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Title: The adventures of a modern occultist
Author: Oliver Bland
Release date: April 18, 2025 [eBook #75900]
Language: English
Original publication: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1920
Credits: deaurider and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ADVENTURES OF A MODERN OCCULTIST ***
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.
CHAPTER VI
THE REALITY OF SORCERY
I have often been asked by folk who were perfectly serious in their
inquiry if there “was anything in” latter-day sorcery, and whether
the practice actually existed outside the realm of fiction. It is a
difficult question to answer, for the average man mixes up witchcraft,
sorcery and necromancy, and one cannot be certain whether he is
alluding to the dark ceremony of the Black Sabbath, to the use of
occult knowledge for malevolent purposes, or whether he is thinking of
wax images and pine, incantations and night rides astride a broomstick.
Put in a simpler form, the question comes to this: Can experienced
occultists utilize spirit or unknown natural forces for malevolent
uses? The answer is an unhesitating affirmative. Under certain
conditions, it can be done.
Magic has always been divided into white or good magic, and black or
bad magic. Both have been liberally endowed with ritual observance, but
shorn of non-essentials the determining factor that decides whether
magic is black or white is the secret intent of the operating magician.
In the past the great popular attribute of the magician was his
knowledge of healing. He was not only a seer of the future and a finder
of lost things, but also a healer. On the reverse side may be set
against his capacity for healing his power for casting spells or doing
harm; against his draughts of beneficent medicine, his vials of poison.
The doctor who uses hypnotic treatment, practises suggestion or acts as
a psychotherapeutist, is to-day the direct twentieth-century descendant
of the magicians of the past. Apollonius of Tyana is his patron; Merlin
worked his wonders by the same rules.
It is to the modern studies in psychic science that we must turn
to find the underlying mechanisms of magic practices, for a full
three-quarters of art magic is due to the little-known effects of
hypnotism or suggestion, and but a shadowy balance to the powers of
discarnate intelligences of evil.
The discoveries of the existence of “animal magnetism” by Mesmer was
the first step which brought the psychic phenomena of will domination
out of the realm of the occult into the domain of medical knowledge.
For a century Mesmer’s theory has been discredited, but to-day modern
students of psychic science are beginning to pay attention to it again.
It fell into discredit owing to the discoveries of Braid, the
Manchester physician, who discovered that Mesmer’s phenomena could be
produced independently of the theory of “animal magnetism” by plain
hypnosis.
Braid’s theories were followed out by Chercot and the Paris School of
Hypnotists, and their theories were in turn demolished by Liébault
and Bernheim of the Nancy School, who held that all the phenomena of
hypnotism in their turn were produced by suggestion.
In point of actual fact, advanced thinkers of to-day hold that the same
effect may be produced by all three methods of practice. In the same
way we may produce a given electrical phenomenon such as the lighting
of an incandescent lamp by the action of chemical solutions on metals
in a battery, or by the rotation of a coil of wire between magnetic
poles in a dynamo. The methods are different, but the forces evolved
and the effect obtained are identical.
The lay mind will follow my argument better if I use the loose terms of
hypnotism and hypnosis than if I attempt a more scientific terminology.
The first point that must be grasped is that the sorcerer or wizard
possesses psychic gifts or qualities of an entirely different order to
those claimed by Spiritualists.
The sorcerer is a hypnotist--that is to say, he is an individual who
possesses the power of emitting or radiating an unknown psychic force.
Most people are neutral, they neither radiate this force nor do they
oppose or resist its passage, but the individuals who are susceptible
to its action seem to possess the faculty of arresting this radiation
and converting it to mental energy within themselves. These are the
people who are what is known as good hypnotic subjects.
In the histories of the great sorcerers of the past the _assistant_,
that is to say the subject, plays as important a rôle as does the mage
himself, for the subject is the instrument of the master.
The average person who possesses mediumistic or psychic qualities in
the Spiritualistic sense, is in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred in a
greater or lesser degree a sensitive hypnotic subject.
The odd few who do not come in the above category may be classed as
hermaphroditic or doubly gifted individuals who possess both radiating
power and subjectivity. One or two noted materializing mediums of the
past have been thus endowed.
In the usual circle there is the medium and the sitters. Some of these
may be neutral, but in an average circle there are one or more who
possess unknown to themselves a certain amount of radiant force. It is
this which passes along the chain of hands to the medium where it is
arrested and condensed to play its mysterious part in the liberation
of psychic elements that can be utilized by the unseen spirit workers.
If there is present in the circle an individual who is greatly endowed
with this force--and whose mental desires approximate to black rather
than white magic, we have an instance of those dread dangers that beset
those who unwittingly pass beyond the threshold of the known.
The trance state of the medium is akin to light hypnosis and the
subject or medium of a well-meaning little circle of Spiritualists may,
unknown to him or herself, become the slave of one or other of the
members of the circle.
It is an asseveration with hypnotists that they have no power without
the _consent_ of the individual. But once they have won the entry
of the mind that entry is theirs for ever, and even the bodily presence
of the operator is not required to achieve this domination of the mind
of the subject.[25]
The common instances where this kind of thing occurs cannot be classed
as true sorcery, for in most cases the operator is unconscious of how
or why the fulfilment of his desires comes about. The true sorcery only
comes in when an individual possessing the required psychic faculty,
and in addition, occult knowledge, exerts these of set purpose in order
to gratify his desires.
Vengeance of an enemy, the subjugation of another’s will, the
satisfaction of a sex passion, all these are motives for sorcery. The
witch-doctor of West Africa, the voodoo priestesses of Cuba and Hayti
practise these accomplishments no less than their white brethren in
black magic. Sorcery lives to-day no less than it lived centuries ago.
There are several roads to its portals--but not a track leading back to
the regions of light for those that pass its gates.
The first aim of the sorcerer is to get the victim in a state of
suggestibility. This can be accomplished in a dozen different ways well
known to the practised student.
In the first, fumes of a special sort of incense played no
inconsiderable part in the rôle of sorcery. According to ritual
they are to propitiate the spirits--in actual practice they induce
relaxation on the part of the subject and assist in building up that
necessary atmosphere which is essential to suggestibility.
The effect of darkness, of points of light gleaming amid surrounding
dark, the magic mirror or the crystal globe; all these were more than
stage properties--they are the mechanical implements of suggestion.
Let us suppose that some weak and curious woman visits a sorcerer to
obtain his help in some affair of heart. The man of mystery seats her
in a comfortable chair; the lights are lowered and he tells her to gaze
at the crystal ball upon the table before her.
Fumes of incense hang in the heavy air. The man’s voice is clear,
dominant, and sonorous; slowly it becomes soothingly monotonous.
Gradually the client feels languor stealing over her. The crystal
becomes cloudy and in the globe appears something that she knows and
recognizes.
Probably the crystal tells her nothing that means anything to her.
Certainly she has seen in it nothing but what she has known at some
time before,[26] or something that the magician has seen before. But
the net result is that she is convinced of the occult powers possessed
by him.
This is the prelude to other visits and little by little her will
yields to that of the sorcerer and the suggestions that he has
implanted in her subconscious mind begin to take effect. If he is a
daring scoundrel, his domination may take any form. Unconscious that
she is not acting of her own free will, she may yet be brought to place
at his disposal everything and anything that he may require of her.
He has invoked no spirit aids, but has caused the powers of hypnotism
and suggestion, taking advantage of the light condition of hypnosis
induced by the crystal-gazing. Police and press persecutions of the
Seers of Bond Street are not altogether unjustified in many cases. The
real facts may not be brought out at the court, owing to the shame that
publicity would inflict upon the dupes, but the prosecution is, in nine
cases out of ten, justifiable.
The class of petty criminals above mentioned are again not true
sorcerers, in that they only use occult natural forces, summoning to
their aid no spirit attributes. In the lowest grade of the sorcerers we
find the necromancers.
There are still a few of these in Paris and latterly there was one in
the West Country. It depends on the individual operator how much of his
ceremonial is for the purpose of inducing suggestibility or partial
hypnosis and how much is for the direct evocation of evil spirits. Very
often the necromancer himself is deluded enough to confuse natural with
supernatural power.
There is a certain class of spirits to whom the ancients gave the name
of Lemures. These can be semi-materialized, made visible, and bound to
service by a comparatively simple ritual, for in place of needing the
material vehicle of ectoplasm, extended by a materializing medium, they
can take shape from the emanations of warm blood.
This vital fluid plays an important part in all magical ceremony. We
find mention of it from the days when Ulysses poured blood and wine
into a trench to call up the spirits before he went down into hell.
In the dark history of Gilles de Retz[27] the blood ritual is seen in
all its ghostliest fluorescence. The calabash of blood of the “white
goat” is essential in obi and voodoo magic, and blood, fresh blood, not
necessarily but preferably human, is used by the necromancer of to-day.
Those learned in occult matters will readily perceive the precious
function that blood emanations exercise, but on the contrary, the man
of science and the psychologist will not be able to understand the part
that blood plays in this peculiar alchemy.
It must be clearly understood that experiment of this nature is
extraordinarily perilous and that any attempt at necromancy by
students whose knowledge is insufficient can have none but disastrous
results.[28]
The elemental forces evoked by this ceremony may be compared to
gunpowder. Any fool can blow himself up with powder by setting a match
to it, but it takes a skilled artillerist to harness the forces and
make them propel a projectile to a given target. Experiment with
elemental forces is analogous and the greater part of the ritual deals
with the protection of the operator or sorcerer himself from those
dread spirits who obey his summons.
In 1912 I attended the course of lectures on psychic science given at a
sub-school of the University of Jena. A fellow-student there gave me a
letter of introduction to Gottlieb Bentlemeyer, a professor of law at
one of the Hanover Hochschulen and an ardent student of black magic.
At that time he had rooms in the Wiesenstrasse and had in his charge
one or two private pupils whom he was cramming for their necessary
examinations. One of these lads, a youngster from Stettin, in North
Prussia, was his assistant in the necromantic art, and was a most
highly gifted sensitive or hypnotic subject.
It was not until we had had several ordinary séances and he had shown
me some astounding experiments in the externalization of sensibility
and clairvoyance under hypnosis that I deemed it fit to mention the
subject of necromancy.
We were at that time in the Hanover Museum and had been examining
an exhibit of “Qualapparat”--racks, winches, and torturing-irons of
various descriptions. It was our discussion of the possible sending
of the spirit of his assistant, Walther Kraus, under hypnosis to
psychometrize these vile memorials of a brutal past that raised the
subject. We came to the conclusion that the experiment would be
extremely hazardous, but Bentlemeyer kindly offered to attempt to call
up the spirit of one or more of the men who had used these things.
“It will not be an easy task to find them,” he said, “but being men of
blood it may be possible to find them by means of the blood elementals.”
It took us three days to make our preparations, for although
Bentlemeyer had an excellent and systematically arranged cabinet of
magical requisites, one or two things had to be procured.
His association with the Hochschule enabled him to obtain fresh blood
through the agency of one of his medical colleagues.
We rehearsed the ritual carefully, in order that there should be no
fault, and I must confess that I prepared myself for the ordeal with
considerable trepidation. His ceremonial of evocation was slightly at
variance with accepted French practice, but the discrepancies were
not material and appeared to have crept in during the time of King
Frederick Wilhelm of Prussia. Bentlemeyer informed me that the original
MS. in German and Hebrew had been in the possession of the celebrated
Steinert.[29]
It was a clear autumn night with a perfect moon; the air had a touch of
frost in it and the great town of Hanover was quiet and still.
Bentlemeyer was already in his robes when one of the pupils admitted
me. I changed into the necessary garments, took the rod and girdle
which he had lent me, and placed the snake-hilted poniard in its belt
sheath.
The circle of evocation had been marked out in chalk on the floor. The
prepared candles burnt in the angles of the pentacle and the saucers of
salt and the elements were in their appropriate places. The sorcerer
stood within his circle of protection facing the small tripod brazier
in which was a brazen plate glowing over the frame of a small spirit
lamp.
I took my place within the _enceinte_ of a similar diagram, and
on a couch, lying between us, was Walther, the assistant. The candle
lights burnt in the draughtless atmosphere, the dull yellowish flames
standing up without a flicker, sending their faint tail of black smoke
toward the ceiling. Beyond the confines of our protective circles was a
grotesque bronze bowl or shallow basin. Bentlemeyer removed the black
velvet hood that covered it and the filmy crimson surface of fresh
blood gleamed in the light.
At a sign we began the chanting of the preliminary invocations to the
guardians of the gates. The room was sonorous with the great Hebrew
names, and from time to time a fresh pinch of incense on the brazier
would send a wreath of pungent fume across the room.
The boy on the couch breathed heavily, loosened the restriction of his
garments, and soon subsided into a definite state of trance.
From invocation we changed to the ritual of evocation. And before the
echoes of the first summons had died down, a cold wind seemed to burst
out in the very heart of the room itself, making the candles flicker
and the shadows flit and dance in arabesques across the low ceiling.
I felt for the poniard at my belt and drawing it from its sheath held
the naked blade ready.[30]
The second and third utterances of the words of power intensified the
effect and the boy moaned pitifully.
Bentlemeyer signed to me with his rod to look toward the blood bowl.
The surface of the liquid was being slowly agitated, strong swirls
and broken wave motions appeared on the surface, sluggish, iridescent
bubbles floated for a while and burst, and at last the whole body of
fluid within the bowl was in a state of violent agitation.
The sorcerer bent to a vessel on the ground and threw upon the brazier
some new essence--not an incense. The smoke wreathed itself above the
brazier, then seemed to take shape like a pillar and curve toward the
blood bowl.
Slowly yet distinctly the vapours clustered above the blood and slowly
took semi-human shape. Incessantly they changed and melted--now
limb-like, here betraying the outline of a demon face, there a
pillared, smoothly working trunk.
From the bowl came a noise like cats’ tongues lapping and now and then
the bowl itself would tilt and move a fraction of an inch or so about
the floor. For a moment we watched this monstrous manifestation in
silence. Then the sorcerer resumed his ritual and bound the spirits
present to do his bidding to the spell of the Three Known and One
Unknown elements.
“What are your names?” he asked, and the elemental demons or spirits
speaking through the trance-bound boy gave them.
“Who is your leader?” There was a momentary hesitation, and then a
spirit answering to the name of Amalik assumed the leadership.
“Have you been a mortal?”
“No, I was never mortal. I was an earth-spirit, serving the priests of
Odin till the Cross came.”
“What brought you here to-night?”
“The Blood Libation and the summons. What do you want of us? We wish to
depart.”
“You are bound to do my bidding by the words of Might. You may not go.
I want you to find for me the spirit of one of the men of blood who
used the torture instruments in the Museum.”
“I do not know the men.”
“I command you to seek them. I command all of you by the powers that
are mine to seek and bring them.”
For a moment there was silence, broken only by the laboured breathing
of the boy. Then he spoke again.
“I have found one, O Masters.”
“What is his name?”
“Kurt Ettethurm.”
“He is to answer my questions himself. Where did you live?”
A new and harsher voice issued from the boy’s lips.
“By Sachsenhausen, near Augsburg.”
“When?”
“In the time of Charles the Fifth of Spain.”
“Were you one of his torturers?”
“No, I served Count Anton of Tornen.”
“Who were your victims?”
“Criminals, bandits, and Lutherans.”
“When did you die?”
“At Muhlberg.”
“When--not where?”
“At Muhlberg--killed in the battle of Muhlberg.”
“Where are you now?”
“Why ask? I am in a lower state.”
“Do you revisit this sphere unless summoned?”
“I am always here, but you cannot see me.”
“Where are you usually?”
“By the slaughter houses.”
“Do you move from place to place?”
“Yes, I follow the Scharfrichter (headsman).”[31]
“Why?”
“To watch.”
“Are you bound to?”
“No, I like it.”
“Can you show yourself to us?”
“I do not think so. Help me and I will try.”
“How can we help you?”
“Place that bowl of blood at the northern corner of the pentacle.”
I must have started to move forward, for Bentlemeyer shouted at me to
keep still, and I realized in a flash that I had nearly been trapped
into going beyond the protection of my circle.
The boy began to chuckle horribly and then suddenly choked. Before our
eyes his face became empurpled, his eyes seemed to start from his head,
and the tongue protruded. His legs kicked and his hands beat feebly at
something solid--impenetrable--but invisible, that poised in the empty
air above him.
“Stop it, for God’s sake!” I cried to Bentlemeyer.
My voice awoke him from the creeping paralysis of terror that was
mastering him, and raising the scroll of the ritual he recovered
himself by an effort of will, and uttered the words of the spell of
release.
A swirl of icy cold wind seemed to sweep about us, and I stabbed at the
invisible grasp that seemed to be plucking at my garments. Two of the
candles went out and the windows rattled violently in their frames.
Then with frightening suddenness the manifestations ceased.
The boy was gasping for breath once more and the terror had passed.
Not until the last of the valedictory phrases of the ritual had been
said did either of us dare leave our stations. Then both of us, shocked
and terrified by what we had seen, went over to the boy Walther.
He was deeply entranced yet, breathing heavily; the colour had not
yet ebbed from his face and on his brow were beads and runnels of
perspiration.
Bentlemeyer made a few passes, breathed on his eyelids, and brought him
round. But there on his uncollared neck was the dark, bruised imprint
of strangling fingers.
* * * * *
This experience was phenomenal. We examined the room carefully
afterwards and came to the conclusion that the couch on which Walther
was lying projected at one corner over the circuit of the diagram
that should have protected it. The identity of the spirit we could
not determine. Whether it was really the spirit of the executioner or
torturer, whether it was merely an impersonation by a demon elemental,
or what particular denizen of the realm of evil it was that came to the
summons and the blood bowl I cannot say.
I learnt later that Bentlemeyer was, despite his learning and his
professional standing, a man of notoriously evil and depraved life.
There is no doubt that our experiences that evening thoroughly startled
him. A brother student of proven reliability told me later that
Bentlemeyer had assured him that he could and did evoke evil spirits,
and evoke them to execute malicious tricks upon his confrères in the
professional world.
In this connection it is interesting to note that when looking
through his cabinet of magical instruments I saw two small nude waxen
models, male and female. I asked at the time the purpose of these and
he explained that they were used by him in a hypnotic experiment
with Walther. This was the phenomenon known as externalization of
sensibility.
Under hypnosis Walther’s feeling of sensation could be transferred by
the operator to any object, such as a glass of water or a waxen doll. A
pin-prick on the surface of the water would be felt by him as an acute
pricking sensation all over the body. When the doll was used, pain was
felt by Walther in the precise place where the doll was pricked.[32]
The hypothesis is that the sorcerer and wizard of the Middle Ages made
use of this phenomenon and that their victims were the unconscious
victims of hypnosis. Before this hypothesis can be dismissed by the
sceptic it should be remembered that sorcery flourished best in ages of
faith and superstition. An active belief in the powers of sorcery or
witchcraft facilitates not only direct suggestion, but also suggestion
on self-hypnosis.
A point of interest is that the effects of sorcery or evil suggestion
are capable of being remedied by people who understand the subject.
Exorcism is valuable and is as real as sorcery, and it is by no means
a lost art among those occultists who have studied the dark side of
spirit phenomena in order to know all that we are allowed to know of
this dangerous subject.
Above all things, the Spiritualist who has certain healing qualities in
connection with mediumistic gifts should avoid any attempt at exorcism.
Cases have been known when the attempt was successful, but only in
so far that the evil was transferred from the original victim to the
would-be healer. As a rule, the results are bad for both parties. The
mental and consequently physical dangers of this kind of thing are far
too serious to be lightly meddled with. One cannot insist on this too
strongly.
FOOTNOTES:
[25] Chapter X of Professor Boirac’s _Psychic Science_ “Experimental
Researches in Sleep Provoked at a Distance.”
[26] See Proceedings of La Société Universelle d’Etudes Psychiques and
_Proceedings S.P.R._, V and VIII.
[27] See “Gilles de Rais, dit Barbe Bleu.” Bonsard et Maulde, _History
of Magic_, Chapter VI: “Eliphas Levi.” In fiction, Huysman’s _La-Bas_.
[28] For obvious reasons I have suppressed the detail of ritual.
[29] Steinert was the chief adept in the Society of the Illuminati. See
_Essai sur la Secte des Illuminés_, Marquis de Lachet.
[30] Elementals cannot face pointed steel. Probably because the latter
concentrates radiations of psychic force from the human body which are
destructive to them.
[31] In Germany capital punishment is still carried out by the
headsman, who beheads with a sword.
[32] Chapter II, _Psychical and Supernormal Phenomena_, by Dr. Paul
Joire; Chapter XV, _Psychic Science_, by Emile Boirac, and numerous
other works give details of this phenomenon.
CHAPTER VII
INCENSE AND OCCULTISM
The ancients possessed amazing secrets concerning psychic knowledge
of all kinds. Apart from the philosophical tenets held by the various
degrees of priestcraft there was a special secret knowledge of what may
be called the mechanical side. They knew how to produce phenomena.
Then as now, the specially gifted were used in connection with the
service of mysteries, but in all the old cults which attained to
any degree of organization the arch-priests or hierophants were not
themselves mediums, but made use of mediums as instruments. The rôle
played by the medium was a more or less unimportant one just as to-day
the “psychics” used by the different sects of Tibetan Lamas are
relatively unimportant and insignificant members of the priestcraft.
The priests had, however, other secrets--secrets which on occasion
conferred the gift of vision on the ordinary non-psychic person.
Sacerdotalism and royalty were closely allied not only in ancient
Egypt, but throughout the bulk of the mid-Oriental and Byzantine cults.
Then as now, people demanded proof of miracles and the proof had to be
forthcoming.
Little by little, savants have recovered from hieroglyph and papyri,
from stone and manuscript, something of the great rituals and something
of both the outer and inner forms of these dead faiths.
We know enough to realize that the adepts possessed the art of
releasing the spirit from the body and of producing the trance state
not only in individuals but in comparatively large congregations.
The two hypotheses are the agency of hypnotism and the agency of some
mechanical or physiological factor such as a drug.
The possibilities of hypnotism in the form of crowd suggestion cannot
be overlooked, but it does not entirely account for some of the
phenomena that tradition has handed down and which is substituted by
contemporary record.
Analysis of some of these cults shows that the initiates partook of a
ceremonial drink or brew of some kind and that there is a more than
mystical use of the censer. Nine-tenths of the so-called propitiatory
ritual was symbolic, but there remains an unexplained tenth part whose
agency was primarily that of mechanical excitant of what one may term
“psychism”--those qualities of perception that we class as psychic
gifts.
It is precisely these extraordinarily valuable secrets that were
among the deepest arts of the priestcraft. There was no record of
these--nothing direct is to be found in the writings, and although
it is possible to recover the philosophic bases of the myths these
rule-of-thumb mysteries still elude us.
After all, many other similar secrets, and even fairly well-known
common facts of antiquity, have been lost to us. We do not know the
composition of the celebrated Roman fish sauce “garum.” We cannot tell
what are the ingredients of Stradivarius’ violin varnishes or some old
master’s colours. Nevertheless, it is unreasonable to suppose that the
necessary materials have vanished from the earth. We have the whole
known world to ransack for them where the ancients had only a limited
and circumscribed number of plants, beasts, and minerals from which to
gather their ingredients.
The function of some drugs is to produce mental effects, visions,
hallucinations, dreams, and phantoms. The logical assumption is that
the ancients knew certain rule-of-thumb methods of utilizing some forms
of these drugs in such a way as to loosen the hold of the body (and the
consciousness) upon the mind, and to produce an artificial state of
clairvoyance.
The wizard of the Middle Ages was also a doctor, and it is claimed that
the familiar that inhabited the sword of Paracelsus--which sword he
always had by him and could never be parted from--was none other than a
certain amount of opium concealed in the hollow pommel.[33]
The function of hypnotic drugs is known to a point. That is to say, we
know what effect is produced on a normal individual by a given dose of
an unknown drug, but in nine cases out of ten we do not know precisely
how this effect is brought about and have few clues to the series of
physiological reactions that bring about the mental state.
The connection between a physical draught and a mental state is
indicated throughout the history of magic. Ceremonial libations, ritual
consumption of potions or “devil’s brews” of one kind and another are
part and parcel of the traditions of necromancy and sorcery.
The connection between these hypnotic draughts and the practice of
poisoning was not clearly perceived by most writers of the past.
Sorcery and poisoning were indeed twin practices of the Middle Ages,
for where the spell might fail white arsenic would succeed, but it
is not fair to class all magical potions as preparations of secret
poisons, although in point of fact most of the hypnotic drugs are toxic.
The methods of administering the drugs are two--namely, by draught,
that is to say by direct consumption, and inhalation. The function
of the incense used in thaumaturgical ceremonies was primarily to
intoxicate the audience.
Just as the Pythoness of the Delphic oracles inhaled the vapours of
the magic cave, so the Egyptians inhaled prepared incenses in their
temples. The casting of herbs upon the fire, the burning of prepared
sacrificial candles or flambeaux, all these play their part in the
mechanical induction of the psychic state.
Frankincense and myrrh, and in particular gum benzoin, possess soothing
properties that affect the throat and nasal passages. Besides being
pleasant, these gums formed an excellent vehicle for disguising the
scent of other matters and preventing their spasmodic or instant action
on the throat.
The kyphic or incense of ancient Egypt[34] was compounded of myrrh,
gum-mastic, aromatic rush roots, resin, and juniper berries. To these
aromatics were added small quantities of symbolic elements, such as
grapes, honey and wine, and a portion of bitumen or _asphateum_,
whose purpose might be either symbolic or to serve as a binding medium
for the mass.
In addition to these, various spices and perfumes were used. Cinnamon
bark, sandalwood, cardamom, and even ambergris and musk. The influence
of scent upon the emotions is well known and the Egyptians favoured the
use of ambra and musk as definitely aphrodisiacal perfumes. To-day pure
essence of patchouli is used in the Orient to serve the same end, and
anybody who has ever smelt a vial of the pure oil will recognize the
instant disturbance of certain nerve centres that it produces.
The clue to the secret of the ancient incense lies not in what we have
been able to recover from the papyri, but in the word itself. Kyphi
is recognizable to-day in “keef,” the popular name for the smokable
variety of the herb cannabis indica.
Cannabis indica is none other than our old friend hashish, the
haseesh of the writers of the time of the Crusades, who gave us those
descriptions of the Old Man of the Mountains and his Hasch-hassins.
From them we get our commonplace word--assassin.
It is not, after all, a far cry from the mysteries of Osiris in Egypt
to the Thammus or _Dumuri-absu_ of Syria and Babylon.
“Thammuz came next behind
Whose annual wound in Lebanon allured
The Syrian damsels to lament his fate
In amorous ditties all a summer’s day,”
says Milton.
Osiris and Thammus “died” annually, and mimicry of the symbolic event
was the basis of all ritual. In the mysteries the initiates “died,”
too, but the death was no mere formula, but an actually induced state
of stupor of deep trance brought about by the fumes of the “keef.”
These secrets lingered long in Lebanon, where to this day the
Crypto-christianity of the Druses may be identified with many of the
actual practices of magic.
The master of the Assassins was a master hypnotist, using the dark
knowledge of certain parts of the mechanical ritual of magic to gain
his mastery over the Moslem youths he sent as fanatics to do his
bidding.
There in the Lebanon he created his artificial paradise of sensuous
delight, drugged dreams and slumber. His commands laid upon his slaves
were no ordinary commands--but spells as black as any weaved by sorcery.
The master lodge of this cult of the Assassins was at Cairo and the
mysteries were only transferred to their new setting in the Lebanon by
Hassan ibn Sabbah at the end of the eleventh century. Outwardly Moslem,
the inner mysteries had no connection with either Mohammedan or any
other religion, and indeed the cult seems to be in many ways a kind of
bastard Masonic organization.
Nominally a Moslem sect of Ismailites, the organization was under a
commander, the _Sheik-al-Tebel_, or Chief of the Mountains, who
was served by minor chiefs or priors--the three _Dai-al-kirbal_.
Following these came the _Dais_ or adepts, and below them three
minor grades, _Refigos_, _Fedais_, and _Lasigos_.[35]
The Fedais or “entered apprentice” grade furnished the rank and file of
the fanatical executants of the paramount will, and these Fedais, who
were customarily mentally and physically pathic, never rose above this
step in the mysteries.
The Society of the Assassins was nominally suppressed by Halaga,
the Mogul invader of the middle of the thirteenth century, but the
knowledge, the secrets, and the traditions endured and still endure to
this day.
The organization was undoubtedly an evil one; it also had nothing to
do with Masonry, but it is an interesting example of an occult society
whose powers affected the course of history, and methods of working
were essentially based upon mechanical rather than spiritual methods of
producing a certain state of mind.
The effect of hashish is a very difficult thing to define. Essentially
a hypnotic--an annihilator of time and space and a stimulant of
hallucinations--it is also a drug largely dependent on the idiosyncracy
of the individual. The same does not necessarily produce equivalent
results in individuals of differing temperament, and for all practical
purposes the psychic value of the dose varies inversely with the
standard of intelligence of the recipient. Also, when dealing with
subjects of dual or multiple personality, it tends to liberate the more
violent and uncontrolled of the individualities.
Hashish is absorbed rapidly. Cases have been known where a little of
the extract used as an anodyne in corn plasters has been absorbed and
produced hallucinatory state. As a smoke, veiled by incense or mixed
with tobacco, rapid intoxication results from its inhalation. This was
one of the keys--perhaps the greatest of the keys--to the storehouse of
those treasures of the mind which are the time Elixir, the True Gold of
the Magi.
In actual practice there is a preliminary state of suggestibility under
the influence of hashish when the operator can exercise his will upon
that of the subject. This stage is soon passed over and in the later
dream states suggestion is inoperative.
The modern pharmacist has lost the secret of the herb whose therapeutic
function is to control the action of the cannabis indica, so that the
subject remained in the suggestible state and did not pass on to the
later stages of hallucinatory visions.
We may take it that so far as the old world is concerned, the half
of the secret has been recovered, but the balancing or deterrent
herb is still unrecognized by the pharmacopœia and known only to a
specialist few among experimental occultists. Just as hashish itself
is missing from the recipient, the Ebers papyri, so is the balancing
coefficient.[36]
On the other hand, the same secret of priestcraft is known on the
other side of the Atlantic. We may or may not believe in the myth
of lost Atlantis and the transmitted ritual, but both the Zaquis of
Sonora and the Tamachecks of Guatemala possess a ritual observance in
which cannabis Americana, a new cousin of the cannabis indica, is the
stimulant agent.
Other tribes use a brew of the mescal bean, but this is a purely
American species and the active principle anhalonium,[37] does not act
on precisely the same nerve centres as the cannabinote principle of the
hemps.
In both cases the induction of a species of intoxication by means of
the sacred herbs gathered in certain lunar or astrological aspects
is held by the natives to be the basis of the communion with the
spirits of the departed dead. The Spiritualist believes that there are
spirits of the dead, the physiologist claims that the “spirits” are
hallucinatory or that they are merely reflex as from the subconscious
mind of the individual or of other individuals. This twin explanation
runs through all psychic phenomena, but not until all phenomena known
to be produced by Spiritualist circles can be produced under hypnosis
will the Spiritualist theory be finally disproved.
The rank and file of Spiritualists are unaware that the scientific
world has a demonstrable answer to nine-tenths of the wonder that
the believing Spiritualist is convinced can only occur by means of
discarnate spirit intelligences. But the honest investigator should
bear in mind that only certain rare phenomena remain unchallenged and
are at present unattainable by practising psychologists.
When the phenomena of materialization--the externalization of
force--are producible by hypnotists, then the whole spirit hypothesis
is imperilled, for the scientists will be able to produce these effects
not by spirit intervention but at the behest of human will.
Still, for the moment, the uncritical white, like the barbarous Indian,
is justified in his belief in external spirit agency as the only
explanation for the apparently miraculous.
A friend of mine who had been a member of an exploring expedition whose
mission was to trace a tributary of the river Usmacinta in Chiapas on
the Mexico-Guatemala border to its source in the volcanic country round
the unknown Lago de Peten, made a careful study of the ritual of the
Tamachacks.
These people still carry out a pre-Columbian religion which antedates
that of the Aztec and Toltec civilizations both of Mexico and the
Yucatan peninsula.
Essentially symbolic in that it takes into account primitive nature and
ancestor worship, the basis of the cult is the evocation of the spirits
of the departed dead for tribal and personal counsel and consultation.
The means employed in the production of the psychic state is the smoke
of the _cannabis americana_. The native name of this herb is
_marihuana_.
The following is my friend’s description of one of the actual native
ceremonies at which he was present:
“We were up in the Intamal country about four days’ hard river
travelling beyond the San Cristobal frontier. Little by little,
the isolated plantations disappeared, and soon we were deep in the
untouched jungle country where there are only native villages.
“That day I was with the advance party, and as we were making a fairly
complete cadastral survey of our route, we deviated slightly toward a
largish jungle-covered hill that would furnish us with an excellent
commanding position for triangulation.
“My native peons were carrying our little transit theodolite and we
were following a native track that led toward the hill when our party
was suddenly surrounded.
“A whistle blew in the jungle and out from the bush came semi-nude
Indians variously armed. A few had trade guns, but the bulk carried the
inevitable machete, while a minority had short bows and long quivers of
obsidian-headed arrows.
“They offered us no overt violence, but made it abundantly clear that
they resented any party attempting to scale their hill. Most of the
dialogue was in the native tongue, a debased agglutinative inflective
speech similar to Nanhatl. The leader, who wore a peculiar breastplate
of featherwork, could, however, talk Spanish comparatively fluently.
“My greatest trouble was to induce him to understand that we were not
a prospecting party and were not after gold. Talk with our men who had
been with us some months finally reassured him. A chance compliment
of mine about his feather breastplate, which was of quetzal feathers,
opened the magic door to me.
“It was astonishing to that Indian, who had probably not seen a hundred
white men, as distinct from Mexicans, in all his life, to find in me a
man who knew more about the mythological importance of the quetzal bird
than he knew himself.
“My work on the ruined cities of Yucatan and my studies of the Mittall
codices and similar work had given me a sound knowledge of the worship
of Quetzalcoatl the god of the Morning Star, to whom the wonderful
emerald-plumaged quetzal bird is sacred.
“To cut a long story short, I arranged things with the head-man so
that we could camp in his village that night. The people were kindly,
once they understood that we were not gold hunters and meant no harm,
and my friend the head-man, having introduced me to certain elders and
discussed with them my knowledge of their almost extinct faith, invited
me to be present as a participant in a religious feast to be held that
night.
“The feast was that of the Cozca cuaptli--the feast of vultures, birds
as important in the Mayan underworld as in the Egyptian ceremonies.
“Shortly after dusk I left the village with them, going alone and to
all external seeming unarmed. We made a long journey through the bush,
climbing higher all the time, and I realized that we were actually on
the sacred hill that they had forbidden us to ascend.
“Here and there along the route we were stopped by sentries or guards,
but at last gained the top of the hill. Here, encircled by trees, was a
flat table top or plateau a few acres in extent.
“Rising on the plateau was a series of three square terraces
culminating in a small ruined building, roofless yet sound as to its
walls. The lowest plateau was packed with Indians; on the second were
congregated the elect--the tribal seniors and the priests. Above them a
figure or two moved in the building.
“My friends took some time explaining my presence, and it was obvious
that I was regarded with dark disfavour by the mass of the natives.
Soon it dawned on me that I was under guard, an unobtrusive guard, but
nevertheless under guard. At last I was taken to the high priest of the
ceremonial.
“He was a wonderful old Indian who spoke the accented Latin Spanish of
forgotten generations. He examined me, and though I could not reply to
certain mysterious ritualistic questions that he put to me, he was at
length satisfied that I had an efficient working knowledge not only
of his ritual but of its underlying astronomical and philosophical
significance. Eventually he was satisfied, and on a word from him I
was taken in hand by two native youths who bound a fillet of red-dyed
wool worked with feather devices round my brow and gave me a peeled
rod surmounted by a vulture’s skull to hold as a wand of office. Over
my clothes was put a loose dark brown cotton robe sewn with charms and
trimmed at each shoulder with tufts of sombre plumage.
“Thus dressed I took my place among the elders. For a while nothing
happened, then slowly the noise of the crowd died down and expectancy
gave place to clamour. From somewhere in the forest came the sudden
rhythm of native drums seemingly casual, inopportune, and meaninglessly
cadenced.
“Little by little the monotony of the drum throbbing became more
insistent, more definitely rhythmical. A brazier in the temple building
began to glow red, and far below in the valley mists we could see a
group of flaring torches dancing like fireflies as their bearers scaled
the difficult trail.
“Suddenly the voice of the chief priest rose in a high-pitched wailing
call, and as he hailed, a new and brilliant star seemed to spring into
being over the dark crest of a nearby hill.
“The assemblage bowed to the star and broke into a wailing Indian chant
that kept time to the beating of the hidden throbbing drums.
“After the prayer came the dance. To the centre of the second terrace
bearers carried what looked like a bundle of blankets; then nude
but for feather adornments, the young initiates came forward in
processional dance. Every tenth man held a torch, and the dancers
carried out a long ballet symbolical of the burial or consumption of
the mortal body of the vultures.
“They hopped grotesquely like the ill-omened zopilotes or scavenger
vultures they initiated. A querulous clucking accompaniment was uttered
by the chorus of spectators and the files of bronze bodies advanced and
retreated, swayed and circled in slow-hopping processions around the
blanketed heap upon the ground that represented the body.
“Suddenly the drum rhythm changed and a curious whistling pipe music
was heard. The heap of blankets stirred and rattled, from the heap
an arm flung out white bones, a skull rolled to the feet of the
spectators, then the blankets were flung aside and an Indian youth,
completely nude, but painted white and marked with ritual signs, leapt
from the pile.
“Rising to his full height he donned a towering feather headdress of
humming bird and quetzal feathers which gleamed like a myriad jewels in
the torchlight.
“Three times the spectators claimed him as the risen God, then the
drums broke out into a violent triumphant dance in an infectious
measure in which both dancers and spectators joined.
“In the meantime a cloth or canvas housing had been drawn over the
roofless temple by minor priests. The brazier was carried inside, and
suddenly the Boy God, leaving the dancers, ascended the steps and
entered the prepared pavilion.
“As suddenly the drums fell silent and the shrill pipes alone kept up
the eerie tune.
“My friend touched me on the shoulder, the seated elders rose, and,
following the high priest, we made our way into the sanctuary.
“Ranging ourselves along the walls we sat down in an open square. In
the centre was the youth stretched on a skin-covered native bedstead,
at its head the brazier.
“Swiftly the door was sealed with skin mats; then to the accompaniment
of a muttered ritual and much raising and lowering of skull-tipped
wands, the priest cast herbs into the brazier. The heavy smoke wreathed
about in the close room and a sense of languor fell upon me.
“Right and left I could hear the elders inhaling the vapour, then one
after another they succumbed to its influence. Then came an invocation
to the spirits, and the old men began to talk to spirits that they
alone could see among the hazy, drug-laden smoke of the lodge.
“As if inspired, the boy uttered oracular wisdom, now answering
questions put to him, now declaiming what he had heard the spirits
say. Slowly the drug gained in its effect over me. The painted leather
screens on the rude walls became instinct with life, the crude stone
carving seemed alive and writhing, and all the air seemed charged with
flashing processions of colours and sonorous music.
“I must have been overcome by the fumes, for I remember nothing more
till I came to in the dawn-light in one of the terraces outside the
building. They gave me a calabash of herb-scented goat’s milk to drink,
and in a moment or two my brain cleared.... I made it my interest to
get some of the marihuana herb, which I send you.”
Analysis of the marihuana revealed that it contained about twenty-five
per cent. admixture of other herbs in addition to the main base of
_cannabis americana_. A gum or sap exudation of an aromatic nature
served to bind the mass together.
A personal experiment carried out with a small portion of the mixture
proved that identical hallucinatory results could be induced by its
use in a London room as well as on the top of a Guatemalan Tescalli.
Of a party of four, three saw colour visions, two heard music, and one
described figures of Mazan mythology with some exactness. As, however,
we all know the origin of the incense and its connection, these latter
visions may be more properly ascribed to suggestion than held to have
objective existence as spirit phenomena.
There is reason to believe that other plants, and possibly some
synthetic products, have the same peculiar properties of the liberation
of the “psyche.” In the same way, although consumption as a draught or
as an inhaled smoke veiled by incense are the ritual ways of achieving
a physiological result, the same might be achieved by spraying a
solution into the air, by absorption through the skin (this may have
been the _raison d’être_ of some “witch ointments”), or by
hypodermic injection.
Needless to say, any attempt to experiment in these matters is
extremely unwise and dangerous.
FOOTNOTES:
[33] _Paracelsus_, Fr. A. Rufini.
[34] See Ebers papyri.
[35] See _Geschichte der Asassinen_. By T. von Hammer. Burgstall, _Un
Grand Maître des Assassins au Temps du Saladin_. Also _Ars Quatuo
Coronati_, Vol. ----
[36] The public interest would not be served by the revelation of the
second missing ingredient, but it is now known.
[37] See monograph on _Mescal_ by Havelock Ellis.
CHAPTER VIII
BEASTS AND ELEMENTALS
The apparitions customarily seen by those who are clairvoyant or
psychic are those that take human form.
In many cases they represent known humans who have passed over, but
sometimes we are brought into contact with non-human apparitions.
These may be semi-human or demoniac forms, they may be animal forms, or
they may be simply manifestations of elemental forces. Discarding the
trumpery attempts at classification that have been advanced by one or
two writers of so-called “ghost stories,” it must be recognized that
the occultist is faced with problems that cannot be readily reduced or
explained by any logical hypothesis.
The Spiritualist approaches the question according to set theories.
“Spirits,” says he, “can do anything. They take what shape they will.
Why they do so is a mystery.”
The woman Spiritualist is usually as open to believe that the spirit
of her beloved Pekingese or Pomeranian can return in astral form, and
ascribes it to the influences of love. “Love me, love my dog,” appears
to furnish as good an explanation of animal manifestation as any.
On the other hand, when you get some absolutely extraordinary
manifestations such as the seal that appeared to Sir Garnet
Wolseley,[38] or the materialization of vampire bats, partially
developed monkeys or a full-sized goat,--and I have known all these to
occur,--then the love theory falls down badly, and we must seek a more
reasonable explanation.
If we accept the idea of discarnate spirit intelligences we certainly
should not accept them all at face value as good. The bulk of humanity
that has passed over has not been good, or for the matter of that,
Christian.
Assuming that these spirits were human, but took bestial form for
purposes of their own, we may find some glimmerings of support for a
new theory when we realize that in the past and in the present idolatry
prevails. The idols of savages are usually totemistic. And they held
that the identity of soul persisted after death, not in a new human
existence but as a rebirth in animal form.
To a large extent, totemistic paganism was mixed up with licentious
and bestial festivals, useful in assuring the continuance and
multiplication of a savage tribe, but evolving practices repugnant to
Western ethics.
The beasts that come back--are beastly. The ghost dog that scratches
and paws and leaps into its mistress’s lap is a very different thing to
that which it pretends to be. When we reach the foulness of the goat or
bat manifestations we feel with no shadow of doubt that we are in touch
with the unmasked spirits of evil. Not only visible form, but touch
and smell are present. We are brought into distinct contact with the
sardonic mocking terror that lies on the other side of life.
The border between the brutal and blood-lusting savage and the demon,
is a slender one. The conception of a singularly evil earth-bound
negro spirit who has believed in an after-life in which his soul will
inhabit the body of an ape or a leopard, comes very close to the
accepted idea of a devil or demon.
We get something of the same basic conception in the idea of the
wer-wolf or vampire, and there is a singular reinforcement of
this theory in that in the Dark Ages when paganism was yielding
reluctantly to the inroads of the Christian faith, the early fathers
explicitly identified such animal manifestations with the sorcery of
paganism. The fantastic gargoyles that ornament cathedrals are simply
traditionalizations of that period when these beast incarnations in all
their devilishness contended against the spread of a purer faith.
Sometimes it chances that we, in this twentieth century, by accident
open a door through which a tenth-century devil can creep in.
Other occultists, notably those of the Viennese school, hold that the
beast manifestations are not forms or shapes assumed by evil spirits
that have been mortal, but are, as it were, living evil thought-forms,
and are the incarnation of dead and evil cults on which a great deal
of human thought-energy had been expended during some time in the
world’s history.
Proof is not possible, and it is not yet the time to marshal the facts
which would seem to indicate that a dead cultus can yet live on,
supported, as it were, by the emotional sin of the present-day world,
although the sin is divorced from its old ritual significance. This
theory of the continuation of the sacrificial value of sin is of course
one of the most serious aspects of the art of sorcery. Propitiation
and symbolism are often linked up in a way that perplexes the most
agile-witted student of the occult, and it may well be that certain
seemingly innocent ritual acts have contributed their quota to the
maintenance of life in certain forgotten cults--whose entities come
suddenly into being again in a most alarming manner.
To the occultist who thinks this matter out, the identity of beast
materializations with incarnate prototypes of sin will probably be
manifest.
As it is, the essential quality of the evil that these entities typify
and attempt to induce does not become apparent from a chance unsought
materialization, but the medium who sees “animals” is suspect.
Repeated evocations of these entities lead to disaster. The beast
becomes an obsession and is to all intents and purposes the old
“familiar” of the days of witchcraft.
For reasons which are hinted at above, but which cannot be more fully
expounded in a book of this nature, the beast materialization is a
phenomenon which should be avoided at all costs. If such occurs at a
séance, break off the sitting at once. If these phenomena appear to be
connected with any particular medium, there are the gravest reasons for
seeking another sensitive. Above all things, avoid people who claim
that the spirits of pet animals have come back to them.
The cynic may contend that it is folly to be afraid of the spirits of
poor dumb animals and yet invite communication with the mortal dead.
The occultist and the mystic who know something of the mysteries will,
however, see the reasons. To-day, when thousands are interested in
psychical matters, knowledge has been forgotten or trampled underfoot.
The well-meaning, loud-voiced blind lead myriads to a new heaven,
acclaiming hell vanquished because in their rapturous exultation over
new discoveries of old things they have forgotten the absolute rule of
balance. Positive and Negative, Good and Bad, Strong and Weak, Plus or
Minus.
There is balance in all things, and this sudden acclamation of the
Unseen World as all good, all easy, and quite safe, is perfectly
ridiculous.
Occultism is not either good, safe, nor amusing for the vast majority
of people. Spiritualism as generally practised is a kind of beneficent
bobbing into the Tom Tiddler’s ground of the Unseen. There is a
pleasing conceit that if the Powers of Evil turn up it will be enough
to utter a Protestant prayer and say that because you are “good” a bogy
can’t touch you.
This is a rather childish way of treating the Powers--in point of fact,
it does not work, it is very much like saying that lightning cannot
strike you because you have rubber heels to your boots.
It is a melancholy reflection that the very people who go about reading
little handbooks on “Knowledge is Power,” never realize that it is the
right use of knowledge that means Power and that sometimes the coming
of Power without knowledge spells catastrophe for all concerned.
Besides the dangerous and perplexing beast manifestations, there is a
third class of phenomenon which is manifestly neither human nor animal,
but bears a close relationship to Elemental Forces such as Fire, Air,
or Water. These phenomena are the only ones properly described as due
to elementals, but a certain confusion has arisen through the use of
this word as applied to all spirit phenomena which were not broadly
classifiable as human.
Ghosts, giant appearances, and ferocious and evil spirits of all kinds
have been described as elementals, so that the word has lost its real
precision. Originally all these outside spirits not known as the souls
of mortals were classed as being spirits of Earth or Fire, Air, or
Water, and by this arbitrary relation to the elements became known as
Elementals.
In effect only phenomena where no apparent organic or physical
materialization or incarnation of any kind occurs should be classified
as purely elemental.
Of these the heat elemental is a phenomenon that is occasionally
observed. Air or wind phenomena are also known, but I know of no case
where earth or water phenomena apart from “apports” by a materialized
presence claiming to be an earth or water elemental, have been noted.
To my mind the organic presence destroys the evidential value of the
latter accounts due to the effect of elementals as distinct from
spirits.
The elementals are properly those intelligences (the word spirits
conveys a wrong implication) that are termed in the old rituals the
Powers of Fire, Air, Earth, and Water. In magic it was held that these
Powers were served by spirits, but there is reason to suppose that this
view rose from the too literal interpretation of the old rituals and
maltranslation of the occult “Grimoires” of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries.
The appearance of these elementals is rare and sporadic, usually
associated with a place or an individual rather than with the sitting
of a séance.
Sometimes the individual afflicted by the elemental is affected in
a negative manner--that is to say, he is immune to the effect of
fire or heat or has the power of inducing enormous draughts and air
disturbances in confined space without knowing why.
These cases are difficult, and though a “fireproof” medium who can
carry live coals in his hand may claim it to be due to the effect of
a fire-elemental control, it must be remembered that in many cases
autosuggestion will induce an extension of the protective ecto- or
psychoplasm which is equally effective.[39] The South Sea and Indian
fanatics who walk across red-hot stones indubitably possess this
self-contained power.
I have only a second-hand instance of a pure heat elemental to relate.
This was communicated to me by a very well-known mountain painter whom
we will call Calvin Muir.
He had been down in the Welsh Marches where the low foothills of the
mountains just change into stretches of rocky moors above the low-lying
wooded valleys.
Muir was by habit and training a keen observer. He was also a Frater
of the Rosicrucian Society and had a wide general knowledge of many
strange aspects of occultism.
“I was staying down at Pwhyll-gor, a little hill village with a few
cottages and two inns of small attractiveness,” said he. “I had been
there some six weeks or so, sketching and wandering and doing a little
trout fishing when the mood took me. One evening I found the taproom
learnedly discussing the blight that was affecting an orchard in a
nearby farm.
“According to them, half the affected trees appeared burnt or seared
and there was great discussion whether lightning could strike without a
concurrent storm or thunderclap.
“Others held that it was probably a mischievous trick by small boys,
but one old man declared it had happened before in the same district
in his father’s time and that it was due to ‘owl blasting.’
“This, it seemed, was a form of witchcraft or magic, but more closely
related to the malevolent forces of nature than to mortal ill will. He
was not communicative, but disclosed enough to make me determine to
visit the farm next day.
“I found it up on the hillside in a little natural valley or gap where
a few fertile acres had been reclaimed. It was a poor enough small
homestead, bleak and barren, and the wretched little orchard was poor
enough in all conscience without suffering supernatural violences.
“The farmer’s wife received me and made no secret of her troubles.
Together we went out to view the damage, and I found two cider-apple
trees whose foliage and fruit had been literally burnt in an area as
large as a good-sized cart wheel.
“That was the queer thing about it, the close circular or rather
spherical limits of the damage. It was just as if a red-hot round bite
had been taken out of the thick of the tree, and left the neighbour
twigs and leaves unsinged--unseared.
“They had no explanation to offer except lightning, and it was manifest
they had no real belief in that. I suggested boys, but was told there
was but one about the farm--even as I made the suggestion I knew it was
futile; but what would you?
“I asked when the calamity occurred, and they told me in full daytime
between dawn and lunch. In the morning all had been well in the
orchard--by noon two trees half ruined, and no one had seen sight of
smoke or flame, nor sound.
“The suggestion of ‘owl blasting’ brought no response. They were
strangers to the country, having come some ten years ago from Swansea
way.
“‘It’s the hills,’ said the woman.
“‘Well,’ said I, ‘another watcher will do no harm. Can you give me a
shakedown, and to-morrow I will go out with my easel and stay sketching
the orchard.’
“She assented without enthusiasm, and I spent that night at the farm.
“The farmer was no wiser and rather surlier than his wife, but both
were manifestly oppressed with fear. Their boy alone was cheerful and
unmoved.
“The next day I rose at cock-crow, passed through the orchard and out
on to the hills to a patch of rock and heather some two hundred yards
away.
“By seven o’clock I had watched in a good stretch of the farm and the
orchard in which not a soul had moved. All at once, I stood with my
brush poised in amazement, as there high above the trees was poised a
small, blue-yellow lambent flame that seemed to drift sideways in the
windless air.
“For a moment I thought it was a fire balloon, then saw my error.
Without a thought I ran toward it just in time to see it settle down on
to a tree whose leaves in a moment turned from green to darkening brown
and burst almost immediately into crackling flame. My cries brought out
the boy and the woman from the house and on their coming it vanished
and we were left gazing at the damage it had done.
“I told them what I had seen, and the woman suddenly put her apron
over her face and burst into tears. We sent the boy to fetch her
husband, who came in a marked state of worry and agitation.
“I could not follow the quick interchange of Welsh words that ensued.
The man then asked me who had told me of ‘owl blasting,’ and together
we went to the village to find the old man.
“It appeared that a month or so back the farmer had used some old
rocks which were part of the ring of a Cromlech to rebuild one of his
stone walls. This, according to the old man, had brought down the ‘owl
blasting’ upon him.
“Painstakingly they dragged the stones back to their original place,
and I believe certain ceremonial was gone through at the next quarter
of the moon.
“The precise things done were kept secret from me, for I was a stranger
and suspect, but I gathered enough to understand that a mercenary
destruction or disturbance of Druidic remains brought its own reward.
“All that I can say is that a ball of fire came out of clear sky
quite slowly and destroyed part of the foliage of an apple tree under
conditions precluding any human agency.”
The above is Calvin Muir’s account. To an occultist the connection
between the Power of Fire and the violation of a Cromlech is
convincing, but it is difficult to conceive in what manner the Powers
were propitiated.
Scientific people have suggested slow-drying phosphorus solution as
an explanation of an apparently supernatural occurrence. Muir, on the
other hand, was positive that it was a true manifestation of a fire
elemental, and that the old man who knew about “owl blasting” was not
an interested or malevolent party in a peasant’s plot.
So far, no hypothesis that will serve as a rational explanation of all
the facts has ever been advanced.
FOOTNOTES:
[38] Mr. Gambier Bolton, who was present, assures me of the reality of
this inexplicable incident.
[39] The really genuine fire medium can hold a red-hot coal or glowing
asbestos from the gas fire on the palm of the hand for two minutes. No
shorter duration of time should be accepted.
CHAPTER IX
POSSESSION
From time to time we come across cases of demoniacal possession. In
these there is apparently the permanent or temporary domination of
the soul or mind of the victim by an evil spirit or demon of alien
personality.
Cases of possession are invariably claimed as “proofs” of the existence
of spirit intelligence, and in cases where the possession is nominally
at least a mild one the possessed are sometimes quite proud of it. It
is, in fact, exhibited as quaint and dreadful deformity would be--the
phrase is exact. It is a mental deformity.
Now, it must be understood that the psychologists have of late years
made enormous strides in their knowledge of the vagaries of the
subconscious mind. Possession, like “shell shock,” is in ninety-nine
cases out of a hundred a perfectly curable disease. It springs
from a perversion of the subconscious state, can be diagnosed by
psychoanalysis and eradicated by transference or by suggestion.
The processes of Christian exorcism often attained the same result.
The wise priest was able to “cast out demons,” and medical science of
to-day, working by analytical methods rather than by rule-of-thumb,
achieves the same results.
Whether one accepts the scientific theory that these “possessions”
are but multiple personalities and that there may be several mental
personalities in the one mind, or whether one believes the idea of
spirit influence, does not much matter. In any case the doors of
the mind can be firmly locked on either spirit or mental disease.
Possession is curable--if the patient really desires to be cured.
Possession can be readily evoked in nearly all hypnotic subjects. Not
only one but several distinct personalities can be developed by the
psychologist. Janet’s experiments developed in Madame B. three separate
individuals: Léonie, known in the waking state as a “possessor”;
Léontine under the light stage of hypnosis, and Léonore in a deeper
condition.[40]
Even a popular knowledge and comprehension of this peculiar disease
of the subconscious is difficult to attain without a sound elementary
grasp of the principles of psychology. The bulk of books on the subject
are written for the medical or scientific mind, but Coriat’s book is a
sound and easily grasped introductory manual.[41]
The normal form of mental trouble is an obsession, the fear or “phobia”
of some perfectly normal thing, a desire to touch objects. There
are dozens of variations of these obsessions which spring to mind.
The state of possession can only be said to exist when the mind is
under the dominance of another individuality distinct from the normal
personality.
It is curious to note that cases of possession by good spirits are
absolutely unknown. A medium may be “controlled” by spirits said to
be good, but this does not amount to a possession. In every case
where normal personality has been overthrown and another or other
personalities take possession we find--evil.
This is to certain extent explicable if we realize that every thought
or wish that occurs to us, and which we _repress_ because it is
bad or evil, is not destroyed or wiped out of existence, but stays as a
suppressed desire or wish buried in the recesses of subconscious mind.
When normal conscious control is overthrown, these subconsciously
stored desires or wishes come bubbling up--a fact that seems to explain
why the language used by nicely brought up girls recovering after the
administration of an anæsthetic would put a coal-heaver to flight.
In the dream state, too, these repressed desires escape all mixed up
from their bondage, a fact which accounts for the peculiar medley of
dreams and their frequent lack of moral balance and accentuation of
sexual characteristics.
The character of a “possessing” demon is in most cases determined by
experiences that the victim has passed through. Shock, neurasthenia,
illness, disappointment; all these may bring about the splitting of
the personality so that the secondary or possessing personality can
overthrow consciousness and take charge.
The victim is often horrified to find his or her mind continually
filled with terrible desires, intolerable passions, and thoughts
utterly repugnant to the sedate conscious self.
Sometimes the idea of possession is stimulated by messages received
through mediums or by automatic writing--this is one of the many
frequent cases where undigested, uneducated Spiritualism is often
abominably harmful. Anything that helps the idea of possession to grow
in the afflicted mind should be avoided.
Gradually the nature of the possession becomes more acutely defined and
is recognized as a different personality--an evil personality resident
in the same body using the same mind. It is in all human probability
only the repressed wishes--all the pent-up unfulfilled evil of a
lifetime taking shape and urging gratification rather than repression
in a new and secondary personality.
Possession by evil spirits is invariably connected with violence and
vice. Sometimes the attacks are periodic; always they are signs of
mental instability and psychic disease. A possessed person is a fit
subject for psychotherapeutic treatment by qualified medical men, but
a source of very real psychic danger in a séance or as a subject for
well-meaning experiments in faith healing by amateurs.
In psychic healing the doctrine of sacrifice and the scapegoat had a
very literal interpretation. The healer often takes upon his own soul
the burden that he lifts from another. This psychic transference can
only be done in safety by certain and specific ways beyond the scope of
this work. It is sufficient to indicate the danger.
Possession in its varying aspects has given rise to many myths and
legends. Larvæ, Incubi, and Succubi were all demons of temporary
possession that tempted man. In the Middle Ages and far later the Faith
strove lustily with them, and where exorcism failed the stake was found
effective.
According to the older writers, Incubi were male demons who possessed
the bodies of mortal women; Succubi, she-devils who seduced the souls
and possessed the bodies of men.
Sorcerers had the power of despatching these erotic demons to gratify
their associates or plague their enemies, and it is notable that this
doctrine of vicarious enjoyment or satisfaction reappears in the
Spiritualist belief in gross and earth-bound souls of sinners who haunt
drinking booths and houses of ill-fame, deriving vicarious satisfaction
from the sins of the living.
The old demonographers give lurid and disgustful accounts of these
“possessions”[42] and insist on their contagious nature. Prosecutions
for sorcery, “possession,” and similar crimes raged throughout the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and in the pages of the records we
can trace the Incubi and Succubi now hidden as familiar spirits, now
described as the devil himself, but curiously true in their nature to
the occasional demoniac possessions that trouble the twentieth century.
Even if one admits that the average “possession” is one’s own evil
subconscious personality attempting to overthrow the conscious mind,
certain questions and possibilities arise.
That the astral body or mind can make discarnate journeys is a
well-known fact to all Spiritualists. There is, then, no reason to
suppose that this faculty would be less material in a possessive
personality whose origin was specifically in the dream realm of the
subconscious.
Indeed, it is far more plausible to suppose that the possessor or
demon mind would find it far easier to make the journey than the other
personality, for it is recognized that the release of the actual body
occurs in trance or dream state.
We have here, then, some possible psychic explanation of many of the
cases of sorcery where the complaint of the sufferers was that they
were victimized during sleep by demons. In other words, they were the
recipients of undesired attentions by the astral body of either the
sorcerer or his followers or associates.
This has been suggested to me in various forms by people who have
believed themselves the victims of discarnate spirits--and who were
at times possessed by them against their wills. It must, however,
be admitted that in all such cases which came under my notice there
had been connection with Spiritualist circles or with minor forms of
occultism, and it was impossible to exclude the possibility of previous
hypnosis, autosuggestion, or the little-known but common phenomena of
psychic invasion--by other members of the circle.
Viewed from the psychical point of view, possession is an extremely
difficult problem. Real spirit possession might occur, suggestion or
psychic invasion is often indicated; and, as I have explained, multiple
personality and the concentration of evil repressed desires in the
secondary individuality furnishes a complete scientific explanation of
the phenomenon.
These cases must be taken individually, and there are not yet grounds
for laying down a general explanation of all the phenomena. One of the
great difficulties is the natural reluctance of the victims to disclose
exact details, but no case of possession which was not either openly or
secretly erotic is known to be recorded.
Possessions fall under two heads: those in which the possessing spirit
urges the victim to the commission of injurious acts in person, and
thereby derives direct satisfaction through the body; and those in
which a vicarious satisfaction is achieved through the astral body. The
possibility of intercourse between spirit and mortal has been held to
be a possibility since Biblical times, and the expulsion of the fallen
angels was due to this sin.[43]
Stainton Moses held that much of the lower phenomena was caused by
spirits who had not yet reached man’s plane of intelligence, just as
some was produced by others who had proceeded further and returned
to enlighten man.[44] This belief occurs in folklore, in Oriental
religions, and in a myriad variations.
The djinn of the _Arabian Nights_ is a very real thing to the
modern native, and a considerable literature exists in which the
intercourse between djinn and mortal is the main theme. In the same way
the belief in fairy wives or husbands is not so long dead in Europe and
alive to-day among the hill tribes of the Pamirs.
The whole theory of spirit possession or demon possession is linked
with this idea. In the “possessed” state the victim is unconscious of
deeds done and words said. The blame is the blame of the demon.
In nine cases out of ten frenzy or hysteria accompanies nominal
possession. There are gifts of strange tongues usually said to be
Eastern or Indian, and the possessed pour out streams of gibberish in
which a few dominant words or phrases bearing a slight resemblance to
some known tongue may be distinguished.
Clairvoyance, the gift of prophecy, and other psychic qualities appear
at the time of the seizure. Often there is marked anæsthesia and
insensitiveness to pain. Hot objects may be handled with impunity,
electric shocks are not felt.
These cases are not genuine cases of possession in its worst sense when
they begin, but very frequently the victim is urged by fools to develop
these wonderful powers and the Darker Powers accept the invitation and
step in.
The occultist and the scientist agree about very few things, but both
agree that possession and surrender to possession are the first steps
to moral and physical disaster. The transferable or infectious quality
of possession is not so widely known as it should be, but with the
increase of Spiritualism its effects will in a year or so become
capable of perception by even the most unenlightened.
A girl of my acquaintance, the daughter of wealthy and respectable
Midland parents, became interested in psychic matters. Her faith was
greater than her powers of discernment and she was, like all too many
Spiritualists, of neurotic and hysterical temperament.
Her first actual essays were with automatic writing; then as she was
an art student she tried painting under spirit control. Some slight
success attended her efforts and she became interested in Egyptian
mythology because her spirit paintings were Egyptian in character.
I did not see her frequently, but met her about a year after she had
taken up her Egyptian studies. She stated that in her was reincarnated
the soul of an Egyptian priest. This invading entity dominated her
entire mind and mode of life.
Before, she had been a healthy, normal girl although inclined to be
neurotic, but once given over to this obsession she found that owing
to the psychic change of sex all men were repugnant to her. She was
possessed by a male mind in a female body, and with this extraordinary
inversion of normal feelings was obliged to break off her engagement.
The remainder of her life was short but tragic. Her automatic writings
(which were destroyed after her unhappy death at her own hands)
showed the ascendancy of the possessing demon as it grew over her.
Interspersed with these records were the tragic outpourings of her
soul, her self-analysis of her psychic disaster. There were things
there terrible to read.
It is not perhaps fair to blame psychic science for disastrous
tragedies such as these, but it must be openly admitted that occultism
is not for the multitude.
There is nothing known to-day that was not known in the past, but
Spiritualists and other investigators have discovered a few of the
minor marvels that were known to, but wisely hidden by, the ancients.
Sometimes they are like children playing with a box of drugs, some of
which are active poisons.
One message of consolation, one instance of subconscious telepathy with
a medium, and they are convinced of the truth of Spiritualism and will
not be warned that whatever truth it may hold it also holds Untruth and
Danger as well as Hope.
The threshold between the innocent “control” and the malevolent “demons
of possession” is a very, very narrow one. Sometimes, indeed often,
there is no dividing line at all. The charges that Spiritualism is the
high road to lunacy have these unfortunate occurrences as their basis.
FOOTNOTES:
[40] Pierre Janet: _L’automatisme Psychologique_.
[41] _Abnormal Psychology._ Isador H. Coriat. Rider, 1911.
[42] See _Tableau de L’Inconstance des Démons_. Pierre de Lancre.
[43] Jude VI, 7.
[44] Stainton Moses, _Spirit Identity_, Appendix II.
CHAPTER X
SOME NEW FACTS AND THEORIES
There are a number of peculiar phenomena that come under no specific
head or grouping at present; that is to say, they are infrequent or
isolated instances which cannot yet be relegated to a specific class
and labelled.
I have frequently come across hearsay evidence and been unable to find
the original observer. In other cases the character or mentality of the
observer has been such as to render the account entirely valueless from
any point of view except that of sensationalism.
The result is that we are faced with an unusual case which remains
mysterious, usually because opportunity for a thorough examination of
the phenomena is lacking.
This is perhaps best illustrated by those cases of material phenomena
which we class as Poltergeists.
The most recently recorded case was the Cheriton dugout,[45] but there
are many others recorded and a good many more details of which have
been suppressed for personal or economic reasons.
Ronald Grey has some interesting notes under this heading to which I
will now turn.
The distinguishing characteristics of a poltergeist haunting are
aimless violence and mischief accompanied by the displacement and
turning about of material objects and unaccompanied by any visible
materialization of the manifesting entity.
In many cases these mischievous phenomena are associated directly or
indirectly with children or young persons. Sceptics usually attribute
the phenomena to pure mischief and a desire to mystify or be revenged
on somebody by the child, but I do not hold that this is the true
interpretation.
The actual power of physical mediumship is a gift which is in some
strange way connected with physiological conditions. It is often more
marked in ill-health than when well and sometimes vanishes completely
or may return again after a year or two.
It has now been ascertained that the site of the haunting is the
functioning factor and that one or other of the humans present is the
often unconscious medium. If a known physical medium is substituted for
the original one the phenomena will often be as effectively reproduced.
The doctrine held by Spiritualists that a poltergeist is a low type of
spirit essentially non-human and akin to the tree dryads or earth or
air elementals does not seem to be borne out in practice.
Just as many people hold that the bulk of harmless as distinct from
malignant apparitions are “thought-impressions” on the surrounding
walls which become visible to people with the gift of clairvoyance,
so are there some grounds for believing that the poltergeist
manifestations are due not to any directing intelligence at all but to
the permanence of some old act or thought which still has in some cases
the power of influencing matter.
Mind cannot affect matter without the influence of a human
intermediary. But the physical medium is a human intermediary and
serves as a dynamo or battery for the generation of a necessary force.
Just as table levitations and similar phenomena are produced by
the extrusion of psychical rods or levers which are invisible,[46]
but which are directed to a definite task by intelligence, so the
poltergeist phenomena seem to be similar phenomena but without any
directing intelligence.
This statement needs qualification in the cases where the child medium
has become partly aware that in some strange way he or she is the
prime motor for the phenomena. Then the child’s mind consciously or
subconsciously directing the impulse may focus the manifestation in the
way of impish, malicious tricks afflicting an individual.
The “psychic force” or psychoplasm extended by the medium is very
closely akin to what is termed “animal magnetism”--it seems to be of
nervous origin and physiologically connected with internal secretory
organs.
A slight nervous derangement of one of the many complexes associated
with the age of puberty may quite conceivably endow occasional children
with a transient power of physical mediumship.
The next point is the accumulatory effect of surroundings. Here we
are very much in the dark, but the manifestations do not occur unless
physical limits, such as walls, are present. In a poltergeisted house
two unconscious agents of the activities may, particularly while
asleep, but also while awake, saturate the surroundings with this
peculiar form of energy.
There is nothing to show that this vitality ceases with death; it
certainly continues during the state of sleep, and if it is borne in
mind that even when the soul has passed from the body after death,
life--that is to say, intense bacterial activity--continues, it is
conceivable that the continued extension of this force may continue
from unascertained physiological conditions, and so explain some of the
baffling and distressing phenomena that have occurred in vaults and
given rise to the theory of bodies being buried alive in a cataleptic
condition.
More advanced students will see in the foregoing hypothesis the
explanation of certain obscure texts relative to the Egyptian
processes of embalming, and other religious rituals in connection with
the disposal of corpses. The ancients were keenly aware of certain
monstrous after-death possibilities which the moderns ignore.
This, then, is where the theory of poltergeist manifestations splits.
They are often traceable to
(_a_) Unconscious physical mediums, usually adolescents.
(_b_) In certain difficult cases the human element has been
eliminated, and the only hypothesis is the sudden
manifestation of a latent force derived from the dead.
It should be remembered that the graves of saints become shrines and
that miracles are attributed to them, and that certain most terrible
vampire phenomena are associated with some unsanctified graves.
Just as the hair and nails of some corpses continue to grow to
extravagant lengths long after death, so in certain cases it seems as
if the corruption of the flesh were accompanied by a translation of
the residual vital force or nervous energy--as distinct from soul or
consciousness--into free psychic power.
This energy can apparently be stored in matter such as walls, wood,
etc., and seems to have the quality of remaining latent until some
unknown cause begins to change it from a static to a “dynamic”
condition.
The sorcerer who produces earth from a particular grave and who
treasures unholy mortal relics of evil man, is practising more than a
mere symbolism. He is using matter whose very body may be impregnated
with that peculiar essence or force which is the vehicle of all psychic
phenomena.
People who are interested in serving the Powers of Evil have sedulously
propagated the idea that, however malignant astral powers may be,
there is a law that they cannot harm or injure mortals. This is one
of those dangerous statements that Spiritualists make use of without
knowing what they are talking about. These powers can be and often
have been applied to the most sinister purposes. Utilized by anyone
with occult knowledge and experience they are pregnant with soul- and
body-destroying capacities, and it is fair to say that certain other
occult powers are the least defence against them.
I am inclined to favour the theory that in all cases of poltergeists,
where non-human sources of power are indicated, careful psychic
analysis will reveal some inanimate matter which has been in contact
with either evil-living mortality or the dead, and is serving as the
focus and reservoir of the force. The power appears to be sporadic and
cumulative, but it can be destroyed or dissipated both by material and
by occult means if it can be traced to its source.
The latent cumulative effect of such an evil relic may possibly
stimulate the extension of psychoplasm by unconscious mediums brought
within its sphere of influence. This seems indicated where an exchange
of physical mediums in the one centre of inflection has produced
parallel results. There is also some ground for supposing that the
phases of the moon affect the manifestation.
It is, of course, fashionable to deride the moon, but any seaside
doctor will admit that his patients die with the ebb of the tide; and,
further, it is highly illogical to suppose that an influence which can
affect the vast masses of the tides is without its influence on the
tenuous fluids of vitality.
The lunar effect is probably due to a screening or projection of
specific solar or ethereal vibrations below the range which we see
as light and colour and above that which we recognize as electrical
phenomena.
“The simple undirected energy display of a poltergeist phenomenon may
be converted into a specifically malignant phenomenon. The energy may
be used to form a vehicle for an evoked elemental succubus or incubus,
or might under certain different conditions be similarly utilized
to accommodate or materialize a ‘familiar’ of a higher order,” says
Duchesne, writing of some researches carried out in the Var, “but I am
still at a loss to know what induces the phenomena to appear with such
fulminant energy and purposeless commencement.”
* * * * *
A peculiar case of poltergeist occurred in Hertfordshire last
spring.[47] The farm bailiff of a home farm complained that his
cottage, which looked out on the yard of the farmstead, had become
intolerable. Crockery was smashed on the dresser, pots and pans flew
about while nobody touched them, and when the whole family were at
midday lunch in their living-room a kettle of boiling water which was
simmering on the kitchener hob was brought through an adjoining open
door and slammed down among the diners at the table without spilling a
drop.
Stones were thrown, windows broken, and even bedclothes snatched off. I
went down in response to an invitation by the owner of the estate and
soon convinced myself that the phenomena were authentic.
The family consisted of the bailiff, his wife, a girl of fourteen, and
a son of twenty. The latter was not much in the house, being about on
the hills with the sheep, as it was lambing time.
Previous experience led one to suspect the girl, who seemed quite
honest and very frightened at the occurrences. My host and I were
personal witnesses of flying stones and still more remarkable the
scattering of a big sheaf of straw.
The sheaf was being carried from the barn to the cow-house by the
girl herself at about three in the afternoon. We were talking to the
bailiff’s wife. Suddenly the girl stopped and the big bundle of straw
seemed to be lifted out of her arms at least two feet above her head.
It balanced for a moment or two like a captive gas balloon, then
whirled into thousands of separate straws which flew all about the yard.
No conceivable trick of wind--and it was a wettish, windless day--nor
any human effort could have accomplished it. The truss burst like
a shell, some of the straws flying right over the roofs of the
outbuildings.
The terrified girl burst into tears and ran to her mother for comfort
and protection.
That night we sent the girl away, and though manifestations continued
for another two days, these were of decreasing violence.
The cottage was only a few years old and no deaths had occurred there,
but the farmstead was a very old one, the estate having a connected
history to pre-Tudor times. I was puzzled to find any clue to the
exciting cause of the trouble.
I went over the whole place most carefully, but found nothing to guide
me, and at last turned my attention to the structure of the cottage. A
certain intuition or psychic susceptibility led me to suspect one of
the big kitchen rafters which supported the ceiling of the kitchen and
the floor of the girl’s room.
On inquiry I found that the architect who had designed the new
buildings had employed a local contractor and used old red bricks and
old timber wherever possible in order to preserve the old fashioned
effect given by weathered colours.
It was not difficult to trace the material; the local contractor’s
foreman told us at once where it had come from.
“It stood in our yard here for ten years or more before we put it into
the new buildings,” said the foreman, “and it come to us when we pulled
down Blackley Old Grange.”
“What kind of a place was that?” said I.
“Private madhouse at the last,” he answered. “The owner was a doctor
and he went mad and hanged himself, he did, after killing one of the
patients a month before. He hanged himself just before the visitors was
expected to see the patient he had killed.”
* * * * *
Research carried us no further, except that I learnt that the murdered
patient lay for a month in the room in which she was killed before the
crime was found out, after the man’s suicide. It was impossible to
trace the beam to its position, but I gathered that the doctor hanged
himself from a window bar or curtain hook, not from the beam.
I am inclined to believe that the absorption of force takes place from
prolonged contact with the emanation of the dead rather than from the
transient impression of conscious thoughts, but there was no further
recrudescence of the trouble when an iron girder was substituted for
the beam, and the girl, when brought back, was perfectly normal.
I experimented with the girl later, but did not find that she possessed
any marked gifts, although she was indubitably a good hypnotic
subject. The beam, or rather a section of it, I secured for the
purposes of research, the remainder was burnt.[48]
* * * * *
Another puzzling if popular subject is that of spirit photographs. I
have handled scores of them, but have never yet come across one in
which all possibility of ingenious fraud has been entirely eliminated.
Certain people have claimed peculiar gifts, but in no case has a
satisfactory result been obtained at a genuine test-séance, where
scientific precautions have been observed.
If anyone has this gift it can be demonstrated easily. The studio must
be neutral ground--that is to say, the room must not be the claimant’s
habitual studio. The camera must be provided by the testers, as also
the dark slide and plates. The medium must be stripped perfectly naked
and the same rule should apply to the testing committee if it includes
anyone known to the medium. He should not be allowed to touch plates,
dark slide, or camera except when naked and under close scrutiny.
Development should be carried out under test conditions at the nearest
chemist’s dark room.
There is no known spiritual law which should lead us to think that
a psychograph or spirit photograph is a possibility, and until the
matter has been tested by a properly qualified body of men all such
photographs are open to the gravest suspicion.
Money-making is not the only motive for fraud, and many of the fakers
are often more anxious to build up a bogus reputation for “mystery
working” than to make a direct profit on the transaction.
The avenues of fraud are so numerous that it is only possible to
indicate a few of the methods adopted to deceive the credulous.
The spirit photograph is deemed to be genuine if it is taken
under conditions which an average expert photographer holds to be
fraud-proof. The weakness of the whole case lies in the fact that they
cannot be obtained under genuine scientific, as opposed to amateur,
test conditions.
In a word, the spirit image is imprinted on the negative under
conditions not normally suspected by the photographers.
There are several methods of attaining the result, even when the
photographer brings his own plates and dark slides and his own camera.
_First_ is the background trick. An acid solution of sulphate
of quinine is invisible to the eye, but shows in the photograph.
“Phenomena” painted on the wall or near by the objects appear in the
photograph though invisible to the eye.
_Second_ is the contact process by which a small negative of
the “spirit” face is mounted on a background of card prepared with
radioactive salt solution. Many of these salts are rich in infra-red
rays which will project an image through a metal dark slide. The
“medium” has only to handle the dark slide during the sitting or the
plate in the dark room previous to development, in order to make a
contact image.
A cruder variation of this, the electric pencil flashlight with a
rubber cup over the end containing the “spirit face” negative contact
with the exposed plate, is achieved in the dark room. The instrument
lies hidden in the medium’s sleeves.
_The third method_ is that most commonly used. The “spirit image”
is projected through a minute lens in a hole in the wall of the studio.
The beam of light is sometimes passed through a prism series in order
to allow a room parallel to the studio to be used for the purpose of
projecting, and it is possible for the apparatus to be arranged inside
a piece of furniture in the studio.
The sitter usually has his back to the source of the projection and the
“medium” takes the photograph and makes the exposure, so the fraud is
childishly easy.
Even expert photographers are fooled by this trick, as they are
satisfied that if plates, slide, and camera are not tampered with,
fraud is impossible.
When stereoscopic cameras with twin lenses are used the fraud is
manifest. Sometimes the fakers try hard to get an image into each half
of the plate, but never are the “spirit images” in the same relative
position or plane.
If the sitters are well-known it is not difficult for photographs of
deceased relatives to be obtained and the spirit negative made from the
photograph. In many cases reproduction of newspaper halftone blocks
have been found on so-called spirit pictures. These show the diamond
patterns of the screen and are obvious fakes, but are accepted by many
uncritical believers.
In the case of an unknown sitter, strange blurred faces or perfect
strangers are thrown on to the plate and excused as “guardian angels.”
When the medium’s own apparatus or dark room is used there are endless
ways of faking, but it is these methods of faking an image without
raising the ordinary photographer’s suspicions that are interesting.
The whole business is a cruel and heartless fraud, but the dupes are
not really deserving of pity. If there was a word of truth in the
claim of “spirit photographers” the testimony of an official test by a
reputable committee of the Royal Photographic Society would settle the
question once and for all.
Myths and legend have grown up round spirit photographs till
Spiritualists have at last come to believe in their genuineness.
Yet the whole of their belief rests on nothing stronger than the
“miraculousness” of a conjuring trick. A good sleight-of-hand expert
can accomplish card or other tricks which seem perfectly inexplicable
to the layman, but we do not acclaim them as evidences of spirit power
because we are deceived by them.
The spirit photographers deplore and avoid investigation by really
efficient scientific men. They welcome the amateur with half-knowledge,
as his very cocksureness renders him an easier dupe. He concentrates
on the obvious roads to fraud, ignoring those which lie without the
slender realm of his knowledge.
The phenomena of what may be called lightless photography were long
ago described by Dr. Gustave le Bon,[49] who describes instantaneous
photography by “Black-light.” Incidentally a common incandescent gas
mantle possesses quite enough radioactive properties for ordinary
experiments.
It is only by the destruction of fraudulent phenomena that the
phenomena will be rightly understood and generally accepted. The
Spiritualist who accepts and bolsters up dubious phenomena does far
more harm to his own cause than the most pronounced sceptic.
The main point about spurious spirit photography is this. It claims
that mechanical chemical relations are produced by spirit agency--yet
though this chemical reaction is said to be produced with ease by
certain individuals and circles, it flinches from facing a simple test
which would, if proved to be true, convert the bulk of the sceptical
world to an acceptance of the truth of spirit photography.
I have met many credulous folk who cherish blurred plates, obvious
double exposures, “accidents,” such as imperfectly cleaned plates
and even the most blatant swindles. Nothing can shake their
convictions--but credulity does nothing to _prove_ fact.
Mr. Gambier Bolton has experimented for years with spirit photography,
but has so far obtained nothing except plates bearing indications
of a radiant energy similar to the N-rays of Becquerel. Many expert
photographers interested in psychic matters agree that the true spirit
photography does not exist and a canvass of both press and studio
photographers who are experts in their profession reveals the same
unhesitating expression of opinion. The same opinion is held not only
by the professional and technical lay element, but by occultists and
students of research whose standard of psychic knowledge is infinitely
higher than that of the Spiritualists.
* * * * *
The aura which surrounds the human form is visible to certain people,
but the faculty for seeing the aura does not necessarily involve the
possession of any psychic gifts at all and is often an indication of a
slight degree of colour-blindness.
The ordinary photographic plate represents colours differently to their
relative values as seen by the human eye, and in order to get the true
effect certain dyes are mixed with the emulsion of the plates, or dyed
screens which eliminate certain rays are interposed between the lens
and the object.
The normal individual cannot see the aura, but a simple chemical device
will put him on a par with the best natural aura discerner.
If a narrow glass trough or an oblong clear crystal glass bottle is
filled with a dilute solution of the dye di-cyanin[50] which dissolves
readily in absolute alcohol; that is all the apparatus necessary.
The subject whose aura is to be inspected should be placed against
a black or neutral background opposite a source of illumination,
preferably a north-facing window.
The observer then takes the bottle of blue solution and gazes through
it at the clear sky for a period of some minutes. This serves to
eliminate the retinal impression of certain of the normal light rays
and renders the observer’s eyes sensitive to vibrations or rays not
normally perceptible and stimulates an abnormal acuteness of vision.
The room should now be entirely darkened, and as soon as the eyes have
recovered their “owl sight” the body of the subject will be seen to be
surrounded by an envelope of vibratory exhalations whose colour varies
with different individuals and changes under stress of emotion.
Suggestion or hypnosis exercises very peculiar effects on this aura,
which would seem to be, if not an ectoplasm a psychoplasm in itself,
yet the invisible vehicle which is capable of being separated from the
material body and forming the astral body.
The aura vibration and the Becquerel or N-rays are closely connected,
and the scientific hypothesis suggests that these rays are in the scale
just above the infra-violet.
The simple instrument indicated above has certain therapeutic values
in the diagnosis of illness, but is also invaluable for the psychic
analysis of hauntings, cases of unconscious mediumship, and other
matters.
FOOTNOTES:
[45] See _The New Revelation_. Sir A. C. Doyle.
[46] For details of leverage, etc., see: _The Reality of Psychic
Phenomena and Experiments in Psychical Science_. By W. T. Crawford.
[47] Author’s note, 1912.
[48] Valuable data were gained by experiment with this disastrous
relic. They are not suitable for publication at this stage, and I
learnt recently of similar objectionable attributes associated with a
battlefield souvenir from near Ypres.
[49] _The Evolution of Forces._ Gustave le Bon.
[50] Used in colour screen making for photography, and poisonous. Some
glasses used in bottle making are not suitable, but a trial of one or
two suitably shaped ones will always reveal one that works all right.
CHAPTER XI
ORIENTAL OCCULTISM
The Orient hides many secrets of occultism, and it is almost a
platitude that the few secrets that the West has painfully deciphered
have been known for all time to the East--and are nothing remarkable.
This is one of those large gestures of speech that contain a half-truth
and pass for a whole truth. It is on a par with the statement that all
Chinese business men are honest--which they are not. Oriental occultism
is far too vast a subject to be accepted or dismissed as summarily as
this, but one thing is certain and that is that Oriental occult systems
are not suitable to the Western man.
There are one or two cardinal points that may be grasped at once.
Firstly, the exiled native in a Western country who claims occult
powers and the gift of being able to teach and transmit them is always
and invariably a fakir of the lowest kind. He is usually a low-caste
and disreputable native or half-breed, and it may be accounted to
his credit that after all he is not expected to know any better. His
dupes, on the other hand, the white men and women that listen to his
balderdash and sit at his séances, are even guiltier parties than he
is. They at least ought to know better than to listen to the first
black-and-tan “Swami” or “Guru” that establishes a bogus tabernacle in
the backwaters of Balham or Bayswater.
The second point is that the true Eastern occultist, whatever his grade
of adeptship in his mysteries, never practises any of his arts or
knowledge for money or equivalent reward. This is a lesson which might
well be learned by the fraternity of mediums and so-called occultists
that infest London and other great cities at home and abroad.
A medium in receipt of fees for séances or lectures will never and can
never develop his or her powers beyond the stage at which they have
arrived when it becomes possible to use them as a direct or indirect
means of making money.
In the East this is realized, and the vow of poverty is more than a
metaphor, but they claim that it is a poverty of the body fully repaid
by riches of the soul.
Practically the whole of Hindu occultism is best described as peculiar
methods of self-hypnosis with the object of provoking states of bliss
and ecstasy. It is upon the basis of the induction of these peculiar
phenomena that ninety per cent. of the Brahmin religious cults are
established. By one path or another the various beliefs attain earnest
of fulfilment, but the primary causes of these psychical phenomena are
physiological in origin.
This material path to spiritual success is admitted and glossed over
as being but part of the mystery. None the less, there is little to
show that anything beyond these self-produced states of hypnotism or
suggested phenomena are ever attained by even the greatest of the
adepts, and there is no justification of their dogmatic religious
teachings even in the results attained.
The Oriental mind is more easily freed from the shackles of the body
than is the Western organism. Just as the hold of the average native
upon life is inferior to a European’s, so is the native’s mastery of
conscious will far less. The faculties of clairvoyance can be created
by almost every dominant European in any young native, and they are
both physically and psychically an inferior race.
It is because of their greater racial familiarity and acquaintance
with the occult that the myth of their spiritual supremacy has been
born. The unheeding deem every Easterner a potential mage, unknowing
that he only develops his psychic gifts, which are in point of fact
mental weaknesses, when in contact with a far more powerfully organized
Western will.
The organized powers of occult India have loathed and hated British
rule since pre-Mutiny days. In a very few rare cases, black
magic--often allied with native poisons--has killed a white man, but on
the whole the result has been a pitiful demonstration compared to what
these magi should have been capable of.
Occultism in India is built to serve but one end, the domination of
lesser castes by those who master its secrets and have aptitude to
impose their powers on others. In the past it stood for an amazing
tyranny, and for this reason--its lost criminal powers--it is opposed
to British rule.
It is noteworthy that the English Society of Theosophists, whose
jig-saw religion is largely compounded of Oriental elements, is now
prominently identified with schemes for the political emancipation of
India, which will reinforce the tyrannous power of the Brahmin.
The whole scheme of Oriental occultism is quite incomprehensible
without a sound basic knowledge of the religious systems of which it is
part and parcel. These enjoy a difficult and complex nomenclature, and
their words have been borrowed indiscriminately without due respect to
their precise meaning.
Yoga conveys a certain popular meaning, but it must be remembered that
there are numberless Yogas, subdivided again into endless subvariants.
The initiate undergoes a prolonged course of mental and physical
training designed to stimulate concentration of the will and subdue the
body.
Little by little the faculties of surrender to ecstatic forms of
self-hypnosis are induced, Ananda or “bliss,” either material or
spiritual ecstasy, according to the Yoga practised, being the end of
the process.
The full development of the powers of a Yogi is beset with all kinds
of dangers and difficulties. The physical strain is a severe one and
the psychic dangers encountered considerable. The evil spirits of the
West find their Oriental counterparts in Pisachas, Shahinis, Bhirtas,
Pretas, and Rakshashas, all malignant and terrible manifestations of
the demon world.
In the end, certain types of Yogi appear to develop the full talents of
a materializing medium and are capable of producing the phenomena that
we associate with a medium of the power of Eusapia Palladino. But--and
it is a very important “but”--these phenomena are capable of production
in full tropic daylight.
From the days of Jacolliot[51] to those of recent Theosophical
investigations, Oriental magic has never been brought to real test
conditions, but in the records gathered by independent students there
is ample ground for stating that the genuine occult phenomena (as
distinct from mere fakir’s conjuring tricks) occur independently of
darkness or special light conditions.
When we consider the fuss made by European mediums over even twilight
conditions, it is remarkable that these offer no obstacle to the
Oriental “spirits.”
These phenomena, too, are not confined to orthodox Hindu, Brahmin,
Tantvik, or Guru followers of any particular creed, race, or religion.
Certain Indian Moslem sects produce devotees capable of equivalent
phenomena, but variants of obscure Tibetan sects, Burmese, Malay,
Mohammedans, and followers of both theistic and pantheistic religions
have equal powers.
The idolater, the Muslim, and the Christian medium all share the same
belief in “spirit” control and in certain states produce the same
results. Where we may learn something from the East is not in the line
of morals, for their morals are different from ours--and many of their
religious customs revoltingly beastly--but in the way of the physical
induction of the psychic state.
The basis of a great many Yogas is the liberation of psychoplasm and
ectoplasm by a combination of concentration on certain internal centres
and the repetition of spells or sonorous magical evocations.
These affect the breathing so that in effect the body is subjected
to a definite rhythmical vibration. It is physical exercise of mind
and brain, applying mind-force to the stimulation and excitement of
internal nerve centres.
These six centres are visualized mentally as lotuses. They cannot be
precisely located in scientific anatomy, but correspond in most cases
with central nervous plexuses and they are as well known in Mohammedan
and Zoroastrian mystic cults, as they are in the Indian Upanishads and
Tantras, and are familiar to the Indians of Yucatan and Guatemala,
where ritual, combined with a species of physical massage, is employed
to initiate the hierophant into the tribal mysteries.
The school of Western occultists who hold the theory of the
all-pervading astral or magic light or fire, hold that these “centres”
open, or act as concentrators of an exterior, all-prevailing force
which is thus conducted to the consciousness, enabling the operator to
make contact with another plane.
In the Oriental theory this force is deemed to be always latent in
the body, and is aroused, evoked, or stimulated in particular ways.
The discussion of the relative values of these two main schools of
thought--static and dynamic light--or their variants is beyond the
scope of these notes.
The lowest of the lotuses or centres is the nerve centre within the
body in the region of the prostatic gland, the next is midway between
this and the third which is the navel centre or solar plexus. The
fourth is nominally the heart, the fifth, that at the base of the
throat, the sixth, that between the eyebrows. In visualizing these
lotuses with the “mental eye,” the depth back in the body of each
centre is assumed to be close to the spine.
Mind force is concentrated by the Yogi under the name Vogabala, and
in Oriental black magic this is concentrated on the lowest centre,
according to the ritual of the infamous Prayoga, with the result of
inducing sexual hallucinations.
In the so-called white or mediumistic magic, the centre of energy
is apparently by the third centre (the navel), for materialization
phenomena, and the fifth, or base of the throat centre for
clairaudience.
Those who can reach the sixth claim the power of astral voyaging in the
spirit world and perception of things on the mortal plane at a distance.
The physiology of the process is not yet understood, but following on
the breathing processes or Pranayama, which relax the body and induce
certain rhythms, a progressive excitation and rigor of the centres is
induced by autohypnosis. The nerve centres control various limbs and
functions, and as each is “put to sleep” so the Yogi becomes rigid and
cataleptic.
Yogis are able to hold out their arms for hours at a stretch without
apparent fatigue--so in the same way can a hypnotized subject be placed
in an attitude of rigidity by an operator.
These progressive inhibitions of functions cannot be achieved by
the Western occultist without the most careful study and painstaking
preparations. The practices are both mentally and physically dangerous,
but when mastered either in part or in whole, they can be evoked by
systems entirely at variance with the accepted Indian methods. In fact,
certain nonsense rhymes of the same rhythm and breathing values as some
of the Tantric spells or mantras are equally efficacious.
There was infinite wisdom in the old law of magic which said “Change
not the _barbaric_ names of evocation,” but if they were changed,
provided rhythm and breathing are preserved, the sense does not appear
to matter. If one verse of Macaulay’s “Horatius”[52] was a powerful
spell--almost any other verse in the same poem would produce the same
effect--if delivered in the same way.
This argument is sometimes used by a sceptic, but after all it only
proves that the same result can be produced by analogous means. Salt
disappears when dissolved in water, but so it does in half a dozen
other liquids.
The tales of life on other planes brought back by native spirits evoked
by Oriental magicians in no way tally with Western accounts, but as
phallic worship is integral with many Eastern beliefs, it is no matter
for wonder that some Eastern spirit evidence concerning the next plane
would make the most hardened Western libertine blush. They also affirm
with considerable emphasis that on the next plane nationalities and
colour lines are unknown, a point which is reinforced by the number of
ex-coloured spirits which frequent Western séances.
It is indeed difficult to know what to believe.
The Yogis can produce phenomena of materialization, prolonged trance
states, and can sometimes act as powerful hypnotists and seize the
Durga, literally citadel, of another’s body. On the other hand, the
net yield of all purely Indian occultism is very disappointing. This
may be due to the selflessness inculcated in their religious teaching,
which subdues love and hatred as equal enemies of spiritual progress.
If their magic were efficient, much more would be done with it, and
the consensus of general opinion is that despite its extraordinary
interest to the mystic and the scholar it has little to offer of
interest to the Spiritualist.
Certain of lesser known Yogas which do produce astonishing phenomena
belong definitely to the domain of black magic and only parallel
certain well-known outbreaks of phallic sorcery that occurred in Europe
in the Middle Ages.
The cult of evocation is held by some students to have spread from
India to the Arab races, but more recent investigations suggest that
the astonishing performances achieved by certain nominally Moslem sects
in the fastnesses of Tripoli and Morocco are due to the survivals from
the aborigines of those lands rather than to Oriental ideas.
The Berbers are a distinct primitive race akin to the Basques, and
probably identical with the ancient Britons who built Stonehenge.
To-day they are fanatical Moslemin, but the old practices linger as
rituals of specific religious cults, such as the Sufi Senoussi and the
Aissouri of Morocco. They are racially strange folk and the Moslem
veneer is only a lay religion imposed on a mass of pagan folklore
closely connected with serpent worship and astronomical observances.
Their festivals of the solstices have an outward-seeming Muslim
connection, but the inner hidden occult religion is a far older thing.
The Berbers are not of Arab stock; they are Semitic and they are
probably pre-Aryan. Some writers[53] trace their connection to the
original Firbolgs of Iceland, and the ethnology of this mysterious race
is still a matter of speculation and doubt.
Pre-eminent among their distinctive differences from the ordinary Arab
is the esteem in which they hold women. Women are chieftainesses among
them, and above all the women are the repositories of the lost lore of
magic. It is to them that the tribesmen turn for the carrying out of
the mystic harvest ceremonies, the charming of unfruitful fields, and
the lighting of the magic Beltane fires.
Fire plays no inconsiderable part in their rituals, and is only called
by its Arabic name el-aafeats (the comforter) when used for domestic
purposes. The sacrificial and ceremonial fires are always spoken of
either in the Shilluh or Schluch tongue--the true Berber language or
referred to as B’lnisac, a term whose philology is unknown, but which
apparently contains the age-old Bel or Baal motive.
This fire cult, coupled with a still more mystical inner creed
symbolized by serpent worship, may be noted by the student explorer
among the Berber folk. Riffis, Mashed Hojja Tuareks of the Sahara,
certain Kabyles of Tripoli, and other tribes all belong to the same
strange race, and there are reasons for believing that the Berbers are
identical with the mystical Fairies--the Good People--so called from a
propitiatory irony because they were so amazingly bad.
Berbers alone of savage folk raid and kill at night. They are
essentially a people of the dark, and he who sifts the mass of terrible
folklore about the earliest fairies in Britain will find a parallel
between these terrible unholy barbarians given to sorcery, necromancy
and unholy rites, the stealing of children for sacrificial purposes,
and other glossed horrors attributed to the Good People--and the Berber
races of to-day.
The practices continue.
In 1909 I was travelling in the Gharb country of Morocco, where there
is a large Berber element. The French occupation of the Shawiah and the
meteoric rise of Sultan Mulai Hafid had left the country unsettled and
dangerous.
Beyond a war correspondent or two and a handful of German engineers--or
spies, employed by the firm of Marmesman--there were no Europeans in
the country outside of the coast towns. For the capital and Manahesh
the big cities of the South were closed, and a Christian’s life was
nowhere worth a moment’s purchase among the fanatics.
I am but an indifferent Arabic scholar, but a certain knowledge of
classical Hebrew served one well, for there are many debased Jews in
Morocco. For the rest, as the high-class Moors are a fair race and
often blue-eyed, travelling in native clothes and well bronzed by the
sun I suffered no molestation and could rely on the fidelity of my four
body-servants.
Some five days’ ride northwest of the argan forests of the coast belt,
I was well within Berber territory. This was mostly stony hill lands,
for Morocco is simply rock deserts and hills, interspersed with lightly
watered fertile valleys and occasional oases of poplar-sheltered walls.
The holy city of Tarudant lay to the north of me, and I had crossed the
Wadi Sifan river and was going south from the Iber Kaken Pass on the
caravan route east into the Ait Jellal country.
There, deep in the hills, lies the ruin of a Roman city of which
strange tales are told. It is even not certain that it is Roman, for a
volume of notes, painstakingly compiled for fifteen years by a resident
in a coast town, discloses unmistakable Phœnician characteristics, but
I at least cannot tell, for my expedition had to beat a swift retreat a
bare two days’ march from the nominal valley of the dead city.
It was on the way there that my little troop of horsemen and pack
mules halted at the Berber village of M’Aerbil Ida and were received
as guests of honour for the night. The village was a curious medley of
thorn and cactus fences, cane-thatched huts, and deep caves cut in the
friable freestone rock of the mountain side.
The men wore the close-knitted wool caps of the country and had the
curious snake-like head angles and the long, curving sidelock and thin
beards of coarse hair that just distinguish these strange, elf-like
folk. Something in their broad cheekbones and curious pale eyes
suggests the snake.
Mohammed-el-Suissi, my horse boy, told me as he pitched my tent that
he did not like the village or the people; “they were,” he said, “not
good Moslemin.” As religious orthodoxy was not one of Mohammed’s
strong points, I did not worry much, but when Hassan-el-Askri, my
soldier muleteer, warned me to keep my arms about me I realized that my
Moors considered that not even the law of desert hospitality was held
inviolate among these folk.
There is, however, a brotherhood of initiates of which I am a member,
whose signs are recognized in many parts of the globe. Gesticulation
is a feature of polite Arabic conversation, and I soon secured an
answering sign from one of the head-men of the tribe. Within half an
hour nobody in that village would have dared to steal the least of my
belongings.
I had considerable difficulty in carrying on my conversation as my
Arabic, apart from ordinary needs of travel, was weak and classical
rather than popular. The Berbers, too, always spoke of these things in
their own tongue, Shilluh, and none of my entourage being initiate I
had no interpreter.
My host was Sidi-el-Belarni, an old chieftain who was also a
_shereef_--that is, a lineal descendant of the Prophet and a
person of sanctity. He soon dropped the mask of orthodoxy and conversed
freely on the metaphysical side of his cult. I found it easier to
understand than to converse with him, but gained an easier appreciation
as I got used to it.
I stayed a second day in the village, as one of our animals was badly
lamed and needed rest, and took occasion to ask him concerning the art
of reviving the dead to temporary life which the Berbers are commonly
held to possess.
He made no objections to my questions, and, to my delight, offered
to give me a demonstration if the ritual of the women who held the
secrets would consent to exhibit them. At noon I was taken to a kind of
tribal palaver and the matter was put to a species of test or judgment
by lot. A young girl was blindfolded and given a basket containing
short and long sticks. Certain prayers and incantations were performed
and she passed into a semi-trance state.
My permission depended on her selection of a majority of short sticks,
but as I could not see the sticks, and she was in a state of light
hypnosis, I made occasion to recite one or two resounding Hebrew charms
and laid my hands on her head; after that, all was easy. Her will
obeyed mine and she selected the sticks as I desired. It was almost an
unanimous election.
When dusk fell with all its African suddenness, the rising moon hung
like a blazing buckler in the sky. Dogs barked in answer to the distant
hill jackals and the acrid smoke of the camel-dung fires hung like a
sour fog about the camp.
We left the village and went about a quarter of a mile along the
hillside to the local buryingplace, following a stony track that was
little more than a dried watercourse. At the head of our little
procession were two men with flaming argan wood torches tied to long
canes, behind them came four men with long silver-decorated Remington
rifles, and then the little group of sorceresses followed by myself and
the elders.
The burial ground was a scanty clearing among the scrub and dwarf oaks,
and bushes encroached upon the outer graves. Each tomb was marked by
a stone monolith or pillar, rough-hewn, with a knob at the top in
pursuance of the Muslim custom. The graves radiated in circles from the
central stone, whereon fluttered little bundles of rags and similar
votive offerings.
We made our way to a recent grave, which was rapidly opened by the men,
disclosing, a bare two feet beneath the surface, the bent body of a man
buried in sitting posture. It was a ghoul-like business and the whole
air of the graveyard carried the tainted scent of the dreadful carrion
they were unearthing.
In the meanwhile, the women were busy, and from behind the tombs
brought forth skulls which they anointed with some strange grease and
set on sticks in a circle round the central altar.
At last the corpse, in its foul, earth-stained wrappings, was exhumed
and carried in a piece of sheeting to the altar. The men who had served
as guards and grave diggers then withdrew out of earshot, and the
ceremonies began.
Fire was applied to the circle of skulls and they began to burn. I
noticed that the eyes and ear sockets were stuffed with old rags which
served as wicks for the unclean oil. They flared smokily, sending off a
foul-scented sooty smoke.
The women began to chant their monotonous wailing rhymes, and their
leader rocked to and fro leading this strange chorus.
Suddenly a power seemed to come upon her and she became frenzied,
dancing round the skull circle in time to the refrain, but undulating
her body in a strange, snake-like manner. Then she knelt down on the
ground, and from somewhere about her person produced something which
she rubbed on her hands. At first it resembled phosphorus, a quick,
flickering faint blue light, but gradually it grew in strength until
streamers of blue flame, some six inches long, seemed to project from
her fingers while her whole person seemed outlined in a faint shape of
flame.
From the ground she picked up a short length of cane which in her grasp
seemed to project this blue emanation--then with a final chorus of
evocation, she leapt upon the altar and knelt astride of the dead man.
With quick passes, she ran her hands the length of his slack limbs and
then poised both hands above the navel of the corpse, about a foot
higher than the shroud.
The emanation curved down like a blue-green waterfall of flame
and seemed to enter the man. Incredible as it may seem, the dead
limbs slowly began to stretch out jerkily, uneasily, as if awaking,
yet--instinct with a new vitality.
The ghastly, lolling head, stained with corruption and bound with the
jaw bandage, began to oscillate on the dreadful neck and the whole
corpse began to phosphoresce with a dull green luminosity.
The chorus now ceased chanting and a small fire was lighted on a cairn
of stones. From this certain objects were taken and placed in the dead
man’s hands. The fingers slowly curled up and grasped them!
The singing began again and the sorceress, still across the body, took
the cane she carried and, breaking the bandage that bound the dead
man’s jaw, inserted the end in his mouth.
Then making certain passes and signs with her hands, she began to
exhale deep breaths into the body, seeming to make the mystic passes as
if to force the living breath down into the dead man’s lungs.
Little by little life seemed to creep back into that unholy shell.
The dreadful contours of death sunk back, the form became more human
and the motions not the strange jerky rigors of the first part of the
ceremony, but the very signs of life.
The eyelids flickered and retracted, the dreadful drawn lips relaxed
and in a minute or so the dead man sat up in his cerements--and spoke.
Then followed the dread consultation of the dead. It was evident from
the awe and respect with which he was addressed that he was treated
not as a reanimated individual, but as an august visitant from another
world.
Thin, high and shrill, the usually coarse gutturals of the Shilluh
tongue seemed strange from _Its_ lips. I suspected ventriloquy for
a while, but could see the slow movements of its throat muscles and
glottis and the rise and fall of the shroud over the sunken abdomen.
Nevertheless it was sheer horror to listen to and dreadful, monstrous
to see.
I was only permitted to ask one question, and I asked would my quest be
successful. I received an unequivocal answer that it would fail, but
not through my fault, but because of the will of the spirits of the
departed and the curse of the dead that hung over the city.
Incidentally this discounted the advice given by other spirit
communicants before the expedition was undertaken,--but later proved
true.
The ritual of re-dissolution was shorter but far more terrible. Again
the sorceress made passes. The objects were taken from the hands of
the dead and slowly the life left the body, which swelled and twitched
as it returned to its original state of terrible decomposition. A thin
wailing chant seemed to symbolize the flight of the spirit back to its
own realms.
* * * * *
I pressed unsuccessful inquiry concerning the details of this
astounding piece of necromancy which was neither more nor less than
that terrible old mystery, the raising of the dead in the flesh.
I could obtain no details of the objects placed in the man’s hands
or the material used to produce the astonishing outpouring of blue,
luminous matter.
So far as I could ascertain, the life force of the sorceress herself
entered the body, but the ceremony of creating it was essential in
combination with the charms in the hands before the spirit could return.
Neither could I ascertain that it was the soul of the departed or some
other spirit that entered into the reanimated corpse.
Some powerful communities are able, it is said, to despatch these
dreadful reanimated dead on missions of evil. But their power only
lasts throughout the night and fails at sunrise.
Here there is an undoubted suggestion of the practical possibility of
vampirism, but I could not learn that these folk possess the lost art
of imprisoning a human or spirit soul within the body of an animal.[54]
I am nevertheless convinced that among the Berbers of North Africa will
be found the key to many legends that have come down to us from our
ancestors in Great Britain, and above all I counsel those good folk who
read the pleasant little fake stories of pretty little fairies in some
of the magazines of what passes for popular occultism to abandon the
delusion.
The term good folk is a paradox. They were the demons or spirits of
the unholy aborigines working in contact with the savages themselves,
and it is good, exceedingly good, that there are no fairies loose in
Britain to-day and that the art of summoning them is well-nigh lost.
* * * * *
This chapter completes all that I have to say for the time being.
There is in this book much food for careful thought. Those who read
it carefully will find in it keys to much that has puzzled them, and
simple explanations of phenomena which have been greatly debated of
late. The general reader will doubtless find the incidents the most
interesting part of the book, but to the critical and those seriously
interested in psychic matters, I commend a careful and reasonable study
of the more scientific sections, for in this matter of things psychic
both Spiritualist and Sceptic are upon the same quest. From different
angles they are both seeking for the Great Truth.
FOOTNOTES:
[51] _Occult Science in India and among the Ancients._ Louis Jacolliot.
[52] _Lays of Ancient Rome._ Macaulay.
[53] See _The Arabs of Tripoli_. Alan Ostler.
[54] This practice is claimed to be possible of achievement by both
Finn and certain Red Indian wizards. But no facts susceptible of proof
have ever been adduced.
* * * * *
Transcriber’s notes.
Two half-title pages (pages blank except for the book title) have been
omitted from the front matter.
Minor typographical and punctuation errors have been corrected
silently. Ambiguous hyphenation has been removed or retained according
to the prevailing style for the period. Inconsistent hyphenation has
been normalised.
Other than as indicated below, the authors spelling has been retained,
even where inconsistent.
The word Balnam on page 23 has been corrected to Balham, a London
suburb suggested by the context. See also Balham or Bayswater on page
195.
The two references to Thotn on page 28 (text and footnote) have been
amended to Thoth and Thot for the English and French respectively.
The author misquotes Milton on page 123, where Thammur has been
corrected to Thammuz.
A second instance of Thammur in the text has been changed to Thamus
to match the Authors alternate spelling in the following paragraph.
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