More has said, a man might as well think "from souls new souls" to
bring as "to press the sunbeams in his fist" or "wring the rainbow
till it dye his hands." We have within us an "airy body" or "spirit
body" which was our only body before our birth as it will be again
when we are dead and its "plastic power" has shaped our terrestrial
body as some day it may shape apparition and ghost. Porphyry is
quoted by Mr. Meade as saying that "Souls who love the body attach
a moist spirit to them and condense it like a cloud," and so become
visible, and so are all apparitions of the dead made visible; though
necromancers, according to Henry More, can ease and quicken this
condensation "with reek of oil, meal, milk, and such like gear,
wine, water, honey." One remembers that Dr. Ochorowicz's naked
imp once described how she filled out an appearance of herself by
putting a piece of blotting paper where her stomach should have been
and that the blotting paper became damp because, as she said, a
materialization, until it is completed, is a damp vapour. This airy
body which so compresses vapour, Philoponus says, "takes the shape
of the physical body as water takes the shape of the vessel that it
has been frozen in," but it is capable of endless transformations,
for "in itself it has no especial form," but Henry More believes that
it has an especial form, for "its plastic power" cannot but find
the human form most "natural," though "vehemency of desire to alter
the figure into another representation may make the appearance to
resemble some other creature; but no forced thing can last long."
"The better genii" therefore prefer to show "in a human shape yet
not it may be with all the lineaments" but with such as are "fit
for this separate state" (separate from the body that is) or are
"requisite to perfect the visible features of a person," desire and
imagination adding clothes and ornament. The materialization, as we
would say, has but enough likeness for recognition. It may be that
More but copies Philoponus who thought the shade's habitual form, the
image that it was as it were frozen in for a time, could be again
"coloured and shaped by fantasy," and that "it is probable that
when the soul desires to manifest it shapes itself, setting its own
imagination in movement, or even that it is probable with the help
of dæmonic co-operation that it appears and again becomes invisible,
becoming condensed and rarefied." Porphyry, Philoponus adds, gives
Homer as his authority for the belief that souls after death live
among images of their experience upon earth, phantasms impressed
upon the spirit body. While Synesius, who lived at the end of the
fourth century and had Hypatia among his friends, also describes the
spirit body as capable of taking any form and so of enabling us after
death to work out our purgation; and says that for this reason the
oracles have likened the state after death to the images of a dream.
The seventeenth century English translation of Cornelius Agrippa's
_De Occulta Philosophia_ was once so famous that it found its way
into the hands of Irish farmers and wandering Irish tinkers, and
it may be that Agrippa influenced the common thought when he wrote
that the evil dead see represented "in the fantastic reason" those
shapes of life that are "the more turbulent and furious ... sometimes
of the heavens falling upon their heads, sometimes of their being
consumed with the violence of flames, sometimes of being drowned
in a gulf, sometimes of being swallowed up in the earth, sometimes
of being changed into divers kinds of beasts ... and sometimes of
being taken and tormented by demons ... as if they were in a dream."
The ancients, he writes, have called these souls "hobgoblins," and
Orpheus has called them "the people of dreams" saying "the gates of
Pluto cannot be unlocked; within is a people of dreams." They are
a dream indeed that has place and weight and measure, and seeing
that their bodies are of an actual air, they cannot, it was held,
but travel in wind and set the straws and the dust twirling; though
being of the wind's weight they need not, Dr. Henry More considers,
so much as feel its ruffling, or if they should do so, they can
shelter in a house or behind a wall, or gather into themselves as it
were, out of the gross wind and vapour. But there are good dreams
among the airy people, though we cannot properly name that a dream
which is but analogical of the deep unimaginable virtues and has,
therefore, stability and a common measure. Henry More stays himself
in the midst of the dry learned and abstract writing of his treatise
_The Immortality of the Soul_ to praise "their comely carriage ...
their graceful dancing, their melodious singing and playing with
an accent so sweet and soft as if we should imagine air itself to
compose lessons and send forth musical sounds without the help of
any terrestrial instrument" and imagines them at their revels in
the thin upper air where the earth can but seem "a fleecy and milky
light" as the moon to us, and he cries out that they "sing and play
and dance together, reaping the lawful pleasures of the very animal
life, in a far higher degree than we are capable of in this world,
for everything here does, as it were, taste of the cask and has some
measure of foulness in it."
There is, however, another birth or death when we pass from the
airy to the shining or ethereal body, and "in the airy the soul may
inhabit for many ages and in the ethereal for ever," and indeed it
is the ethereal body which is the root "of all that natural warmth in
all generations" though in us it can no longer shine. It lives while
in its true condition an unimaginable life and is sometimes described
as of "a round or oval figure" and as always circling among gods and
among the stars, and sometimes as having more dimensions than our
penury can comprehend.
Last winter Mr. Ezra Pound was editing the late Professor Fenollosa's
translations of the Noh Drama of Japan, and read me a great deal of
what he was doing. Nearly all that my fat old woman in Soho learns
from her familiars is there in an unsurpassed lyric poetry and in
strange and poignant fables once danced or sung in the houses of
nobles. In one a priest asks his way of some girls who are gathering
herbs. He asks if it is a long road to town; and the girls begin to
lament over their hard lot gathering cress in a cold wet bog where
they sink up to their knees and to compare themselves with ladies
in the big town who only pull the cress in sport, and need not when
the cold wind is flapping their sleeves. He asks what village he
has come to and if a road near by leads to the village of Ono. A
girl replies that nobody can know that name without knowing the
road, and another says: "Who would not know that name, written on
so many pictures, and know the pine trees they are always drawing."
Presently the cold drives away all the girls but one and she tells
the priest she is a spirit and has taken solid form that she may
speak with him and ask his help. It is her tomb that has made Ono so
famous. Conscience-struck at having allowed two young men to fall
in love with her she refused to choose between them. Her father
said he would give her to the best archer. At the match to settle
it both sent their arrows through the same wing of a mallard and
were declared equal. She being ashamed and miserable because she had
caused so much trouble and for the death of the mallard, took her
own life. That, she thought, would end the trouble, but her lovers
killed themselves beside her tomb, and now she suffered all manner
of horrible punishments. She had but to lay her hand upon a pillar
to make it burst into flame; she was perpetually burning. The priest
tells her that if she can but cease to believe in her punishments
they will cease to exist. She listens in gratitude but she cannot
cease to believe, and while she is speaking they come upon her and
she rushes away enfolded in flames. Her imagination has created all
those terrors out of a scruple, and one remembers how Lake Harris,
who led Laurence Oliphant such a dance, once said to a shade, "How
did you know you were damned?" and that it answered, "I saw my own
thoughts going past me like blazing ships."
In a play still more rich in lyric poetry a priest is wandering in
a certain ancient village. He describes the journey and the scene,
and from time to time the chorus sitting at the side of the stage
sings its comment. He meets with two ghosts, the one holding a red
stick, the other a piece of coarse cloth and both dressed in the
fashion of a past age, but as he is a stranger he supposes them
villagers wearing the village fashion. They sing as if muttering,
"We are entangled up--whose fault was it, dear? Tangled up as the
grass patterns are tangled up in this coarse cloth, or that insect
which lives and chirrups in dried seaweed. We do not know where are
today our tears in the undergrowth of this eternal wilderness. We
neither wake nor sleep and passing our nights in sorrow, which is
in the end a vision, what are these scenes of spring to us? This
thinking in sleep for some one who has no thought for you, is it more
than a dream? And yet surely it is the natural way of love. In our
hearts there is much, and in our bodies nothing, and we do nothing
at all, and only the waters of the river of tears flow quickly." To
the priest they seem two married people, but he cannot understand
why they carry the red stick and the coarse cloth. They ask him to
listen to a story. Two young people had lived in that village long
ago and night after night for three years the young man had offered a
charmed red stick, the token of love, at the young girl's window, but
she pretended not to see and went on weaving. So the young man died
and was buried in a cave with his charmed red sticks, and presently
the girl died too, and now because they were never married in life
they were unmarried in their death. The priest, who does not yet
understand that it is their own tale, asks to be shown the cave, and
says it will be a fine tale to tell when he goes home. The chorus
describes the journey to the cave. The lovers go in front, the priest
follows. They are all day pushing through long grasses that hide the
narrow paths. They ask the way of a farmer who is mowing. Then night
falls and it is cold and frosty. It is stormy and the leaves are
falling and their feet sink into the muddy places made by the autumn
showers; there is a long shadow on the slope of the mountain, and an
owl in the ivy of the pine tree. They have found the cave and it is
dyed with the red sticks of love to the colour of "the orchids and
chrysanthemums which hide the mouth of a fox's hole"; and now the two
lovers have "slipped into the shadow of the cave." Left alone and
too cold to sleep the priest decides to spend the night in prayer.
He prays that the lovers may at last be one. Presently he sees to
his wonder that the cave is lighted up "where people are talking and
setting up looms for spinning and painted red sticks." The ghosts
creep out and thank him for his prayer and say that through his pity
"the love promises of long past incarnations" find fulfilment in
a dream. Then he sees the love story unfolded in a vision and the
chorus compares the sound of weaving to the clicking of crickets.
A little later he is shown the bridal room and the lovers drinking
from the bridal cup. The dawn is coming. It is reflected in the
bridal cup and now singers, cloth, and stick break and dissolve like
a dream, and there is nothing but "a deserted grave on a hill where
morning winds are blowing through the pine."
I remember that Aran story of the lovers who came after death to the
priest for marriage. It is not uncommon for a ghost, "a control" as
we say, to come to a medium to discover some old earthly link to fit
into a new chain. It wishes to meet a ghostly enemy to win pardon or
to renew an old friendship. Our service to the dead is not narrowed
to our prayers, but may be as wide as our imagination. I have known
a control to warn a medium to unsay her promise to an old man, to
whom, that she might be rid of him, she had promised herself after
death. What is promised here in our loves or in a witch's bond may be
fulfilled in a life which is a dream. If our terrestrial condition
is, as it seems the territory of choice and of cause, the one ground
for all seed sowing, it is plain why our imagination has command
over the dead and why they must keep from sight and earshot. At the
British Museum at the end of the Egyptian Room and near the stairs
are two statues, one an august decoration, one a most accurate
looking naturalistic portrait. The august decoration was for a public
site, the other, like all the naturalistic art of the epoch, for
burial beside a mummy. So buried it was believed, the Egyptologists
tell us, to be of service to the dead. I have no doubt it helped a
dead man to build out of his spirit-body a recognizable apparition,
and that all boats or horses or weapons or their models buried in
ancient tombs were helps for a flagging memory or a too weak fancy
to imagine and so substantiate the old surroundings. A shepherd at
Doneraile told me some years ago of an aunt of his who showed herself
after death stark naked and bid her relatives to make clothes and to
give them to a beggar, the while remembering her.[4] Presently she
appeared again wearing the clothes and thanked them.
XII
Certainly in most writings before our time the body of an apparition
was held for a brief, artificial, dreamy, half-living thing. One
is always meeting such phrases as Sir Thomas Browne's "they steal
or contrive a body." A passage in the _Paradiso_ comes to mind
describing Dante in conversation with the blessed among their
spheres, although they are but in appearance there, being in truth
in the petals of the yellow rose; and another in the Odyssey where
Odysseus speaks not with "the mighty Heracles," but with his phantom,
for he himself "hath joy at the banquet among the deathless gods and
hath to wife Hebe of the fair ankles, child of Zeus, and Hero of the
golden sandals," while all about the phantom "there was a clamour of
the dead, as it were fowls flying everywhere in fear and he, like
black night with bow uncased, and shaft upon the string, fiercely
glancing around like one in the act to shoot."
W.B.Y.
_14th October, 1914._
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The Japanese _Noh_ play _Awoi no Uye_ has for its theme the
exorcism of a ghost which is itself obsessed by an evil spirit. This
evil spirit, drawn forth by the exorcism, is represented by a dancer
wearing a "terrible mask with golden eyes."
[2] Besides the well-known books of Atsikof, Myers, Lodge, Flammarion,
Flournoy, Maxwell, Albert De Rochas, Lombroso, Madame Bisson, Delanne,
etc., I have made considerable use of the researches of D'Ochorowicz
published during the last ten or twelve years in _Annales des Science
Psychiques_ and in the English _Annals of Psychical Science_, and of
those of Professor Hyslop published during the last four years in the
_Journal_ and _Transactions of the American Society for Psychical
Research_. I have myself been a somewhat active investigator.
[3] Henry More considered that "the animal spirits" were "the
immediate instruments of the soul in all vital and animal functions"
and quotes Harpocrates, who was contemporary with Plato, as saying,
"that the mind of man is ... not nourished from meats and drinks
from the belly but by a clear and luminous substance that redounds
by separation from the blood." Ochorowicz thought that certain small
oval lights were perhaps the root of personality itself.
[4] Herodotus has an equivalent tale. Periander, because the ghost
of his wife complained that it was "cold and naked," got the women
of Corinth together in their best clothes and had them stripped and
their clothes burned.
NOTES
NOTES
NOTE 1. A woman from the North would probably be a faery woman or
at any rate a "knowledgeable" woman, one who was "in the faeries"
and certainly not necessarily at all a woman from Ulster. The North
where the old Celtic other world was thought to lie is the quarter of
spells and faeries. A visionary student, who was at the Dublin Art
School when I was there, described to me a waking dream of the North
Pole. There were luxuriant vegetation and overflowing life though
still but ice to the physical eye. He added thereto his conviction
that wherever physical life was abundant, the spiritual life was
vague and thin, and of the converse truth.
NOTE 2. St. Patrick prayed, in _The Breastplate of St. Patrick_, to
be delivered from the spells of smiths and women.
Transcriber's Notes:
Obvious punctuation and spelling errors have been fixed throughout.
Inconsistent hyphenation is as in the original.