Spiritism, whether of folk-lore or of the seance room, the visions of
Swedenborg, and the speculation of the Platonists and Japanese plays, will
have it that we may see at certain roads and in certain houses old murders
acted over again, and in certain fields dead huntsmen riding with horse
and hound, or ancient armies fighting above bones or ashes. We carry to
_Anima Mundi_ our memory, and that memory is for a time our external
world; and all passionate moments recur again and again, for passion
desires its own recurrence more than any event, and whatever there is of
corresponding complacency or remorse is our beginning of judgment; nor do
we remember only the events of life, for thoughts bred of longing and of
fear, all those parasitic vegetables that have slipped through our
fingers, come again like a rope's end to smite us upon the face; and as
Cornelius Agrippa writes: "We may dream ourselves to be consumed in flame
and persecuted by daemons," and certain spirits have complained that they
would be hard put to it to arouse those who died, believing they could not
awake till a trumpet shrilled. A ghost in a Japanese play is set afire by
a fantastic scruple, and though a Buddhist priest explains that the fire
would go out of itself if the ghost but ceased to believe in it, it cannot
cease to believe. Cornelius Agrippa called such dreaming souls
hobgoblins, and when Hamlet refused the bare bodkin because of what dreams
may come, it was from no mere literary fancy. The soul can indeed, it
appears, change these objects built about us by the memory, as it may
change its shape; but the greater the change, the greater the effort and
the sooner the return to the habitual images. Doubtless in either case the
effort is often beyond its power. Years ago I was present when a woman
consulted Madame Blavatsky for a friend who saw her newly-dead husband
nightly as a decaying corpse and smelt the odour of the grave. When he was
dying, said Madame Blavatsky, he thought the grave the end, and now that
he is dead cannot throw off that imagination. A Brahmin once told an
actress friend of mine that he disliked acting, because if a man died
playing Hamlet, he would be Hamlet in eternity. Yet after a time the soul
partly frees itself and becomes "the shape changer" of the legends, and
can cast, like the mediaeval magician, what illusions it would. There is
an Irish countryman in one of Lady Gregory's books who had eaten with a
stranger on the road, and some while later vomited, to discover he had but
eaten chopped up grass. One thinks, too, of the spirits that show
themselves in the images of wild creatures.