Transcriber’s Note.
Italic text is indicated with _underscores_, bold text with =equals=.
Small/mixed capitals have been replaced with ALL CAPITALS.
THE ADVENTURES OF A MODERN OCCULTIST
BY OLIVER BLAND
[Illustration: decoration]
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1920
COPYRIGHT, 1920
BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, INC.
=The Quinn & Boden Company=
BOOK MANUFACTURERS
RAHWAY NEW JERSEY
INTRODUCTION
The individual who deals with the by-paths and mysteries of that great
Science which we term loosely Occultism, courts neither personal
notoriety nor publicity for the strange proceedings in which he plays a
part.
I have always been an energetic student of psychic matters, drawn
thereto by the possession of certain unusual gifts with which Nature
has endowed me. (Throughout the history of mankind there have always
been a certain number of individuals who have kept alive the sacred
fire and held the secret keys of many mysteries, and from time to time
an advance in general human knowledge or in an applied art or science
has revealed to the vulgar some small part of the outer mysteries that
have always been known to the initiates. These disclosures are hailed
as discoveries and set in their ordered place in the catalogue of human
knowledge.)
There are in this book certain disclosures of hidden facts which are
given to the world simply because the time is ripe when they should be
more fully known and their revelation is counselled by wisdom.
Human nature has always suffered from its lack of discrimination
between Prophets and False Prophets, and one of the greatest
difficulties that besets the Occultist is to know what is safe to
reveal. It is for this reason that secrets are hidden from the vulgar
and the charlatan, for these things must be hidden lest they are turned
to base ends.
The revival of deep public interest in psychic matters is only a matter
of time, and then those things which have been of absorbing interest to
the few will become of vital interest to the many.
The following chapters are simply transcripts of some of the
astoundingly interesting matters which have been reposing for years in
my diaries and note-books.
They have been set out in conventional narrative form with no great
changes except of names and places and the elimination of the rather
involved scientific terminology of the psychologist and the laboratory.
In these days when men are turning from the crude materialism of the
nineteenth century and the true scientist is the last person to deny
the realities which were deemed mythical a few short years ago, they
may serve to fill a certain need.
An interest in Occultism is common to most people, but a deep study
of its principles and its phenomena is attainable only by the few. It
is not advisable to seek transcendental experiences without a sound
working knowledge of the root-springs of these phenomena, and one of
the purposes of this volume is to render invaluable assistance to those
who possess psychic gifts in greater or lesser degree.
The Spiritualist, the Theosophist, and the student of Psychic Research
will all find in these pages much to interest them and much to ponder.
It throws light in some of the dark places which have seemed obscure
to those of the modern schools of thought who have not studied ancient
knowledge.
As it is impossible to expound an infinite mass of fact within the
limits of a slender volume, I have added footnotes here and there which
will direct any interested reader to further sources of information
than my condensed text affords, but the purpose of the book is directed
to the general reader rather than to the student or specialist who will
doubtless know more than these pages can tell him.
OLIVER BLAND.
CONTENTS
I. THE DEAD RAPPER 1
II. THE AUTOMATIST 17
III. ASTRAL LIGHT AND PSYCHO-LASTROMETER 36
IV. AN EXPERIMENT ON THE THEORY OF PROTECTIVE VIBRATION 56
V. SEX IN THE NEXT WORLD 76
VI. THE REALITY OF SORCERY 93
VII. INCENSE AND OCCULTISM 117
VIII. BEASTS AND ELEMENTALS 141
IX. POSSESSION 157
X. SOME NEW FACTS AND THEORIES 171
XI. ORIENTAL OCCULTISM 194
“_Read not to contradict and confute,
not to believe and take for granted
... but to weigh and consider._”
_Bacon’s Essays._
CHAPTER I
THE DEAD RAPPER
I had known Harry Carthew as a second-year man at Oxford. He never
completed his course or took a degree because family reasons, some
catastrophe of some kind or another--made it imperative for him
to earn a living at once. As an undergraduate he was an ardent
anti-Spiritualist.
He dropped out of sight of our little world and I had only heard of him
casually as having something to do with oil wells in Mexico and had not
come into contact with him for years. I was therefore rather surprised
to receive a letter from him which showed that he was in London and
knew that I was working on research subjects. His letter was couched in
rather non-committal terms, and though he was a man whom I had never
known well, he expressed an anxiety to meet me again and lay before me
certain psychical problems that were puzzling him.
I make it an invariable rule never to discuss psychic matters with
people who are ignorant or sceptical of them, unless the sceptics are
of a class sufficiently educated to be able to appreciate the absolute
facts of the phenomena associated with Spiritualism.
It is impossible to convince a non-scientific person by facts, as
he can never assure himself that the possibility of fraud has been
absolutely eliminated. A scientist or an engineer can assure himself
fairly easily of the genuineness or otherwise of phenomena provided
that he is given every latitude for research. But it is difficult to
convince either a clergyman or an ordinary medical man of the reality
of any psychic phenomena because he is not mentally trained in the
same inexorably logical processes of thought as are the engineers and
scientists.
Experience has taught me to mistrust the man who approaches with
indirect advances to the subject of Spiritualism. I prefer the
definite challenge of a critical journalist who demands facts and
judges on facts, for it is undoubtedly an axiom that the Seeker after
Truth, however sceptical he may be, has no hostile influence in a
properly constituted circle.
It has ever been a matter of regret to me that the mass of
Spiritualists hold the fallacious idea that a sceptical influence can
hinder a séance. For it is not the lack of belief or disbelief of the
one or few sceptics that weakens the influence. It is the mass belief
of the whole circle in the hostile influence of the sceptic that does
the harm.
After thinking matters over I decided that it might be wrong to
prejudice Carthew by his undergraduate views. After all, some years
had passed, and if every Oxford man held to the eccentric habits and
beliefs of his puppy days the world would be a sorry place. I wrote to
him asking him to dine with me at my club during the following week.
He had changed so much that when he entered the smoking room I did not
recognize him. Tropical sunlight had bronzed and wrinkled his skin, his
eyes had the clear hard steel-grey fadedness of the blue iris that
comes to men who have gazed long across deserts. Malaria had thinned
down his form and his hands were big-veined and tremulous with quinine.
Over the meal he told me a good deal about his life abroad, and I
realized something of the deadly loneliness of a white man’s life in
the dull oil fields of Mexico. Four other whites to speak to and for
the rest native peons, Indians and a sprinkling of Chinese coolies.
A bottle of good wine is a splendid lubricant for the human tongue, and
the Burgundy--a “Clos du Poi,” ’84--soon eased him of all awkwardness.
Over the coffee and cigars he came to his point.
“You still go on with Spiritualism, don’t you, Grey?”
“Yes,” I answered him, “but I thought that you did not believe in it.”
His answer almost shocked me with its violence.
“God! but I wish that I did not!” He was silent with emotion for a
moment, then resumed: “You know I never believed in it at the House. I
always thought you fellows were simply running it as a craze, but up
at Los Chicharras--that was the third big oil gusher that the Company
owned--there was a Cornish mining engineer, Bill Tregarthen.
“He was a queer fish, a silent man; squat-shaped, broad as he was long
and full of queer fancies. He had a little planchette board that he
used to consult about everything, and I have seen him sit there in the
patio of the office building with the little jigger dancing about over
reams of paper.
“I thought he was crazy, but he persuaded me to try the thing, _and I
got messages, too_. One day it spelt out a message from Ellen, and
Ellen has been dead for four years--she was my old nurse--Ellen----
“Even then I was only half convinced. One’s brain plays one strange
tricks down there in the Tierra Caliente, and I have seen an upturned
mountain standing on its head in the desert--mirage of course, and I
used to think the planchette mental mirage, subconscious stuff of some
kind--and I didn’t believe.
“Then Tregarthen used to laugh at me for a fool, and one night he
blazed up into a strange bit of rage and stood there in the moonlight
shaking his fist at me. ‘We Cornish folk have known the unwrit lore for
all time,’ said he. ‘Old odd people we are and we know old odd things.
I tell you. I will tell you that I am right when I am dead. You will
not listen to me now, but you shall listen then, indeed.’
“Lots of the stuff he raved at us that night, but I and another man at
last calmed him down and got him off to bed. I thought little enough of
it at the time, and a week later I went back from Los Chicharras to the
Offices at Tampico.
“I suppose it was a month later that I heard the first knock. It was
past midday, right in the heart of the siesta hour. Not a soul moving,
the very dogs silent in the streets, and the whole place a blinding
blaze of sunlight.
“I knew at once--that’s the odd thing about it. _I knew instantly in
my heart that Tregarthen was dead._
“That was six months ago, and since then I keep on hearing the raps.
I know that Tregarthen is keeping his pledge, but I cannot answer him
back; I cannot get into touch with him.
“Now tell me this--with all your knowledge of these things, can you
help me?”
I asked him what he had done, and he told me a long chronicle of visits
to mediums in New York, of an attempt to talk through a voodoo woman
in New Orleans, and of honest, patient sittings in a little suburban
circle in London.
Carthew was clearly desperate and absolutely in earnest. I knew without
his telling me what was at the back of his mind.
The problem was a peculiar one, for here was a live man to all intents
haunted by a malicious spirit now on another plane. Carthew’s character
was a strong one, though of a low and violent type. This mental
persecution had produced a prodigious feeling of hatred for the dead
man--a feeling of hatred that had not existed when he was alive, for
then the hatred was all on Tregarthen’s side.
There was also the possibility that the knock was pure hallucination
and not a genuine clairaudient phenomenon at all.
I asked Carthew if he could give me particulars of how Tregarthen died,
and I was not surprised to learn that his end had been a violent one.
A small oil gusher had broken out as an offshoot from the larger one.
In order to cut off the flow and waste of oil it is the practice to
force a dynamite cartridge into these small leads. This when exploded
breaks the natural channel of the oil and blocks the outlet.
Tregarthen, through an accident or carelessness--he was a deep
drinker--had destroyed himself when preparing the charge.
I asked Carthew if he was prepared to attend a séance or two and if
he would put himself completely in my hands. He assented readily,
reasserting his dominant desire to be able to talk back to Tregarthen.
I was holding private séances twice a week then, but my little circle
was, though powerful enough for research work, quite unsuitable for
dealing with an abnormal case of undesired communication. During
the week I got into touch with a private medium whose faculty of
clairaudience was coupled with an excellent nervous system, and I
reinforced the circle by the addition of Dr. Miller,[1] who, though
not a professed Spiritualist, is no sceptic concerning occult phenomena
and is admittedly one of the most successful practitioners of curative
psychology that we have to-day.
A few days later Carthew came to my chambers in the Temple and was
introduced to the members of the circle. I placed him on the left-hand
contact side of the medium and lowered the lights.
The medium engaged in this case was under double controls, one a spirit
called “Louis,” the other a rather elusive and intermittent control
that answered to the name of “Montecatini.”
The trance state was entered almost immediately and “Louis” took
control. I asked him to find Tregarthen and he showed considerable
reluctance, insisting that he was “not there.” The control “Louis”
was then dispossessed by “Montecatini,” who answered in an entirely
different voice and showed a distinct and separate personality.
“I can find him,” said Montecatini, and almost on the echo of the words
a distinct audible rap came from the ceiling of the room.
Carthew recognized it instantly and flinched as if it were a personal
blow at him.
“Have you got Tregarthen there?” I asked.
“No, they won’t let him come here,” was the answer.
“Why won’t they let him come?”
“Afraid of him.”
“Who is it rapping, then?”
“It’s a sent rap for somebody. I didn’t do it.”
“Who is the rap for?”
“For the brown man.” (Carthew was sunburnt.)
“He wants to speak to the spirit who sends it.”
“He can’t, it’s from a bad spirit.”
“But you said you could find Tregarthen.”
“I have found him, but I can’t bring him.”
“Why not?”
“He is too heavy.”
“What do you mean?”
“Too heavy--too low down--too much hatred.”
“Can’t Louis help you bring him?”
This was answered after a pause by the voice of Louis.
“We will try if you all help--but the brown man is hindering us.”
I then determined to break the circle and set Carthew on a chair
outside. “If you want to get through to Tregarthen,” I told him, “you
must subdue that hatred of yours. I am going to try for Tregarthen by
the direct voice method.”
I placed an ordinary gramophone trumpet on a light table within the
circle, then we rejoined hands and concentrated.
“Can you get Tregarthen now?” I asked.
“Yes, he is coming--but he doesn’t want to come.”
“I want him to speak to us through the trumpet,” I told them.
Almost immediately there were three knocks on the table close by the
trumpet. Then the voice came out of the trumpet, not out of the medium,
but it was the voice of Montecatini.
“He’s a bad spirit and he won’t talk,” said the control.
“Ask him if he knows who’s here?”
“Carthew!” blared the trumpet _in the voice of Tregarthen_.
I heard the crash of Carthew’s chair falling back as he rose, and then
his words:
“Tregarthen--at last!”
The trumpet chuckled at him, a hard sardonic chuckle, and it was a
dreadful thing to hear.
“Stop that, Tregarthen,” I said sharply. “Now listen to me. You must
stop sending these knocks. You have proved to Carthew that you were
right, and for the future there is no sense in it.”
Again the trumpet began to chuckle.
“I want Carthew--here,” said the voice of Tregarthen. “I want him to
keep me company where I am now.”
The medium began to writhe uneasily, and I suddenly realized that
something dangerous had happened. The two normal controls, “Louis”
and “Montecatini,” whom we had sent to fetch Tregarthen’s spirit, had
disappeared _and Tregarthen himself had taken over control_.
Something of a spirit of uneasiness and a general sense of danger began
to spread through the circle.
I called to Carthew to come into the circle again and to cross his
hands, grasping my wrist and Miller’s, so as not to break the chain
when entering.
“Now man!” I told him, “here is your chance. We have Tregarthen here,
and we will help you all we can. You must fight him with the whole of
your will-power. Defy him, raise him to anger, and at the crucial point
I will do something which will destroy his power over you for ever!
Now!”
Carthew’s grip burnt into my wrists as he took hold of himself, and
then all the bitter, dominant hatred that was in the man flamed out.
He stood in the circle towering above us on our chairs and he poured
into that trumpet a breadth of bilingual Spanish and English invective
that would have led to murder anywhere.
He paused for breath and from the trumpet came no chuckle, but a
spluttering, stammering, furious attempt to reply. I had no need to
prompt him to go on. He laced into his ghostly antagonist as if he had
the earthly body there in front of him. All the pent-up hatred of the
past months winged his words. The consciousness of his torment made his
quarrel just, and at the height of his peroration I concentrated the
whole of my psychic energies and made the four exorcism signs of the
martinist ritual, bidding Tregarthen begone, never to return and never
to be able to send a rap, and instantly broke the circle. I then roused
the medium from the trance with a couple of simple passes.
The reaction from the violence of the séance left us all spent and
shaken. The medium recovered, remembering nothing, but feeling
unusually exhausted. Later experiments with her showed that the
domination by the Tregarthen control was purely temporary and that
“Louis” and “Montecatini” had reasserted command.
My own opinion is that nothing but the intense “hate concentration” of
Carthew toward his ghostly antagonist could have enabled Tregarthen to
assume control at all.
It was a duel of wills between the living and the dead, fought over the
narrow no-man’s land of the earth and spirit planes, and I am not sure
that it was not a duel which ended fatally for the soul of Tregarthen.
Carthew at any rate was free of all trouble afterwards, but wild horses
could not drag him to a séance.
Miller was more convinced by this astonishing séance than by far more
material phenomena that he had seen. The following day, though, he sent
me an explanation of the whole affair argued out on his own lines. He
held that Carthew was the subject of an obsession and that the whole
of the phenomena were due to subconscious hypnotism of the medium
alternatively by me as a believer in Spiritualism and by Carthew.
The direct voice he ascribed to unconscious or subconscious
ventriloquism by the medium, and he pointed out that the words uttered
by Tregarthen were precisely what one would expect Carthew to say if
Carthew were in Tregarthen’s place. In other words, we were present at
an amazing duel between Carthew’s conscious mind and an obsession of
his subconscious mind that had built itself into a malignant identity.
It is interesting as a psychological theory, but in point of fact I
hold it to be entirely wrong. We argued it out a good deal together,
but experiments in psychic science can seldom be repeated, and, as
I say, Carthew refused to submit to any further attempt to evoke
Tregarthen.
As a man I sympathize with him, and he was really very grateful to
us--but as a scientist I would have liked to try again in order to
attempt to convince Miller.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] All names of people and places have been changed, but Dr. Miller’s
cures of “shell shock” during the war have shown that one’s estimate of
his powers was perfectly correct.
CHAPTER II
THE AUTOMATIST
A well-known psychic investigator once jokingly complained to me that
the telephone service of the spirit world seemed to be as unreliable
and badly damaged as that of Great Britain. Certainly, communication is
often freakish and intermittent, and the ethical value of the teachings
received at great length and painstakingly transcribed is often
completely valueless.
It must be remembered that we who are conducting research in psychic
matters have a poor range of instruments or tools to work with. There
must inevitably be the human medium, and long experience has taught me
that in the case of automatic writing one must be prepared to recognize
the intrusion of the medium’s own thought-processes into the record
received from the spirit world.
That these interpolated writings are conscious frauds by the mediums
we can unhesitatingly deny, but they appear to be either unconscious
records of the medium’s own thoughts or else the re-transmitted
subconscious thought-processes of the medium echoed back by the control.
I have hopes that in the future we shall be able to devise an appliance
for the recording of automatic writing in which the function of the
medium will be purely that of a bridge between the two planes and in
which the physical act of writing will be mechanically performed.[2]
The difficulty in automatic writing lies in the association of ideas,
and one word written by a planchette or spelt out by an ouija traverser
leads to the stimulation of a train of thought in the subconscious mind
even though the conscious brain may be in the trance state.
The difficulty is to piece together what can be termed the true spirit
messages out of the mass of pseudo-communications that surround them.
The analysis of the familiar examples of “cross-correspondence” are a
valuable guide in the complexities that are involved in the question.
A popular idea of the difficulty of communication can be gained by
imagining a man in a telephone exchange in London trying to talk to
Newcastle. He can go from instrument to instrument and speak through,
but all the instruments keep on going out of order, so that only
disconnected fragments of communication pass over one wire.
This would not matter if the person with whom he wishes to talk
were also in an exchange at Newcastle. He, too, could pass to other
instruments, but we must imagine the mortal recipient of spirit
messages as a subscriber with only one defective instrument.[3]
Difficult as the subject of automatic writing is, it is from these
writings that the Spiritualist conception of life in the next world is
gleaned.
Many a student has found eloquent, fluent, and convincing description
of the life beyond the veil flow from his pen when the spirit controls
were working well. Other writers have had accounts of terrors beyond
the veil: shocking and astonishing revelations of new concepts of
evil, exotic violences of the soul, and even direct incitements to the
commission of criminal acts in this plane.
Spiritualists are accustomed to divide these spirits into classes of
good and bad, and it has been assumed on all too slender grounds that
only the “good” spirits tell the truth about the other planes.
There are bad and lying spirits, just as there are wicked and
untruthful men, but latterly there has been a distinct tendency
to suppress all mention of the bad communicators and to attempt
the organization of Spiritualist and psychic investigation as an
unorthodox ascending sect organized as a distinct church or religious
body. This tendency would be fatal to the progress of occult
investigation.
The professional mediums, on the other hand, realize that to attain
financial success, organization, and the establishment of a mediumistic
hierarchy is essential. Bad spirits are bad business and it is bad form
to mention them outside certain circles.
Any investigator of experience will recognize at once that the spirits
of suicides are frequent communicators to private research circles,
private automatists and others, but it is an undeniable fact that in
public circles our leading exponents now never admit that any of the
spirits who communicate have been anything but mortals whose end was
normal, or more recently, those who were killed in battle.
There is more in Spiritualism than the mere assurance to inquiries
that life on the other side is very beautiful, that vocations similar
to those on earth are followed there and that there is a steady upward
progression.
These things dominate the minds of a certain section of the English
Spiritualists, and their tacit negation of the other darker side of
the revelations is entirely contrary to French, Russian, and certain
Latin-American schools of thought.
The history of all religions and analysis of their tenets reveal one
great outstanding fact. There has always been an element of fear and
terror connected with all conceptions of the after-life. There is
nothing in revealed Spiritualism to suggest that abstract justice is
more prevalent on the next plane than on this imperfect earth. The
very fact of the admitted existence of bad and evil spirits capable of
malice, is in itself fatal to the bed of rose-leaves theories.
In science it is the abnormal properties of a new gas, compound, or
element that lead scientists to study it, so in the realm of psychic
science it is only through close study of the abnormal that we can
attain to any clear idea of the normal.
It has been cast at me as a reproach that I have pursued vain and
extraordinary paths of research, not disdaining to delve into dark
secrets of occultist ritual whose proceedings would be unorthodox
and blasphemous if laid bare to the orthodox and anæmic Spiritualist
circles of Balham.
Yet Shamonnism is Spiritualism, and the old schools of sorcery and
art magic held psychic secrets that are still reproducible but yet
inexplicable in these twentieth-century days.
One of the most wonderful automatists I ever met was the late Jules
Carrier. A tall, spare figure, black-bearded, aquiline-nosed, vividly
pale in complexion, he had dark hazel eyes with brown mottled rings
about the pupil that suggested in a vague way something feline or
leopard-like.
I met him quite by chance in a bookshop in the Rue de Valenciennes
whose proprietor had written to me about some curious early
nineteenth-century manuscripts that had come into his possession.
These books consisted of some rather commonplace manuscripts of certain
philosophical transactions dealing with occult phenomena. Paris in the
early thirties of the last century was seamed with secret organizations
devoted to scientific and political studies. The great impulse of
the Revolution had produced in turn Napoleon and then the Bourbon
reaction. The strong arm of the clerical party drove the philosophers
underground, and only from time to time can one find these peculiar
archives of occultist activity in odd booksellers’ shops and the
libraries of students.
The proprietor of the shop knew my interest in these matters and had
before been at pains to secure me certain personal souvenirs from his
library of Eliphas Levi,[4] so whenever an odd “Grimoire,” or early
matter on occultism fell to his lot he would put it by against my next
visit.
He it was who introduced Carrier to me as a fellow-student, but he made
it abundantly clear that Carrier was too poor to be a book buyer and
that he himself looked on him as a peculiar acquaintance rather than as
a customer.
We fell into conversation, and I was delighted to find that Carrier had
a wide and erudite knowledge of early books on magical practice.
This he told me he had gained principally by spare-time study at the
Librairie de Paris, but also from the loan of books from friends. He
had, it appeared, catalogued several private collections of works on
psychic and supernormal subjects.
I took him off to lunch with me at the Café Bastien, and he explained
that he was completing a catalogue or bibliography of books on magic
published previously to 1850. “There are,” said he, “a number of
missing works referred to by contemporary authors. Of these there is
little knowledge, but little by little I am rewriting them.”
“Automatic writing or original deductive work?” I asked him.
“Automatic--_pur et simple_,” he replied. “My control is called
Fernand de Féques and was a monk of the Abbey of Saint-Barnabe near
Blagues. Thanks to his help, I have recovered amazing things that were
lost.”
He sank his voice as he told me and his leopard eyes seemed to glow
golden as the wine in his glass. “I know the secrets of the lost inner
ritual of the Illuminati,” he told me. “I have recovered Pietro
Zarantino’s invocation, and could I only master ancient Greek I could
lay the secrets of the Bacchæ bare. But their confused script paralyses
my hand and I must keep to French and Latin.”
I knew too much of the vast breadth and heritage of knowledge that the
Hermetic philosophers inherited from the Gnostics to doubt his words.
Revealed knowledge may sometimes appear to be withdrawn for a while,
but it will inevitably be re-disclosed.
Having an appointment to keep, I made a note of his address and
promised to resume our acquaintanceship on another day.
A week later I had had leisure to go through my manuscripts. They were
very interesting, but verbose, and were full of curiously involved
obliquities of meaning and contained some peculiar Hebrew charms of
Kabbalistic significance. By either bad luck or the design of some
earlier owner, two pages of the invocatory ritual for the raising of
the spirits of the dead were missing.
It occurred to me that Carrier might be able to fill the gap by means
of automatic writing, so I wrote to him suggesting the attempt
and asking him to my rooms. He replied by return, expressing his
willingness to help, and adding that his control had assented, but
desired me to visit him in his own rooms in order that he might not be
disturbed by novel surroundings.
The next night I went to Carrier’s. He lived in one of those dull
meandering streets that rise from the mass of the city toward
Montparnasse. The house was an old tumble down warren, dirty and
ill-kept, the various floors let out in rooms or suites of apartments
to tenants who were none too particular in their choice of lodging. By
the light of a match I examined the grimy cards pinned in the hallway,
and at last located Carrier’s name as owner of the back room on the
third floor.
He opened to my knock and I found myself in a room which made no
pretension to disguise the poverty of its tenant. Most of his furniture
was books. A globeless gas jet burnt feebly over a side table on which
were some dishes and there was an old and uncleanly box bed in the
corner. In the centre of the room was a heavy old fashioned circular
pedestal table and on this he had laid out glasses, a bottle of wine,
and paper.
He showed me his books, and for a while we discussed Guldenstubbé.[5]
I looked at some of his automatic writings that gave interpretations
of some aspects of Etteilla and was in particular interested in a new
rendering of his Book of Thoth.[6]
In the meantime Carrier was glancing through the imperfect MS. that I
had brought with me.
“This is rather different from most of the books of the period,” said
he. “It is more like a note-book of lectures or a précis of an existing
magical ritual as performed by a small child. What do you make of it?”
“That is just how it struck me,” I told him. “It is about the period
of the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century.
The writer might have been one of the adepts trained by Francis Barret,
by Cagliostro, or by Dom Gerle, but it might even be as late as Madame
Lenormand.”
“Hardly 1815, I think,” said Carrier, “but no matter. The interesting
thing is that this writer seems to have shorn his ritual of lots of the
inessential matters. For instance, in this matter of the invocation
of simple elements he has resolutely reduced his formula to mere
essentials. Two kinds of the wearisome Hebrew prayers are gone and the
actual mechanical adjuncts to the invocation are simplified.
“His consecrations too are limited simply to the repetition of words of
power. This man had in his way reduced his art magic to what one may
term working formulæ.”
“Sometime I will experiment with them,” I told him, “but for the
present let us see if we can recover the ritual on the missing pages.”
Carrier soon passed under control. His mouth seemed to fall slack and
open in rather ghastly fashion and the eyeballs turned up under the
lids so that though he wrote with half-opened eyes; only the blue-tinted
white of the eyeballs could be seen under his heavy lids. His hand and
forearm began to twitch spasmodically, but the pencil stayed almost
immobile on the paper forming a little knot of scratches, but no
letters. Finally I saw that he had completely entered the trance state
and was directly under control.
“Who is the author of these manuscripts?” I asked.
Without a pause the pencil wrote rapidly in a sharp angular script:
“Marcel Theot, Adept and Minor Master of the Arcana.”
“Under whom did you study?”
“Under the divine Giuseppe Balsamo Count Cagliostro, the Grand Copt of
the Universe, and later under Doctor Jules Lemercier pupil of Lavater
and Cagliostro.”
“Will you reveal to us the missing pages of your manuscript?” The
answer was unexpected.
“To you two,” the pencil wrote, “I can reveal these secrets, for you
too are initiate and know what progress is permitted to the children
of men. This I say unto you. In the third decade of this century shall
there be a revival of art magic, but much that has been sealed to the
philosophers shall be known to the healers of men.”[7]
The control revealed a complete and up-to-date knowledge of movements
in the world of psychic research and the refrain of the communications
was ever the same. “These things were known before, but mankind had not
the sense to apply the doctrines and practice.”
At length the control took up the actual communication of the missing
portion of the ritual and Carrier’s automatic script changed entirely
from his own angular, large-lettered, trim, and straggly lettering to
the staid precise well-formed handwriting of the original manuscript.
All went well until it came to the names of God, which had to be
written in Hebrew characters in the corners of the triangle within the
pentagon of the president of the air. Carrier’s hand struggled with
the attempt to produce the letters, but the characters would not form.
There was a moment of indecision, and then I saw hovering over the
table a small lambent sphere of bluish light.
The room, remember, was lighted by a gas jet and we were not in
darkness, but clear and distinct the flickering globe of blue light
formed over the table, then descended to wrap round Carrier’s hand and
pencil.
With it there seemed to come an impression of intense cold, then there
formed within the light a plainly visible hand bearing a curiously
wrought talismanic ring. This hand took the pencil and wrote the names
in Hebrew characters VEVAHLIAH, ANIEL, and MUMIAH, then withdrew again.
While the rest of the ritual was being written the globe of light
into which the hand had redissolved hovered over the table, but at
the end of the script when Carrier’s hand fell idle it returned and
materializing again wrote in bold script in ordinary Latin characters:
“The dead ye will summon, but Nahemah will answer, for I too am a
creature of the fire and it is only on the underplanes that I command.”
Once again the globe of fire redissolved the hand, then the whole
ascending toward the ceiling appeared to expand, dissipate and vanish
away. Carrier came round and I boiled him up a glass of hot water,
which, with a liberal dash of wine, soon restored him to himself.
Together we went over the script while I told him of the curious
phenomenon that I had witnessed.
“That may account for the way my hand is aching,” he said. “I thought
it was more than usual,” and spreading his hand out in front of him we
both noticed for the first time that both the first joint of the thumb
and the nail and first joint of the forefinger were actually swollen
and bruised.
“This Marcel Theot seems to be a terrible fellow,” said he ruefully.
“It is the last part of the message that he has attached to the ritual
that puzzles me,” I said. “Assuming that he is actually a bad spirit,
he yet seems to be able to repeat the construction of a protective
circle of exorcism in which the names of God are frequently repeated
and which is in itself supposed to be demon-proof and then warns us
that Nahemah will answer. Nahemah is the spirit queen who presides over
the female devils of obsession--the Succubi. Thus Carrier, my friend, I
do not quite see what to expect.”
“The Succubi,” said Carrier, “are known to be able to assume the forms
of the most desirable of women. This Marcel Theot studied thaumaturgy
and magic under Cagliostro and his followers, and you know to what
amazing practices the Grand Copt set his female devotees. It is
probable that the invocation in its peculiarly condensed style opens
the doors to dangers that are not present when the full ritual is
applied. You notice that he styles himself minor master.”
I agreed, and later analysis of the ritual as compared to others showed
that in the process of condensation many of the safeguarding ceremonies
and propitiatory invocations had been discarded.
My own opinion is that Marcel Theot was one of that numerous class of
people who undertook the study of magic only in order to obtain the
supernatural qualification of carnal desires. In any case I have deemed
his ritual unsafe for experiment and have taken steps so that it can
never fall into unsuitable hands.
The actual materialism of a spirit hand to aid automatic writing is
such an unusual occurrence that to my mind it completely disposes
of any theory of other than spirit knowledge being applied in this
particular case.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] I carried out a long series of experiments with the idea of
developing an automatic recorder operating on the lines of the familiar
tape machine, and experimented at length both in London and in Paris,
where my work was done in connection with the student Du Plessis,
who was one of the heroes who gave his life at Verdun. Latterly we
abandoned the idea of an actual print-registering machine for a device
designed to register impulses on a wax cylinder, something on the lines
of a phonograph. Some results were obtained, but the machine was not
successful or reliable.
[3] It is a saddening and depressing thought to think of a recently
passed over spirit racing from medium to medium in an attempt to get
through bits of messages to an individual on this plane. The spirit of
F. W. H. Myers had to communicate through mediums as distant as Mrs.
Holland in India and Mrs. Verrall at Cambridge. Later communications
were received in complex fashion from other sources and the whole had
to be collected by the Research Officer of the S.P.R. before they made
any sense at all. _Proceedings S.P.R._, Vols. XX to XXV inclusive.
[4] The library and papers of Alphonse Louis Constant are, I believe,
still in existence but inaccessible.
[5] Baron de Guldenstubbé. _La Réalité des Esprits et le Phénomène
Merveilleux de leur Ecriture Directe._ 1857.
[6] _Les Sept Nuances de l’Œuvre Philosophique Hermétique._ Leçons
Théoriques et Pratique du Livre de Thot. 1786.
[7] This would seem to point to the present research in psychology and
psychotherapeutics and its applications to cases of “shell shock” and
kindred mental disturbances.
CHAPTER III
ASTRAL LIGHT AND THE PSYCHO-LASTROMETER
One of the commonest phenomena associated with Spiritualism is the
production of light. Many mediums possess this power of attracting or
emitting light and even small circles where there is in truth little
enough Light in the true psychic sense, yet produce this, the most
elementary of the phenomena.
It is possibly because it is so easy to induce light phenomena of
various kinds that the production of any form of spirit luminosity
has been, so to speak, taken at face value as a criterion of
_goodness_.
In actual point of fact at least two-thirds of the light manifestations
seen at Séances may be classed as dubious and a portion of them are
more than dubious, they are malevolent manifestations.
To this blind belief in the “goodness” of spirit light in itself we
may trace certain disastrous mental calamities that have overtaken
too trustful searchers. The myth springs possibly from an acceptance
of early Bible teachings and a desire to identify these manifestations
with the Pentecostal tongues of fire and similar analogies. But among
the mass of humble practitioners of Spiritualism who follow the path of
the Light are many that are mistaking astral evils for psychic good.
To the average Spiritualist the success of a small circle in the
production of spirit lights is a heartening message from the spirit
world. It is a testimony that life-after-death endures, and as such
the phenomena are welcomed as spirit visitors, sometimes identified
as actual spirit forms, and no doubt is raised in the minds of
those present concerning the innate and essential “goodness” of the
visitation.
In order to avoid confusion I shall use the term astral light to
describe the usual spirit light.
The light phenomena are customarily associated with the dark or
semi-dark séance because in the full light of day or under normal
conditions of artificial light it is almost impossible to see
the astral light at all, unless one is clairvoyant or unless the
concentration of spirit force is so marked that there is no possibility
of mistaking it.
The normal appearance of astral light is that of indefinite globular or
pear-shaped masses of faint phosphorescence. These appear near sitters
or on objects in the room and frequently move about, wax and wane, or
gather into clouds before a materialism or in support of a particular
effort.[8]
In other cases they take the form of direct rays and in certain
individuals have been known to occur as flashes like dull electric
discharges. Another not uncommon form is the projection from the body
of a distinctly defined aura or radiation of light which is faintly
luminous like the gases in a Geissler tube subjected to oscillant
discharges.
We must go far back into history and indeed beyond the bounds of
history before we can come to a time when this manifestation of light
was not one part of the common stock in trade of the thaumaturge or
wonder worker.
The manipulation and control of astral light phenomena were part of the
religious mysteries of the magicians of Chaldea who transmitted the
secret knowledge to the seers of Egypt. We find it in the myth of the
luminous bull in the Greek mysteries and again as an attribute of the
great healer Apollonius of Tyana. This mysterious radiance plays equal
parts in the records of the lives of the saints and in the terrible
archives of the trials for sorcery.
Confusion exists because to the untrained eye of mankind all forms of
astral light are identical.
The greater proportion of the astral light seen by circles is that
generated and given off by the human mental energy of the circle
itself. The spirit-forms are all too often thought-forms built up out
of the liberated psychoplasm or thought-matter given off by sitters.
The physical nature of this psychoplasm has so far defied all attempts
at scientific research, but it appears to be something more substantial
than the mere emission of vibrations that it is commonly held to
be. It appears to be an all-penetrating imponderable emanation which
dissipates rapidly, but which under certain conditions is capable of
being energized by the intelligence of the living or by discarnate
intelligence. Under these conditions it becomes luminous and under
certain further conditions can be used as the vehicle for the
transmission of force.
It can best be realized as being to the mind what ectoplasm[9] is to
the body of the medium, but the precise limitations of both the astral
body-matter ectoplasm, and astral mind-matter psychoplasm are not yet
ascertained.
It is a conceivable hypothesis that both are functions of the vast
unknown mechanism of the subconscious self, but where the capacity for
the projection of ectoplasm is rare, the emission of psychoplasm is the
basis of most Spiritualist phenomena.
It is to this radiation of psychoplasm that we must look for the
explanation of such a simple thing--and at the same time such a
complex thing--as psychic atmosphere. Do we not all know the peculiar
atmosphere which surrounds individuals and places? The phenomena
associated with apparitions have been ascribed to the penetration of
structure by violently liberated psychoplasm set free in moments of
passion and bloody violence. There too is the clue to its physical
source, for in some obscure way blood and the emanations from blood
play a vital and important part in psychic matters.
Under normal circumstances psychoplasm is dissipated and the liberated
energy that animated it goes with it to return in the normal way of the
cycle of life. Under other circumstances the psychoplasm retreats back
into the mind whence it came, just as the materialized ectoplasm is
reabsorbed into the body of the medium.
The dangers latent in assuming all astral light phenomena to be “good”
can be realized when it is considered what may occur to the projected
psychoplasm which is emotionally liberated beyond the confines of the
body and beyond its living human control.
A party of some half-dozen form a circle in some provincial city.
They may know one another well or they may be, comparatively speaking,
strangers. However well they may know the public lives of the members
of the circle, can they fathom the secret soul of each sitter? Can they
say whose mind is a garden of purity or who may have some tendency to
some unknown enormity?
Yet it is precisely this weakness that makes a soul-appalling danger of
the hideous mental promiscuity that is one of the essential things of
which all the more ingenuous and simple believers and a few clever evil
hypocrites among Spiritualists make a cult.
They may unknowingly include among themselves an individual, man or
woman, who has somewhere a secret kink--a mental leaning--it need not
be an actually accomplished physical fact--but simply an inclination to
the obscene, the evil, or the cruel.
The circle launches its prayer, concentrates on the attraction of the
discarnate spirits of those who have passed over--and what comes, who
comes?
There is no gifted Spiritualist or student of matters psychic who has
not had either personal or absolutely credible second-hand experience
of the existence of bad or lying spirits. It is true that insistence
upon their existence has latterly become unfashionable in Spiritualist
circles--because it does harm to the professional medium, but not even
the most insistent of suppressive propaganda can live down the writings
and testimonies of the past and the ever-recurrent undeniable phenomena
of the present.
It is not too much to say that in nine cases out of ten where a crude
and humble belief in Spiritualism is put in practice by a circle of
operators whose standard of education and intellectual attainment
is low, the etherealization of the psychoplasm of the believers is
mistaken for the materialization of the spirit.[10]
So much for the visible luminous appearances of astral light. Now let
us consider the range of probabilities that may affect these. It must
be borne in mind that it is the process of their reabsorption into the
sitters after being charged with outside influences that introduces
the element of danger.
Psychologists know that certain fixed laws govern mental processes.
There is the Law of Similarity, which evokes the association of
ideas; there is the Law of Integration, which splits memories and
picture memories into integral fragments; and there is the Law of
Redintegration, which enables the subconscious mind to reassemble the
part memories into one completed picture of a past scene or event.
The astral light, once beyond the control of the sitter, is at the
command of (1) stronger human wills in the circle, (2) the lower or
baser forms of discarnate intelligence, (3) spirits of ex-mortals, (4)
higher spirits.
It is the dominance of the human will that is the first positive
danger. Part of the accepted dogma of Spiritualism is that hostile
or unbelieving influences are antagonistic to the spirits. This is
by no means accurate, but can be classed for practical purposes as a
half-truth. The state of mental concentration and muscular relaxation
that is necessary to the séance bears a close and analogous resemblance
to the state of consent that the hypnotist demands of his subject.
The first requisite of the Spiritualist is the question put to him or
her by others of the cult.
“Do you believe in Spiritualism?”
The honest sceptic, the unreasoning man-in-the-street observer is
soon converted by evidence, then faith in the inexplicable wonders of
Spiritualism is born.
In other words the mind of the neophyte accepts the whole loose
doctrine of Spiritualism and is prepared to believe that all phenomena
are due to spirit influence, and does not attempt to further analyse
the accepted spirit influence.
The mental or emotional state produced by the participation of a devout
believer in a séance, leaves the mind receptive of ideas, and the ideas
received back into the mind are those impressed upon the psychoplasm
that is liberated and is visible as astral light and is reabsorbed into
its sources after it has been beyond the control of its originator’s
consciousness.
In a circle of ten or fewer people where the sexes are mixed, it is
impossible to say what suppressed desires may be latent in the minds
of those who compose it. Even in the case of circles confined to one
sex alone there is the possibility of sex perversion being a secretly
dominant mental force in the mind of someone there.
It is an inexorable law that the conscious or subconscious will of the
most powerful and determined member of the circle dominates the minds
of the others through its influence on the psychoplasm or astral light.
Even without the knowledge of the dominant influence his or her will or
thought-force emission will gain mastery over those of the others, and
if there is any violent sex disturbance at the bottom of the dominant
will, this will be communicated to the others or to the selected other
furthering the desire.
The next stage occurs where passion or desire on the part of one member
of the circle for another is absent. Despite repeated statements that
the desire of the members of the circle is to meet pure spirits, there
may be members whose secret wishes are not those of the pathway of
light. Love for those who have passed over may be still carnal love
in the hearts of those who remain. Abélard may have passed beyond
passion into the realm of death, but Héloïse may refuse his plea of
impossibility and still pursue in the spirit that which escaped her in
the flesh.
Carnality is not confined to this plane nor does it cease upon the
next, but the endeavour of mortals to get in touch with the spirit
world while there is latent in them either known or suppressed, and
unrecognized desire is fatal.
Every sexual desire the mind has experienced is indexed or pigeon-holed
in the recesses of the subliminal mind. People whose conscious mind
is free of any vestige of such desire may go to a séance and under
the influence of the emotional forces of a séance liberate all the
repressed energy of their past ungratified sexual desires--without
knowing it.
These forces attract low-grade spirits some of whom have never been
human and the lowest and most vicious of spirits whose human lives have
been a cycle of debauchery. Like attracts like, is one of the laws of
Nature. The Law of Similarity is one of the rules of psychology.
The gateways of the soul are thrown open not to whoever may enter in,
but with an explicit mental invitation to those spirits that derive
gratification from the lusts and desires of mortals.
The whole body of the psychoplasm of a circle is at the mercy of the
mind of the individual to whose call the spirits come.
The practical results of these open-house invitations to the spirits
are devastating. The ideas of gratification become rooted not in the
conscious mind but in the subconscious mind, where they work slowly but
inevitably to the subversion of conscious “good.”
The first step toward possession and obsession are often the result of
séances, where Truth has been sought with the tongue and Evil within
the heart of one present. It is not the guilty alone who suffer, but
the weak and innocent who sit beside them.
There are no bounds to the malignancy of the impure spirits. They are
sly and notable liars--they can assume the form of mortals who have
passed over and they can assume personality and knowledge that was
known to the dead. By degrees they inculcate evil, predisposing the
victim to accept and yield to evil in particular forms. Frequently they
proceed by slow stages, advising and inspiring savage asceticism, but
seizing each stage of natural reaction from this unnatural régime to
further subvert their victim in wantonness.
The obvious need is for some method of distinguishing between good and
bad projections of astral light.
To the human eye alone there is no means of distinguishing between the
etherealizations of the psychoplasm of the believer and the identical
luminous phenomena which occur when there is a materialization of
the actual spirit. It is there that psychic science can come to our
assistance.
The fluorescent bodies zinc sulphide, barium platino-cyanide, and
the preparation known as Sidot’s hexagonal blonde, are all intensely
susceptible to radioactivity. The rays of radioactive bodies have the
peculiar property of being able to penetrate the ether, and the mass
of spirit teaching tells us that this property is also common to the
disembodied spirits of those who have passed to other planes.
The relative purity or potency of astral lights may be readily
ascertained by their effect upon a simple instrument that I have named
the Psycho-Lastrometer.
This instrument is both cheap and easy to make in the simple form
in which I first used it. The later applications which make it a
registering instrument in addition to being a mere indicator are
necessarily costly, but these are only necessary to the expert
investigator and are of no value to the mere seeker after proof or
those who seek communion with the spirits of the dead for the purposes
of solace, quasi-religious conviction, or vulgar curiosity.
To make a crude psycho-lastrometer all that is necessary is a
wide-mouthed glass jar whose walls should not be more than two
millimetres thick. The height of the jar should be some eight inches,
the width in proportion three and a quarter inches.
I have found that an ordinary lipped beaker of Bohemian glass such
as is readily obtainable from any maker of laboratory apparatus is
admirably suited to the purpose.
The neck of this jar must be fitted with a large cork or wooden bung
the whole of which is covered with tinfoil. The centre of this cork
should be pierced by a piece of brass wire five inches long, bent at
one end to form a hook. This end is inside the jar and from the hook
hangs the plate of the lastrometer. To the projecting end of the brass
wire outside the jar should be soldered a circular collecting disc of
brightly polished brass or tinplate three inches in diameter. This
should stand up vertically to the axis of the wire, being thus on edge
instead of forming a flat table.
The plate of the lastrometer consists of a rectangle of thin aluminum
two and half inches wide by four inches deep. Half an inch from the
top edge three slits should be cut in the metal so that a portion of a
magnetized knitting needle three inches long may be threaded through
the breadth of the plate, projecting half an inch on each side.
This needle forms a cross bar at the top of the plate and should be
accurately adjusted so that the broad surface of the plate is always in
the same plane as the axis of the needle.
To the projecting ends of the needle is secured a loop of copper wire
four inches long whose other end is made fast to the other end of the
needle and whose centre passes over the hooked end of the wire through
the cork. The plate thus swings like a miniature signboard suspended
from the hook.
The surface of one side of the plate is now painted with several
successive layers of a saturated solution of gum arabic in one ounce of
water to which has been added one and a half drachms of luminous zinc
sulphide or Sidot’s preparation (preferably the latter) and one liquid
drachm of a ten per cent. solution of barium platino-cyanide. The other
side of the plate should be painted with “optical black” or any other
suitable dead black varnish.
Between the edge of the bung and the central wire should be inserted
at convenient intervals three or four sections of glass tubing whose
internal bore exceeds half an inch. These serve to admit external
influences to the interior of the lastrometer.
When complete it will be found that the plate of the lastrometer is
highly fluorescent and can be energized into greater activity by
exposure to sun or artificial light. It is desirable that the plate
should be kept in a state of relatively low radiancy, as otherwise
spirit agency cannot raise its luminous powers to a higher degree.
At a séance the instrument should be placed within the circle and the
jar rotated till the magnetized needle can oscillate freely in its
natural position pointing toward the North and South Poles.
Concentrations of genuine spirit force will raise the luminosity of
the plate to double and treble its normal output of light. When the
force is concentrated in the lastrometer, questions can be answered by
the spirits by signaling in Morse or simple code by rotating the plate
through an angle of 90° against the surface force of the magnet.[11]
It may be urged that this apparatus is not fraud-proof and that it
would respond to certain agencies such as the concealment of an
electromagnet in the room. To this it may be answered that an ordinary
pocket compass placed on the table by the lastrometer would also
respond to these forces and the fraud would be transparent to any
observer.
So far as I can tell, no human mental effort conscious or subconscious
can affect this simple instrument. It is necessary to guard against
illusion by imagining that the lastrometer is gaining radiance, and
to this end it is advisable to prepare a stand and test-piece made of
aluminum and coated with precisely the same solution as is applied to
the plate. These should always be kept together and allowed to become
equally radiant. If this is placed on the table near the lastrometer,
any variations in the latter can be rapidly verified by comparison with
the non-insulated and non-oriented test-piece.
Antipathy on the part of the presiding medium to the use of the
psycho-lastrometer is invariably a bad sign. Spirit messages objecting
to it are the most valid reasons for its retention, and such
communications should be viewed with the deepest suspicion. The cost of
the apparatus is a few shillings, it can be made by anybody in an hour
or so of spare time, and in actual point of fact there is nothing about
it that is offensive to the spirits of “good” or to the pure.
To those who are learned in symbolism I may suggest that the receiving
disc at the top of the wire need not be in the form of a disc, but can
be cut or pierced with ornament such as sacred symbols or with any
decorative design.
It is desirable, however, that the light surface be retained and that
the available metallic surface of the disc should not be diminished
more than is necessary.
FOOTNOTES:
[8] _Notes of an Enquiry into the Phenomena Called Spiritual._ William
Crookes, F.R.S., p. 91; Class VIII: Luminous Appearances.
[9] For details concerning ectoplasm see _Ghosts in Solid Form_,
Gambier Bolton, etc.
[10] Something of this view may be found in the chapter on “Pseudo
Spirit Phenomena” in _Borderland of Psychical Research_, H. J. Hyslop.
A book deserving of attention by all interested in Spiritualism.
[11] The psycho-lastrometer was further perfected. The element selenium
is inordinately sensitive to all forms of light rays and according
to the light thrown upon it permits more or less electric current to
pass. I arranged the apparatus so that the light thrown out by the
psycho-lastrometer impinged upon a selenium cell whose resistance
varied from 50,000 ohms to 100,000 ohms, which was in its turn
connected to a cell and to a Deprex d’Arsonval mirror galvanometer.
This enables accurate readings of the actual waxings and wanings of
the light value of the lastrometer plate to be taken, and entirely
eliminates any possibility of visual illusion seeming to make the plate
more luminous than before. A series of plotted curves based on time
abscissæ and light co-ordinates will give an accurate scientific record
of any differences in the radiant value of the plate that occur during
the séance.
CHAPTER IV
AN EXPERIMENT ON THE THEORY OF PROTECTIVE VIBRATION
Ghost phenomena do not come into the province of practising
Spiritualism. The average Spiritualist is content to follow the
Catholic doctrine of offering up a few devout prayers for the rest of
the uneasy spirit should circumstances throw him into contact with it.
Apparitions as a whole affect the Spiritualist with as much unreasoning
terror as falls to the lot of the non-Spiritualist mortal.
The chance-met apparition of the dead is after all a fairly common
phenomenon. The theory of the veridic apparition of the recently dead
is explainable by various hypotheses, but there is little reason to
suppose that the human spirit still animates the astral body that
appears.
The luminous quality or phosphorescence of astral light that enwraps
the astral body of the apparition is not necessarily a proof of the
survival of the identity of the soul whose astral body appears. The
phosphorescent radiance associated with certain kinds of fish survives
the death of the organism, and luminous bodies or glands extracted
from these creatures may be preserved for months after death and still
retain elements of luminosity.
The thinking Spiritualist does not disregard the lessons and analogies
of science. The great names in the history of Spiritualism have been
those of scientists like Lodge and Crookes,[12] and it has ever been
their desire to translate the apparent miracles of the supernatural
into no less miraculous but more deeply understood parallels with the
natural.
The great slogan of Spiritualism is that it is a perfectly natural
understandable thing; thus is it the duty of every Spiritualist to
reduce those things which non-Spiritualistic thought deems supernatural
to the realms of the understood, the explained and the known,--in a
word, to the state of the natural.
It is no good to tell a materialistic world that owing to the
intervention of spirit force mechanical results contrary to all natural
laws were obtained. The sceptic, and above all the logical sceptic--who
is the easiest of all to convert, can you but once bring him to see the
fallacies that underlie his logic--demands proof, proof not in terms of
second-hand evidence, but proof in terms of cold matter-of-fact science.
The missionary effort of Spiritualism must be made a crusade not into
the minds of the unintelligent but straight into the citadels of reason
of the men of science. It is necessary first of all to demonstrate the
spirit forces and then to _prove_ that they are forces of the
spirit and not natural, so far as the meaning of the term “natural” may
be held to imply limitation to the physical laws governing this mortal
earth.
The spirit realm is the realm of the ether, the boundless range of
unknown interstellar space. Blindly, gropingly, the men of science
are putting out feelers--theories--pragmatical assumptions that serve
them as laws. Little by little it is being recognized that the physics
of the ether is the underlying superscientific structure of modern
Spiritualism. Little by little their discoveries fall into harmony with
our claims, and we must look upon science as the handmaiden rather than
the antagonist of our truth.
The theories of apparition that are held vary according to the
classification of the apparition. There are numerous instances of
apparitions of the living[13] and there is an infinite mass of data
concerning veridical apparitions of the dead. A statistical analysis
of 17,000 cases collected by the Society for Psychical Research resulted
in the finding by the Committee that “Between deaths and apparitions
of the dying person a connexion exists which is not due to chance
alone.”[14]
A clear distinction must, however, be drawn between apparitions which
may appear to relatives, friends, and acquaintances, and then disappear
for ever, and those definite and persistently recurring apparitions
that go by the name of haunts.
The terminology of matters psychic is loose and inexact, but it is well
to have a clear mental distinction between the occasional “apparition”
and the periodic or repeating “ghost.”
For purposes of scientific investigation the casual apparition
is almost valueless, but the established ghost is the nearest
approximation that we can get to a serious test standard for
experimental purposes.
There are in England at least half a dozen ghosts whose periodical
manifestations are regular enough to serve as test instances. The
genuine ghost is so rare that from the point of view of psychical
research it is vitally important that the haunt should not be harried
by every party of sensation-avid amateurs who think they would “like to
see a ghost.” The amateur exorcists, the psychically gifted ladies, and
all the ragtag and bobtail of well-meaning idiots that disturb a haunt
once it becomes known, can only be compared to a set of egg-stealing,
bird-scaring boys who invade a woodland sanctuary and destroy the
fruition of the work of a painstaking observer of nature who has been
recording the life of the rare birds.
In parenthesis it may be remarked that if the ghost is a full-blooded
manifestation it will take more than the well-meaning effort of some
anæmic amateur psychic to lay it. The very last person who should go
near a violent ghost is anyone whose capacity for mediumship is in
any way developed. Mediums should only be present when adequate and
experienced mortal controls are there also.
In the West of England there is an excellent example of a genuinely
haunted house that has so far resisted all attempts to solve the origin
of the haunt, the precise nature of the supernatural intelligence that
directs the manifestation, or the motive of the phenomena.[15]
It is now extremely difficult to get permission to carry out
investigations, as adequate precautions have been taken to safeguard
both the phenomena and the incautious dabbler in matters beyond the
veil.
I may take occasion here to warn my readers against the legal risks
attached to stating that a house is haunted. In the eyes of the law
such a statement is actionable, as it tends to depreciate the market
value of the property. It is for this reason that stories concerning
haunted houses when printed in newspapers have to be obscured in their
indication of the precise locality and silent with regard to the name,
number, or address of the suspected dwelling. The verbal repetition of
such statements is also actionable and such cases as the bogus haunting
of a house by the tenants or by caretakers in order to avoid payment of
rent or the letting of the house are manifest reasons why the matter of
haunted houses should always be treated with the utmost discretion.
Particulars concerning a reputed haunt can, however, be communicated
to a newspaper with safety. All communications to a journal are
privileged, and they can be trusted not to print anything which renders
them party to an action for damages.
In 1913 a well-known student of occult matters announced his theory
of _Protective Vibrations_.[16] It was in effect an analysis of
the actual physical methods reported to be employed by spirit forces
in building up their visible and material forms. His theory contained
several assumptions which it is impossible to disregard and which
certainly do not admit of rejection.
Taken in series he stated that “The presence of human beings was an
essential to the appearance of the ghost.” This admits of no disproof,
as unless human witnesses are present there can be no testimony to
the presence of the manifestation. A general consensus of opinion
discredits ghost photographs unless taken under the strictest test
conditions which again implies the presence of the human element.
“The energy or thought-matter” (i.e. psychoplasm) “extended by the
mortals is the matter out of which the astral form is constructed.
They are, so to speak, the prime motors or the energy and material,
providing units out of which the discarnate intelligence builds its
carnate habit.”
This conception embraces psychoplasm and ectoplasm as one, but the
researches of Schrenck-Notzing were not then known. These and other
similar experiments all point to the essential probability that the
broad sense of his reasoning is correct.
From this point onward he traces the development of the material astral
body as a process of the conversion of the original vibrations into low
forms of actual energy which are able to manipulate the atoms of matter
and under the directing will of the intelligence or entity build up the
materialization.
He makes one notable reservation, asserting that “there is no evidence
to prove that discarnate intelligence is the directing force. Pure
autosuggestion, due to concentrated belief and anticipation that a
specified ghost will appear, may achieve the same result.”
But the purpose of his paper was not to argue concerning the reality of
spirits, but to put forward an ingenious scientific theory concerning
their mechanism. The sum-total of his theory is that the physical
structure of the hallucination-spirit or ghost-form in its early stages
of concentration is destructible by many forms of etheric vibration of
greater force or different wave-length.
Ghosts and spirits are integrally bound up with the conditions of
darkness and dusk. The rays of solar light are admittedly inimical
to all these manifestations. In other words, materialization cannot
be performed under certain conditions of light which means certain
conditions of vibration. The light rays which are visible to the human
eye represent about one-tenth of the complete range of light rays known
to exist from ultra-violet to infra-red.[17] At other points in the
scale of ether waves come the vibrations associated with sound, with
electricity and magnetic phenomena and with radioactivity.
The complexity of these wave-lengths of vibration is enormous, for
within the range of light rays there are rays of another kind of light,
so that the sum-total of two kinds of light is, paradoxically enough,
darkness.[18]
Passing, logically enough, from stage to stage the “Theory of
Protective Vibrations” points out that assuming the existence of ghosts
or malevolent spirits, these cannot take material shape when opposed
by hostile vibrations. Certain kinds of light, sound (such as the
sonorous vibrations of church bells or gongs of special note), and
high-frequency electric currents all destroy the initial stages of
manifestation by purely mechanical means. Lastly he postulates that
“in the presence of a radium salt (of specified intensity) ... a ghost
cannot manifest.”
Protection or exorcism by radium salts is undeniably a
twentieth-century possibility, for the terrific and incessant discharge
of ether waves consequent upon the disintegration of the radium atoms
is so powerful that even such a known and powerful force as electric
energy is completely destroyed by it.
In the presence of a radium salt non-conductors of electricity become
conductors. Differences of potential cease to exist and electroscopes
and Leyden jars fail to retain their charges.
Under these conditions, then, it was hardly conceivable that a
manifestation which depends, in its initial stages, upon the most
delicate of vibrations--the unknown vibrations of the psychoplasm could
take place.
Truth is dependent upon experiment, upon patient repetition and trial
and error. In order to test the theory in actual practice, I determined
to pay a visit to the well-known and malignant ghost at X----[19] and
actually put to the test whether or not a ghost can manifest in the
presence of a radium salt.
The rays of radioactive salts are unable to pass through lead, and pure
radium bromide, which is the nearest that we have got to the isolation
of the element radium, always has to be kept in a leaden box or cell,
as otherwise its rays would pass through and destroy the skin and flesh
of the man carrying it. Before the properties of radium were known,
this destructive faculty of radium vibrations caused several mishaps,
for unwary men of science carried these dangerous salts loose in glass
vials in their pockets.
For the purposes of experiment I obtained the loan of a small supply of
a solution of a radium salt that gives out powerful emanations. This
was enclosed in a glass vial which was in turn encased in a leaden box.
The haunted house is a peculiar old building of no particular
architectural beauty. It stands remote and deserted in its own
overgrown extended grounds, and over it breathes a generally depressing
atmosphere of damp, neglect, oppression, and decay.
Viewed from the outside the house presents no outstanding features that
attract the eye. The lower windows are heavily barred by rusted iron
rails without and closed wooden shutters within. Even creepers seem to
have felt the blight that lies upon the mansion, for no patch of green
or rambling ivy tendril covers the bare surface of the brick.
Three storeys high, mansard-roofed and turreted with a dozen contorted
Tudor chimney-stacks, the roof-line stands out against the sky and the
dull leaf masses of the surrounding trees. The higher windows are also
shuttered, but not even the small boys of the neighbouring village
have dared to break the grimy window frames that lie over the shutters.
Desolate and forbidding, the mansion and its grounds lie derelict,
shunned by all men.
My key is that of the small back door, and it is used but once or twice
a year when the needs of the psychic call upon us to tread a path of
peril and hazard.
Inside one steps into the cold stone-flagged passages that lead to the
empty kitchens and offices. The air is heavy and dank with that queer
smell of earth that one associates with crypts and graves rather than
with the clean new-turned furrow. The whole house is bare of furniture,
the paint of the woodwork dull and dirty. Spots of amorphous fungus
cling to the walls, and here and there wallpaper has peeled off in long
leprous strips, exposing the corpse-grey plaster behind.
The door from the servants’ offices opens into the wide Georgian
hall, from which sweeps up a monstrous wooden staircase. Half-way
up the stair is a landing which marks the limit of activity of the
manifestation. In the rooms beyond that and on the landing itself the
presence is terribly powerful, but it seems that beyond that limit the
terror cannot go.
The actual room where the presence is at its strongest is a chamber at
the end of the first floor. The room walls are outside walls on three
sides, the remaining partition wall is the one in which is the door to
the main corridor that runs through the house. In the centre of the
floor is a deep cavity. This has been a priest’s hiding hole or secret
treasure closet, and from signs in the woodwork it is manifest that the
trapdoor was once concealed beneath a big four-poster bed.
The windows are barred with high shutters that let in no light. The
rays of my electric lantern disclose the mats of cobwebs that hang
from the rusted cross bars, and it is evident that no human hand has
disturbed the shutters for years. A trial shows me that some of the
bolts are indeed rusted home with age-old neglect.
I unpacked my handbag, in which I carry the few simple necessities I
need on these occasions, and wrapping myself up in my travelling rug
composed myself to read by the light of my travelling candles until
the hour of ten was reached.
At ten o’clock I closed my book, put out my candle, and composed
myself to watch for the manifestation, which I _knew_ by inner
consciousness would be forthcoming.
It was a dark and moonless night and not a flicker or ray of external
light penetrated the dark stretches of the haunted room. No wind
stirred the trees or moaned in the chimney-tops and the qualities of
absolute dark and absolute quiet were all that could be desired.
Slowly out of the darkness seemed to come pinpoints of bluish
light--mere specks of phosphorescence scintillant in the still air.
The specks thickened and multiplied till they floated like a maze of
dancing midgets; then too came the dark power of oppression, that sense
of the dread and the uncanny that seems to grip the very heart and the
base of the skull in a numbing grip of fear.
Cold grew the room, colder and colder--that sense of freezing that
experienced psychics associate with the dread phenomena of malevolent
apparitions. It is a coldness of the soul as well as of the body, a
dull biting cold that suggests the limitless freezing eternities of
interstellar space.
The blue specks spun their dance and slowly became more luminous. They
collected in little nebulæ of light like cigarette ends of intense blue
radiance. Every particle of the air was filled with this luminosity, so
that the room seemed to be filled with a dull moonlight.
Slowly the nebulæ changed from their spinning movement to a slow
weaving motion. Strands and floating webs of phosphorescence drifted
like smoke wreaths about the room.
The points of light gave place to clouds of luminous mist like softly
rolling, utterly silent globes of dull blue light. Little by little the
dance of the globes speeded up. They spun and whirled and wove in and
out among themselves till they had drawn into one mass all the luminous
matter in the room.
Like a terror-charged cloud this mass hovered some eight feet high, a
clear two feet off the floor; its brilliance waxed and waned and its
confines drew in. Slowly the cloud was taking shape as a pillar and
within the pillar one could see the ghastly shaping of the rudimentary
form.
Here before my eyes was the actual form of the stranger--for this ghost
is a malevolent strangling demon--on the very point of concentration.
Carefully I stretched out my hand to the leaden box, unscrewed the
cylindrical lid, and threw into my right hand the precious vial of
radium salt.
The energy-charged tube glowed in the dark with all the beauty of
intense phosphorescence, and as I held it at arm’s length toward the
pillar of semi-materialization that represented all the evil forces of
discarnate Hate--_the mists of vapour rolled away. As if by magic the
whole apparition was dissipated_, and in twenty seconds was as if it
had never been.
There is little more to be said. The theory had been brilliantly
vindicated in practice, but it is impossible to generalize from one
particular instance. Physicists know the wide range of differences
that exist between the different radium salts,[20] and there the matter
must rest until opportunity for further experiments is available.
The analogous protective vibrations that the author of the monograph
alleges would work are all probable, but require considerably more
apparatus. To my mind the use of radioactive salts as talismans with
which to exorcise a case of malignant haunting is at once a great
and practical step in the direction of relieving humanity of these
troublesome psychic intruders. The discovery and the theory are one of
the most remarkable contributions to psychic science in our time.
Pitchblende, from which radium is extracted, does not appear to have
attracted the attention of the ancients and there is no trace of its
use in any process of alchemy or the allied sciences. Dr. Dee’s magic
mirror is reported to have been of a black substance and it is possible
that it may have been of radioactive material, although this quality
is not necessary for the purposes for which he required it.[21]
It is after all only a few years since the theory of ether waves and
vibrations was formulated. Research into psychic phenomena gives us
a chain of disconnected phenomena which nevertheless are obviously
connected. The distance from telepathy or thought-transference to
exteriorized energy or power-transference is but a short one. Science
will soon enable us to understand the mechanism of phenomena, and when
we once know the true rules or laws governing these phenomena we shall
be able to establish spirit communication at will.
FOOTNOTES:
[12] Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is perhaps to-day an even greater name. But
he is not a scientist and is greater as a publicist than as a healer
despite his medical degree. But then too--all the Apostles were not of
one trade.
[13] _Proceedings S.P.R._
[14] _Ibid._, Vol. X, p. 394.
[15] This particular ghost has been exorcised without effect. The
house has been visited by psychic experts of considerable eminence,
including H. Barson and others. The results of all these investigations
were uniformly disastrous and disagreeable, and there is reason to
believe that in some cases the health and mentality of less experienced
investigators were adversely affected.
[16] Capt. Hugh Pollard was the author of this theory. His monograph
was never printed, but typescripts of his sensational lecture before
the members of the now defunct Odic Club were circulated to certain
interested parties. He tells me that he had previously spent an
interesting night at a haunted house. He was in the company of Mr.
Eliott O’Donell and obtained a puzzling and unsatisfactory flashlight
photograph of the manifestation that occurred on that occasion.
[17] A complete scale of all known ether waves, including the visible
spectrum, has been drawn by Professor Lebedeff and is given on page 383
of the English edition of Kolbe’s _Electricity_.
[18] This is a little-known fact, but nevertheless a commonplace of
physics demonstrable in any lecture room.
[19] The actual locality of X---- will be clear to many investigators.
[20] The solution used was a solution of radium emanations which gives
out α, τ, and γ rays together. It is not well known which ray affects
the dissolution of psychoplasm.
[21] The mirror of Dr. Dee is still in existence, but the material the
mirror is made of is a surface of polished coal.
CHAPTER V
SEX IN THE NEXT WORLD
There is in existence an enormous mass of recorded spirit communication
concerning life and death. The one outstanding feature concerning these
revelations is that they tell us extremely little. Sometimes the reason
given for this withholding of information is that it is forbidden by
higher spirits, and it is certainly remarkable that despite the great
enthusiasm shown for the principles of democracy in this world, there
have never been any revelations of a democratic principle on the higher
plane.
The rule of the next world appears to be that of a benevolent
autocracy, working through a hierarchy of directing spirits controlling
other spirits on clearly defined planes. We know nothing of the
political system of the other world except that there is no such thing
as any form of elective system, no majority rule, and little social
structure.
The great dominant factor of the hereafter as described by the
bulk of Spiritualistic literature appears to be the acceptance of
_authority_. The recently arrived spirit is taken in hand by
“guides” who instruct, and the spirit then passes from grade to grade
or plane to plane, until it achieves an eminence entirely beyond the
bounds of human thought.
There is perhaps no limit to the speculation that can be indulged in
concerning the after-life, but there are certain aspects of it that
appear contradictory. There are good spirits and bad spirits, low
grades and high grades and all intermediate stages. There are also low
spirits that are said never to have been human and high spirits of the
same non-mortal nature. But badness and goodness exist on the spiritual
planes as much as on this earth.
The spirits who visit séances retain many of their earthly
characteristics. They state that they are still male and female despite
the assumption on the part of many writers that sex does not exist
upon the spiritual plane. The least possible experience of spirit
communication in any form is quite sufficient to expose this amazing
fallacy.
If the differentiation of sex has any purpose at all, it can only have
the same purpose in the next world as it has in this. Otherwise sex
distinction would be cast off just as is the human body after death.
This brings us to the consideration of how and why the myth of the
sexlessness of spirits has passed into acceptance as a fact.
The Spiritualist is open to human error and it is only human to
build into our theories those things which tend to prove them and to
disregard matters which are not in harmony with our ideas. Both in
Britain and in America there is a certain amount of false modesty that
amounts to pruriency concerning all matters of sex.
As a result, the very limited moral doctrines of sexual relationship
as understood by certain Christian sects, have been tacitly held to by
those dominating the after-life. Sex, as understood in conventional
terms, has been seen to be such a danger to the construction of a
hypothetical but perfectly moral future state, that the whole sex
question has been squashed by a statement by Spiritualists that sex
does not exist in after-life.
This is entirely wrong, for, as I have pointed out above, according to
spirit statement sex does exist and it is only fair to suppose that it
is there for the usual reason.
There exists the further problem of the origin of spirits that have
never been mortal. These must come somehow from somewhere, and there
is no reason to suppose that the continuation of sex upon the astral
planes is not for this purpose. Its existence is indeed an absolute
answer to the theories of parthenogenesis held by believers whose minds
were clouded with a residuum of theological beliefs.
To sum up, we have evidence of the continuation of sex--indeed it is
a cardinal point, for it is impossible to believe in continuation
of personality after death unless sex continues with it. One cannot
logically believe in the one without the other.
The state of error has arisen through the confusion of sex with sin.
The would-be formulators of the new Spiritualistic dogmas, having been
unable to effect a mental compromise between the moral and monogamous
Christian and the moral and polygamous Mohammedan, attempted to solve
the whole business by a bland statement that there was no sex in the
other world.
Some writers do indeed recognize this permanence of sex, but gloss it
over.[22] They ignore the fact that if a thing exists it exists for a
purpose and the fatal conception that the gratification of a sex desire
is a sin persists throughout their pages.
On the other hand, gratification of other voluptuous sense desires
such as aural pleasures from music or self-abandonment to any of
the pleasures of the intellect, appears to be regarded not only as
permissible but as praise-worthy. In fact, any analysis of the reported
habits and customs of the next world, plunges us into a mass of
paradoxical contradictions.
In point of fact it is impossible to draw a hard-and-fast line between
the actual spirit revelation and interpolated ideas by the medium. It
is also notorious that as soon as any new concept of the next world is
published in book form, the “revelations” from any different sources
seem to take on an unmistakable tinge according to the latest theories.
In fact, a literary psychoanalysis of reported next worlds shows the
unmistakable traces of books read in the past.
Certain accounts of the spirit life obtained through Mohammedan mediums
by French investigators in Algiers show what may be called a peculiarly
active sexual life in the after-world. This may possibly be attributed
to either early religious belief in a sensuous Mohammedan paradise or
alternatively to the particular type of Arab spirits who furnished
the description. In any case, the accounts could not be published for
general or even private reading, but there is no conceivable reason why
they should be deemed more unreliable than other spirit communications.
Some idea of the theme of these revelations can be gathered if I may
say that one of the communicators, called Sidi Aissa Ben S’dub,
prefaces his words by the cryptic statement: “Know then, O mortals,
that here are neither camels nor horses--nor virtuous women,--for
us virtue, as ye know it, exists not. And, as I have related, there
being neither camels nor horses nor virtuous women, what think ye then
occupies the time of us who were strong men?”
Oriental imagery is rich in terms concerning sex, and the revelation
as taken down in Arabic is a document of some literary value. Its
translation into precise French leaves us under no misapprehension
as to the actual technique of sex gratification on the next plane.
Their methods appear to be our methods, but it is of course impossible
to arrive at any conception of relative degrees of pleasure. It is
also curious to note that in the Arab revelations given there was no
reference at all to any ensuing spirit birth, but one interpretation of
and obscure text might lead one to suppose that the offspring of these
unions were “djinni,” i.e. non-mortal and soulless spirits.
Cases of intercourse between djinns and mortals are the basis of many
Moslem tales and legends in which the sex interest is paramount. But
it must be borne in mind that the Mohammedan idea of the invisible
world is so different from that prescribed either by Eastern or Western
thought that it is almost impossible to co-ordinate it with any of our
accepted theories.
On the other hand, no Spiritualist revelation or theory is of value
unless it fits all lands and all creeds. Thus, when the number of
spirit visitants of African, Red Indian, or other origin, is taken into
account, it is manifest that no _abstract theory of morality which is
not in accordance with the known physical facts concerning the spirit
world, is likely to be practised there_.
As time goes on, it will become increasingly impossible for the
practising Spiritualist to ignore the enormous fact of sex. At present
various beliefs are held. These range from the pure sexlessness theory,
which is manifestly untenable to variations like a “perfectly pure and
spiritual sex relationship in no way physical,” or some such platitude.
This kind of expression is pure mental flatulence, for it is clear that
in the spirit world there is nothing _physical_ as we know it,
and that everything there is _psychical_--again as we know it.
The conception of the spirit world that is most widely held does
away with all idea of penal restrictions. Hell, purgatory, and
the theological varieties of damnation are contrary to the whole
conception. Once again we are dependent on spirit teaching for our
visualization of life in the hereafter, and having established
the existence of sex, which would not exist unless it implied the
permanence of sexual attraction and sex gratification, we not
unreasonably desire to know what, if any, are the sex limits in the
next life.
The realm of speculation thus opened up is enormous. It is possibly the
vision of a voluptuous sensualist heaven. It is possibly the vision
of a new theory of hell in which spirits are unable to obtain the
gratification of those desires which they are equipped to experience.
There is no particular reason to suppose that the married state
continues--indeed, there is evidence to the reverse. Altogether the
problems raised are far too great for the little evidence we have yet
obtained from the spirit world to lead us to a true solution.
As ever we come back to the point of: How much is real spirit
communication? How much is simply well-meaning but inaccurate
Spiritualist interpretation or interpolation?
The answer of the Spiritualist to such a question is usually the
affirmation that “desire does not exist in the spirit world.”
This may be good enough to hoodwink the amateur or the shallow thinker,
but it must be remembered that the whole of what we must admit is
the dark side of Spiritualism, the bad or lying spirits, the demons
of possession and the demons of obsession, all these are active
affirmations of the reality of desire persisting.
It is not enough for us to affirm that the dark elements are either
non-existent or simply the effects of our subconscious minds. If these
rules apply to the dark side they must apply to the light side, too.
If this were the case the whole fabric of Spiritualism crumbles to the
ground. If we accept any spirit evidence we must accept _all_
spirit evidence, and we have no right to reject as unsound statements
that do not fall in with the theories which we have accepted on the
strength of similar statements.
The continuation of sexual activity on the psychic planes may be
a staggering conception to some people, but a little thought will
show that it is not half such a shattering idea as the perfectly
unjustifiable hypothesis that there is none.
The existence of sex in the spirit world leads us to the supposition
that there are there some organized forces of law and order, otherwise
this conception of the next world would seem to be a field where a
highly intellectual, intelligent, and powerful individual soul might
enjoy a limitless orgy of psychic rape.
There is no reason to think that such a thing is impossible, for cases
of demoniac or spirit possession are in effect cases of psychic rape
of a mortal and often present instances of the most amazing sexual
aberration owing to the terrible desires of the uninvited tenant of the
mind.
The believing Spiritualist has built on slender grounds a wonderful
conception of the spirit world, but it is a one-sided structure, and
it is important to note that the “Everything in the garden is lovely!”
idea of the next world is not by any means borne out by the revelations
of its inhabitants. One can indeed ask oneself what ground is there for
optimism?
What reasons other than self-deception, self-assurance, and
self-flattery are there for sweeping away the idea of terror,
punishment, and the inexorable law of Abstract Justice that has for
ages been held to be implicit in the life hereafter?
The sceptic is indeed justified when, after reading reams of well-meant
pseudo-religious twaddle, he asks the supporters of the new revelation:
“And _why_ should it all be _couleur de rose_?”
Faith may do many things, but Faith cannot make black white--even in
the realm of the spirit.
There is good reason to suppose that in the past many revelations
concerning sex-life in the spirit plane have been suppressed or
destroyed. The well-meaning Spiritualist with mediumistic gifts or the
capacity for automatic writing does not always get the precise kind of
spirit teaching expected. On the other hand, there is a wide difference
between the meaningless obscenities that are sometimes sent and various
coherent statements that can be classed as definite revelations. The
private operator, knowing little of the matters with which he or she is
dealing, is frequently ashamed to let these strange, frank manuscripts
or records be seen by others. Often they are shown to a wrong person,
classed as evil spirit writings, and the great question that animates
the spirit world: “Should mortals be told?” again goes on.
At a séance held in Paris some interesting statements concerning the
psychic world were vouchsafed by a spirit calling itself Zaza Guilbert.
There were five of us at the table and two of the party were practised
automatists.
First came some personal particulars of the spirit. She was born near
Grenoble, in Dauphine, in 1826, but was in Paris when Napoleon the
Third was proclaimed Emperor (1852) and was employed with theatrical
dressmaking. She married and left two girl children.
It was the question: “Is life in the spirit world as gay and
gallant[23] as it was in those days in this sphere?” that set the ball
rolling.
A. That depends on how you look at things. We are men and women over
here in so far as that goes.
Q. Is life on the spirit plane sexless?
A. Certainly not! (Emphasis conveyed by violent knocking of the table.)
Q. (By one of the ladies of the party.) Is there childbirth in the
spirit world?
A. Not in the same way as on earth. (No answer was returned to some
further inquiries on this subject.)
Q. Is there separation of the sexes?
A. No; it would be intolerable.
Q. Is morality of earth binding on the spirit plane?
A. No; that would be still more intolerable.
Q. Have you a husband there?
A. No; several affinities.
Q. Intellectual affinities only?
A. By no means.
Q. Can you compare the relationship to any earthly parallel?
A. Yes. Living _une vie de demi-mondaine sans reproche_.
Q. Do all spirits enjoy life in this manner?
A. It is not obligatory.
Q. (By one of the ladies.) Are there scandals in the spirit world?
A. Sometimes.
Q. Are they due to moral censure of higher spirits?
A. No; jealousy, because higher spirits mix themselves up in it.
Q. Can you describe one of these scandals?
A. Not through the table. Write.
Q. You will give it as automatic writing?
A. Yes.
One of the automatists left the circle to fetch pencil and paper. Then
we resumed. The power appeared to be instantly forthcoming, and the
writing stated that:
“Benedetta Chiesole was the mistress of Théodule Affra and several
other spirits on our plane.
“This intimacy became obnoxious to a spirit called du Paits Herbault,
who was a monk of Montpellier in the sixteenth century. He was not
on our plane but higher up, but was permitted to come down to us for
certain purposes. Being on a higher plane, there was no way of keeping
him out when he was not wanted, for he had the power of passing through
all psycho-material substances that serve us as material substances
serve you.
“His persecution of Benedetta was remarkable, for he was astonishingly
enamoured of her. At length matters got to such a pitch that the others
protested through the guides. But they got cold comfort. They were told
not to interfere with the higher spirits or it would be the worse for
them, and Benedetta was told that it was natural for her to have to
expiate her earthly shortcomings in this manner.”
The results of other sittings at which other spirits have made
communications are in some cases quite as detailed and a great deal
more startling than the above. In addition, a great mass of what may
be definitely termed abnormal sex literature has come from the pens of
people practising automatic writing--and it is an indubitable fact
that some of these writings have been written under control by people
of irreproachable life and character.
The common-sense explanation is that these writings and communications
have nothing whatever to do with spirits and that these are, so to
speak, a seething up of illegal desires and ideas which have been
repressed by the conscious mind into the censorship of the subliminal
self. This theory is only tenable if the whole basic doctrine that
these things are communicated by spirits is given up.
If, on the other hand, we hold that there is anything at all in
Spiritualism we are faced with the inevitable conclusion that, however
much we may desire to get rid of it, sex is as troublesome in the next
world as in this.[24]
FOOTNOTES:
[22] “People live in communities as one would expect if like attracts
like, and the male spirit still finds his true mate though there is no
sensuality in the grosser sense and no childbirth.” Sir A. Conan Doyle,
Chapter III, _The New Revelation_.
[23] The word “gallant” carries rather different implications in French
than are covered by the literal English rendering of “gallant.”
[24] The notes and papers concerning the physiological side of sex in
the next world that have been collected are not suitable for general
reading. Experienced Spiritualists will have no difficulty in surmising
the general character of these records.