heavy window-curtains, which we had pinned together in a vain attempt to keep out the sunlight during the experiment.

And yet once again, and in spite of the conditions which we regarded as utterly hopeless, the figure of a man appeared in less than ten minutes, materialized from head to foot, as he proved to us by showing us his lower limbs. He left the side of the sensitive, walked out into the room and stood between us, talking to us in a deep rich voice for nearly three minutes. As he stood beside us we could hear the sensitive, twelve feet away, moving uneasily on his chair and groaning slightly.

Five minutes after he disappeared the same (alleged) recently deceased member of the royal family walked out to us and held a short private conversation with my companion, and sent another message to his mother, Queen --.

EXPERIMENT NO. 3

Place--_West Hampstead, London, N. W. Sensitive B, female, aged about 49._

Persons of middle age or older who happened to be in England a few years ago at the time that two lawsuits were brought against a celebrated conjurer by the clever young man who had succeeded in exposing one of his most mystifying tricks, will well remember the sensation caused by the giving of both verdicts against the conjurer; and the young man--to whom I shall refer as Mr. X--at once became famous as the man who had beaten one of the cleverest conjurers of the day.

A friend of mine, who had been present on several occasions when Sir William Crookes's sensitive--Florrie Cook (Mrs. Corner), referred to above as Sensitive B--had produced materializations in gaslight at my house in London, asked her to visit his house at West Hampstead one evening to meet several friends of his, and to see if it were possible for any entity to materialize in my friend's own drawing-room.

She at once accepted his invitation to sit there under strict test conditions; and, talking the matter over with some of his friends a day or two before the one chosen for the experiment, he told me that they had arranged to have the sensitive securely tied to her chair, to have strong iron rings fastened to the floor-boards, through which ropes would be passed, these ropes to be securely fastened to the sensitive's legs; all knots of every size and kind to be sealed, so as to prevent any attempt on her part to leave her chair and to masquerade as a materialized entity.

One of his friends happened to know the celebrated Mr. X--, and, as he had so recently succeeded in beating so notable a conjurer, he was invited to be present and to take entire charge of the tying up, the binding and sealing arrangements, in order to render the escape of the sensitive from her chair an impossibility.

When I joined the party in the drawing-room, Mr. X--, to whom I was introduced, was busily engaged in tying the sensitive up with his own ropes and tapes, sealing every knot with special sealing-wax and with a seal provided by our host. The room was a large one, and a portion at one end had been cleared of all furniture, and in the center of this space only the sensitive seated upon her chair, and Mr. X-- busily at work, were to be seen; and the latter, after another fifteen minutes of real hard labor, was asked by our host if he was thoroughly satisfied that the sensitive was fastened to her chair securely. He replied that so securely was she fastened, that if she could produce phenomena of any kind whatever under such conditions, he would at once admit their genuineness.

The sensitive was all this time in a perfectly normal state, and not flurried in any way, her one anxiety being lest we should lower the lights, as she was so terrified at the thought of darkness.

Mr. X--, after stepping backwards to have a final look at the result of his labors, then walked close to the spot where the sensitive was sitting in gaslight, and put one hand up towards the top of the curtain, and was in the act of drawing this round her to keep the direct rays of the gaslight from falling upon her, when a large brown arm and hand suddenly appeared, the hand being clapped heavily upon Mr. X--'s shoulder, whilst a gruff masculine voice asked him in loud tones, "Are you really satisfied?"

I have witnessed some strange happenings in connection with my investigation of occult matters, but to my dying day I shall never forget the look of blank astonishment on Mr. X--'s face at that moment.

Quickly recovering himself, however, he at once examined the sensitive--a little woman, far below the average height, having small hands and feet, as we could all see quite clearly--and declared that every seal and every knot was unbroken, and just as he had left them not sixty seconds before.

Amongst other entities who materialized that evening was a young girl of about eighteen years of age who stated that when she left her earth-body she had been a dancer at a cafe in Algiers.

She came from the spot where the sensitive was seated, laughing heartily, stating that the hand and arm belonged to an old English sailor, whom she spoke of as "the Captain." She said, further, that he had been standing with her watching the tying-up process from their sphere, and laughing at Mr. X--'s vain attempt to prevent the production of the phenomena. The Captain had very much wished to materialize fully, so as to surprise Mr. X-- as he stepped back from the sensitive; but, finding that he could only get sufficient "power" to produce a hand and arm, he was in a bad temper. And this was evidently the case, for during the ten minutes that the girl remained talking to us we could now and then hear the gruff voice of the Captain rolling out language which can only be described as "forcible and free."

The experiment lasted for nearly an hour, and at its conclusion Mr. X-- examined the sensitive, and once again reported that every seal and knot were just as he had left them at the commencement of the experiment.

EXPERIMENT NO. 4

Place--_My House in London. Sensitive D, male, aged about 34._

On numerous occasions this sensitive has been seen by all present, in gaslight shaded by red paper, seated on his chair in a state of deep trance, and was heard to be breathing heavily, whilst two materialized entities stood beside him; or with one beside him, and the other standing five to eight feet away from him and close to the sitters.

Again, two female entities were seen simultaneously when this male sensitive was experimenting with us, one of them inside the half-circle formed by the sixteen sitters, and talking to them in a low sweet voice, at a distance of about eight feet from the sensitive; whilst the other female entity passed through or over the sitters, and, walking about the room outside the half-circle formed by the sitters, came up behind two of them, and not only spoke audibly to them, but also held a short conversation with the entity inside the ring, both speaking almost instantaneously.

THE PHANTOM ARMIES SEEN IN FRANCE[17]

BY HEREWARD CARRINGTON

[Footnote 17: By permission of the author.]

History abounds in cases showing the apparent intrusion of spiritual help in time of trouble, and in the annals of military history these accounts are not lacking. On several occasions the Crusaders thought that they saw angelic hosts fighting for them--phantom horsemen charging the enemy, when their own utter destruction seemed imminent. In the wars between the English and the Scotch, several such cases were cited, and the Napoleonic wars also furnished examples. But the most striking evidence of this character--because the newest--and supported, apparently, by a good deal of first-hand and sincere testimony, is that afforded by the Phantom Armies seen in France during the retreat of the British army from Mons--the field of Agincourt. Cut off by overwhelming numbers, and all but annihilated, the British army fought desperately, but the 80,000 were opposed by 300,000 Germans, backed by a terrific fire of artillery, and were indeed in a critical position. They were only saved, as we know, by the heroism of a small force of men--a rear-guard--who were practically wiped out in consequence. At the most critical moment came what appeared to be angelic assistance. The tide of battle seemed to be stemmed by supernatural means. In a letter written by a soldier who actually witnessed these startling events, quoted by the Hon. Mrs. St. John Mildmay (_North American Review_, August, 1915), the following graphic account is given. Our soldier writes:

"The men joked at the shells and found many funny names for them, and had bets about them, and greeted them with music-hall songs, as they screamed in this terrific cannonade. The climax seemed to have been reached, but 'a seven-times heated hell' of the enemy's onslaught fell upon them, rending brother from brother. At that very moment, they saw from their trenches a tremendous host moving against their lines. Five hundred of the thousand (who had been detailed to fight the rear-guard action) remained, and as far as they could see the German infantry was pressing on against them, column by column, a gray world of men--10,000 of them, as it appeared afterwards. There was no hope at all. Some of them shook hands. One man improvised a new version of the battle song Tipperary, ending 'and we shan't get there!' And all went on firing steadily. The enemy dropped line after line, while the few machine guns did their best. Every one knew it was of no use. The dead gray bodies lay in companies and battalions, but others came on and on, swarming and advancing from beyond and beyond.

"'World without end. Amen!' said one of the British soldiers, with some irreverence, as he took aim and fired. Then he remembered a vegetarian restaurant in London, where he had once or twice eaten queer dishes of cutlets made of lentils and nuts that pretended to be steaks. On all the plates in this restaurant a figure of St. George was painted in blue with the motto, _Adsit Anglis Sanctus Georgius_ (May St. George be a present help to England). The soldier happened to know 'Latin and other useless things,' so now, as he fired at the gray advancing mass, 300 yards away, he uttered the pious vegetarian motto. He went on firing to the end, till at last Bill on his right had to clout him cheerfully on the head to make him stop, pointing out as he did so that the King's ammunition cost money and was not lightly to be wasted. For, as the Latin scholar uttered his invocation, he felt something between a shudder and an electric shock pass through his body. The roar of the battle died down in his ears to a gentle murmur, and instead of it, he says, he heard a great voice louder than a thunder peal, crying 'Array! Array!' His heart grew hot as a burning coal, then it grew cold as ice within him, for it seemed to him a tumult of voices answered to the summons. He heard or seemed to hear thousands shouting:

"'St. George! St. George!

"'Ha! Messire, Ha! Sweet Saint, grant us good deliverance!

"'St. George for Merrie England!

"'Harow! Harow! Monseigneur St. George, succour us, Ha! St. George! A low bow, and a strong bow, Knight of Heaven, aid us!'

"As the soldier heard these voices, he saw before him, beyond the trench, a long line of shapes with a shining about them. They were like men who drew the bow, and with another shout their cloud of arrows flew singing through the air toward the German host. The other men in the trenches were firing all the while. They had no hope, but they aimed just as if they had been shooting at Bisley.

"Suddenly one of these lifted up his voice in plain English. 'Gawd help us!' he bellowed to the man next him, 'but we're bloomin' marvels! Look at those gray gentlemen! Look at them! They 're not going down in dozens or hundreds--it's _thousands_ it is! Look, look! There's a regiment gone while I'm talking to ye!'

"'Shut it,' the other soldier bellowed, taking aim. 'What are ye talkin' about?' But he gulped with astonishment even as he spoke, for indeed the gray men were falling by the thousands. The English could hear the guttural scream of their revolvers as they shot, and line after line crashed to the earth. All the while the Latin-bred soldier heard the cry 'Harow, Harow! Monseigneur! Dear Saint! Quick to our aid! St. George help us!'

"The singing arrows darkened the air, the hordes melted before them. 'More machine guns,' Bill yelled to Tom. 'Don't hear them,' Tom yelled back, 'but thank God, anyway, that they have got it in the neck!'

"In fact, there were ten thousand dead German soldiers left before that salient of the English army, and consequently--_no Sedan_. In Germany the General Staff decided that the English must have employed turpenite shells, as no wounds were discernible on the bodies of the dead soldiers. But the man who knew what nuts tasted like when they called themselves steak, knew also that St. George had brought his Agincourt Bowmen to help the English."

Such accounts have been confirmed by others. Thus, Miss Phyllis Campbell, writing in _The Occult Review_ (October, 1915), says:

"I tremble, now that it is safely past, to look back on the terrible week that brought the Allies to Vitry-le-Francois. We had not had our clothes off for the whole of that week, because no sooner had we reached home, too weary to undress, or to eat, and fallen on our beds, than the 'chug-chug' of the commandant's car would sound into the silence of the deserted street, and the horn would imperatively summon us back to duty--because, in addition to our duties as _ambulancier auxiliare_, we were interpreters to the post, now at this moment diminished to half a dozen.

"Returning at 4:30 in the morning, we stood on the end of the platform, watching the train crawl through the blue-green mist of the forest into the clearing, and draw up with the first wounded from Vitry-le-Francois. It was packed with dead and dying and badly wounded. For a time we forgot our weariness in a race against time--removing the dead and dying, and attending to those in need. I was bandaging a man's shattered arm with the _majeur_ instructing me, while he stitched a horrible gap in his head, when Madame de A--, the heroic president of the post, came and replaced me. 'There is an English in the fifth wagon,' she said. 'He wants something--I think a holy picture!'

"The idea of an English soldier wanting a holy picture struck me, even in that atmosphere of blood and misery, as something to smile at--but I hurried away. 'The English' was a Lancashire Fusilier. He was propped in a corner, his left arm tied-up in a peasant woman's handkerchief, and his head newly bandaged. He should have been in a state of collapse from loss of blood, for his tattered uniform was soaked and caked in blood, and his face paper-white under the dirt of conflict. He looked at me with bright, courageous eyes and asked for a picture or a medal (he didn't care which) of St. George. I asked him if he was a Catholic. 'No,' he was Wesleyan Methodist, and he wanted a picture or a medal of St. George, _because he had seen him on a white horse_, leading the British at Vitry-le-Francois, when the Allies turned.

"There was an F. R. A. man, wounded in the leg, sitting beside him on the floor; he saw my look of amazement, and hastened in: 'It's true, sister,' he said. 'We all saw it. First there was a sort of yellow mist-like, sort of risin' before the Germans as they came on the top of the hill--come on like a solid wall, they did--springing out of the earth just solid--no end to 'em! I just give up. No use fighting the whole German race, thinks I; it's all up with _us_. The next minute comes this funny cloud of light, and when it clears off, there's a tall man with yellow hair in golden armor, on a white horse, holding his sword up, and his mouth open as if he was saying: "Come on, boys! I'll put the kybosh on the devils!" Sort of "This is my picnic" expression. Then, before you could say "knife," the Germans had turned, and we were after them, fighting like ninety ..."

"Where was this?" I asked. But neither of them could tell. They had marched, fighting a rear-guard action, from Mons, till St. George had appeared through the haze of light, and turned the enemy. They both _knew_ it was St. George. Hadn't they seen him with a sword on every 'quid' they'd ever seen? The Frenchies had seen him too--ask them; but they said it was St. Michael...."

Much additional testimony of a like nature might be given--and has been collected by students of psychical research. If the spiritual world ever intervenes in matters mundane, it assuredly did so on this occasion. And it could hardly have chosen a more opportune time. Could the aspiring thoughts of the dead and dying, and those still living and fighting for their country, have drawn "St. George" to earth, to aid in again redeeming his country from a foreign foe? Could a simple "hallucination" have been so widespread and so prevalent? Or might there not have been some spiritual energy behind the visions thus seen--stimulating them, and inspiring and encouraging the stricken soldiers? We cannot say. We only know what the soldiers themselves say; and we also know the undoubted effects upon the enemy. For on both occasions were the Germans repulsed with terrible slaughter. Perhaps the vision of St. George led our soldiers into closer touch and _rapport_ with the consciousness of some high intelligence--or the veil separating the two worlds was rent--as so often appears to be the case in apparitions and visions of this character.

THE PORTAL OF THE UNKNOWN

BY ANDREW JACKSON DAVIS, "THE SEER"

When the hour of her death arrived, I was fortunately in a proper state of mind and body to produce the superior (clairvoyant) condition; but, previous to throwing my spirit into that condition, I sought the most convenient and favorable position, that I might be allowed to make the observations entirely unnoticed and undisturbed. Thus situated and conditioned, I proceeded to observe and investigate the mysterious processes of dying, and to learn what it is for an individual human spirit to undergo the changes consequent upon physical death or external dissolution. They were these:

I saw that the physical organization could no longer subserve the diversified purposes or requirements of the spiritual principle. But the various internal organs of the body appeared to resist the withdrawal of the animating soul. The body and the soul, like two friends, strongly resisted the various circumstances which rendered their eternal separation imperative and absolute. These internal conflicts gave rise to manifestations of what seemed to be, to the material senses, the most thrilling and painful sensations; but I was unspeakably thankful and delighted when I perceived and realized the fact that those physical manifestations were indications, not of pain or unhappiness, but simply that the spirit was eternally dissolving its co-partnership with the material organism.

Now the head of the body became suddenly enveloped in a fine, soft, mellow, luminous atmosphere; and, as instantly, I saw the cerebrum and the cerebellum expand their most interior portions; I saw them discontinue their appropriate galvanic functions; and then I saw that they became highly charged with the vital electricity and vital magnetism which permeate subordinate systems and structures. That is to say, the brain, as a whole, suddenly declared itself to be tenfold more positive, over the lesser proportions of the body, than it ever was during the period of health. This phenomenon invariably precedes physical dissolution.

Now the process of dying, or the spirit's departure from the body, was fully commenced. The brain began to attract the elements of electricity, of magnetism, of motion, of life, and of sensation, into its various and numerous departments. The head became intensely brilliant; and I particularly remarked that just in the same proportion as the extremities of the organism grow dark and cold, the brain appears light and glowing.

Now I saw, in the mellow, spiritual atmosphere which emanated from and encircled her head, the indistinct outlines of the formation of _another_ head. This new head unfolded more and more distinctly, and so indescribably compact and intensely brilliant did it become, that I could neither see through it, nor gaze upon it as steadily as I desired. While this spiritual head was being eliminated and organized from out of and above the material head, I saw that the surrounding aromal atmosphere which had emanated from the material head was in great commotion; but, as the new head became more distinct and perfect, this brilliant atmosphere gradually disappeared. This taught me that those aromal elements, which were, in the beginning of the metamorphosis, attracted from the system into the brain, and thence eliminated in the form of an atmosphere, were indissolubly united in accordance with the divine principle of affinity in the universe, which pervades and destinates every particle of matter, and developed the spiritual head which I beheld.

In the identical manner in which the spiritual head was eliminated and unchangeably organized, I saw, unfolding in their natural progressive order, the harmonious development of the neck, the shoulders, the breast and the entire spiritual organization. It appeared from this, even to an unequivocal demonstration, that the innumerable particles of what might be termed unparticled matter which constitute the man's spiritual principle, are constitutionally endowed with certain elective affinities, analogous to an immortal friendship. The innate tendencies which the elements and essences of her soul manifested by uniting and organizing themselves, were the efficient and imminent causes which unfolded and perfected her spiritual organization. The defects and deformities of her physical body were, in the spiritual body which I saw thus developed, almost completely removed. In other words, it seemed that those hereditary obstructions and influences were now removed, which originally arrested the full and proper development of her physical constitution; and, therefore, that her spiritual constitution, being elevated above those obstructions, was enabled to unfold and perfect itself, in accordance with the universal tendencies of all created things.

While this spiritual formation was going on, which was perfectly visible to my spiritual perceptions, the material body manifested, to the outer vision of observing individuals in the room, many symptoms of uneasiness and pain; but the indications were totally deceptive; they were wholly caused by the departure of the vital or spiritual forces from the extremities and viscera into the brain, and thence into the ascending organism.

The spirit arose at right angles over the head or brain of the deserted body. But immediately previous to the final dissolution of the relationship which had for so many years subsisted between the two, the spiritual and material bodies, I saw--playing energetically between the feet of the elevated spiritual body and the head of the prostrate physical body--a bright stream or current of vital electricity. And here I perceived what I had never before obtained a knowledge of, that a small portion of this vital electrical element returned to the deserted body immediately subsequent to the separation of the umbilical thread; and that that portion of this element which passed back into the earthly organism instantly diffused itself through the entire structure, and thus prevented immediate decomposition.

As soon as the spirit, whose departing hour I thus watched, was wholly disengaged from the tenacious physical body, I directed my attention to the movements and emotions of the former; and I saw her begin to breathe the most interior or spiritual portions of the surrounding terrestrial atmosphere. At first it seemed with difficulty that she could breathe the new medium; but in a few seconds she inhaled and exhaled the spiritual elements of nature with the greatest possible ease and delight. And now I saw that she was in possession of exterior and physical proportions, which were identical, in every possible particular--improved and beautified--with those proportions which characterized her earthly organization. Indeed, so much like her former self was she that, had her friends beheld her as I did, they certainly would have exclaimed--as we often do upon the sudden return of a long-absent friend, who leaves us and returns in health--'Why, how well you look! How improved you are!' Such was the nature--most beautifying in their extent--of the improvements that were wrought upon her.

I saw her continue to conform and accustom herself to the new elements and elevating sensations which belong to the inner life. I did not particularly notice the workings and emotions of her newly-awakening and fast-unfolding spirit, except that I was careful to remark her philosophical tranquillity throughout the entire process, and her non-participation with the different members of her family in their unrestrained bewailing of her departure from the earth, to unfold in Love and Wisdom throughout eternal spheres. She understood at a glance that they could only gaze upon the cold and lifeless form, which she had but just deserted; and she readily comprehended the fact that it was owing to a want of true knowledge upon their parts that they thus vehemently regretted her merely physical death.

The period required to accomplish the entire change which I saw was not far from two hours and a half; but this furnished no rule as to the time required for every spirit to elevate and reorganize itself above the head of the outer form. Without changing my position or spiritual perceptions I continued to observe the movements of her new-born spirit. As soon as she became accustomed to her new elements which surrounded her, she descended from her elevated position, which was immediately over the body, by an effort of the will-power, and directly passed out of the door of the bedroom in which she had lain, in the material form, prostrated with disease for several weeks. It being in a summer month, the doors were all open, and her egress from the house was attended with no obstruction. I saw her pass through the adjoining room, out of the door, and step from the house into the atmosphere! I was overwhelmed with delight and astonishment when, for the first time, I realized the universal truth that the spiritual organization can tread the atmosphere, which is impossible while in the coarser earthly form--so much more refined is man's spiritual constitution. She walked in the atmosphere as easily, and in the same manner, as we tread the earth and ascend an eminence. Immediately upon her emergement from the house, she was joined by two friendly spirits from the spiritual country, and after tenderly recognizing and communing with each other, the three, in the most graceful manner, began ascending obliquely through the ethereal envelopment of her globe. They walked so naturally and fraternally together that I could scarcely realize the fact that they trod the air--they seemed to be walking upon the side of a glorious but familiar mountain. I continued to gaze upon them until the distance shut them from my view,--whereupon I returned to my external and ordinary condition.

* * * * *

This account of the facts--of what actually happened at death--is confirmed by numerous other witnesses, who agree as to the main details.

THE SUPERNORMAL: EXPERIENCES

BY ST. JOHN B. SEYMOUR

When Mrs. Seymour was a little girl she resided in Dublin; amongst the members of the family was her paternal grandmother. This old lady was not as kind as she might have been to her granddaughter, and consequently the latter was somewhat afraid of her. In process of time the grandmother died. Mrs. Seymour, who was then about eight years of age, had to pass the door of the room where the death occurred in order to reach her own bedroom, which was a flight higher up. Past this door the child used to fly in terror with all possible speed. On one occasion, however, as she was preparing to make the usual rush past, she distinctly felt a hand placed on her shoulder, and became conscious of a voice saying, "Don't be afraid, Mary!" From that day on the child never had the least feeling of fear, and always walked quietly past the door.

The Rev. D. B. Knox sends a curious personal experience, which was shared by him with three other people. He writes as follows: "Not very long ago my wife and I were preparing to retire for the night. A niece, who was in the house, was in her bedroom and the door was open. The maid had just gone to her room. All four of us distinctly heard the heavy step of a man walking along the corridor, apparently in the direction of the bathroom. We searched the whole house immediately, but no one was discovered. Nothing untoward happened except the death of the maid's mother about a fortnight later. It was a detached house, so that the noise could not have been made by the neighbors."

In the following tale the "double" or "wraith" of a living man was seen by three different people, one of whom, our correspondent, saw it through a telescope. She writes: "In May, 1883, the parish of A-- was vacant, so Mr. D--, the Diocesan Curate, used to come out to take service on Sundays. One day there were two funerals to be taken, the one at a graveyard some distance off, the other at A-- churchyard. My brother was at both, the far-off one being taken the first. The house we then lived in looked down towards A--churchyard, which was about a quarter of a mile away. From an upper window my sister and I saw _two_ surpliced figures going out to meet the coffin, and said, 'Why, there are two clergy!' having supposed that there would be only Mr. D--. I, being short-sighted, used a telescope, and saw the two surplices showing between the people. But when my brother returned he said: 'A strange thing has happened. Mr. D-- and Mr. W-- (curate of a neighboring parish) took the far-off funeral. I saw them both again at A--, but when I went into the vestry I only saw Mr. W--. I asked where Mr. D-- was, and he replied that he had left immediately after the first funeral, as he had to go to Kilkenny, and that he (Mr. W--) had come on _alone_ to take the funeral at A--.'"

Here is a curious tale from the city of Limerick of a lady's "double" being seen, with no consequent results. It is sent by Mr. Richard Hogan as the personal experience of his sister, Mrs. Mary Murnane. On Saturday, October 25, 1913, at half-past four o'clock in the afternoon, Mr. Hogan left the house in order to purchase some cigarettes. A quarter of an hour afterwards Mrs. Murnane went down the town to do some business. As she was walking down George Street she saw a group of four persons standing on the pavement engaged in conversation. They were her brother, a Mr. O'S--, and two ladies, a Miss P. O'D--, and her sister, Miss M. O'D--. She recognized the latter, as her face was partly turned towards her, and noted that she was dressed in a knitted coat, and light blue hat, while in her left hand she held a bag or purse; the other lady's back was turned towards her. As Mrs. Murnane was in a hurry to get her business done she determined to pass them by without being noticed, but a number of people coming in the opposite direction blocked the way, and compelled her to walk quite close to the group of four, but they were so intent on listening to what one lady was saying that they took no notice of her. The speaker appeared to be Miss M. O'D--, and though Mrs. Murnane did not actually hear her _speak_ as she passed her, yet from their attitudes the other three seemed to be listening to what she was saying, and she heard her _laugh_ when right behind her--not the laugh of her sister P--and the laugh was repeated after she had left the group a little behind.

So far there is nothing out of the common. When Mrs. Murnane returned to her house about an hour later she found her brother Richard there before her. She casually mentioned to him how she had passed him and his three companions on the pavement. To which he replied that she was quite correct except in one point, namely that there were only _three_ in the group, as M. O'D-- _was not present_, as she had not come to Limerick at all that day. She then described to him the exact position each one of the four occupied, and the clothes worn by them, to all of which facts he assented, except as to the presence of Miss M. O'D--. Mrs. Murnane adds, "That is all I can say in the matter, but most certainly the fourth person was in the group, as I both saw and heard her. She wore the same clothes I had seen on her previously, with the exception of the hat; but the following Saturday she had on the same colored hat I had seen on her the previous Saturday. When I told her about it she was as much mystified as I was and am. My brother stated that there was no laugh from any of the three present."

Mrs. G. Kelly sends an experience of a "wraith" which seems in some mysterious way to have been conjured up in her mind by the description she had heard, and then externalized. She writes: "About four years ago a musical friend of ours was staying in the house. He and my husband were playing and singing Dvorak's 'Spectre's Bride,' a work which he had studied with the composer himself. This music appealed very much to both, and they were excited and enthusiastic over it. Our friend was giving many personal reminiscences of Dvorak, and his method of explaining the way he wanted his work done. I was sitting by, an interested listener, for some time. On getting up at last, and going into the drawing-room, I was startled and somewhat frightened to find a man standing there in a shadowy part of the room. I saw him distinctly, and could describe his appearance accurately. I called out, and the two men ran in, but as the apparition only lasted for a second, they were too late. I described the man whom I had seen, whereupon our friend exclaimed, 'Why, that was Dvorak himself!' At that time I had never seen a picture of Dvorak, but when our friend returned to London he sent me one which I recognized as the likeness of the man whom I had seen in our drawing-room."

A curious vision, a case of second sight, in which a quite unimportant event, previously unknown, was revealed, is sent by the percipient, who is a lady well known to both the compilers, and a life-long friend of one of them. She says: "Last summer I sent a cow to the fair of Limerick, a distance of about thirteen miles, and the men who took her there the day before the fair left her in a paddock for the night close to Limerick city. I awoke up very early next morning, and was fully awake when I saw (not with my ordinary eyesight, but apparently _inside_ my head) a light, an intensely brilliant light, and in it I saw the back gate being opened by a red-haired woman and the cow I had supposed in the fair walking through the gate. I then knew that the cow must be home, and going to the yard later on I was met by the wife of the man who was in charge in a great state of excitement. 'Oh law! Miss,' she exclaimed, 'you'll be mad! Didn't Julia [a red-haired woman] find the cow outside the lodge gate as she was going out at 4 o'clock to the milking!' That's my tale--perfectly true, and I would give a good deal to be able to control that light, and see more if I could."

Another curious vision was seen by a lady who is also a friend of both the compilers. One night she was kneeling at her bedside saying her prayers (hers was the only bed in the room), when suddenly she felt a distinct touch on her shoulder. She turned round in the direction of the touch and saw at the end of the room a bed, with a pale, indistinguishable figure laid therein, and what appeared to be a clergyman standing over it. About a week later she fell into a long and dangerous illness.

An account of a dream which implied an extraordinary coincidence, if coincidence it be and nothing more, was sent as follows by a correspondent, who requested that no names be published. "That which I am about to relate has a peculiar interest for me, inasmuch as the central figure in it was my own grand-aunt, and moreover the principal witness (if I may use such a term) was my father. At the period during which this strange incident occurred my father was living with his aunt and some other relatives.

"One morning at the breakfast-table, my grand-aunt announced that she had had a most peculiar dream during the previous night. My father, who was always very interested in that kind of thing, took down in his notebook all the particulars concerning it. They were as follows:

"My grand-aunt dreamt that she was in a cemetery, which she recognized as Glasnevin, and as she gazed at the memorials of the dead which lay so thick around, one stood out most conspicuously, and caught her eye, for she saw clearly cut on the cold white stone _an inscription bearing her own name_:

CLARE.S.D-- Died 14th of March, 1873 Dearly loved and ever mourned R.I.P.

while, to add to the peculiarity of it, the date on the stone as given above was, from the day of her dream, exactly a year in advance.

"My grand-aunt was not very nervous, and soon the dream faded from her mind. Months rolled by, and one morning at breakfast it was noticed that my grand-aunt had not appeared, but as she was a very religious woman it was thought that she had gone out to church. However, as she did not appear my father sent someone to her room to see if she were there, and as no answer was given to repeated knocking the door was opened, and my grand-aunt was found kneeling at her bedside, dead. The day of her death was March 14, 1873, corresponding exactly with the date seen in her dream a twelvemonth before. My grand-aunt was buried in Glasnevin, and on her tombstone (a white marble slab) was placed the inscription which she had read in her dream." Our correspondent sent us a photograph of the stone and its inscription.

The present Archdeacon of Limerick, Ven. J. A. Haydn, LL.D., sends the following experience: "In the year 1870 I was rector of the little rural parish of Chapel Russell. One autumn day the rain fell with a quiet, steady, and hopeless persistence from morning to night. Wearied at length from the gloom, and tired of reading and writing, I determined to walk to the church about half a mile away, and pass a half-hour playing the harmonium, returning for the lamp-light and tea.

"I wrapped up, put the key of the church in my pocket, and started. Arriving at the church, I walked up the straight avenue, bordered with graves and tombs on either side, while the soft, steady rain quietly pattered on the trees. When I reached the church door, before putting the key in the lock, moved by some indefinable impulse I stood on the doorstep, turned round, and looked back upon the path I had just trodden. My amazement may be imagined when I saw, seated on a low, tabular tombstone close to the avenue, a lady with her back towards me. She was wearing a black velvet jacket or short cape, with a narrow border of vivid white; her head and luxuriant jet-black hair were surmounted by a hat of the shape and make that I think used to be called at that time a 'turban'; it was also of black velvet, with a snow-white wing or feather at the right-hand side of it. It may be seen how deliberately and minutely I observed the appearance, when I can thus recall it after more than forty years.

"Actuated by a desire to attract the attention of the lady, and induce her to look towards me, I noisily inserted the key in the door, and suddenly opened it with a rusty crack. Turning around to see the effect of my policy--the lady was gone!--vanished. Not yet daunted, I hurried to the place, which was not ten paces away, and closely searched the stone and the space all around it, but utterly in vain; there were absolutely no traces of the late presence of a human being! I may add that nothing particular or remarkable followed the singular apparition, and that I never heard anything calculated to throw any light on the mystery."

Here is a story of a ghost who knew what it wanted--and got it! "In the part of County Wicklow from which my people come," writes a Miss D--, "there was a family who were not exactly related, but of course of the clan. Many years ago a young daughter, aged about twenty, died. Before her death she had directed her parents to bury her in a certain graveyard. But for some reason they did not do so, and from that hour she gave them no peace. She appeared to them at all hours, especially when they went to the well for water. So distracted were they, that at length they got permission to exhume the remains and have them reinterred in the desired graveyard. This they did by torchlight--a weird scene truly! I can vouch for the truth of this latter portion, at all events, as some of my own relatives were present."

Mr. T. J. Westropp contributes a tale of a ghost of an unusual type, i.e. one which actually did communicate matters of importance to his family. "A lady who related many ghost stories to me, also told me how, after her father's death, the family could not find some papers or receipts of value. One night she awoke, and heard a sound which she at once recognized as the footsteps of her father, who was lame. The door creaked, and she prayed that she might be able to see him. Her prayer was granted: she saw him distinctly holding a yellow parchment book tied with tape. 'F--, child,' said he, 'this is the book your mother is looking for. It is in the third drawer of the cabinet near the cross-door; tell your mother to be more careful in future about business papers.' Incontinently he vanished, and she at once awoke her mother, in whose room she was sleeping, who was very angry and ridiculed the story, but the girl's earnestness at length impressed her. She got up, went to the old cabinet, and at once found the missing book in the third drawer."

Here is another tale of an equally useful and obliging ghost. "A gentleman, a relative of my own," writes a lady, "often received warnings from his dead father of things that were about to happen. Besides the farm on which he lived, he had another some miles away which adjoined a large demesne. Once in a great storm a fir-tree was blown down in the demesne, and fell into his field. The woodranger came to him and told him he might as well cut up the tree, and take it away. Accordingly one day he set out for this purpose, taking with him two men and a cart. He got into the fields by a stile, while his men went on to a gate. As he approached a gap between two fields he saw his father standing in it, as plainly as he ever saw him in life, and beckoning him back warningly. Unable to understand this, he still advanced, whereupon his father looked very angry, and his gestures became imperious. This induced him to turn away, so he sent his men home, and left the tree uncut. He subsequently discovered that a plot had been laid by the woodranger, who coveted his farm, and who hoped to have him dispossessed by accusing him of stealing the tree."

A clergyman in the diocese of Clogher gave a personal experience of table-turning to the present Dean of St. Patrick's, who kindly sent the same to the writer. He said: "When I was a young man, I met some friends one evening, and we decided to amuse ourselves with table-turning. The local dispensary was vacant at the time, so we said that if the table would work we should ask who would be appointed as medical officer. As we sat round it touching it with our hands it began to knock. We said:

"'Who are you?'

"The table spelt out the name of a bishop of the Church of Ireland. We asked, thinking that the answer was absurd, as we knew him to be alive and well:

"'Are you dead?'

"The table answered 'Yes.'

"We laughed at this and asked:

"'Who will be appointed to the dispensary!'

"The table spelt out the name of a stranger, who was not one of the candidates, whereupon we left off, thinking that the whole thing was nonsense.

"The next morning I saw in the papers that the bishop in question had died that afternoon about two hours before our meeting, and a few days afterwards I saw the name of the stranger as the new dispensary doctor. I got such a shock that I determined never to have anything to do with table-turning again."

The following extraordinary personal experience is sent by a lady, well-known to the present writer, but who requests that all names be omitted. Whatever explanation we may give of it, the good faith of the tale is beyond doubt.

"Two or three months after my father-in-law's death, my husband, myself, and three small sons lived in the west of Ireland. As my husband was a young barrister, he had to be absent from home a good deal. My three boys slept in my bedroom, the eldest being about four, the youngest some months. A fire was kept up every night, and with a young child to look after, I was naturally awake more than once during the night. For many nights I believed I distinctly saw my father-in-law sitting by the fireside. This happened, not once or twice, but many times. He was passionately fond of his eldest grandson, who lay sleeping calmly in his cot. Being so much alone probably made me restless and uneasy, though I never felt afraid. I mentioned this strange thing to a friend who had known and liked my father-in-law, and she advised me to 'have his soul laid,' as she termed it. Though I was a Protestant and she was a Roman Catholic (as had also been my father-in-law), yet I fell in with her suggestion. She told me to give a coin to the next beggar that came to the house, telling him (or her) to pray for the rest of Mr. So-and-so's soul. A few days later a beggar-woman and her children came to the door, to whom I gave a coin and stated my desire. To my great surprise I learned from her manner that such requests were not unusual. Well, she went down on her knees on the steps, and prayed with apparent earnestness and devotion that his soul might find repose. Once again he appeared, and seemed to say to me, 'Why did you do that, E----? To come and sit here was the only comfort I had.' Never again did he appear, and strange to say, after a lapse of more than thirty years I have felt regret at my selfishness in interfering.

"After his death, as he lay in the house awaiting burial, and I was in a house some ten miles away, I thought that he came and told me that I would have a hard life, which turned out only too truly. I was then young, and full of life, with every hope of a prosperous future."

Of all the strange beliefs to be found in Ireland that in the Black Dog is the most widespread. There is hardly a parish in the country but could contribute some tale relative to this specter, though the majority of these are short, and devoid of interest. There is said to be such a dog just outside the avenue gate of Donohill Rectory, but neither of the compilers have had the good luck to see it. It may be, as some hold, that this animal was originally a cloud or nature-myth; at all events, it has now descended to the level of an ordinary haunting. The most circumstantial story that we have met with relative to the Black Dog is that related as follows by a clergyman of the Church of Ireland, who requests us to refrain from publishing his name.

"In my childhood I lived in the country. My father, in addition to his professional duties, sometimes did a little farming in an amateurish sort of way. He did not keep a regular staff of laborers, and consequently when anything extra had to be done, such as hay-cutting or harvesting, he used to employ day-laborers to help with the work. At such times I used to enjoy being in the fields with the men, listening to their conversation. On one occasion I heard a laborer remark that he had once seen the devil! Of course I was interested and asked him to give me his experience. He said he was walking along a certain road, and when he came to a point where there was an entrance to a private place (the spot was well known to me), he saw a black dog sitting on the roadside. At the time he paid no attention to it, thinking it was an ordinary retriever, but after he had passed on about two or three hundred yards he found the dog was beside him, and then he noticed that its eyes were blood-red. He stooped down, and picked up some stones in order to frighten it away, but though he threw the stones at it they did not injure it, nor indeed did they seem to have any effect. Suddenly, after a few moments, the dog vanished from his sight.

"Such was the laborer's tale. After some years, during which time I had forgotten altogether about the man's story, some friends of my own bought the place at the entrance to which the apparition had been seen. When my friends went to reside there I was a constant visitor at their house. Soon after their arrival they began to be troubled by the appearance of a black dog. Though I never saw it myself, it appeared to many members of the family. The avenue leading to the house was a long one, and it was customary for the dog to appear and accompany people for the greater portion of the way. Such an effect had this on my friends that they soon gave up the house, and went to live elsewhere. This was a curious corroboration of the laborer's tale."

A distinction must be drawn between the so-called _Headless_ Coach, which portends death, and the _Phantom_ Coach, which appears to be a harmless sort of vehicle. With regard to the latter we give two tales below, the first of which was sent by a lady whose father was a clergyman, and a gold medalist of Trinity College, Dublin.

"Some years ago my family lived in County Down. Our house was some way out of a fair-sized manufacturing town, and had a short avenue which ended in a gravel sweep in front of the hall door. One winter's evening, when my father was returning from a sick call, a carriage going at a sharp pace passed him on the avenue. He hurried on, thinking it was some particular friends, but when he reached the door no carriage was to be seen, so he concluded it must have gone round to the stables. The servant who answered his ring said that no visitors had been there, and he, feeling certain that the girl had made some mistake, or that some one else had answered the door, came into the drawing-room to make further inquiries. No visitors had come, however, though those sitting in the drawing-room had also heard the carriage drive up.

"My father was most positive as to what he had seen, viz. a closed carriage with lamps lit; and let me say at once that he was a clergyman who was known throughout the whole of the north of Ireland as a most level-headed man, and yet to the day of his death he would insist that he met that carriage on our avenue.

"One day in July one of our servants was given leave to go home for the day, but was told she must return by a certain train. For some reason she did not come by it, but by a much later one, and rushed into the kitchen in a most penitent frame of mind. 'I am so sorry to be late,' she told the cook, 'especially as there were visitors. I suppose they stayed to supper, as they were so late going away, for I met the carriage on the avenue.' The cook thereupon told her that no one had been at the house, and hinted that she must have seen the ghost-carriage, a statement that alarmed her very much, as the story was well known in the town, and car-drivers used to whip up their horses as they passed our gate, while pedestrians refused to go at all except in numbers. We have often heard the carriage, but these are the only two occasions on which I can positively assert that it was seen."

The following personal experience of the phantom coach was given to the present writer by Mr. Matthias Fitzgerald, coachman to Miss Cooke, of Cappagh House, County Limerick. He stated that one moonlight night he was driving along the road from Askeaton to Limerick when he heard coming up behind him the roll of wheels, the clatter of horses' hoofs, and the jingling of the bits. He drew over to his own side to let this carriage pass, but nothing passed. He then looked back, but could see nothing, the road was perfectly bare and empty, though the sounds were perfectly audible. This continued for about a quarter of an hour or so, until he came to a cross-road, down one arm of which he had to turn. As he turned off he heard the phantom carriage dash by rapidly along the straight road. He stated that other persons had had similar experiences on the same road.

NATURE-SPIRITS OR ELEMENTALS[18]

BY NIZIDA

[Footnote 18: From Journal of Proceedings of Theosophical Society.]

"Life is one all-pervading principle, and even the thing that seems to die and putrefy but engenders new life and changes to new forms of matter. Reasoning, then, by analogy--if not a leaf, if not a drop of water, but is, no less than yonder star, a habitable and breathing world, common sense would suffice to teach that the circumfluent Infinite, which you call space--the boundless Impalpable which divides the earth from the moon and stars--is filled also with its correspondent and appropriate life."--ZANONI.

Within the last fifty years the human mind has been awakening slowly to the fact that there is a world, invisible to ordinary powers of vision, existing in close juxtaposition to the world cognized by our material senses. This world, or condition of existence for more ethereal beings, has been variously called Spirit-world, Summer-land, Astral-world, Hades, Kama-loca, or Desire-world, etc. Slowly and with difficulty do ideas upon the nature and characteristics of this world dawn upon the modern mind. The imagination, swayed by pictures of sensuous life, revels in the fantastic imagery it attributes to this unknown and dimly conceived state of existence, more often picturing what is false than what is true. Generally speaking, the most crude conceptions are entertained; these embrace but two conditions of life, the embodied and disembodied, for which there are only the earth and heaven, or hell, with that intermediate state accepted by Roman Catholics, called purgatory. There is, therefore, for such minds, only two orders of beings, _i.e._, mankind, and angels or devils, categorically termed _spirits_; but what would be the mode of life of those spirits, is a subject upon which ordinary intellects can throw no light at all. Their ideas are walled in by an impenetrable darkness, and not a ray of light glimmers across the unfathomable gulf lying beyond the grave; that portal of death which, for them, opens upon unknown darkness, and closes upon the light, vivacity, and gaiety of the earth.

The idea that the beings we would term _disembodied_ do actually inhabit bodies of an aerial substance, invisible to our grosser senses, in a world exactly suited to their needs, surpasses the comprehension of an ordinary understanding, which can conceive only of gross matter, visible and tangible. Yet science begins to talk of _mind-stuff_, or _soul-substance_, in reality that ethereal substance which ranks next to dense matter, and which it wears as an external, more hardened shell. For there is space within space. Once realizing the existence of an _inner world_, we shall find that all our ideas concerning space, time, and every particular of our existence, and the world we live in must become entirely revolutionized.

The principal source of knowledge which has been opened in modern times concerning the next state of existence has revealed itself in a manner homogeneous to itself. It has come by an interior method--a revelation from within acting upon the without. The inner world, although always acting upon and through its external covering, in a hidden or veiled way, as from an inscrutable cause, has manifested itself in a manner more overt and cognizable by the bodily senses of man. At least that which has usually been termed, with more or less awe, the _supernatural_, the _ghostly_, has impinged upon the mental incrassation of sensual man as a thing to be reckoned with in daily life; no longer to be relegated to the region of vague darkness _d'outre tombe_. Hence the human mind is being awakened to study and dive into the depths of that life within life, wherein dwell the disembodied, the so-called _dead_, the angels, and, _per contra_, the devils. Those hidden aerial and ethereal regions, wherein the _souls_ of things, and beings, draw life from the bosom of nature; wherein they find their _active_ habitat; wherein nature keeps a store of objects more wonderful, and infinitely more varied, than serve for her regions of dense matter; wherein man can discern the occult causes and beginnings of all things, even of his own thoughts; and whereupon he learns, at length, that he possesses the power of projecting by thought-creation forms more or less endued with life and intelligence, which compose his mental world, and with which he, as it were, "peoples space." He finds the sphere of his responsibilities immensely enlarged by this new knowledge, of which he is taking the first honeyed sips, delighted with the self-importance which the heretofore unsuspected power of diving into the unseen seems to bestow. If hitherto he has had to hold himself responsible for the consequences of his external actions, that they should not militate against the order of society as regards the laws of morality and virtue, he has at least acted upon the impression that his _secret thoughts_ were his own, and remained with him, affecting no one but himself; were incognizable in their veiled chambers, and of which it was not necessary to take any notice; the transitory, evanescent, spontaneous workings of mind, unknown and inscrutable, which begin and end like the flight of a bird, whence coming and where going it is impossible to know.

By the first faint gleams of the light of hidden wisdom, which are beginning to dawn upon his mind, he now perceives that responsibility does not end upon the plane of earth, but extends into the aerial regions of that inner world where his thoughts are no longer secret, and where they affect the astral currents, acting for the good or detriment of others to almost infinite extent; that he may act upon the ambient atmospheres, not only of the outer but inner planes of life, like a plant of poisonous exhalations, if his thoughts be not pure and good; peopling _unseen_ space with the outcome of a debased mind, in the shape of hideous and maleficent creatures. He becomes responsible, therefore, for the consequences of his mental actions and thought-life, as well as those actions carefully prepared to pass unchallenged before this world's gaze.

Diving into the unseen by the light of the new spiritual knowledge now radiating into all minds, we learn that there are three degrees of life in man, the material, the aerial, and the ethereal, corresponding to body, soul, and spirit; and that there are three corresponding planes of existence inhabited by beings suited to them.

The subject of our paper will limit us at present to the aerial, or soul-plane--the next contiguous, or astral world. The beings that more especially live in this realm of the soul, have by common consent been termed _elementals_. Nature in illimitable space teems with life in forms ethereal, evanescent as thought itself, or more objectively condensed and solidified, according to the inherent attraction which holds them together; enduring according to the force, energy, or power which gave them birth; intelligent, or non-intelligent, from the same source, which is mental. These spirits of the soul-world are possessed of aerial bodies, and their world has its own firmament, its own atmosphere and conditions of existence, its own objects, scenes, habitations. Yet their world and the world of man intermingle, interpenetrate, and "throw their shadows upon each other," says Paracelsus. Again, he says: "As there are in our world water and fire, harmonies and contrasts, visible bodies and invisible essences, likewise these beings are varied in their constitution, and have their own peculiarities, for which human beings have no comprehension."

Matter, as known to men in bodies, is seen and felt by means of the physical senses; but to beings not provided with such senses, the things of our world are as invisible and intangible as things of more ethereal substance are to our grosser senses. Elementals which find their habitat in the interior of the earth's shell, usually called _gnomes_, are not conscious of the density of the element of earth as we perceive it; but breathe in a free atmosphere, and behold objects of which we cannot form the remotest conception. In like manner exist the _undines_ in water, _sylphs_ in air, and _salamanders_ in fire. The elementals of the air, sylphs, are said to be friendly towards man; those of the water, undines, are malicious. The salamanders can, but rarely do, associate with man, "on account of the fiery nature of the element they inhabit." The pigmies (gnomes) are friendly; but as they are the guardians of treasure they usually oppose the approach of man, baffling by many mysterious arts the selfish greed of seekers for buried wealth. We, however, read of their alluring miners either by stroke of pick, or hammer, or by floating lights to the best mineral "leads." Paracelsus says of these subterranean elementals that they build houses, vaults, and strange-looking edifices of certain immaterial substances unknown to us. "They have some kind of alabaster, marble, cement, etc., but these substances are as different from ours as the web of a spider is different from our linen."

These inhabitants of the elements, or "nature-spirits," may, or may not be, conscious of the existence of man; oftentimes feeling him merely as a force which propels, or arrests them; for by his will and by his thought, he acts upon the astral currents of the aerial world in which they live; and by the use of his hands he sways the material elements of earth, fire, and water wherein they are established. They perceive the soul-essence of man with its "currents and forms," and they also are capable of reading such thoughts as do not spiritually transcend their powers of discernment. They perceive the states of feeling and emotions of men by the "_colors_ and impressions produced in their auras," and may thus irresistibly be drawn into overt action upon man's plane of life. They are the invisible _stone-throwers_ we hear of so frequently, supposed to be _human_ spirits; the perpetrators of mischief, such as destruction of property in the habitations of men, noises, and mysterious nocturnal annoyances.

Of all writers upon occult subjects to whose works we have as yet gained access, Paracelsus throws the greatest light upon these tricky sprites celebrated in the realm of poesy, and inhabiting that disputed land popularly termed fairydom. From open vision, and that wonderful insight of the master or adept into the secrets of nature, Paracelsus is able to give us the most positive information concerning their bodily formation, the nature of their existence, and other extraordinary particulars, which proves that he has actually seen and observed them, and doubtless also employed them as the obedient servants of his purified will; a power into which the spiritual man ascends by a species of right, when he has thrown off, or conquered, the thraldom of matter in his own body, and stands open-eyed at "the portals of his deep within."

We will quote certain extracts from the pages of this wonderful interpreter of nature. "There are two kinds of flesh. One that comes from Adam, and another that does not come from Adam. The former is gross material, visible and tangible for us; the other one is not tangible and not made from earth. If a man who is a descendant from Adam wants to pass through a wall, he will have first to make a hole through it; but a being who is not descended from Adam needs no hole nor door, but may pass through matter that appears solid to us without causing any damage to it. The beings not descended from Adam, as well as those descended from him, are organized and have substantial bodies; but there is as much difference between the substance composing their bodies as there is between matter and spirit. Yet the elementals are not spirits, because they have flesh, blood, and bones; they live and propagate offspring; they eat and talk, act and sleep, etc., and consequently they cannot be properly called spirits. They are beings occupying a place between man and spirits, resembling men and women in their organization and form, and resembling spirits in the rapidity of their locomotion. They are intermediary beings or composita, formed out of two parts joined into one; just as two colors mixed together will appear as one color, resembling neither one nor the other of the two original ones. The elementals have no higher principles; they are therefore not immortal, and when they die they perish like animals. Neither water nor fire can injure them, and they cannot be locked up in our material prisons. They are, however, subject to diseases. Their costumes, actions, forms, ways of speaking, etc., are not very unlike those of human beings; but there are a great many varieties. They have only animal intellects, and are incapable of spiritual development."

In saying the elementals have "no higher principles," and "When they die they perish like animals," Paracelsus does not stop to explain that the higher principles in them are absolutely latent, as in plants; and that animals in "perishing" are not destroyed, but the psychical or soul-part of the animal passes, by the processes of evolution, into higher forms.

"Each species moves only in the element to which it belongs, and neither of them can go out of its appropriate element, which is to them as the air is to us, or the water to fishes; and none of them can live in the element belonging to another class. To each elemental being the element in which it lives is transparent, invisible, and respirable, as the atmosphere is to ourselves."

"As far as the personalities of the elementals are concerned, it may be said that those belonging to the element of water resemble human beings of either sex; those of the air are greater and stronger; the salamanders are long, lean, and dry; the pigmies (gnomes) are the length of about two spans, but they may extend or elongate their forms until they appear like giants.

"Nymphs (undines, or naiads) have their residences and palaces in the element of water; sylphs and salamanders have no fixed dwellings. Salamanders have been seen in the shape of fiery balls, or tongues of fire running over the fields or appearing in houses;" or at psychical seances as starry lights, darting and dancing about.

"There are certain localities where large numbers of elementals live together, and it has occurred that a man has been admitted into their communities and lived with them for a while, and that they have become visible and tangible to him."

Poets, in their moments of exaltation, have an unconscious soul-vision before which nature's invisible worlds lie like an open volume, and they translate her secrets into language of mystic meanings whose harmonies are re-interpreted by sympathetic minds. The poet Hogg, in his _Rapture of Kilmeny_, would seem to have had a vision of some such visit as that described above, into the fairyland of pure, peaceful _elementals_.

"Bonny Kilmeny gaed up the glen"--and is represented as having fallen asleep. During this sleep she is transported to "a far countrye," whose gentle, lovely inhabitants receive her with delight. The following lines reveal the poet's power of inner vision, as will be seen by the words italicized. They are in wonderful accord with the descriptions given by Paracelsus from the actual observation of a _conscious seer_:

"They lifted Kilmeny, they led her away, And she walk'd _in the light of a sunless day_; The sky was _a dome of crystal bright_, The _fountain of vision and fountain of light_; The emerald fields _were of dazzling glow_, And the _flowers of everlasting blow_."

It needs but a brushing away of the films of flesh, which occurs in moments of rapt inspiration, for the soul, escaping from its prison-house, to revel in the innocent, peaceful scenes of its own inner world, and give a true description of what it beholds. The inner meanings of things, the symbolical correspondences are revealed in a flash of light, and the poet-soul becomes revelator and prophet all in one. He sets it down to imagination and fancy, when he returns into his normal state, and it is what we call "a flight of genius"--the power of the soul to enter its own appropriate world. Certainly _les ames de boue_ have no such power. It is, however, a _proof that world exists_, if we will but understand it aright.

There has never existed a poet with a truer conception of "elemental" life than Shakespeare. What more exquisite creation of the poet's fancy, which _might be every word of it true_, for in no particular does it surpass the truth, than that of _Ariel_, whom the "foul witch Sycorax," "by help of her more potent ministers, and in her most unmitigable rage," did confine "into a cloven pine;" for Ariel, the good elemental, was "a spirit too delicate to act her earthly and abhorred commands." When Prospero, the Adept and White Magician, arrived upon the scene, by his superior art he liberated the delicate Ariel, who afterwards becomes his ministering servant for _good_, not for evil.

In the _Midsummer Night's Dream_, Titania transports a human child into her elemental world, where she keeps him with so jealous a love as to refuse to yield him even to her "fairy lord," as Puck calls him. Puck himself is almost as exquisite a realization of elemental life as Ariel. As Shakespeare unfolds the lovely, innocent tale of the occupations, sports and pranks of this aerial people, he introduces us to the elementals of his own beautiful thought world; and, although indulging in the "sports of fancy," there is so broad a foundation of truth, that, being enlightened by the revelations of Paracelsus, we no longer think we are merely entertained by the poetical inventions of a master of his art, but may well believe we have been witnesses of a charming reality beheld through the "rift in the veil" of the poet's unconscious inner sight. Indeed, one of the tenets of occult science is that there is nothing on earth, nor that the mind of man can conceive, which is not already existent in the unseen world.

We reflect in the translucence, or _diaphane_ of our mental world those concrete images of things which we attract by the irresistible magnetism of _desire_ working through the thought. It is a spontaneous, unconscious mental process with us; but there is no reason why it should not become a perfectly conscious process regulated by a divine wisdom to functions of harmony with nature's laws, and to productions of beauty and beneficence for the good of the whole world. As the world is the concreted emanation of divine thought, so it is by thought that man, the microcosm, _creates_ upon his petty, finite plane. Given the desire--even if it be only as the lightest breath of a summer zephyr upon the sleeping bosom of the ocean, scarcely ruffling its surface--it becomes a center of attraction for suitable molecules of thought-substance floating in space, which immediately "agglomerate round the idea proceeding to reveal itself," _by means_ of clothing itself in substance. By these silent processes in the invisible world wherein our souls draw the breath of life, we form our mental world, our personal character, even our very physical bodies. The _perisprit_, or astral body, the vehicle for _formless spirit_, is essentially builded up from the mental life, and grows by the accretion of those atoms or molecules of thought-substance which are assimilable by the mind. Hence a good man, a man of lofty aspirations, forms, as the _nearest_ external clothing of his inner spirit, a beautiful soul-body, which irradiates through and beautifies the physical body. The man of low and groveling mind will, on the contrary, attract the depraved and poisoned substances of the lower astral world; the malarial emanations thrown off by other equally depraved beings, by which his mind becomes embruted, his soul diseased, whilst his physical form presents in a concrete image the ugliness of his inner nature. Such a man never ascends above the dense, mephitic vapors of the sin-laden world, nor takes into his soul the slightest breath of pure, vitalizing air. He is diseased by invisible astral _microbes_, being most effectually self-inoculated with them by the operation of desires which never transcend the earth. Did we lift the veil which shrouds from mortal sight the elemental world of such a moral pervert, we should behold a world teeming with hideous forms, and as actively working as the _bacteria_ of fermentation revealed by a powerful microscope, elementals of destruction, death, and decay, which must pass out into other forms for the purification of the spiritual atmosphere; creatures produced by the man's own thoughts, living upon and in him, and reflecting, like mirrors, his hideousness back again to himself. It is from the presence of innumerable foci of evil of this kind that the world is befouled, and the moral atmosphere of our planet tainted. They emit poisoned astral currents, from which none are safe but those who are in the _positive_ condition of perfect moral health.

From the fountain of life we draw in the materials of life, and become, upon our lower plane, other living fountains, which from liberty of choice, and freedom of will, have the power of so muddying the pure stream, that in its turbidness and foulness it becomes death instead of life, and produces hell instead of heaven. When we, by self-purification, and that constant mental discipline which trains us upwards, clinging to our highest ideal by the tendrils of faith, and love, and continual aspiration, as the vine would cling to a rock--have eliminated all that is impure in our thought world, we become fountains of life, and make our own heavens, wherein are reflected only images of divine beauty. The whole elemental world on our immediate astral plane becomes gradually transformed during the progress of our evolution into the higher spiritual grades of being. And as humanity _en masse_ advances, throwing off the moral and spiritual deformity of the selfish, ignorant ego, the astral atmospheres belonging to our planet world become filled with elementals of a peaceful, loving character, of beautiful forms, and of beneficent influences. The currents of evil force which now act with a continually jarring effect upon those striving to maintain the equilibrium of harmony with nature upon the side of _good_, would cease. That depression, agitation, and distress which now, from inscrutable causes, assail minds otherwise rejoicing in an innocent happiness, forewarning them of some impending calamity, or of some evil presence it seems impossible to shake off, would become unknown. The horrible demons of war, with which humanity, in its sinful state of _separateness_, is continually threatening itself--as if the members of one body were self-opposed, and revolting from that state of agreement that can alone ensure the well-being of the whole--would no longer be held, like ravenous bloodhounds chafing against their leashes, ready to spring, at a word, upon their hellish work; but they will have passed away, like other hideous deformities of evil; and the serene astral atmospheres would no longer reflect ideas of cruel wrongs to fellow-beings, revenge, lust of power, injustice, and ruthless hatred. We are taught that around an "idea" agglomerate the suitable molecules of soul-substance--"Monads," as Leibnitz terms them, until a concrete form stands created, the production of a mind, or minds. All the hideous man-created beings, powers or forces, which now act like ravaging pestilences and storms in the astral atmospheres of our planet will have disappeared like the monstrous phantoms of a frightful dream, when the whole of humanity has progressed into a state of higher spiritual evolution. It is well to reflect that _each individual_, however humble and apparently insignificant his position in the great human family, can aid by his life, by the silent emanation of his pure and wise thoughts, as well as by his active labors for humanity, in bringing nearer this halcyon period of peace, harmony, and purity--that millennium, in short, we are all looking forward to, as a dream we can never hope to see realized.

In _Man: Fragments of Forgotten History_, we read: "Violence was the most baneful manifestation of man's spiritual decadence, and it rebounded upon him from the elemental beings, whom it was his duty to develop"--those _sub-mundanes_, towards whom man is now learning that he incurs _responsibilities_ of which he is at present utterly unconscious, but of which he will indubitably become more and more aware as he ascends the ladder of spiritual evolution.

To continue our extract from _Fragments_. "When this duty was ignored, and the separation of interests was accentuated, the natural man forcibly realized an antagonism with the elemental spirits. As violence increased in man, these spirits waxed strong in their way, and, true to their natures, which had been outraged by the neglect of those who were in a sense their guardians, they automatically responded with resentment. No longer could man rely upon the power of love or harmony to guide others, because he himself had ceased to be impelled solely by its influence; distrust had marred the symmetry of his inner self, and beings who could not perceive but only _receive impressions projected towards them_, quickly adapted themselves to the altered conditions." (Elementals as _forces_, respond to forces, or are swayed by them; man, as a superior force, acts upon them, therefore, injuriously, or beneficially, and they in their turn, poisoned by his baleful influence, when he is depraved, become injurious forces to him by the laws of reaction.) "At once nature itself took on the changed expression; and where all before was gladness and freshness there were now indications of sorrow and decay. Atmospheric influences hitherto unrecognized began to be noted; there was felt a chill in the morning, a dearth of magnetic heat at noon-tide, and a universal deadness at the approach of night, which began to be looked upon with alarm. For a change in the object must accompany every change in the subject. Until this point was reached there was nothing to make man afraid of himself and his surroundings.

"And as he plunged deeper and deeper into matter, he lost his consciousness of the subtler forms of existence, and attributed all the antagonism he experienced to unknown causes. The conflict continued to wax stronger, and, in consequence of his ignorance, man fell a readier victim. There were exceptions among the race then, as there are now, whose finer perceptive faculties outgrew, or kept ahead, of the advancing materialization; and they alone, in course of events, could feel and recognize the influences of these earliest progeny of the earth.

"Time came when an occasional appearance was viewed with alarm, and was thought to be an omen of evil. Recognizing this fear on the part of man, the elementals ultimately came to realize for him the dangers he apprehended, and they banded together to terrify him." (They reflected back to him his own fears in a concrete form, sufficiently intelligent, perhaps, to take some malicious pleasure in it, for man in propelling into space a force of any kind is met by a reactionary force, which seems to give exactly what his mind foreshadowed. In the negative coldness of fear, he lays himself open to infesting molecules or atoms which paralyze life, and he falls a victim to his own lack of faith, cheerful courage and hope.) "They found strong allies in an order of existence which was generated when physical death made its appearance" (_i.e._, elementaries, or shells); "and their combined forces began to manifest themselves at night, for which man had a dread as being the enemy of his protector, the sun.[19]

[Footnote 19: _Fragments of Forgotten History._]

"The elementaries galvanized into activity by the elemental beings began to appear to man under as many varieties of shape as his hopes and fears allowed. And as his ignorance of things spiritual became denser, these agencies brought in an influx of error, which accelerated his spiritual degeneration. Thus, it will be seen that man's neglect of his duty to the nature-spirits is the cause which has launched him into a sea of troubles, that has shipwrecked so many generations of his descendants. Famines, plagues, wars, and other catastrophes are not so disconnected with the agency of nature-spirits as it might appear to the sceptical mind."[20]

[Footnote 20: _Fragments of Forgotten History._]

It is therefore evident that the world of man exercises a controlling power over this invisible world of elementals. Even in the most remote and inaccessible haunts of nature, where we may imagine halcyon days of an innocent bliss elapsing in poetic peace and beauty for the more harmless of these irresponsible, evanescent offspring of nature's teeming bosom, they must inevitably, sooner or later, yield up their peaceful sovereignty to the greater monarch, man, who usually comes with a harsh and discordant influence, like the burning sirocco of the desert, like the overwhelming avalanche from the silent peaks of snow, or the earthquake, convulsing and tearing to atoms the beauty of gardens, palaces, cities. It is said that elementals _die_; it is presumable that at such times they die by myriads, when the whole surface of the earth becomes changed from the unavoidable passing away of nature's wildernesses, the peaceful homes of bird and beast, as the improving, commercial, money-grasping man--that contradiction of God, that industrious destroyer, who lives at war with beauty, peace, and goodness--appears upon the scene. These may be called poetical rhapsodies; yet poetry is, in a mysterious way, closely allied to that hidden truth which has its birth on the soul-plane, and the imagination of man is, according to Eliphas Levi, a clairvoyant and magical faculty--"the wand of the magician."

To speak of elementals _dying_, is to use a word which expresses for us _change of condition_; the passing from one sphere of life to another, or from one plane of consciousness to another. This to the sensual man is "death." But there is _no_ death--it is merely a passing from one phase of existence to another. Hence the elementals lose the forms they once held, changing their plane of consciousness, and appearing in other forms.

We have shown somewhat of the mysterious way in which man acts upon these invisible denizens of his soul-world, and by which he incurs a certain responsibility. By the dynamic power of thought and will it is done--as everything is done. The elementals pushed by man, as by a superior force, off that equilibrium of harmony with pure, innocent nature, which they originally maintained when our planet was young, have been transformed into powers of evil, which man brings upon himself as retribution--the reaction of that force he ignorantly sets in motion when he breaks the beneficent laws of nature. Originally dependent upon him, and capable of aiding him in a thousand ways when he is wise and good, they have become his enemies, who thwart him at every turn, and guard the secrets of their abodes with none the less implacable sternness because they are probably only semi-conscious of the functions they perform. It is nature acting through them--the great cosmic consciousness, which forbids that desecrating footsteps shall invade the holy precincts of her stupendous life-secrets. But to the spiritual man--the god--these secrets open of themselves, like a hand laden with gifts, readily unclosing to a favorite and deserving child.

Giving forth a current of evil, and sinking therefrom into a state of bestial ignorance, man has enveloped himself in clouds of darkness which assume monstrous shapes threatening to overwhelm him. A wicked man is generally a coward because he lives in a state of perpetual dread of the reactionary effect of the evil forces he has set in motion. These are volumes of elemental forms banded together, and swaying like the thunder-clouds of a gathering storm.

To disperse these, his own spiritual mind must ray forth the light reflected from the source of light--omniscience. In the astral atmospheres of the spiritual man, there are no clouds, and fear is unknown. In the mental world of the innocent and pure, those are only forms of gracious beauty, as lovely as the shapes of nature's innocent embryons, which reveal themselves in the forests, the running streams, the floating breeze, and in company with the birds and flowers, to the clairvoyant sight of those nature-lovers before whom she withdraws her veils, communing with their souls by an intuitional speech which fills them with rapturous admiration. It is not only the learned scientist who may read nature's marvelous revelations; for she whispers them with maternal tenderness into the open ears of babes, where they remain ever safe from desecration, and are cherished as the soul's innocent delights in hours of isolation from the busy, jarring world.

The spiritual soul is ever looking beneath nature's material veils for _correspondences_. Every natural object _means_ something else to such penetrating vision--a vision which begins to be spontaneously exercised by the soul when it has fairly reached that stage of spiritual evolution; and to this silent exploration many a secret meaning reveals itself by object-pictures, which awaken reflection and inquiry as to the why and wherefore. Thus the spiritual man drinks, as it were, from nature's own hand the pure waters of an inexhaustible spring--that occult knowledge which feeds his soul, and aids in forming for him a beautiful and powerful astral body. And nature becomes invested to his penetrating sight with a beauty she never wore before, and which the clay-blinded eyes of animal man can never behold. Such a man would enter the isolated haunts of the purer nature-spirits with gentle footsteps, and loving thoughts. To him the breeze is wafted wooingly, the streams whisper music, and everything wears an aspect of loving joyousness, and inviting confidence. Beside the rigid material forms, he sees their _aromal counter-parts_; everything is life; the very stones live, and have a consciousness suited to their state; and he feels as if every atom of his own body vibrated in unison with the living things about him--as if _all were one flesh_. To injure a single thing would be impossible to him. Such is the soul-condition of the perfect man, to whom evil has become impossible.

An adept has written--"Every thought of man upon being evolved passes into another world and becomes an active entity by associating itself--coalescing, we might term it--with an elemental; that is to say, with one of the semi-intelligent forces of the kingdoms. It survives as an active intelligence--a creature of the mind's begetting--for a longer or shorter period, proportionate with the original intensity of the cerebral action which generated it. Thus, a good thought is perpetuated as an active, beneficent power, an evil one as a maleficent demon. And so man is continually peopling his current in space with the offspring of his fancies, desires, impulses, and passions; a current which re-acts upon any sensitive or nervous organization which comes in contact with it, in proportion to its dynamic intensity. The adept evolves these shapes consciously, other men throw them off unconsciously."

Therefore, man must be held responsible not only for his outward actions, but his secret thoughts, by which he puts into existence irresponsible entities of more or less maleficent power, if his thoughts be of an evil nature. These are revelations of a deep and abstruse character; but would they have come at all if man had not reached that stage of evolution when it is necessary he should step up into his spiritual kingdom, and rule as a master over his lower self, and as a beneficent god over every department of unintelligent nature?

We note the closing words of the adept's letter: "The adept evolves these shapes consciously, other men throw them off unconsciously." In the adept's soul-world then--the man who has ascended, by self-conquest primarily, into his spiritual kingdom, and who has graduated through years of probation and study in spiritual or occult science--_i.e._, the White Magician, the Son of God, the inheritor by spiritual evolution, of divinity--there would reign peace, happiness, beauty, order, absolute harmony with nature on the side of good. No discordant note, no deformed astral production to embarrass or obstruct the current of divine magnetism he emanates into space--the delicious, soul-purifying, healing, and uplifting aura which radiates from him as from a center of beneficence to the lower world of struggling humanity. The semi-intelligent forces of nature, the innocent nature spirits would in such a soul-world, find an appropriate and harmonious habitat, clustering in waiting obedience upon the behests of a master whose every thought-breath would be as an uplifting life.

To such a state and condition of complete harmony with God and nature must the truly perfect spiritual man ascend by evolution.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ELEMENTALS AND ELEMENTARIES

From the similarity of the terms used to designate two classes of astral beings who are able to communicate with man, a certain confusion has arisen in the public mind, which it would be as well, perhaps, to aid in removing.

_Elementals_ is a term applied to the nature spirits, the living existences which belong peculiarly to the elements they inhabit; "beings of the _mysteria specialia_," according to Paracelsus, "soul-forms, which will return into their chaos, and who are not capable of manifesting any higher spiritual activity because they do not possess the necessary kind of constitution in which an activity of a spiritual character can manifest itself.... Matter is connected with spirit by an intermediate principle which it receives from this spirit. This intermediate link between matter and spirit belongs to all the three kingdoms of nature. In the mineral kingdom it is called Stannar, or Trughat; in the vegetable kingdom, Jaffas; and it forms in connection with the vital force of the vegetable kingdom, the Primum Ens, which possesses the highest medicinal properties.... In the animal kingdom, this semi-material body is called Evestrum, and in human beings it is called the Sidereal Man. Each living being is connected with the Macrocosmos and Microcosmos by means of this intermediate element of soul, belonging to the Mysterium Magnum from whence it has been received, and whose form and qualities are determined by the quality and quantity of the spiritual and material elements." From this we may infer that the _Elementals_, properly speaking, are the _Soul-forms_ of the elements they inhabit--the activities and energies of the _world-soul_ differentiated into forms, endowed with more or less consciousness and capacities for feeling, and hours of enjoyment, or pain. But these, never or rarely, entering any more deeply into dense matter than enabled so to do by their aerial invisible bodies, do not appear upon our gross physical plane otherwise than as forces, energies, or influences. Their soul-forms are the intermediate link between matter and spirit, resembling the soul-forms of animals and men, which also form this intermediate link, the difference being that the souls of animals and men have enveloped themselves in a casing of dense matter for the purposes of existence upon the more external planes of life. Consequently, after the death of the external bodies of men and animals, there remain astral remnants which undergo gradual disintegration in the astral atmospheres. These have been termed _elementaries_; _i.e._, "the astral corpses of the dead; the ethereal counterpart of the once living person, which will sooner or later be decomposed into its astral elements, as the physical body is dissolved into the elements to which it belongs. The elementaries of good people have little cohesion and evaporate soon; those of wicked people may exist a long time; those of suicides, etc., have a life and consciousness of their own as long as a division of principles has not taken place. These are the most dangerous."

In the introduction to _Isis Unveiled_, we find the following definition of elemental spirits:

"The creatures evolved in the four kingdoms of earth, air, fire, and water, and called by the Kabalists gnomes, sylphs, salamanders, and undines. They may be termed the forces of nature, and will either operate effects as the servile agents of general law, or may be employed by the disembodied spirits--whether pure or impure--and by living adepts of magic and sorcery, to produce desired phenomenal results. _Such_ beings never become men." (But there are classes of elemental spirits who do become men, as we shall see further on.)

"Under the general designation of fairies and fays, these spirits of the elements appear in the myth, fable, tradition, and poetry of all nations, ancient and modern. Their names are legion--peris, devs, djins, sylvans, satyrs, fawns, elves, dwarfs, trolls, kobolds, brownies, stromkarls, undines, nixies, salamanders, goblins, banshees, kelpies, prixies, moss people, good people, good neighbors, wild women, men of peace, white ladies, and many more. They have been seen, feared, blessed, banned, and invoked in every quarter of the globe and in every age. These elementals are the principal agents of disembodied but never visible spirits at seances, and the producers of all the phenomena except the 'subjective.'"--(Preface xxix, vol. I.)

"In the Jewish Kabala the nature spirits were known under the general name of _Shedim_, and divided into four classes. The Persians called them _devs_; the Greeks indistinctly designated them as _demons_; the Egyptians knew them as _afrites_. The ancient Mexicans, says Kaiser, believed in numerous spirit-abodes, into one of which the shades of innocent children were placed until final disposal; into another, situated in the sun, ascended the valiant souls of heroes; while the hideous specters of incorrigible sinners were sentenced to wander and despair in subterranean caves, held in the bonds of the earth-atmosphere, unwilling and unable to liberate themselves. They passed their time in communicating with mortals, and frightening those who could see them. Some of the African tribes know them as Yowahoos."--(P. 313, vol. I.)

Of the ideas of Proclus on this subject it is said in _Isis Unveiled_:

"He held that the four elements are all filled with demons, maintaining with Aristotle that the universe is full, and that there is no void in nature. The demons of earth, air, fire, and water, are of an elastic, ethereal, semi-corporeal essence. It is these classes which officiate as intermediate agents between the gods and men. Although lower in intelligence than the sixth order of the higher demons, these beings preside directly over the elements and organic life. They direct the growth, the inflorescence, the properties, and various changes of plants. They are the personified ideas or virtues shed from the heavenly _ule_ into the inorganic matter; and, as the vegetable kingdom is one remove higher than the mineral, these emanations from the celestial gods take form in the plant, and become _its soul_. It is that which Aristotle's doctrine terms the _form_ in the three principles of natural bodies, classified by him as _privation_, matter, and form. His philosophy teaches that besides the original matter, another principle is necessary to complete the triune nature of every particle, and this is _form_; an invisible, but still, in an ontological sense of the word, a substantial being, really distinct from matter proper. Thus, in an animal or a plant, besides the bones, the flesh, the nerves, the brains, and the blood in the former; and besides the pulpy matter, tissues, fibers, and juice in the latter, which blood and juice by circulating through the veins and fibers nourish all parts of both animal and plant; and besides the animal spirits which are the principles of motion, and the chemical energy which is transformed into vital force in the green leaf, there must be a substantial form, which Aristotle called in the horse, the _horse's soul_; and Proclus, the _demon_ of every mineral, plant, or animal, and the medieval philosophers, the _elementary spirits_ of the four kingdoms."--(P. 312, vol. I.)

"According to the ancient doctrines, the soulless elemental spirits were evolved by the ceaseless motion inherent in the astral light. Light is force, and the latter is produced by _will_. As this will proceeds from an intelligence which cannot err, for it has nothing of the material organs of human thought in it, being the super-fine pure emanation of the highest divinity itself--(Plato's _Father_)--it proceeds from the beginning of time, according to immutable laws, to evolve the elementary fabric requisite for subsequent generations of what we term human races. All of the latter, whether belonging to this planet or to some other of the myriads in space, have their earthly bodies evolved in the matrix out of the bodies of a certain class of these elemental beings which have passed away in the invisible worlds." (P. 285, vol. I.)

Speaking of Pythagoras, Iamblichus, and other Greek philosophers, _Isis_ says:

"The universal ether was not, in their eyes, simply a something stretching, tenantless, throughout the expanse of heaven; it was a boundless ocean peopled, like our familiar seas, with monstrous and minor creatures, and having in its every molecule the germs of life. Like the finny tribes which swarm in our oceans and smaller bodies of water, each kind having its 'habitat' in some spot to which it is curiously adapted; some friendly and some inimical to man; some pleasant and some frightful to behold; some seeking the refuge of quiet nooks and land-locked harbors, and some traversing great areas of water, the various races of the elemental spirits were believed by them to inhabit the different portions of the great ethereal ocean, and to be exactly adapted to their respective conditions." (P. 284, vol. I.)

"Lowest in the scale of being are those invisible creatures called by the Kabalists the _elementary_. There are three distinct classes of these. The highest, in intelligence and cunning, are the so-called terrestrial spirits, the _larvae_, or shadows of those who have lived on earth, have refused all spiritual light, remained and died deeply immersed in the mire of matter, and from whose sinful souls the immortal spirit has gradually separated. The second class is composed of invisible antitypes of men _to be_ born. No form can come into objective existence, from the highest to the lowest, before the abstract idea of this form, or as Aristotle would call it, the privation of this form is called forth.... These models, as yet devoid of immortal spirits, are elementals properly speaking, _psychic embryos_--which when their time arrives, die out of the invisible world, and are borne into this visible one as human infants, receiving _in transitu_ that divine breath called spirit which completes the perfect man. This class cannot communicate objectively with man.

"The third class of elementals proper never evolve into human beings, but occupy, as it were, a specific step of the ladder of being, and, by comparison with the others, may properly be called nature-spirits, or cosmic agents of nature, each being confined to its own element, and never transgressing the bounds of others. These are what Tertullian called 'the princes of the powers of the air.'

"This class is believed to possess but one of the three attributes of man. They have neither immortal souls nor tangible bodies; only astral forms, which partake, in a distinguishing degree, of the element to which they belong, and also of the ether. They are a combination of sublimated matter and a rudimental mind. Some are changeless, but still have no separate individuality, acting collectively so to say. Others, of certain elements and species, change form under a fixed law which Kabalists explain. The most solid of their bodies is ordinarily just immaterial enough to escape perception by our physical eyesight, but not so unsubstantial but that they can be perfectly recognized by the inner or clairvoyant vision. They not only exist, and can all live in ether, but can handle and direct it for the production of physical effects, as readily as we can compress air or water for the same purpose by pneumatic or hydraulic apparatus; in which occupation they are readily helped by the 'human elementary.' More than this; they can so condense it as to make to themselves tangible bodies, which by their protean powers they can cause to assume such likenesses as they choose, by taking as their models the portraits they find stamped in the memory of the persons present. It is not necessary that the sitter should be thinking at the moment of the one represented. His image may have faded away years before. The mind receives indelible impression even from chance acquaintance, or persons encountered but once." (Pp. 310, 311, vol. I.)

"If spiritualists are anxious to keep strictly dogmatic in their notions of the spirit-world, they must not set _scientists_ to investigate their phenomena in the true experimental spirit. The attempt would most surely result in a partial re-discovery of the magic of old--that of Moses and Paracelsus. Under the deceptive beauty of some of their apparitions, they might find some day the sylphs and fair undines of the Rosicrucians playing in the currents of _psychic_ and _odic_ force.

"Already Mr. Crookes, who fully credits the _being_, feels that under the fair skin of Katie, covering a simulacrum of heart borrowed partially from the medium and the circle, there is no soul! And the learned authors of the _Unseen Universe_, abandoning their "electro-biological" theory, begin to perceive in the universal ether the _possibility_ that it is a photographic album of _En-Soph_ the Boundless.--(P. 67, vol. I.)

"We are far from believing that all the spirits that communicate at circles are of the classes called 'elemental' and 'elementary.'" Many, especially among those who control the medium subjectively to speak, write, and otherwise act in various ways, are human, disembodied spirits. Whether the majority of such spirits are good or _bad_, largely depends on the private morality of the medium, much on the circle present, and a great deal on the intensity and object of their purpose.... But in any case, human spirits can _never_ materialize themselves in _propria persona_.[21]--(P. 67, vol. I.)

[Footnote 21: By which it is doubtless meant that the _full_ individuality is not present; the higher principles, the _true_ spirit, having ascended to its appropriate house, from which there is no attraction to earth. That which materializes would be an elemental, or elementals molding their fluidic forms in the likeness of the departed human being; or, on the other hand, considering and revivifying the atomic remnants of the sidereal encasement, or astral body, still left undissipated in the soul-world.]

In _Art Magic_ we find the following pertinent remarks, p. 322. "There are some features of mediumship, especially amongst those persons known as _physical force mediums_, which long since should have awakened the attention of philosophical spiritualists to the fact that there were influences kindred only with animal natures at work somewhere, and unless the agency of certain classes of elemental spirits was admitted into the category of occasional control, humanity has at times assumed darker shades than we should be willing to assign to it. Unfortunately in discussing these subjects, there are many barriers to the attainment of truth on this subject. Courtesy and compassion alike protest against pointing to illustrations in our own time, whilst prejudice and ignorance intervene to stifle inquiry respecting phenomena, which a long lapse of time has left us free to investigate.

"The judges whose ignorance and superstition disgraced the witchcraft trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, found a solvent for all occult, or even suspicious circumstances, in the control of 'Satan and his imps.' The modern spiritualists, with few exceptions, are equally stubborn in attributing everything that transpires in spiritualistic circles, even to the wilful _cunningly contrived preparations for deception_ on the part of pretended media, to the influence of disembodied human spirits--good, bad, or indifferent; but the author's own experience, confirmed by the assurances of wise-teaching spirits, impels him to assert that the tendencies to exhibit animal proclivities, whether mental, passional, or phenomenal, are most generally produced by elementals.

"The rapport with this realm of beings is generally due to certain proclivities in the individual; or, when whole communities are affected, the cause proceeds from revolutionary movements in the realms of astral fluid; these continually affect the elementals, who, in combination with low undeveloped spirits of humanity (elementaries), avail themselves of magnetic epidemics to obsess susceptible individuals, and sympathetically affect communities."

In the introduction to _Isis Unveiled_, we find the following definition of elementary spirits:

"Properly, the disembodied _souls_ of the depraved; these souls, having at some time prior to death, separated from themselves their divine spirits, and so lost their chance of immortality. Eliphas Levi and some other Kabalists make little distinction between elementary spirits, who have been men, and those beings which people the elements and are the blind forces of nature. Once divorced from their bodies, these souls (also called astral bodies) of purely materialistic persons, are irresistibly attracted to the earth, where they live a temporary and finite life amid elements congenial to their gross natures. From having never, during their natural lives, cultivated this spirituality, but subordinated it to the material and gross, they are now unfitted for the lofty career of the pure, disembodied being, for whom the atmosphere of earth is stifling and mephitic, and whose attractions are all away from it. After a more or less prolonged period of time these material souls will begin to disintegrate, and finally, like a column of mist, be dissolved, atom by atom, in the surrounding elements.--(Preface xxx., vol. I.)

"After the death of the depraved and the wicked, arrives the critical moment. If during life the ultimate and desperate effort of the inner-self to reunite itself with the faintly-glimmering ray of its divine parent is neglected; if this ray is allowed to be more and more shut out by the thickening crust of matter, the soul, once freed from the body, follows its earthly attractions, and is magnetically drawn into and held within the dense fogs of the material atmosphere. Then it begins to sink lower and lower, until it finds itself, when returned to consciousness, in what the ancients termed Hades. The annihilation of such a soul is never instantaneous; it may last centuries perhaps; for nature never proceeds by jumps and starts, and the astral soul, being formed of elements, the law of evolution must bide its time. Then begins the fearful law of compensation, the _Yin-Youan_ of the Buddhists. This class of spirits is called the terrestrial, or _earthly_ elementary, in contradistinction to the other classes." (They frequent seance rooms, &c.)--(P. 319, vol. I.)

Of the danger of meddling in occult matters before understanding the elementals and elementaries, _Isis_ says, in the case of a rash intruder:

"The spirit of harmony and union will depart from the elements, disturbed by the imprudent hand; and the currents of blind forces will become immediately infested by numberless creatures of matter and instinct--the bad demons of the theurgists, the devils of theology; the gnomes, salamanders, sylphs, and undines will assail the rash performer under multifarious aerial forms. Unable to invent anything, they will search your memory to its very depths; hence the nervous exhaustion and mental oppression of certain sensitive natures at spiritual circles. The elementals will bring to light long-forgotten remembrances of the past; forms, images, sweet mementos, and familiar sentences, long since faded from our own remembrance, but vividly preserved in the inscrutable depths of our memory and on the astral tablets of the imperishable 'Book of Life.'"--(P. 343, vol. I.)

Paracelsus speaks of _Xeni Nephidei_: "Elemental spirits that give men occult powers over visible matter, and then feed on their brains, often causing thereby insanity.

"Man rules potentially over all lower existences than himself," says the author of _Art Magic_ (p. 333), "but woe to him, who by seeking aid, counsel, or assistance, from lower grades of being, binds himself to them; henceforth he may rest assured they will become his parasites and associates, and as their instincts--like those of the animal kingdom--are strong in the particular direction of their nature, they are powerful to disturb, annoy, prompt to evil, and avail themselves of the contact induced by man's invitation to drag him down to their own level. The legendary idea of evil compacts between man and the 'Adversary' is not wholly mythical. Every wrong-doer signs that compact with spirits who have sympathy with his evil actions.

"Except for the purposes of scientific investigation, or with a view to strengthening ourselves against the silent and mysterious promptings to evil that beset us on every side, we warn mere curiosity-seekers, or persons ambitious to attach the legions of an unknown world to their service, against any attempts to seek communion with elemental spirits, or beings of any grade lower than man. _Beings below mortality can grant nothing that mortality ought to ask._ They can only serve man in some embryonic department of nature, and man must stoop to their state before they can thus reach him.... Knowledge is only good for us when we can apply it judiciously. Those who investigate for the sake of science, or with a view to enlarging the narrow boundaries of man's egotistical opinions, may venture much further into the realms of the unknown than curiosity-seekers, or persons who desire to apply the secrets of being to selfish purposes. It may be as well also for man to remember that he and his planet are not _the all_ of being, and that, besides the revelations included in the stupendous outpouring called 'Modern Spiritualism,' there are many problems yet to be solved in human life and planetary existences, which spiritualism does not cover, nor ignorance and prejudice dream of.... Besides these considerations, we would warn man of the many subtle, though invisible, enemies which surround him, and, rather by the instinct of their embryonic natures than through _malice prepense_, seek to lay siege to the garrison of the human heart. We would advise him, moreover, that into that sacred entrenchment no power can enter, save by invitation of the soul itself. Angels may solicit, or demons may tempt, but none can compel the spirit within to action, unless it first surrenders the _will_ to the investing power."--(_Art Magic_, p. 335.)

From the _Theosophist_ of July 1886, we make the following extract, bearing upon the subject of the loss of immortality by soul-death, and the dangers of Black Magic:

"It is necessary to say a few words as regards the real nature of soul-death, and the ultimate fate of a black magician. The soul, as we have explained above, is an isolated drop in the ocean of cosmic life. This current of cosmic life is but the light and the aura of the Logos. Besides the Logos, there are innumerable other existences, both spiritual and astral, partaking of this life and living in it. These beings have special affinities with particular emotions of the human soul, and particular characteristics of the human mind. They have, of course, a definite individual existence of their own, which lasts up to the end of the Manwantara. There are three ways in which a soul may cease to retain its special individuality. Separated from its Logos, which is, as it were, its source, it may not acquire a strong and abiding individuality of its own, and may in course of time be reabsorbed into the current of universal life. This is real soul-death. It may also place itself _en rapport_ with a spiritual or elemental existence by evoking it, and concentrating its attention and regard upon it for purposes of black magic and Tantric worship. In such a case it transfers its individuality to such existence and is sucked up into it, as it were. In such a case the black magician lives in such a being, and as such a being he continues until the end of Manwantara."

A good deal of highly interesting information on the subject of elementals and elementaries is to be found in numbers of _The Path_. A few of the points contained in these articles may be mentioned here, but the reader is strongly recommended to study these articles, entitled _Conversations on Occultism_, for himself. According to the writer:

An elemental is a center of force, without intelligence, as we understand the word, without moral character or tendencies similar to ours, but capable of being directed in its movements by human thoughts, which may, consciously or not, give it any form, and endow it to a certain extent with what we call intelligence. We give them form by a species of thought which the mind does not register--involuntary and unconscious thought--"as, one person might shape an elemental so as to seem like an insect, and not be able to tell whether he had thought of such a thing or not." The elemental world interpenetrates this one, and elementals are constantly being attracted to, or repelled from, human beings, taking the prevailing color of their thoughts. Time and space, as we understand them, do not exist for elementals. They can be seen clairvoyantly in the shapes they assume under different influences, and they do many of the phenomena of the seance room. Light and the concentrated attention of any one make a disturbance in the magnetism of a room, interfering with their work in that respect. At seances elementaries also are present; these are shells, or half-dead human beings. The elementaries are not all bad, however, but the worst are the strongest, because the most attracted to material life. They are all helped and galvanized into action by elementals.

Contact with these beings has a deteriorating effect in all cases. Clairvoyants see in the astral light surrounding a person the images of people or events that have made an impression on that person's mind, and they frequently mistake these echoes and reflections for astral realities; only the trained seer can distinguish. The whole astral world is full of illusions.

Elementals have not got _being_ such as mortals have. There are different classes for the different planes of nature. Each class is confined to its own plane, and many can never be recognized by men. The elemental world is a strong factor in Karma. Formerly, when men were less selfish and more spiritual, the elementals were friendly. They have become unfriendly by reason of man's indifference to, and want of sympathy with the rest of creation. Man has also colored the astral world with his own selfish and brutal thoughts, and produced an atmosphere of evil which he himself breathes. When men shall cultivate feelings of brotherly affection for each other, and of sympathy with nature, the elementals will change their present hostile attitude for one of helpfulness.

Elementals aid in the performance of phenomena produced by adepts. They also enter the sphere of unprotected persons, and especially of those who study occultism, thus precipitating the results of past Karma.

The adepts are reluctant to speak of elementals for two reasons. Because it is useless, as people could not understand the subject in their present state of intellectual and spiritual development; and because, if any knowledge of them were given, some persons might be able to come into contact with them to their own detriment and that of the world. In the present state of universal selfishness and self-seeking, the elementals would be employed to work evil, as they are in themselves colorless, taking their character from those who employ them. The adepts, therefore, keep back or hide the knowledge of these beings from men of science, and from the world in general. By-and-by, however, material science will rediscover black magic, and then will come a war between the good and evil powers, and the evil powers will be overcome, as always happens in such cases. Eventually all about the elementals will be known to men--when they have developed intellectually, morally, and spiritually sufficiently to have that knowledge without danger.

Elementals guard hidden treasures; they obey the adepts, however, who could command the use of untold wealth if they cared to draw upon these hidden deposits.

N. B.--Nizida has quoted from _Man: Fragments of Forgotten History_. The S. P. S. desires to say that while some of the statements contained in that work are correct, there is also in it a large admixture of error. Therefore, the S. P. S. does not recommend this work to the attention of students who have not yet learned enough to be able to separate the grain from the husk. The same may be said of _Art-Magic_.

A WITCH'S DEN

BY MME. HELENA BLAVATSKY

Our kind host Sham Rao was very gay during the remaining hours of our visit. He did his best to entertain us, and would not hear of our leaving the neighborhood without having seen its greatest celebrity, its most interesting sight. A _jadu wala_--sorceress--well known in the district, was just at this time under the influence of seven sister-goddesses, who took possession of her by turns, and spoke their oracles through her lips. Sham Rao said we must not fail to see her, be it only in the interests of science.

The evening closes in, and we once more get ready for an excursion. It is only five miles to the cavern of the Pythia of Hindostan; the road runs through a jungle, but it is level and smooth. Besides, the jungle and its ferocious inhabitants have ceased to frighten us. The timid elephants we had in the "dead city" are sent home, and we are to mount new behemoths belonging to a neighboring Raja. The pair that stand before the verandah like two dark hillocks are steady and trustworthy. Many a time these two have hunted the royal tiger, and no wild shrieking or thunderous roaring can frighten them. And so, let us start! The ruddy flames of the torches dazzle our eyes and increase the forest gloom. Our surroundings seem so dark, so mysterious. There is something indescribably fascinating, almost solemn, in these night-journeys in the out-of-the-way corners of India. Everything is silent and deserted around you, everything is dozing on the earth and overhead. Only the heavy, regular tread of the elephants breaks the stillness of the night, like the sound of falling hammers in the underground smithy of Vulcan. From time to time uncanny voices and murmurs are heard in the black forest.

"The wind sings its strange song amongst the ruins," says one of us, "what a wonderful acoustic phenomenon!"

"Bhuta, bhuta!" whisper the awestruck torch-bearers. They brandish their torches and swiftly spin on one leg, and snap their fingers to chase away the aggressive spirits.

The plaintive murmur is lost in the distance. The forest is once more filled with the cadences of its invisible nocturnal life--the metallic whirr of the crickets, the feeble, monotonous croak of the tree-frog, the rustle of the leaves. From time to time all this suddenly stops short and then begins again, gradually increasing and increasing.

Heavens! What teeming life, what stores of vital energy are hidden under the smallest leaf, the most imperceptible blades of grass, in this tropical forest! Myriads of stars shine in the dark blue of the sky, and myriads of fireflies twinkle at us from every bush, moving sparks, like a pale reflection of the far-away stars.

* * * * *

We left the thick forest behind us, and reached a deep glen, on three sides bordered with the thick forest, where even by day the shadows are as dark as by night. We were about two thousand feet above the foot of the Vindhya ridge, judging by the ruined wall of Mandu, straight above our heads.

Suddenly a very chilly wind rose that nearly blew our torches out. Caught in the labyrinth of bushes and rocks, the wind angrily shook the branches of the blossoming syringas, then, shaking itself free, it turned back along the glen and flew down the valley, howling, whistling and shrieking, as if all the fiends of the forest together were joining in a funeral song.

"Here we are," said Sham Rao, dismounting. "Here is the village; the elephants cannot go any further."

"The village? Surely you are mistaken. I don't see anything but trees."

"It is too dark to see the village. Besides, the huts are so small, and so hidden by the bushes, that even by daytime you could hardly find them. And there is no light in the houses, for fear of the spirits."

"And where is your witch? Do you mean we are to watch her performance in complete darkness?"

Sham Rao cast a furtive, timid look round him; and his voice, when he answered our questions, was somewhat tremulous.

"I implore you not to call her a witch! She may hear you.... It is not far off, it is not more than half a mile. Do not allow this short distance to shake your decision. No elephant, and not even a horse, could make its way there. We must walk.... But we shall find plenty of light there...."

This was unexpected, and far from agreeable. To walk in this gloomy Indian night; to scramble through thickets of cactuses; to venture in a dark forest, full of wild animals--this was too much for Miss X--. She declared that she would go no further. She would wait for us in the howdah on the elephant's back, and perhaps would go to sleep.

Narayan was against this _parti de plaisir_ from the very beginning, and now, without explaining his reasons, he said she was the only sensible one among us.

"You won't lose anything," he remarked, "by staying where you are. And I only wish every one would follow your example."

"What ground have you for saying so, I wonder?" remonstrated Sham Rao, and a slight note of disappointment rang in his voice, when he saw that the excursion, proposed and organized by himself, threatened to come to nothing. "What harm could be done by it? I won't insist any more that the 'incarnation of gods' is a rare sight, and that the Europeans hardly ever have an opportunity of witnessing it; but, besides, the Kangalim in question is no ordinary woman. She leads a holy life; she is a prophetess, and her blessing could not prove harmful to any one. I insisted on this excursion out of pure patriotism."

"Sahib, if your patriotism consists in displaying before foreigners the worst of our plagues, then why did you not order all the lepers of your district to assemble and parade before the eyes of our guests? You are a _patel_, you have the power to do it."

How bitterly Narayan's voice sounded to our unaccustomed ears. Usually he was so even-tempered, so indifferent to everything belonging to the exterior world.

Fearing a quarrel between the Hindus, the colonel remarked, in a conciliatory tone, that it was too late for us to reconsider our expedition. Besides, without being a believer in the "incarnation of gods," he was personally firmly convinced that demoniacs existed even in the West. He was eager to study every psychological phenomenon, wherever he met with it, and whatever shape it might assume.

It would have been a striking sight for our European and American friends if they had beheld our procession on that dark night. Our way lay along a narrow winding path up the mountain. Not more than two people could walk together--and we were thirty, including the torch-bearers. Surely some reminiscence of night sallies against the Confederate Southerners had revived in the colonel's breast, judging by the readiness with which he took upon himself the leadership of our small expedition. He ordered all the rifles and revolvers to be loaded, despatched three torch-bearers to march ahead of us, and arranged us in pairs. Under such a skilled chieftain we had nothing to fear from tigers; and so our procession started, and slowly crawled up the winding path.

It cannot be said that the inquisitive travelers, who appeared later on, in the den of the prophetess of Mandu, shone through the freshness and elegance of their costumes. My gown, as well as the traveling suits of the colonel and of Mr. Y-- were nearly torn to pieces. The cactuses gathered from us whatever tribute they could, and the Babu's disheveled hair swarmed with a whole colony of grasshoppers and fireflies, which probably, were attracted thither by the smell of cocoanut oil. The stout Sham Rao panted like a steam engine. Narayan alone was like his usual self--that is to say, like a bronze Hercules, armed with a club. At the last abrupt turn of the path, after having surmounted the difficulty of climbing over huge, scattered stones, we suddenly found ourselves on a perfectly smooth place; our eyes, in spite of our many torches, were dazzled with light, and our ears were struck by a medley of unusual sounds.

A new glen opened before us, the entrance of which, from the valley, was well masked by thick trees. We understood how easily we might have wandered round it, without ever suspecting its existence. At the bottom of the glen we discovered the abode of the celebrated Kangalim.

The den, as it turned out, was situated in the ruin of an old Hindu temple in tolerably good preservation. In all probability it was built long before the "Dead City," because during the epoch of the latter, the heathen were not allowed to have their own places of worship; and the temple stood quite close to the wall of the town, in fact, right under it. The cupolas of the two smaller lateral pagodas had fallen long ago, and huge bushes grew out of their altars. This evening their branches were hidden under a mass of bright-colored rags, bits of ribbon, little pots, and various other talismans, because, even in them, popular superstition sees something sacred.

"And are not these poor people right? Did not these bushes grow on sacred ground? Is not their sap impregnated with the incense of offerings, and the exhalations of holy anchorites, who once lived and breathed here?"

The learned but superstitious Sham Rao would only answer our questions by new questions.

But the central temple, built of red granite, stood unharmed by time, and, as we learned afterwards, a deep tunnel opened just behind its closely-shut door. What was beyond it no one knew. Sham Rao assured us that no man of the last three generations had ever stepped over the threshold of this thick iron door; no one had seen the subterranean passage for many years. Kangalim lived there in perfect isolation, and, according to the oldest people in the neighborhood, she had always lived there. Some people said she was three hundred years old; others alleged that a certain old man on his death-bed had revealed to his son that this old woman was no one else than _his own uncle_. This fabulous uncle had settled in the cave in the times when the "Dead City" still counted several hundreds of inhabitants. The hermit, busy paving his road to Moksha, had no intercourse with the rest of the world, and nobody knew how he lived and what he ate. But a good while ago, in the days when the Bellati (foreigners) had not yet taken possession of this mountain, the old hermit suddenly was transformed into a hermitess. She continues his pursuits and speaks with his voice, and often in his name; but she receives worshippers, which was not the practice of her predecessor.

We had come too early, and the Pythia did not at first appear. But the square before the temple was full of people, and a wild though picturesque scene it was. An enormous bonfire blazed in the center, and round it crowded the naked savages like so many black gnomes, adding whole branches of trees sacred to the seven sister-goddesses. Slowly and evenly they all jumped from one leg to another to a tune of a single monotonous musical phrase, which they repeated in chorus, accompanied by several local drums and tambourines. The hushed trill of the latter mingled with the forest echoes and the hysterical moans of two little girls, who lay under a heap of leaves by the fire. The poor children were brought here by their mothers, in the hope that the goddesses would take pity upon them and banish the two evil spirits under whose obsession they were. Both mothers were quite young, and sat on their heels blankly and sadly staring at the flames. No one paid us the slightest attention when we appeared, and afterwards during all our stay these people acted as if we were invisible. Had we worn a cap of darkness they could not have behaved more strangely.

"They feel the approach of the gods! The atmosphere is full of their sacred emanations!" mysteriously explained Sham Rao, contemplating with reverence the natives, whom his beloved Haeckel might have easily mistaken for his "missing link," the brood of his _Bathybius Haeckelii_.

"They are simply under the influence of toddy and opium!" retorted the irreverent Babu.

The lookers-on moved as in a dream, as if they all were only half-awakened somnambulists, but the actors were simply victims of St. Vitus's dance. One of them, a tall old man, a mere skeleton with a long white beard, left the ring and begun whirling vertiginously, with his arms spread like wings, and loudly grinding his long, wolf-like teeth. He was painful and disgusting to look at. He soon fell down, and was carelessly, almost mechanically pushed aside by the feet of the others still engaged in their demoniac performance.

All this was frightful enough, but many more horrors were in store for us.

Waiting for the appearance of the _prima donna_ of this forest opera company, we sat down on the trunk of a fallen tree, ready to ask innumerable questions of our condescending host. But I was hardly seated when a feeling of indescribable astonishment and horror made me shrink back.

I beheld the skull of a monstrous animal, the like of which I could not find in my zoological reminiscences.

This head was much larger than the head of an elephant skeleton. And still it could not be anything but an elephant, judging by the skilfully restored trunk, which wound down to my feet like a gigantic black leech. But an elephant has no horns, whereas this one had four of them! The front pair stuck from the flat forehead slightly bending forward and then spreading out; and the others had a wide base, like the root of a deer's horn, that gradually decreased almost up to the middle, and bore long branches enough to decorate a dozen ordinary elks. Pieces of the transparent amber-yellow rhinoceros skin were strained over the empty eye-holes of the skull, and small lamps burning behind them only added to the horror, the devilish appearance of this head.

"What can this be?" was our unanimous question. None of us had ever met anything like it, and even the colonel looked aghast.

"It is a Sivatherium," said Narayan. "Is it possible you never came across these fossils in European museums? Their remains are common enough in the Himalayas, though, of course, in fragments. They were called after Shiva."

"If the collector of this district ever hears that this antediluvian relic adorns the den of your--ahem!--witch," remarked the Babu, "it won't adorn it many days longer."

All around the skull and on the floor of the portico there were heaps of white flowers, which, though not quite antediluvian, were totally unknown to us. They were as large as a big rose, and their white petals were covered with a red powder, the inevitable concomitant of every Indian religious ceremony. Further on there were groups of cocoanuts, and large brass dishes filled with rice, each adorned with a red or green taper. In the center of the portico there stood a queer-shaped censer, surrounded with chandeliers. A little boy, dressed from head to foot in white, threw into it handfuls of aromatic powders.

"These people, who assemble here to worship Kangalim," said Sham Rao, "do not actually belong either to her sect or to any other. They are devil-worshippers. They do not believe in Hindu gods; they live in small communities; they belong to one of the many Indian races which usually are called the hill-tribes. Unlike the Shanars of Southern Travancore, they do not use the blood of sacrificial animals; they do not build separate temples to their bhutas. But they are possessed by the strange fancy that the goddess Kali, the wife of Shiva, from time immemorial has had a grudge against them, and sends her favorite evil spirits to torture them. Save this little difference, they have the same beliefs as the Shanars. God does not exist for them; and even Shiva is considered by them as an ordinary spirit. Their chief worship is offered to the souls of the dead. These souls, however righteous and kind they may be in their lifetime, become after death as wicked as can be; they are happy only when they are torturing living men and cattle. As the opportunities of doing so are the only reward for the virtues they possessed when incarnated, a very wicked man is punished by becoming after his death a very soft-hearted ghost; he loathes his loss of daring, and is altogether miserable. The results of this strange logic are not bad, nevertheless. These savages and devil-worshippers are the kindest and the most truth-loving of all the hill-tribes. They do whatever they can to be worthy of their ultimate reward; because, don't you see, they all long to become the wickedest of devils!"

And put in good humor by his own wittiness, Sham Rao laughed till his hilarity became offensive, considering the sacredness of the place.

"A year ago some business matters sent me to Tinevelli," continued he. "Staying with a friend of mine, who is a Shanar, I was allowed to be present at one of the ceremonies in the honor of devils. No European has as yet witnessed this worship, whatever the missionaries may say; but there are many converts amongst the Shanars, who willingly describe them to the _padres_. My friend is a wealthy man, which is probably the reason why the devils are especially vicious to him. They poison his cattle, spoil his crops and his coffee plants, and persecute his numerous relations, sending them sunstrokes, madness and epilepsy, over which illnesses they especially preside. These wicked demons have settled in every corner of his spacious landed property--in the woods, the ruins, and even in his stables. To avert all this, my friend covered his land with stucco pyramids, and prayed humbly, asking the demons to draw their portraits on each of them, so that he may recognize them and worship each of them separately, as the rightful owner of this, or that, particular pyramid. And what do you think?... Next morning all the pyramids were found covered with drawings. Each of them bore an incredibly good likeness of the dead of the neighborhood. My friend had known personally almost all of them. He found also a portrait of his own late father amongst the lot."

"Well? And was he satisfied?"

"Oh, he was very glad, very satisfied. It enabled him to choose the right thing to gratify the personal tastes of each demon, don't you see? He was not vexed at finding his father's portrait. His father was somewhat irascible; once he nearly broke both his son's legs, administering to him fatherly punishment with an iron bar, so that he could not possibly be very dangerous after his death. But another portrait, found on the best and the prettiest of the pyramids, amazed my friend a good deal, and put him in a blue funk. The whole district recognized an English officer, a certain Captain Pole, who in his lifetime was as kind a gentleman as ever lived."

"Indeed? But do you mean to say that this strange people worshipped Captain Pole also?"

"Of course they did! Captain Pole was such a worthy man, such an honest officer, that, after his death, he could not help being promoted to the highest rank of Shanar devils. The Pe-Kovil, demon's-house, sacred to his memory, stands side by side with the Pe-Kovil Bhadrakali, which was recently conferred on the wife of a certain German missionary, who also was a most charitable lady and so is very dangerous now."

"But what are their ceremonies? Tell us something about their rites."

"Their rites consist chiefly of dancing, singing, and killing sacrificial animals. The Shanars have no castes, and eat all kinds of meat. The crowd assembles about the Pe-Kovil, previously designated by the priest; there is a general beating of drums, and slaughtering of fowls, sheep and goats. When Captain Pole's turn came an ox was killed, as a thoughtful attention to the peculiar tastes of his nation. The priest appeared, covered with bangles, and holding a wand on which tinkled numberless little bells, and wearing garlands of red and white flowers round his neck, and a black mantle, on which were embroidered the ugliest fiends you can imagine. Horns were blown and drums rolled incessantly. And oh, I forgot to tell you there was also a kind of fiddle, the secret of which is known only to the Shanar priesthood. Its bow is ordinary enough, made of bamboo; but it is whispered that the strings are human veins.... When Captain Pole took possession of the priest's body, the priest leaped high in the air, and then rushed on the ox and killed him. He drank off the hot blood, and then began his dance. But what a fright he was when dancing! You know, I am not superstitious.... Am I?..."

Sham Rao looked at us inquiringly, and I, for one, was glad at this moment that Miss X-- was half a mile off, asleep in the howdah.

"He turned, and turned, as if possessed by all the demons of Naraka. The enraged crowd hooted and howled when the priest begun to inflict deep wounds all over his body with the bloody sacrificial knife. To see him, with his hair waving in the wind and his mouth covered with foam; to see him bathing in the blood of the sacrificed animal, mixing it with his own, was more than I could bear. I felt as if hallucinated, I fancied I also was spinning round...."

Sham Rao stopped abruptly, struck dumb. Kangalim stood before us!

Her appearance was so unexpected that we all felt embarrassed. Carried away by Sham Rao's description, we had noticed neither how nor whence she came. Had she appeared from beneath the earth we could not have been more astonished. Narayan stared at her, opening wide his big jet-black eyes; the Babu clicked his tongue in utter confusion.

Imagine a skeleton seven feet high, covered with brown leather, with a dead child's tiny head stuck on its bony shoulders; the eyes set so deep and at the same time flashing such fiendish flames all through your body that you begin to feel your brain stop working, your thoughts become entangled and your blood freeze in your veins.

I describe my personal impressions, and no words of mine can do them justice. My description is too weak. Mr. Y-- and the colonel both grew pale under her stare and Mr. Y-- made a movement as if about to rise.

Needless to say that such an impression could not last. As soon as the witch had turned her gleaming eyes to the kneeling crowd, it vanished as swiftly as it had come. But still all our attention was fixed on this remarkable creature.

Three hundred years old! Who can tell? Judging by her appearance, we might as well conjecture her to be a thousand. We beheld a genuine living mummy, or rather a mummy endowed with motion. She seemed to have been withering since the creation. Neither time, nor the ills of life, nor the elements could ever affect this living statue of death. The all-destroying hand of time had touched her and stopped short. Time could do no more, and so had left her. And with all this, not a single gray hair. Her long black locks shone with a greenish sheen, and fell in heavy masses down to her knees.

To my great shame, I must confess that a disgusting reminiscence flashed into my memory. I thought about the hair and the nails of corpses growing in the graves, and tried to examine the nails of the old woman.

Meanwhile, she stood motionless as if suddenly transformed into an ugly idol. In one hand she held a dish with a piece of burning camphor, in the other a handful of rice, and she never removed her burning eyes from the crowd. The pale yellow flame of the camphor flickered in the wind, and lit up her death-like head, almost touching her chin; but she paid no heed to it. Her neck, as wrinkled as a mushroom, as thin as a stick, was surrounded by three rows of golden medallions. Her head was adorned with a golden snake. Her grotesque, hardly human body was covered by a piece of saffron-yellow muslin.

The demoniac little girls raised their heads from beneath the leaves, and set up a prolonged animal-like howl. Their example was followed by the old man, who lay exhausted by his frantic dance.

The witch tossed her head convulsively, and began her invocations, rising on tiptoe, as if moved by some external force.

"The goddess, one of the seven sisters, begins to take possession of her," whispered Sham Rao, not even thinking of wiping away the big drops of sweat that streamed from his brow. "Look, look at her!"

This advice was quite superfluous. We _were_ looking at her, and at nothing else.

At first, the movements of the witch were slow, unequal, somewhat convulsive; then, gradually, they became less angular; at last, as if catching the cadence of the drums, leaning all her long body forward, and writhing like an eel, she rushed round and round the blazing bonfire. A dry leaf caught in a hurricane could not fly swifter. Her bare bony feet trod noiselessly on the rocky ground. The long locks of her hair flew round her like snakes, lashing the spectators, who knelt, stretching their trembling arms towards her, and writhing as if they were alive. Whoever was touched by one of this Fury's black curls, fell down on the ground, overcome with happiness, shouting thanks to the goddess, and considering himself blessed forever. It was not human hair that touched the happy elect, it was the goddess herself, one of the seven.

Swifter and swifter fly her decrepit legs; the young, vigorous hands of the drummer can hardly follow her. But she does not think of catching the measure of his music; she rushes, she flies forward. Staring with her expressionless, motionless orbs at something before her, at something that is not visible to our mortal eyes, she hardly glances at her worshippers; then her look becomes full of fire, and whoever she looks at feels burned through to the marrow of his bones. At every glance she throws a few grains of rice. The small handful seems inexhaustible, as if the wrinkled palm contained the bottomless bag of Prince Fortunatus.

Suddenly she stops as if thunderstruck.

The mad race round the bonfire had lasted twelve minutes, but we looked in vain for a trace of fatigue on the death-like face of the witch. She stopped only for a moment, just the necessary time for the goddess to release her. As soon as she felt free, by a single effort she jumped over the fire and plunged into the deep tank by the portico. This time she plunged only once, and whilst she stayed under the water the second sister-goddess entered her body. The little boy in white produced another dish, with a new piece of burning camphor, just in time for the witch to take it up, and to rush again on her headlong way.

The colonel sat with his watch in his hand. During the second obsession the witch ran, leaped, and raced for exactly fourteen minutes. After this, she plunged twice in the tank, in honor of the second sister; and with every new obsession the number of her plunges increased, till it became six.

It was already an hour and a half since the race began. All this time the witch never rested, stopping only for a few seconds, to disappear under the water.

"She is a fiend, she cannot be a woman!" exclaimed the colonel, seeing the head of the witch immersed for the sixth time in the water.

"Hang me if I know!" grumbled Mr. Y--, nervously pulling his beard. "The only thing I know is that a grain of her cursed rice entered my throat, and I can't get it out!"

"Hush, hush! Please, do be quiet!" implored Sham Rao. "By talking you will spoil the whole business!"

I glanced at Narayan and lost myself in conjectures.

His features, which usually were so calm and serene, were quite altered at this moment by a deep shadow of suffering. His lips trembled, and the pupils of his eyes were dilated, as if by a dose of belladonna. His eyes were lifted over the heads of the crowd, as if in his disgust he tried not to see what was before him, and at the same time could not see it, engaged in a deep reverie which carried him away from us and from the whole performance.

"What is the matter with him?" was my thought, but I had no time to ask him, because the witch was again in full swing, chasing her own shadow.

But with the seventh goddess the program was slightly changed. The running of the old woman changed to leaping. Sometimes bending down to the ground, like a black panther, she leaped up to some worshipper, and halting before him touched his forehead with her finger, while her long, thin body shook with inaudible laughter. Then, again, as if shrinking back playfully from her shadow, and chased by it, in some uncanny game, the witch appeared to us like a horrid caricature of Dinorah, dancing her mad dance. Suddenly she straightened herself to her full height, darted to the portico and crouched before the smoking censer, beating her forehead against the granite steps. Another jump, and she was quite close to us, before the head of the monstrous Sivatherium. She knelt down again and bowed her head to the ground several times, with the sound of an empty barrel knocked against something hard.

We had hardly the time to spring to our feet and shrink back when she appeared on the top of the Sivatherium's head, standing there amongst the horns.

Narayan alone did not stir, and fearlessly looked straight in the eyes of the frightful sorceress.

But what was this? Who spoke in those deep manly tones? Her lips were moving, from her breast were issuing those quick, abrupt phrases, but the voice sounded hollow as if coming from beneath the ground.

"Hush, hush!" whispered Sham Rao, his whole body trembling. "She is going to prophesy!..."

"She?" incredulously inquired Mr. Y--. "This a woman's voice? I don't believe it for a moment. Someone's uncle must be stowed away somewhere about the place. Not the fabulous uncle she inherited from, but a real live one!..."

Sham Rao winced under the irony of this supposition, and cast an imploring look at the speaker.

"Woe to you! woe to you!" echoed the voice. "Woe to you, children of the impure Jaya and Vijaya! of the mocking, unbelieving lingerers round great Shiva's door! Ye, who are cursed by eighty thousand sages! Woe to you who believe not in the goddess Kali, and you who deny us, her seven divine sisters! Flesh-eating, yellow-legged vultures! friends of the oppressors of our land! dogs who are not ashamed to eat from the same trough with the Bellati!" (foreigners).

"It seems to me that your prophetess only foretells the past," said Mr. Y--, philosophically putting his hands in his pockets. "I should say that she is hinting at you, my dear Sham Rao."

"Yes! and at us also," murmured the colonel, who was evidently beginning to feel uneasy.

As to the unlucky Sham Rao, he broke out in a cold sweat, and tried to assure us that we were mistaken, that we did not fully understand her language.

"It is not about you, it is not about you! It is of me she speaks, because I am in Government service. Oh, she is inexorable!"

"Rakshasas! Asuras!" thundered the voice. "How dare you appear before us? how dare you to stand on this holy ground in boots made of a cow's sacred skin? Be cursed for etern----"

But her curse was not destined to be finished. In an instant the Hercules-like Narayan had fallen on the Sivatherium, and upset the whole pile, the skull, the horns and the demoniac Pythia included. A second more, and we thought we saw the witch flying in the air towards the portico. A confused vision of a stout, shaven Brahman, suddenly emerging from under the Sivatherium and instantly disappearing in the hollow beneath it, flashed before my dilated eyes.

But, alas! after the third second had passed, we all came to the embarrassing conclusion that, judging from the loud clang of the door of the cave, the representative of the Seven Sisters had ignominiously fled. The moment she had disappeared from our inquisitive eyes to her subterranean domain, we all realized that the unearthly hollow voice we had heard had nothing supernatural about it and belonged to the Brahman hidden under the Sivatherium--to some one's live uncle, as Mr. Y-- had rightly supposed.

* * * * *

Oh, Narayan! how carelessly, how disorderly the worlds rotate around us. I begin to seriously doubt their reality. From this moment I shall earnestly believe that all things in the universe are nothing but illusion, a mere Maya. I am becoming a Vedantin.... I doubt that in the whole universe there may be found anything more objective than a Hindu witch flying up the spout.

* * * * *

Miss X-- woke up, and asked what was the meaning of all this noise. The noise of many voices and the sounds of the many retreating footsteps, the general rush of the crowd, had frightened her. She listened to us with a condescending smile, and a few yawns, and went to sleep again.

Next morning, at daybreak, we very reluctantly, it must be owned, bade good-by to the kind-hearted, good-natured Sham Rao. The confoundingly easy victory of Narayan hung heavily on his mind. His faith in the holy hermitess and the seven goddesses was a good deal shaken by the shameful capitulation of the sisters, who had surrendered at the first blow from a mere mortal. But during the dark hours of the night he had had time to think it over, and to shake off the uneasy feeling of having unwillingly misled and disappointed his European friends.

Sham Rao still looked confused when he shook hands with us at parting, and expressed to us the best wishes of his family and himself.

As to the heroes of this truthful narrative, they mounted their elephants once more, and directed their heavy steps towards the high road and Jubbulpore.

REMARKABLE PSYCHIC EXPERIENCES OF FAMOUS PERSONS

BY WALTER F. PRINCE, PH.D.,

Official Investigator American Society for Psychical Research

It does not necessarily give an occult incident more weight that it was experienced or related and credited by a person whose name is prominent for one reason or another. The great are nearly as likely to suffer illusions, pathological hallucinations, and aberrations as the humble remainder of mankind, or, according to Lombroso a good deal more so. Nor have famous persons a monopoly of veracity. Besides, a rare psychological incident is not more or less a problem, nor has it more or less significance in the experience of honest John Jones than in that of William Shakespeare.

And yet it is natural and quite proper to look with somewhat enhanced interest upon the experiences or the testimonies of those whose names are in the cyclopedias and biographical dictionaries. It is legitimate to set these forth and to call attention to them. These persons at least we know something about. William Moggs of Waushegan, Wisconsin, may be a very excellent and trustworthy man but we don't know him, and it is tedious to be told that somebody else whom we may know as little knows and esteems him. How do we know that the avouching unknown could not have been sold a gold brick? But Henry M. Stanley, and General Fremont, and W. P. Frith, and Henry Clews are characters whom we do know something about, or at least whom we can easily look up for ourselves in biographical dictionaries and _Who's Whos_. They are names which have at the very outset a reputation which has impressed the world, which stand for assured ability, genius, achievement, forcefulness of one kind or another. Even though we have no particular data at hand regarding the veracity of a particular member of the shining circle, it is not easy to see why he, having an assured reputation, should dim it by telling spooky lies. It is easier to conceive of William Moggs, a quite obscure man, calling attention to himself by the device, though as a rule the William Moggs's do nothing of the kind. We spontaneously argue within ourselves, in some inchoate fashion, "That fellow made his mark in the world; he gained a big reputation by his superiority to the rank and file in some particular at least; it will be worth while to hear what he has to say."

We present herewith a group of such testimonies either given out to the world by prominent persons as their own experiences or as the experiences of persons whom they knew and believed, or else as told by friends of the prominent persons whose experiences they were.

It is not owing to any selective process that the material is mostly of the sort which favors supernormal hypotheses. We take what we can get. Whenever an experience is accompanied by a normal explanation, such will be included only a little more willingly than an experience which does not readily suggest a normal explanation. But, let it be noted, the groups which we propose will be composed of human _experiences_, and not opinions, except as the opinions accompany the experiences. And it cannot be expected that, after certain types of experiences as related by certain men have been given, we shall then proceed to name other men who haven't had any such experiences. True, against Paul du Chaillu's assertion that he had seen gorillas was once urged the fact that nobody else had ever seen gorillas. Nevertheless the sole assertion of the one man who had seen them proved to outweigh in value the lack of experience on the part of all other travelers up to that time.

A PREMONITION OF SIR H. M. STANLEY

This incident is related by the famous explorer, Sir Henry M. Stanley, in his autobiography edited by Dorothy Stanley (Houghton Mifflin Co., 1909), on pages 207-208.

Stanley, then a private in the Confederate Army, was captured in the battle of Shiloh and sent to Camp Douglas near Chicago. It was while here that the incident in question occurred.

"On the next day (April 16), after the morning duties had been performed, the rations divided, the cooks had departed contented, and the quarters swept, I proceeded to my nest and reclined alongside of my friend Wilkes in a posture that gave me a command of one half of the building. I made some remarks to him upon the card-playing groups opposite, when suddenly, I felt a gentle stroke on the back of my neck, and in an instant I was unconscious. The next moment I had a vivid view of the village of Tremeirchion and the grassy slopes of the hills of Hirradog, and I seemed to be hovering over the rook woods of Brynbella. I glided to the bed-chamber of my Aunt Mary. My aunt was in bed, and seemed sick unto death. I took a position by the side of the bed, and saw myself, with head bent down, listening to her parting words which sounded regretful, as though conscience smote her for not having been as kind as she might have been, or had wished to be. I heard the boy say, 'I believe you, Aunt. It is neither your fault, nor mine. You were good and kind to me, and I knew you wished to be kinder; but things were so ordered that you had to be what you were. I also dearly wished to love you, but I was afraid to speak of it lest you would check me, or say something that would offend me. I feel our parting was in this spirit. There is no need of regrets. You have done your duty to me, and you had children of your own who required all your care. What has happened to me since, it was decreed should happen. Farewell.'

"I put forth my hand and felt the clasp of the long thin hands of the sore-sick woman. I heard a murmur of farewell, and immediately I awoke.

"It appeared to me that I had but closed my eyes. I was still in the same reclining attitude, the groups opposite me were still engaged in their card games, Wilkes was in the same position. Nothing had changed.

"I asked, 'What has happened?'

"'What could happen?' said he. 'What makes you ask? It is but a moment ago you were speaking to me.'

"'Oh, I thought I had been asleep a long time.'

"On the next day the 17th of April, 1862, my Aunt Mary died at Fynnon Beuno, in Wales!

"I believe that the soul of every human being has its attendant spirit--a nimble, delicate essence, whose method of action is by a subtle suggestion which it contrives to insinuate into the mind, whether asleep or awake. We are too gross to be capable of understanding the signification of the dream, the vision, or the sudden presage, or of divining the source of the premonition or its import. We admit that we are liable to receive a fleeting picture of an act, or a figure at any moment, but, except being struck by certain strange coincidences which happen to most of us, we seldom make an effort to unravel the mystery. The swift, darting messenger stamps an image on the mind, and displays a vision to the sleeper; and if, as sometimes follows, among tricks and twists of the errant mind, by reflex acts of memory, it happens to be a true representation of what is to happen, we are left to grope hopelessly as to the manner and meaning of it, for there is nothing tangible to lay hold of.

"There are many things relating to my existence which are inexplicable to me, and probably it is best so; this death-bed scene, projected on my mind's screen, across four thousand five hundred miles of space, is one of these mysteries."

The precise meaning of the passage wherein Sir Henry speculates on the nature and meaning of such facts, is not entirely clear. Does he by the word _spirit_ mean what is usually meant by that term, or does he mean some part of the mind functioning upon the rest as its object, like Freud's _psychic censor_ though with a different purpose? And the affirmative employment of the terms "presage" and "premonition" do not seem to be consistent with the expression "it happens to be a true representation of what is to happen." It seems plain that the distinguished explorer did believe that the death-bed scene was "projected on" his "mind's screen, across four thousand five hundred miles of space." However, what Stanley thought about the facts is of much less importance than the facts themselves, as reported by one whose life was one long drill in observing, appraising and recording facts.

COINCIDENT EXPERIENCES OF GENERAL FREMONT AND RELATIVES

These are related on pages 69-72 of _Recollections of Elizabeth Benton Fremont, Daughter of the Pathfinder General John C. Fremont and Jessie Benton Fremont His Wife_.

After describing a terrible experience of her father and his men in 1853, while crossing the Wahsatch Mountains, and their rescue from starvation by reaching Parowan, Utah, Miss Benton goes on:

"That night my father sat by his campfire until late in the night, dreaming of home and thinking of the great happiness of my mother. Could she but know that he was safe! Finally he returned to his quarters in the town only a few hundred yards away from the camp. The warm bright room, the white bed with all suggestion of shelter and relief from danger made the picture of home rise up like a real thing before him, and at half-past eleven at night he made an entry in his journal, putting there the thought that had possession of him and that my mother in far away Washington might know that all danger was past and that he was safe and comfortable.

"All this is a prelude to a most uncommon experience which befell my mother in our Washington home on the night in question. We could not possibly hear from father at the earliest until midsummer. Though my mother went into society but little that year, there was no reason for gloomy forebodings. The younger members of the family kept her in close touch with the social side of life, while her father, whose confidant she always was, kept her informed as to the political events of the moment. Her life was busy and filled with her full share of its responsibilities. In midwinter, however, my mother became possessed with the conviction that my father was starving, and no amount of reasoning could calm her fears. The idea haunted her for two weeks or more, and finally began to leave its physical effects upon her. She could neither eat nor sleep; open-air exercise, plenty of company, the management of a household, all combined, could not wean her from the belief that father and his men were starving in the desert.

"The weight of fear was lifted from her as suddenly as it came. Her young sister Susie and a party of relatives returned from a wedding at General Jessup's on the night of February 6, 1854, and came to mother to spend the night, in order not to awaken the older members of my grandmother's family. The girls doffed their party dresses, replaced them with comfortable woolen gowns, and, gathered before the open fire in mother's room, were gaily relating the experiences of the evening. The fire needed replenishing and mother went to an adjoining dressing-room to get more wood. The old-fashioned fire-place required long logs which were too large for her to handle, and as she half knelt, balancing the long sticks of wood on her left arm, she felt a hand rest lightly on her left shoulder, and she heard my father's laughing voice whisper her name, 'Jessie.'

"There was no sound beyond the quick-whispered name, no presence, only the touch, but my mother knew as people know in dreams that my father was there, gay and happy, and intending to startle Susie, who when my mother was married was only a child of eight, and was always a pet playmate of my father's. Her shrill, prolonged scream was his delight, and he never lost an opportunity to startle her.

"Mother came back to the girl's room, but before she could speak, Susie gave a great cry, fell in a heap upon the rug, and screamed again and again, until mother crushed her balldress over her head to keep the sound from the neighbors. Her cousin asked mother what she had seen, and she explained that she had seen nothing, but had heard my father tell her to keep still until he could scare Susie.

"Peace came to my mother instantly, and on retiring she fell into a refreshing sleep from which she did not waken until ten the next morning; all fear for the safety of father had vanished from her mind; with sleep came strength, and she soon was her happy self again.

"When my father returned home, we learned that it was at the time the party was starving that my mother had the premonition of evil having befallen them, and the entry in his journal showed that exactly the moment he had written it in Parowan, my mother had felt his presence, and in the wireless message from heart to heart knew that my father was safe and free from harm. The hour exactly tallied with the entry in his book, allowing for the difference in longitude."

Further details would have been desirable, particularly just what was the immediate occasion of Susie's fright, for she screamed before Mrs. Fremont related what had befallen herself. The only escape from the conclusion that Susie had some separate peculiar experience is to suppose--which we may not unreasonably do--that the elder lady betrayed her own agitation before she spoke, perhaps by dropping the sticks, hurrying back, and looking strangely at Susie. We would have liked a sight of the General's journal, also, and to have been permitted to copy the entry exactly as it stands.

Nevertheless, though we leave Susie and her screams quite out of account, we have a very pretty case remaining, however we explain it. Mrs. Fremont's depression might be explained by the very natural fears of a woman whose husband was engaged in a possibly dangerous expedition, though she picked out for her fears exactly the period of the expedition when there was an actual state of privation and danger. But why did the fear so afflicting to her health and spirits so suddenly leave her, while it was still winter in the mountains? And why did the hour and moment of the cessation of these fears coincide with the hour and moment when the explorer was occupied with thoughts of home and writing his wish that his wife might know that he was safe?

Many a reader will be disposed to answer the question "why?" with the facile answer "telepathy," but that word is a key which does not turn in this lock with perfect ease. There are cases where one person thinks a particular thing under extraordinary circumstances, and precisely that thought, or a hallucination of precisely that nature, occurs to another person at a distance. But in this case General Fremont thinks a wish that his wife knew he was safe, and his wife seems to feel a hand upon her shoulder, seems to hear his voice pronounce her name, and somehow gets the impression that he proposes to play a trick on her sister Susie. If exact coincidence between the thought of the supposed "sender" and that of the supposed "recipient" is a support to the theory of telepathy as applied to one case, then wide discrepancy between the coincident thoughts of two persons in another case should be an argument against the theory of telepathy as applied to that. There should be some limit to the handicap which, by way of courtesy, the spiritistic hypothesis allows to the telepathic.

If there are spirits, and if they have a certain access to human thoughts, and if the limitations of space are little felt by them, then the spiritistic theory would have an easier time than telepathy with the facts in this case. A friendly intermediary might convey the assurance that the Pathfinder wanted conveyed to his wife, and in doing so employ such devices as an intelligent personal agent could think up, and were within its grasp. The touch, the hallucination of a voice resembling that of the absent husband, the sense of gayety, and even the very characteristic trait of liking to startle Susie, might all be the result of the friendly messenger's attempts to implant in Mrs. Fremont's mind a fixed assurance that somebody was safe and happy, and that this somebody was in very truth her husband.

INCIDENTS RELATED BY DEAN HOLE

The Very Rev. Samuel Reynolds Hole, Dean of Rochester, England, was not only an effective preacher and popular lecturer, but likewise the author of fascinating books, composed of reminiscences and shrewd and witty comments upon men and affairs. He made two lecturing tours in America.

His _The Memories of Dean Hole_ contains a remarkable dream of his own, and one of similar character told him by a trusted friend. They may be found on pages 200-201. After rehearsing the account of a dream and its tragic sequel told him many years before, he goes on:

"Are these dreams coincidences only, imaginations, sudden recollections of events which had been long forgotten? They are marvelous, be this as it may. In a crisis of very severe anxiety, I required information which only one man could give me, and he was in his grave. I saw him distinctly in a vision of the night, and his answer to my question told me all I wanted to know; and when, having obtained the clearest proof that what I had heard was true, I communicated the incident and its results to my solicitor, he told me that he himself had experienced a similar manifestation. A claim was repeated after his father's death which had been resisted in his lifetime and retracted by the claimant, but the son was unable to find the letter in which the retraction was made. He dreamed that his father appeared and told him it was in the left hand drawer of a certain desk. Having business in London, he went up to the offices of his father, an eminent lawyer, but could not discover the desk, until one of the clerks suggested that it might be among some old lumber placed in a room upstairs. There he found the desk and the letter.

"Then, as regards coincidence, are there not events in our lives which come to us with a strange mysterious significance, a prophetic intimation, sometimes of sorrow and sometimes of success? For example, I lived a hundred and fifty miles from Rochester. I went there for the first time to preach at the invitation of one who was then unknown to me, but is now a dear friend. After the sermon I was his guest in the Precincts. Dean Scott died in the night, almost at the time when he who was to succeed him arrived at the house which adjoins the Deanery. There was no expectation of his immediate decease, and no conjecture as to a future appointment, and yet when I heard the tolling of the cathedral bell, I had a presentiment that Dr. Scott was dead, and that I should be Dean of Rochester."

Again, Dean Hole in his _Then and Now_, pp. 9-11, together with some opinions of his, sets down a seeming premonition and what he considers answers to prayer.

"There is an immeasurable difference between ghosts and other apparitions--between that which witnesses declare they saw with their own eyes when they were wide awake--as Hamlet saw the ghost of his father, and Macbeth saw Banquo--and that which presents itself to us when we are asleep, or in that condition between waking and sleeping which makes the vision so like reality. I do not believe in the former, and I am fully persuaded in my own mind that the wonderful stories which we hear are to be accounted for either as exaggerations or as the result of natural causes which have been misstated or suppressed; but many of us have had experience of the latter--of those visions of the night which have seemed so real, and which in some instances have brought us information as to occurrences before unknown to us, but subsequently proved to be true.

"George Benfield, a driver on the Midland Railway living at Derby, was standing on the footplate oiling his engine, the train being stationary, when he slipped and fell on the space between the lines. He heard the express coming on, and had only just time to lie full length on the 'six-foot' when it rushed by, and he escaped unhurt. He returned to his home in the middle of the night, and as he was going up the stairs he heard one of his children, a girl about eight years old, crying and sobbing. 'Oh, Father!' she said, 'I thought somebody came and told me that you were going to be killed, and I got out of bed and prayed that God would not let you die.' Was it only a dream, a coincidence?"

Dean Hole is the first person whom we remember to have held that a man's testimony respecting a given species of experience is more credible if he was asleep at the time that he claims to have had it, than if he was awake. He states that dreams "in some instances have brought us information as to occurrences before unknown to us, but subsequently proved to be true," but the same is asserted in respect to waking apparitional experiences on exactly as satisfactory evidence, in many cases. He accounts for the wonderful stories we hear in respect to waking apparitions, and discredits them on exactly the same grounds that others account for and discredit his dreams. The fact is that, with Dean Hole as with many others, the personal equation is operative. He believes in coincidental dreams because he himself has experienced them and knows that he is not guilty of exaggerations in recounting them, nor can he see how natural causes can explain them; he never has had a waking apparition, and therefore is inclined to conjure up guesses as to the inaccuracy and inveracity of those who have--guesses which he would resent if they were applied to himself.

But the Dean's testimony is one matter, his opinions or prejudices another.

INCIDENTS REPORTED BY SERJEANT BALLANTINE

Serjeant William Ballantine (1812-1887) was one of the foremost lawyers in England, noted for his skill in cross-examination. He was counsel in the Tichborne claimant case, one of the most celebrated in the history of the English courts, and in the equally famed trial of the Gaekwar of Baroda. The incidents which impressed him are to be found in Ballantine's _Some Experiences of a Barrister's Life_, pp. 256-267.

"I do not think it will be out of place whilst upon this subject to relate a story told of Sir Astley Cooper.[22] I am not certain that it has not been already in print, but I know that I have had frequent conversations about it with his nephew.

[Footnote 22: Sir Astley Paston Cooper was perhaps the most famous and influential surgeon of his time in England.]

"There had been a murder, and Sir Astley was upon the scene when a man suspected of it was apprehended. Sir Astley, being greatly interested, accompanied the officers with their prisoner to the gaol, and he and they and the accused were all in a cell, locked in together, when they noticed a little dog which kept biting at the skirt of the prisoner's coat. This led them to examine the garment, and they found upon it traces of blood which ultimately led to conviction of the man. When they looked around the dog had disappeared, although the door had never been opened. How it had got there or how it got away, of course nobody could tell. When Bransby Cooper spoke of this he always said that of course his uncle had made a mistake, and was convinced of this himself; Bransby used to add that no doubt if the matter had been investigated it would have been shown that there was a mode of accounting for it from natural causes. But I believe that neither Sir Astley nor his nephew in their hearts discarded entirely the supernatural."

Mr. Ballantine added an incident which some may think is accounted for by a telepathic impression followed by auto-suggestion which lowered the mental alertness of the player.

"There was a member of the club, a very harmless, inoffensive man of the name of Townend, for whom Lord Lytton [the novelist] entertained a mortal antipathy, and would never play whilst that gentleman was in the room. He firmly believed that he brought him bad luck. I was witness to what must be termed an odd coincidence. One afternoon, when Lord Lytton was playing and had enjoyed an uninterrupted run of luck, it suddenly turned, upon which he exclaimed, 'I am sure that Mr. Townend has come into the club.' Some three minutes after, just time enough to ascend the stairs, in walked that unlucky personage. Lord Lytton as soon as the rubber was over, left the table and did not renew the play."

BEN JONSON'S PREMONITION BY APPARITION

This eminent dramatist, contemporary of Shakespeare (1573?-1637), visited the Scottish poet, William Drummond, who took notes of his conversations which he afterwards published in the form of a book. One incident which Jonson related and Drummond recorded may be found in _The Library of the World's Best Literature_ under the title, _Ben Jonson_.

"At that tyme the pest was in London; he being in the country--with old Cambden, he saw in a vision his eldest sone, then a child and at London, appear unto him with the mark of a bloodie crosse in his forehead, as if it had been cutted with a shord, at which amazed he prayed unto God, and in the morning he came to Mr. Cambden's chamber to tell him; who persuaded him it was but ane apprehension of his fantasie, at which he sould not be disjected; in the mean tyme comes then letters from his wife of the death of that boy in plague. He appeared to him (he said) of a manly shape, and of that grouth that he thinks he shall be at the resurrection."

RUBINSTEIN'S DEATH COMPACT

A pupil of Anton Rubinstein, the great pianist and composer (1829-1894), tells this story. It may be found in _Harper's Magazine_ for December, 1912, under the title _A Girl's Recollections of Rubinstein_, by Lillian Nichia.

"One wild, blustery night I found myself at dinner with Rubinstein, the weather being terrific even for St. Petersburg. The winds were howling round the house and Rubinstein, who liked to ask questions, inquired of me what they represented to my mind. I replied, 'The moaning of lost souls.' From this a theological discussion followed.

"'There may be a future,' he said.

"'There is a future,' I cried, 'a great and beautiful future. If I die first I shall come to you and prove this.'

"He turned to me with great solemnity.

"'Good, Liloscha, that is a bargain; and I will come to you.'

"Six years later in Paris I woke one night with a cry of agony and despair ringing in my ears, such as I hope may never be duplicated in my lifetime. Rubinstein's face was close to mine, a countenance distorted by every phase of fear, despair, agony, remorse and anger. I started up, turned on all the lights, and stood for a moment shaking in every limb, till I put fear from me and decided it was merely a dream. I had for the moment completely forgotten our compact. News is always late in Paris, and it was in _Le Petit Journal_, published in the afternoon, that had the first account of his sudden death.

"Four years later, Teresa Carreno, who had just come from Russia and was touring America--I had met her in St. Petersburg frequently at Rubinstein's dinner-table--told me that Rubinstein died with a cry of agony impossible of description. I knew then that even in death Rubinstein had kept, as he always did, his word."

Here again, we are at liberty to accept the testimony regarding the remarkable and complex coincidence, and to disregard what is really an expression of opinion in the last sentence. Whether Rubinstein remembered his compact in his dying hour, or the impression produced upon his far-away pupil was automatically produced by some obscure telepathic process, the dying man having in his mind no conscious thought of his promise, or some intervening _tertium quid_ produced the impression, could never be determined by this incident alone.

PREVISIONARY DREAM BY CHARLES DICKENS

This incident in the experience of Charles Dickens (1812-1870) is to be found in the standard biography by Forster, III, pp. 484-5 (London, 1874). On May 30, 1863, Dickens wrote:

"Here is a curious case at first-hand. On Thursday night in last week, being at my office here, I dreamed that I saw a lady in a red shawl with her back toward me (whom I supposed to be E--). On her turning round I found that I didn't know her, and she said, 'I am Miss Napier.' All the time I was dressing next morning I thought 'What a preposterous thing to have so very distinct a dream about nothing!' and why Miss Napier?--for I never heard of any Miss Napier. That same Friday night I read. After the reading, came into my retiring-room, Mary Boyle and her brother, and the lady in the red shawl, whom they present as 'Miss Napier.' These are all the circumstances exactly told."

I can imagine the late Professor Royce saying thirty years ago--for I much doubt if he would have said it twenty years later--"In certain people, under certain exciting circumstances, there occur what I shall henceforth call _Pseudo-presentiments_, _i.e._, more or less instantaneous hallucinations of memory, which make it seem to one that something which now excites or astonishes him has been prefigured in a recent dream, or in the form of some other warning, although this seeming is wholly unfounded, and although the supposed prophecy really succeeds its own fulfillment."

Apply this curious theory (which has probably not been urged for many years) to the incident just cited, and see how loosely it fits. What was there about three persons, one a stranger coming to Dickens after he had finished a reading from his own works, to "excite" or "astonish" him, make his brain whirl and bring about a hallucination of memory, an illusion of having dreamed it all before? It was the most commonplace event to him. Besides, as in most such cases, he had the distinct recollection of his thoughts about the dream after waking, thoughts inextricably interwoven with the acts performed while dressing! Besides, a pseudo-presentiment should tally with the event as a reflection does with the object, but in the dream Miss Napier introduced herself, while in reality she was introduced by another.