Part 16

NOTE 2. This light occurs again and again in modern spiritism as in old legends. It shows in some form in almost every dark séance. Grettir the Strong saw it over buried treasure. It surrounded the head of Hereward the Wake in childhood, and in the middle of the nineteenth century, Baron Reichenbach called it "odic light" and published much evidence taken down from his "sensitives" who saw it about crystals, magnets, and one another, and over new-made graves. Holman Hunt represents in his _Flight into Egypt_ the souls of the Innocents encircled by creeping and clinging fire. When this fire encircles a good spirit it is generally described as white and brilliant, but about the evil as lurid and smoky.

NOTE 3. When I was a boy, there was a countryman in a Sligo madhouse who was sane in all ways except that he saw, in pools and rivers, beings who called and beckoned. I have myself known a landscape painter who after painting a certain stagnant pool was nightly afflicted by a dream of strange shapes, bidding him to drown himself there. The obsession was so strong that he could not throw it off during his waking hours, and for some days struggled with the temptation. I was with him at the time and had noticed his growing gloom and had questioned him about it.

NOTE 4. Bran, in the _Voyage of Bran_ when sailing, meets Manannan the sea-god. "And Manannan spoke to him in a song, and it is what he said:

"It is what Bran thinks, he is going in his curragh over the wonderful, beautiful, clear sea; but to me, from far off in my chariot, it is a flowery plain he is riding on.

"What is a clear sea to the good boat Bran is in, is a happy plain with many flowers to me in my two-wheeled chariot.

"It is what Bran sees, many waves beating across the clear sea; it is what I myself see, red flowers without any fault.

"The sea-horses are bright in summer-time, as far as Bran's eyes can reach; there is a wood of beautiful acorns under the head of your little boat.

"A wood with blossom and with fruit, that has the smell of wine; a wood without fault, without withering, with leaves of the colour of gold." (_Gods and Fighting Men_, by Lady Gregory.)

NOTE 5. Swedenborg describes these colours and I have a note of similar visions as seen by a fellow-student of mine at the Dublin Art School. Mrs. Besant in her _Ancient Wisdom_ and other writers of the Modern Theosophical School describe them and moralize about them.

NOTE 6. There are constant stories in the history of modern spiritism of people carried through the air often for considerable distances. It is not my business to weigh the evidence at this moment, for I am concerned only with similarity of belief. The medium, Mrs. Guppy, somewhere in the "sixties" was believed to have been carried from Hampstead, a pen in one hand and an account book in the other, and dropped on to the middle of a table in South Conduit Street. Lord Dunraven was one of a number of witnesses who testified to having seen the medium Hume float out of one window of the upper room, where they were sitting, and in at another window. I read the other day in a spiritistic paper, of two boys carried through the air in Italy and dropped in front of a bishop who immediately handed them over to the police. And of course the folk-lore of all countries and the legends of the saints are full of such tales.

NOTE 7. The offering to the Sidhe is generally made at Hallowe'en, the old beginning of winter, and upon that night I was told when a boy the offering was still made in the slums of Dublin.

NOTE 8. Father Sinistrari speaks of a like commerce between beasts and spirits. "Et non solum hoc evenit cum mulieribus, sed etiam cum equabus, cum quibus commicetur; quæ si libenter coitum admittunt, ab eo curantur optime, ac ipsarum jubæ varie artificiosis et inextricabilibus nodis texuntur; si autem illum adversentur, eas male tractat, percutit, macras reddit, et tandem necat, ut quotidiana constat experienta."

NOTE 9. Houses built upon faery paths are thought to be unlucky. Often the thatch will be blown away, or their inhabitants die or suffer misfortune.

NOTE 10. The number of quotations I can find to prove the universality of the thought that the dead and other spirits change their shape as they please is but lessened by the fewness of the books that are near my hand in the country where I am writing. John Heydon, "a servant of God and secretary of nature," writing in 1662 in _The Rosie Cross Uncovered_ which is the last book of his _Holy Guide_ says that a man may become one of the heroes: "A hero," he writes, "is a dæmon, or good genius, and a genius a partaker of divine things and a companion of the holy company of unbodied souls and immortal angels who live according to their vehicles a versatile life, turning themselves proteus-like into any shape."

And Mrs. Besant, a typical writer of the modern Theosophical School, insists upon these changes of form, especially among those spirits that are most free from the terrestrial body and explains it by saying that, "astral matter takes form under every impulse of thought." Swedenborg I have already quoted in my long essay, but to prove that the shape-changer is a part of general literature--I have but Wordsworth and Milton under my hand. When the white doe of Rylstone shows itself at the church door according to its Sunday custom, one has one tale to tell, another another, but an Oxford student will have it that it is the faery that loved a certain "shepherd-lord."

"'Twas said that she all shapes could wear."

And Milton writes like any Platonist of his time:

"For Spirits, when they please, Can either sex assume, or both; so soft And uncompounded is their essence pure, Not ty'd or manacled with joint or limb, Nor founded on the brittle strength of bones, Like cumbrous flesh; but, in what shape they choose, Dilated or condensed, bright or obscure, Can execute their aery purposes, And works of love or enmity fulfil."

NOTE 11. The seers and healers in this section differ but little from clairvoyants and spirit mediums of the towns, and explain their powers in much the same way. Indeed one of Lady Gregory's story-tellers will have it that America is more full than Ireland of faeries, and describes the mediums there to prove it. It is often through some virtue in these country seers and healers that the faeries or spirits are able to affect men and women and natural objects. Mrs. Sheridan says that a child could not have been taken if she had not been looking on, and one hears again and again that even when the faeries fight among themselves or play at hurley, there must be a man upon either side. We are all in a sense mediums, if the village seer speaks truth, for through any unsanctified emotion, love, affection, admiration, the spirits may attain power over a child or horse or whatever is before our eyes, and perhaps, as the controls of mediums will sometimes say, they can only see the world through our eyes. Albert de Rochas, borrowing a theory from the seventeenth century, has suggested with the general assent of spiritists that the fluidic or sidereal body of the medium, the mould upon which the physical body is, it may be, built up, is more detachable than in persons who are not mediums, and that the spirits make themselves visible by transforming it into their own shape or into what shape they please and attain by its means a power over physical objects. (See _L'Extériorisation de la Motricité_.) Instead of the expensive crystal of the Bond Street clairvoyant, Biddy Early gazed into her bottle, but that is almost the whole difference. If the dreams and visions of Connacht have more richness and beauty than those of Camberwell, it is that Connacht, having no doubts as to our survival of death, is not always looking for but one sort of evidence, and so can let things happen as they will. The brother or sister or the like who comes to the knowledgeable man or woman after death is but the "guide" that has been so common in England and America, since the Rochester rappings, and a country form of Plutarch's "dæmon." At other moments, however, "seer" or "healer" resembles a witch or wizard rather than a modern medium.

* * * * *

In one thing, however, they always resemble the medium and not the witch. They seem to have no dealings with the devil. The Irish Trials for witchcraft of the English and continental type took place among the English settlers. I have never come across a case of a "compact" nor has Lady Gregory, nor have I read of one.

NOTE 12. It is almost unthinkable to Lady Gregory and myself, who know Mrs. Sheridan, that she can ever have seen a drawbridge in a picture or heard one spoken of. Nor does this instance stand alone. I have had in my own family what seemed the accurate calling up of an unknown past but failing a link of difficult evidence still unfound, coincidence, though exceedingly unlikely, is still a possible explanation. I have come upon a number of other cases which are, though no one case is decisive, a powerful argument taken altogether. In _The Adventure_ (MacMillan), an elaborate vision of this kind is recorded in detail and, accepting the record as accurate, the verification is complete. Two ladies found themselves in the garden of the Petit Trianon in the midst of what seemed to be the court of Marie Antoinette, in just the same sudden way in which some countryman finds himself among ladies and gentlemen dressed in what seem the clothes of a long passed time. The record purports to have been made in November and December 1901, whereas the vision occurred in August. This lapse of time does not seem to me to destroy the value of the evidence, if the record was made before its corroboration by long and difficult research.[2] Accepting the good faith of the narrators, both well-known women and of established character, its evidence for some more obscure cause than unconscious memory can only be weakened by the discovery in some book or magazine accessible to the visionaries before their visit to the Trianon, of historical information on such minute points as the dress Marie Antoinette wore in a particular month, and the position of ornamental buildings and rock work not now in existence. There is a great mass of similar evidence in Denton's _Soul of Things_ though its value is weakened by his not sufficiently allowing for thought transference from his own mind to that of his sensitives.

A "theosophist" or "occultist" of almost any modern school explains such visions by saying they are "pictures in the astral light" and that all objects and events leave their images in the astral light as upon a photographic plate, and that we must distinguish between spirits and these unintelligent pictures. I was once at Madame Blavatsky's when she tried to explain predestination, our freedom and God's full knowledge of the use that we should make of it. All things past and to come were present to the mind of God and yet all things were free. She soon saw that she had carried us out of our depth and said to one of her followers with a mischievous, mocking voice: "You with your impudence and your spectacles will be sitting there in the Akasa to all eternity" and then in a more meditative voice, "No, not to all eternity for a day will come when even the Akasa will pass away and there will be nothing but God, chaos, that which every man is seeking in his heart." Akasa, she was accustomed to explain as some Indian word for the astral light. Perhaps that theory of the astral pictures came always from the despair of some visionary to find understanding for a more metaphysical theory. It is, however, ancient. To Cornelius Agrippa it is the air that reflects, but the air is something more than what the word means for us. "It is a vital spirit passing through all beings giving life and substance to all things ... it immediately receives into itself the influences of all celestial bodies, and then communicates them to the other elements as also to all mixed bodies. Also it receives into itself as if it were a divine looking-glass the species of all things, as well natural as artificial," it enters into men and animals "through their pores" and "makes an impression upon them as well when they sleep as when they awake and affords matter to divers strange dreams and divinations.... Hence it is that a man passing by a place where a man was slain and the carcase newly laid is moved by fear and dread; because the air in that place being full of the dread species of man-slaughter does being breathed in, move and trouble the spirit of the man with a like species ... whence it is that many philosophers were of the opinion that the air is the cause of dreams." Henry More is more precise and philosophical and believes that this air which he calls _Spiritus Mundi_ contains all forms, so that the parents when a child is begotten, or a witch when the double is projected as a hare, but as it were, call upon the _Spiritus Mundi_ for the form they need. The name "Astral Light" was given to this air or spirit by the Abbé Constant who wrote under the pseudonym of Élephas Lévi and like Madame Blavatsky, claimed to be the voice of an ancient magical society. In his _Dogma et Rituel de la Haute Magie_ published in the fifties, he described in vague, eloquent words, influenced perhaps by the recent discovery of the daguerreotype these pictures which we continually confuse with the still animate shades. A more clear exposition of a perhaps always incomprehensible idea is that of Swedenborg who says that when we die, we live over again the events that lie in all their minute detail in our memory, and this is the explanation of the authors of _The Adventure_ who believe, as it seems, that they were entangled in the memory of Marie Antoinette. I have met students who claimed to have had knowledge of Lévi's sources and who believed that when at last a spirit has been, as it were, pulled out of its coil, other spirits may use its memory, not only of events but of words and of thoughts. Did Cornelius Agrippa identify soul with memory when, after quoting Ovid to prove that the flesh cleaves to earth, the ghost hovers over the grave, the soul sinks to Oxos, and the spirit rises to the stars, he explains that if the soul has done well it rejoices with the almost faultless spirit, but if it has done ill, the spirit judges it and leaves it for the devil's prey and "the sad soul wanders about hell without a spirit and like an image?" Remembering these writings and sayings, I find new meaning in that description of death taken down by Lady Gregory in some cottage: "The shadow goes wandering and the soul is tired and the body is taking a rest."

I was once talking with Professor James of experiences like to those in _The Adventure_ and said that I found it easiest to understand them by believing in a memory of nature distinguished from individual memory, though including and enclosing it. He would, however, have none of my explanation and preferred to think the past, present, and future were only modes of our perception and that all three were in the divine mind, present at once. It was Madame Blavatsky's thought, and Shelley's in the _Sensitive Plant_:

"That garden sweet, that lady fair, And all sweet shapes and odours there, In truth have never passed away; 'Tis we, 'tis ours, are changed, not they.

"For love, and beauty, and delight, There is no death nor change; their light Exceeds our organs, which endure No light, being themselves obscure."

NOTE 13. The ancient Irish had quadrilateral houses built of logs, and round houses of clay and wattles. O'Sullivan, in his introduction to O'Curry's _Manners and Customs_, writes: "The houses built in _Duns_ and in _stone caiseal_, and those surrounded by mounds of earth, were, probably in all cases round houses." A _Bo Aires_, or farmer with ten cows was supposed to have a house at least twenty-seven feet wide but the houses of better off men must have made one room of considerable size, a whole household sleeping on beds, sometimes with low partitions between, raying out from the wall like spokes of a wheel. Petrie thought the great quadrilateral banqueting hall of Tara was once ninety feet wide.

NOTE 14. In _The Roman Ritual_, there is an exorcism for evil spirits and a ceremony for the succour of the sick (_cura infirmorum_). And in the beginning of the chapter containing this ceremony (Caput IV., verse 12), it is stated that images of Christ, the Virgin, and of saints especially in veneration of the sick man, may cure him if brought into the room. In the ceremony of exorcism, the priest is directed to make numerous signs of the cross over the possessed person (_sic. rubric: Tres cruces sequentes fiant in pectore dæmoniaci_). The spirit is commanded to be gone in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. The ceremony with psalms covers twenty-six pages of my copy. The exorcism is described as a driving out of the "most unclean spirit" of every phantasm and every legion. It commands the "most evil dragon, in the name of the immaculate lamb who walked upon the asp and the basilisk and cast down the lion and the dragon" to "go down out of this man."

In the ceremony for the sick, the priest places his hand on the head of the sick man and says:

"Let them place their hands on the sick and they shall be well [_Super ægros manus imponent, et bene habebunt_]. May Christ Son of Mary, Saviour of the world and Lord, by the merits and intercession of his holy apostles Peter and Paul and of all the saints be clement and propitious to you."

The ceremony is ten pages and contains various psalms and selections from the Gospels.

Round these two ceremonies have gathered in the minds of the country people, at least, many traditional ideas. When any one is cured, there is a victim, some other human being or some animal will die. If one remembers that diseases were very commonly considered to be the work of demons, one sees how the story of the Gadarene swine would support the tradition. I know not into what subtlety the dreaming mind may not carry the thought, for some few months ago in France, an excommunicated miracle-working priest said in my hearing: "There is always a victim; so-and-so was the victim for France," naming a holy Italian nun who had just died. "And so-and-so," naming a living holy woman, "is the victim for my own village." Various medieval saints, and even certain witches, cured sick persons by taking the disease upon themselves.

Christian Scientists and Mental Healers are often afraid of themselves acquiring the disease which they drive out of their patient; they sometimes speak of the effort that it costs them to shake it off. I was told a story the other day, which I have proved not to be true, but which is evidence of the belief. A woman said to me some such words as these: "My friend so-and-so, who is a Mental Healer, was staying in the country. She saw a woman there with a strange look. She asked what was wrong, and found that this woman was expecting a periodical fit of madness. She offered to undertake her cure, and brought her to her own house. The patient became violent, but my friend was able by faith and prayer to soothe her till she fell asleep. My friend went downstairs exhausted, and lay upon the sofa. Presently she saw strange shadows coming into the room and knew they had come from the patient upstairs, and these shadows, taking the form of swine, threw themselves upon her and only after a long struggle could she throw them off." The swine and their attack were all moonshine, but the healer, whom I found and questioned, did believe that she saw shadows leaving the patient.

The transference of disease was a generally recognized part of medieval and ancient medicine; and Albert de Rochas gives considerable space to it in his _L'Extériorisation de la Sensibilité_, Paris, 1909. He quotes from a seventeenth-century writer, Abbé de Vellemort, many examples from medical and scientific writers of that time who believed themselves to have transferred diseases from their patients to animals and to trees and to various substances, "Mumia" as they called them, which absorb _des esprits qui résident dans le sang_ and then describes various experiments made in 1885 by Dr. Babinski "Chef de Clinique de M. Charcot" in transferring now by magnets, now by suggestion various forms of nervous disease from one patient to another. Where these diseases were produced in the first instance by suggestion, the patient from whom the disease was transferred, was freed from it, but where the disease was natural and the cause of the patient being at the hospital, there was no cure although in one case there was improvement. Albert de Rochas then quotes as follows from a lecture given by Dr. Luys to La Société de Biologie in 1894.

"M. D'Arsonval has, according to a communication from an English physician, given an account at the last meeting of the Société de Biologie, of the persistent action in a magnetized iron bar of the magnetic fluid, which to a certain extent, kept a memory of its former state.

"My researches of the same kind have given me proofs some time since of analogous phenomena with the help of magnetized crowns placed on the head of a subject in an hypnotic state.

"In this case, it is a question not only of storing vibrations of magnetic nature, but of really living nature, of real cerebral vibrations through the coating of the brain, stored in a magnetic crown, in which they remain for a greater or less length of time.

"To arrive at this phenomenon, instead of using an unresponsive physical instrument, I use a reacting living being--an hypnotized subject, who has thus become sensitive to living magnetic vibrations. I am presenting to the Society the magnetized crown, like several other models which I have already shown. It is adapted to the head by means of a system of straps, encircles it and leaves the frontal region free.

"It also forms a bent magnet with a positive and a negative pole. This crown was put, more than a year ago, on the head of a woman suffering from melancholia with ideas of persecution, agitation, and a tendency to suicide, etc. The application of the crown lead to the patient's getting slowly better after five or six séances; and at the end of ten days I thought I could send her back to the hospital without any danger. At the end of a fortnight, the crown having been isolated, the idea came to me quite empirically of placing it on the head of the 'subject' now before you.

"He is a male, hypnotizable, _hystérique_, given to frequent fits of lethargy. What was my surprise to see this subject, put into the somnambulistic state, complaining in exactly the same terms as those the cured patient had used a fortnight before.

"_He_ first of all took on the sex of the patient; _he_ spoke in the feminine gender; _he_ complained of violent headache; _he_ said he was going mad, that his neighbours came into his room to do him harm. In a word, the hypnotic subject had, thanks to the magnetized crown, taken on the cerebral state of the melancholic patient. The magnetized crown had been powerful enough to draw off the morbid cerebral influx of the patient (who got well), which had persisted, like a memory, in the intimate (or innermost) texture of the magnetic strip of metal.

"This is a phenomenon we have produced many times, for several years; not only with the subject now present, but with others.

"This communication is, amongst physiological phenomena, on a line with M. D'Arsonval's on the persistence of certain anterior states in inorganic bodies; it will no doubt cause much astonishment and scepticism amongst those who are not accustomed to hypnologic research.