footsteps behind him and began to run, but the footsteps, though they
did not seem to come more quickly and were still the regular pace of
a man walking, came nearer. Presently he saw an old, white-haired
man beside him who said: "You cannot run away from life," and asked
him where he was going. "I am going home," he said, and the phantom
answered, "I also am going home," and then vanished. Twice in later
childhood, and a third time when he had grown to be a young man, he
was overtaken by the same phantom and the same words were spoken,
but the last time he asked why it had vanished so suddenly. It said
that it had not, but that he had supposed that "changes of state"
in himself were "appearance and disappearance." It then touched him
with one finger upon the side of his head, and the place where he was
touched remained ever after without feeling, like those places always
searched for at the witches' trials. One remembers "the touch" and
"the stroke" in the Irish stories.
VI
Allen Cardec, whose books are much more readable than those of Davis,
had himself no mediumistic gifts. He gathered the opinions, as he
believed, of spirits speaking through a great number of automatists
and trance speakers, and all the essential thought of Swedenborg
remains, but like Davis, these spirits do not believe in an eternal
Hell, and like Blake they describe unhuman races, powers of the
elements, and declare that the soul is no creature of the womb,
having lived many lives upon the earth. The sorrow of death, they
tell us again and again, is not so bitter as the sorrow of birth,
and had our ears the subtlety we could listen amid the joy of lovers
and the pleasure that comes with sleep to the wailing of the spirit
betrayed into a cradle. Who was it that wrote: "O Pythagoras, so
good, so wise, so eloquent, upon my last voyage, I taught thee, a
soft lad, to splice a rope"?
This belief, common among continental spiritists, is denied by those
of England and America, and if one question the voices at a séance
they take sides according to the medium's nationality. I have even
heard what professed to be the shade of an old English naval officer
denying it with a fine phrase: "I did not leave my oars crossed; I
left them side by side."
VII
Much as a hashish eater will discover in the folds of a curtain a
figure beautifully drawn and full of delicate detail all built up out
of shadows that show to other eyes, or later to his own, a different
form or none, Swedenborg discovered in the Bible the personal symbolism
of his vision. If the Bible was upon his side, as it seemed, he had
no need of other evidence, but had he lived when modern criticism
had lessened its authority, even had he been compelled to say that
the primitive beliefs of all peoples were as sacred, he could but
have run to his own gift for evidence. He might even have held of
some importance his powers of discovering the personal secrets of the
dead and set up as medium. Yet it is more likely he had refused, for
the medium has his gift from no heightening of all the emotions and
intellectual faculties till they seem as it were to take fire, but
commonly because they are altogether or in part extinguished while
another mind controls his body. He is greatly subject to trance and
awakes to remember nothing, whereas the mystic and the saint plead
unbroken consciousness. Indeed the author of _Sidonia the Sorceress_,
a really learned authority, considered this lack of memory a certain
sign of possession by the devil, though this is too absolute. Only
yesterday, while walking in a field, I made up a good sentence with an
emotion of triumph, and half a minute after could not even remember
what it was about, and several minutes had gone by before I as suddenly
found it. For the most part, though not always, it is this unconscious
condition of mediumship, a dangerous condition it may be, that seems
to make possible "physical phenomena" and that overshadowing of the
memory by some spirit memory, which Swedenborg thought an accident and
unlawful.
In describing and explaining this mediumship and so making
intelligible the stories of Aran and Galway I shall say very seldom,
"it is said," or "Mr. So-and-So reports," or "it is claimed by the
best authors." I shall write as if what I describe were everywhere
established, everywhere accepted, and I had only to remind my reader
of what he already knows. Even if incredulous he will give me his
fancy for certain minutes, for at the worst I can show him a gorgon
or chimera that has never lacked gazers, alleging nothing (and I do
not write out of a little knowledge) that is not among the sober
beliefs of many men, or obvious inference from those beliefs, and if
he wants more--well, he will find it in the best authors.[2]
VIII
All spirits for some time after death, and the "earth-bound," as
they are called, the larvæ, as Beaumont, the seventeenth-century
Platonist, preferred to call them, those who cannot become
disentangled from old habits and desires, for many years, it may be
for centuries, keep the shape of their earthly bodies and carry on
their old activities, wooing or quarrelling, or totting figures on a
table, in a round of dull duties or passionate events. Today while
the great battle in Northern France is still undecided, should I
climb to the top of that old house in Soho where a medium is sitting
among servant girls, some one would, it may be, ask for news of
Gordon Highlander or Munster Fusilier, and the fat old woman would
tell in Cockney language how the dead do not yet know they are dead,
but stumble on amid visionary smoke and noise, and how angelic
spirits seek to awaken them but still in vain.
Those who have attained to nobler form, when they appear in the
séance room, create temporary bodies, commonly like to those they
wore when living, through some unconscious constraint of memory, or
deliberately, that they may be recognized. Davis, in his literal
way, said the first sixty feet of the atmosphere was a reflector and
that in almost every case it was mere images we spoke with in the
séance room, the spirit itself being far away. The images are made
of a substance drawn from the medium who loses weight, and in a less
degree from all present, and for this light must be extinguished or
dimmed or shaded with red as in a photographer's room. The image will
begin outside the medium's body as a luminous cloud, or in a sort of
luminous mud forced from the body, out of the mouth it may be, from
the side or from the lower parts of the body.[3] One may see a vague
cloud condense and diminish into a head or arm or a whole figure of a
man, or to some animal shape.
I remember a story told me by a friend's steward in Galway of the
faeries playing at hurley in a field and going in and out of the
bodies of two men who stood at either goal. Out of the medium will
come perhaps a cripple or a man bent with years and sometimes the
apparition will explain that, but for some family portrait, or for
what it lit on while rumaging in our memories, it had not remembered
its customary clothes or features, or cough or limp or crutch.
Sometimes, indeed, there is a strange regularity of feature and
we suspect the presence of an image that may never have lived, an
artificial beauty that may have shown itself in the Greek mysteries.
Has some cast in the Vatican, or at Bloomsbury been the model? Or
there may float before our eyes a mask as strange and powerful as the
lineaments of the Servian's _Frowning Man_ or of Rodin's _Man with
the Broken Nose_. And once a rumour ran among the séance rooms to
the bewilderment of simple believers, that a heavy middle-aged man
who took snuff, and wore the costume of a past time, had appeared
while a French medium was in his trance, and somebody had recognized
the Tartuffe of the Comédie Française. There will be few complete
forms, for the dead are economical, and a head, or just enough of
the body for recognition, may show itself above hanging folds of
drapery that do not seem to cover solid limbs, or a hand or foot is
lacking, or it may be that some _Revenant_ has seized the half-made
image of another, and a young girl's arm will be thrust from the
withered body of an old man. Nor is every form a breathing and
pulsing thing, for some may have a distribution of light and shade
not that of the séance room, flat pictures whose eyes gleam and move;
and sometimes material objects are thrown together (drifted in from
some neighbour's wardrobe, it may be, and drifted thither again)
and an appearance kneaded up out of these and that luminous mud or
vapour almost as vivid as are those pictures of Antonio Mancini which
have fragments of his paint tubes embedded for the high lights into
the heavy masses of the paint. Sometimes there are animals, bears
frequently for some unknown reason, but most often birds and dogs. If
an image speak it will seldom seem very able or alert, for they come
for recognition only, and their minds are strained and fragmentary;
and should the dogs bark, a man who knows the language of our dogs
may not be able to say if they are hungry or afraid or glad to meet
their master again. All may seem histrionic or a hollow show. We are
the spectators of a phantasmagoria that affects the photographic
plate or leaves its moulded image in a preparation of paraffin. We
have come to understand why the Platonists of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, and visionaries like Boehme and Paracelsus
confused imagination with magic, and why Boehme will have it that it
"creates and substantiates as it goes."
Most commonly, however, especially of recent years, no form will show
itself, or but vaguely and faintly and in no way ponderable, and
instead there will be voices flitting here and there in darkness,
or in the half-light, or it will be the medium himself fallen into
trance who will speak, or without a trance write from a knowledge and
intelligence not his own. Glanvil, the seventeenth-century Platonist,
said that the higher spirits were those least capable of showing
material effects, and it seems plain from certain Polish experiments
that the intelligence of the communicators increases with their
economy of substance and energy. Often now among these faint effects
one will seem to speak with the very dead. They will speak or write
some tongue that the medium does not know and give correctly their
forgotten names, or describe events one only verifies after weeks
of labour. Here and there amongst them one discovers a wise and
benevolent mind that knows a little of the future and can give good
advice. They have made, one imagines, from some finer substance than
a phosphorescent mud, or cobweb vapour that we can see or handle,
images not wholly different from themselves, figures in a galanty
show not too strained or too extravagant to speak their very thought.
Yet we never long escape the phantasmagoria nor can long forget
that we are among the shape-changers. Sometimes our own minds shape
that mysterious substance, which may be life itself, according to
desire or constrained by memory, and the dead no longer remembering
their own names become the characters in the drama we ourselves
have invented. John King, who has delighted melodramatic minds for
hundreds of séances with his career on earth as Henry Morgan the
buccaneer, will tell more scientific visitors that he is merely
a force, while some phantom long accustomed to a decent name,
questioned by some pious Catholic, will admit very cheerfully that he
is the devil. Nor is it only present minds that perplex the shades
with phantasy, for friends of Count Albert de Rochas once wrote out
names and incidents but to discover that though the surname of the
shade that spoke had been historical, Christian name and incidents
were from a romance running at the time in some clerical newspaper no
one there had ever opened.
All these shadows have drunk from the pool of blood and become
delirious. Sometimes they will use the very word and say that we
force delirium upon them because we do not still our minds, or that
minds not stupefied with the body force them more subtly, for now
and again one will withdraw what he has said, saying that he was
constrained by the neighbourhood of some more powerful shade.
When I was a boy at Sligo, a stable boy met his late master going
round the yard, and having told him to go and haunt the lighthouse,
was dismissed by his mistress for sending her husband to haunt
so inclement a spot. Ghosts, I was told, must go where they are
bid, and all those threatenings by the old _grimoires_ to drown
some disobedient spirit at the bottom of the Red Sea, and indeed
all exorcism and conjuration affirm that our imagination is king.
_Revenants_ are, to use the modern term, "suggestable," and may be
studied in the "trance personalities" of hypnoses and in our dreams
which are but hypnosis turned inside out, a modeller's clay for our
suggestions, or, if we follow _The Spiritual Diary_, for those of
invisible beings. Swedenborg has written that we are each in the
midst of a group of associated spirits who sleep when we sleep and
become the _dramatis personæ_ of our dreams, and are always the other
will that wrestles with our thought, shaping it to our despite.
IX
We speak, it may be, of the Proteus of antiquity which has to be
held or it will refuse its prophecy, and there are many warnings in
our ears. "Stoop not down," says the Chaldæan Oracle, "to the darkly
splendid world wherein continually lieth a faithless depth and Hades
wrapped in cloud, delighting in unintelligible images," and amid that
caprice, among those clouds, there is always legerdemain; we juggle,
or lose our money with the same pack of cards that may reveal the
future. The magicians who astonished the Middle Ages with power as
incalculable as the fall of a meteor were not so numerous as the more
amusing jugglers who could do their marvels at will; and in our own
day the juggler Houdin, sent to Morocco by the French Government, was
able to break the prestige of the dervishes whose fragile wonders
were but worked by fasting and prayer.
Sometimes, indeed, a man would be magician, jester, and juggler. In
an Irish story a stranger lays three rushes upon the flat of his hand
and promises to blow away the inner and leave the others unmoved, and
thereupon puts two fingers of his other hand upon the outer ones and
blows. However, he will do a more wonderful trick. There are many
who can wag both ears, but he can wag one and not the other, and
thereafter, when he has everybody's attention, he takes one ear between
finger and thumb. But now that the audience are friendly and laughing
the moment of miracle has come. He takes out of a bag a skein of silk
thread and throws it into the air, until it seems as though one end
were made fast to a cloud. Then he takes out of his bag first a hare
and then a dog and then a young man and then "a beautiful, well-dressed
young woman" and sends them all running up the thread. Nor, the
old writers tell us, does the association of juggler and magician
cease after death, which only gives to legerdemain greater power and
subtlety. Those who would live again in us, becoming a part of our
thoughts and passion have, it seems, their sport to keep us in good
humour, and a young girl who has astonished herself and her friends in
some dark séance may, when we have persuaded her to become entranced
in a lighted room, tell us that some shade is touching her face, while
we can see her touching it with her own hand, or we may discover her,
while her eyes are still closed, in some jugglery that implies an
incredible mastery of muscular movement. Perhaps too in the fragmentary
middle world there are souls that remain always upon the brink, always
children. Dr. Ochorowicz finds his experiments upset by a naked girl,
one foot one inch high, who is constantly visible to his medium and
who claims never to have lived upon the earth. He has photographed her
by leaving a camera in an empty room where she had promised to show
herself, but is so doubtful of her honesty that he is not sure she did
not hold up a print from an illustrated paper in front of the camera.
In one of Lady Gregory's stories a countryman is given by a stranger
he meets upon the road what seems wholesome and pleasant food, but a
little later his stomach turns and he finds that he has eaten chopped
grass, and one remembers Robin Goodfellow and his joint stool, and
witches' gold that is but dried cow dung. It is only, one does not
doubt, because of our preoccupation with a single problem, our survival
of the body, and with the affection that binds us to the dead, that all
the gnomes and nymphs of antiquity have not begun their tricks again.
X
Plutarch, in his essay on the dæmon, describes how the souls of
enlightened men return to be the schoolmasters of the living, whom
they influence unseen; and the mediums, should we ask how they escape
the illusions of that world, claim the protection of their guides. One
will tell you that when she was a little girl she was minding geese
upon some American farm and an old man came towards her with a queer
coat upon him, and how at first she took him for a living man. He
said perhaps a few words of pious commonplace or practical advice and
vanished. He had come again and again, and now that she has to earn her
living by her gift, he warns her against deceiving spirits, or if she
is working too hard, but sometimes she will not listen and gets into
trouble. The old witch doctor of Lady Gregory's story learned his cures
from his dead sister whom he met from time to time, but especially at
Hallowe'en, at the end of the garden, but he had other helpers harsher
than she, and once he was beaten for disobedience.
Reginald Scott gives a fine plan for picking a guide. You promise some
dying man to pray for the repose of his soul if he will but come to
you after death and give what help you need, while stories of mothers
who come at night to be among their orphan children are as common
among spiritists as in Galway or in Mayo. A French servant girl once
said to a friend of mine who helped her in some love affair: "You
have your studies, we have only our affections"; and this I think is
why the walls are broken less often among us than among the poor. Yet
according to the doctrine of Soho and Holloway and in Plutarch, those
studies that have lessened in us the sap of the world may bring to us
good, learned, masterful men who return to see their own or some like
work carried to a finish. "I do think," wrote Sir Thomas Browne, "that
many mysteries ascribed to our own invention have been the courteous
revelations of spirits; for those noble essences in heaven bear a
friendly regard unto their fellow creatures on earth."
XI
Much that Lady Gregory has gathered seems but the broken bread
of old philosophers, or else of the one sort with the dough they
made into their loaves. Were I not ignorant, my Greek gone and my
meagre Latin all but gone, I do not doubt that I could find much
to the point in Greek, perhaps in old writers on medicine, much in
Renaissance or Medieval Latin. As it is, I must be content with what
has been translated or with the seventeenth-century Platonists who
are the handier for my purpose because they found in the affidavits
and confessions of the witch trials, descriptions like those in our
Connaught stories. I have Henry More in his verse and in his prose
and I have Henry More's two friends, Joseph Glanvil, and Cudworth in
his _Intellectual System of the Universe_, three volumes violently
annotated by an opposed theologian; and two essays by Mr. G. R. S.
Meade clipped out of his magazine, _The Quest_. These writers quote
much from Plotinus and Porphyry and Plato and from later writers,
especially Synesius and John Philoponus in whom the School of Plato
came to an end in the seventh century.